Don't let the Roe v. Wade controversy fog your vision of the real problem with Alito

While I am firmly in favor of a woman's right to choose, I cannot blindly use this as the only test for the confirmation odf a Supreme Court Justice. What really scares me about Alito is his lap dog loyalty to the Executive branch of government - be wary of a man who is constantly claiming that he was just acting as an advocate for a client (by the way, the government, especially the executive branch, seems to be his only client of note before he was elevated to the bench). It sounds a a little bit like the Nuremberg defense of I was just following orders . (yeah, that's right righty -another Nazi reference - they're just so handy). We must immediately stem the tode of the Imperial Bush Presidency - it becomes more and more clear every day, that the true model for this Administation is not don't do anything Daddy did. It is more like do do everything that Nixon did. The assumption that he was above the law is eerily being replicated by the current administation, and it certainly does not need any more support from the body thast helped him heist the electionin 2000. William Safire, that ever popular pundit of liberal thought (yeah, right!) said on Meet the Press earlier this year -
MR. SAFIRE: I was writing a speech on welfare reform, and the president looks at it and says, "OK, I'll go with it, but this is not going to get covered. Leak it as far an wide as you can beforehand. Maybe we'll get something in the paper." And so I go back to my office and I get a call from a reporter, and he wants to know about foreign affairs or something, and I said, "Hey, you want a leak? I'll tell you what the president will say tomorrow about welfare reform." And he took it down and wrote a little story about it. But the FBI was illegally tapping his phone at the time, and so they hear a White House speechwriter say, "Hey, you want a leak?" And so they tapped my phone, and for six months, every home phone call I got was tapped. I didn't like that. And when it finally broke--it did me a lot of good at the time, frankly, because then I was on the right side--but it told me how easy it was to just take somebody who is not really suspected of anything for any good reason and listen to every conversation in his home--you know, my wife talking to her doctor, my--everything.
So I have this thing about personal privacy. And I think what's happening now is that the--as a result of that scandal back in the '70s, we got this electronic eavesdropping act stopping it, or requiring the president to go before this court. Now, this court's a rubber-stamp court, let's face it. They give five noes and 20,000 yeses.
MR. RUSSERT: The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA.
MR. SAFIRE: Right. But the very fact that the FBI has to do a little paperwork beforehand slows them down and makes them think for a minute. It doesn't slow them down as much as the president has made out to believe, because there's a wrinkle in it saying that if it's a real emergency and you have to get this information, then you can get it and get the approval within 72 hours afterwards. So there's always this struggle in a war between liberty and security. Doris, you go into that in your book, and Lincoln did, indeed, suspend habeas corpus, but there it is in the Constitution, "It shall not be suspended except in invasion or a rebellion," so he had the right to. He didn't have the right, I think, to close the Brooklyn Eagle or see the arrest of the leading dissident, Vanlandingham, and he made some mistakes.
But just as FDR later made a mistake with the eight saboteurs and hanged them all, and just as we made a terrible mistake with the Japanese-Americans in World War II and have apologized for that. During wartime, we have this excess of security and afterwards we apologize. And that's why I offended a lot of my conservative and hard-line friends right after September 11th when they started putting these captured combatants in jail, and said the president can't seize dictatorial power. And a lot of my friends looked at me like I was going batty. But now we see this argument over excessive security, and I'm with the critics on that.

Just remember that all journeys start with one step, and I, for one do not want to go on a journey towards tyranny or dictatorship.