The Left's Take on Alito

Although I certainly have my reservations about the Alito nomination (see this post), the liberal talking-points released by Think Progress that are being widely distributed and repeated seem to be nothing but a lot of inflated rhetoric and exaggeration making Alito out to be some sort of bigoted autocrat. Juan Sanchez at Reason's blog has a good analysis of the examples given by Think Progress, and shows them to be mostly wild exaggerations and unfair assumptions based on fairly reasonable (though sometimes un-libertarian) dissents in certain cases (link here). One characteristic example is Think Progress's claim that:

ALITO WOULD OVERTURN ROE V. WADE In his dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Alito concurred with the majority in supporting the restrictive abortion-related measures passed by the Pennsylvania legislature in the late 1980's. Alito went further, however, saying the majority was wrong to strike down a requirement that women notify their spouses before having an abortion. The Supreme Court later rejected Alito's view, voting to reaffirm Roe v. Wade.

In reality Alito only claimed that since this notification requirement had so many exceptions (such as if the woman believed that the spouse would react violently or if the spouse is not the child's father, etc) that it was not an "undue burden", and was therefore not unconstitutional. Now, it is perfectly reasonable to disagree with his opinion, as the majority did in this case, but this opinion is far from a statement that he would overturn Roe v. Wade.

The left hurts itself with this kind of foolish and obviously false inflated rhetoric. They would be much better off concentrating on Alito's real shortcomings (he has them), and in this case just stating that it is probable that Alito has a bias against Roe v. Wade. This kind of exaggeration is also simply unnecessary since they could have easily pointed to other indicators of Alito's stance on Roe v. Wade. For example, his mother said that he was pro-life. There is no need to use extreme exaggerations and stretch the facts when you could just as easily be truthful.

Dahlia Lithwick has an article at Slate.com (link here) that makes this same mistake, saying that Alito's ruling in the above-mentioned case was an "explicit promise to overturn Roe v. Wade." Such absurd exaggerations are just meant to score cheap political points, and have no real place in reasoned debate. Then again, what would politics be without lying?