Sam the Sham

When you apply for a job, you tell your prospective employer what he or she wants to hear. It's that simple. Only the most self-destructive or arrogant applicant would do otherwise. Sam Alito is neither self-destructive nor arrogant; that is clear.

But during his interchange with Senator Schumer (D-NY) at Wednesday's hearings, Judge Samuel Alito unwittingly revealed that he was in fact "Sam the Sham" - smiling for the camera as he admitted in public that he lies on job applications. I don't know anyone - and I'm ten years older than Alito - who doesn't remember groups he belonged to in college, especially groups he used as references.

The forgotten group in question is the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, an extremely reactionary organization founded just after Alito graduated in 1972. Time and again different senators asked him why he joined the group, why he "plucked" it from a list of possible groups to use as references for a job in the Reagan White House.

CAP had a magazine with articles written by its members. One such article in 1983, two years before Alito put the group on his job application, said "People nowadays just don't seem to know their place. Everywhere one turns, blacks and Hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they're black and Hispanic. The physically handicapped are trying to gain equal representation in professional sports. And homosexuals are demanding the government vouchsafe them the right to bear children."

Judge Alito is the nice guy who hates one person/one vote; he is the affable son of Italian immigrants who hates affirmative action; he is the loving husband who hates a woman's right to privacy. There are two common denominators, but only one is visible: nice guy. All who question him are put into the category of not-nice guys. In much the same way, nice-guy patriot George W. Bush paints into a corner those who protest his administration's wiretapping or its conduct of the war in Iraq.

The other common denominator - revealed in the CAP article - is hate, hidden behind Sam's smile, and lied about in the blandest of ways. But Alito slipped up as he blundered through Schumer's efforts to get him to explain why he used that group as a reference. He showed his hand when he explained that what he "was trying to outline were the things that were relevant to obtaining a political position." In other words, he openly admitted that he tells people what he thinks they want to hear. But in 1985 Alito meant what he said: for the next twenty years, both in the Reagan White House and as an Appellate Judge, he worked to promote CAP's ultra-reactionary agenda. Suddenly, the week of January 9, 2006 he admits that he is, or was always, Sam the Sham.