Jonathan Alter is Chicken Little’s little brother

In his very aptly named occasional raving rant called "Between the Lines," Newsweek’s coke-addled [or is it meth from firedog lake?] menagerie Donkey/Onager/Ass Jonathan Alter brays hysterically at the full moon above:

What if we faced a constitutional crisis and hardly anyone noticed? It's so much easier to talk about Joe Biden's big mouth or a right-wing Princeton alumni group or Mrs. Alito's tears than to figure out how the country should prevent a president of the United States from castrating the United States Congress

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Ewwwh, Yukkie Jonathan the girlie-man putting on crossover clothing?

Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Russ Feingold ably raised some of these questions last week; Al Gore is about to weigh in, too. But the Democratic Party as a whole cannot stay focused on the issue. Some activists keep jumping ahead to the remedy for the president's power grab, which they say is impeachment. But that's a pipe dream and a distraction from the task at hand, which is figuring out how to reassert Congress's institutional role. This must by necessity involve Republicans, who control Congress. Unfortunately, most have so far shown little concern about being defenestrated by their president.

“Defenestrated?” Oh, yeah. This is Prague or are Alter’s controls permanently on the histrionic mode? We see he likes fellow hysteric Al Gore and is pimping for the ex-VEEP's Monday [today] rant against that small minority of Americans who want to protect US national security [Heh, heh] and protect the US against the crime of treason. Yep, Alter likes being against US security and is against fighting crime [at least when it concerns Al-Qaeda calling its American sleeper cells]. Sounds like a typical left-wing Dem, a.k.a. "Loser." At least impeachment is "a pipe dream," in another of Alter’s bong-based analogies.

Alter makes the idiotic claim that:

But "Snoopgate" is already creating new fissures on the right.

Without pointing out any "fissures on the right," Alter proceeds to use his specious defective reasoning as follows:

Alito embodies the inherent contradiction of the conservative movement. The nominee is an "originalist," which means, as he said last week, that "we should look to the meaning that someone would have taken from the text of the Constitution at the time of its adoption." But at that time, the 18th century, the Founders could not have been clearer about the role of Congress in wartime. As James Madison put it, "In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislative and not to the executive branch."

Of course, Alter conveniently or misleadingly neglects to point out that the question of war means a declaration of war, not the prosecution and execution of the war. His sentence "could not have been clearer," should always alert us that Alter is about to uncork a hilarious fib. The end of his article, like the rest of his reasoning, is defective, to employ a mild description of dishonesty. He ends up with his customary shrill whine:

Fortunately, Sen. Arlen Specter will hold hearings in early February on presidential power. Watch them, please, even if you're tired of this cast of Judiciary Committee characters. Our whole system is on the line.

Post-Note: Washington Post low-key crybaby
David Broder wails that:

What we did not see was the rich appreciation of American history and tradition that illuminated Chief Justice John Roberts's commentary on legal issues when he was before the Judiciary Committee a few months ago. Where Roberts appeared to be enjoying his repartee with the senators, Alito approached the hearings with a grim, thin-lipped stoicism -- as an ordeal he was determined to endure.

What the fatuous booby Broder fails to note is that the Judiciary Committee choirboys adoring pastor John, or Father John in deference to his Catholic roots, Roberts a couple of months ago had changed their vestments.

The Dems were SNARLING at Judge Sam because nasties like the multi-octave droner Schumer and chronic-drunk bully Kennedy were in full high dudgeon concerning phony conflicts of interest and questionable membership in a Princeton alumni club.

Who would not have pursed their lips with low-IQ bully K and high-IQ pit bull Schumer howling and attacking, incongruously as Broder does manage to point out, Judge Alito’s character.

Let’s give the excellent British point of view about the hilarity of Teddy the mentally “troubled” and “disturbed” misfit thus in
The Economist.

TED KENNEDY is deeply troubled by the ethics of the Supreme Court nominee. Between 2001 and 2006, Samuel Alito, who is currently an appeals court judge, accepted $7,684,423 in “donations” from special interests who perhaps wanted the law tweaked in their favour. That included $28,000 from defence contractors, $42,200 from drug firms and a whopping $745,373 from lawyers and law firms.
No, wait. Those are Senator Kennedy's conflicts of interest—or, rather, a brief excerpt from a long list compiled by the Centre for Responsive Politics. The lapse for which the senator berated Mr Alito was considerably less clear-cut.