I'm Alito Scared By This Guy

In the discussion about Judge Alito, his supporters focus on "qualifications", like a job resume review. This is fine, and certainly is a piece of the puzzle, but this piece from Michael O'Hare talks about another chunk:

I also have a sense of a man with, as my friend Ed Reilly once said of another public figure of our acquaintance, an "unrelenting instinct for the capillary". He was described by various witnesses, some admiringly, as always deciding cases on the narrowest possible grounds. This is generally a virtue in a judge, but not always and especially not always in a judge of high or highest appellate jurisdiction. Brown v. Board of Education could have been decided like Plessy, or so narrowly as to demand only (say) equal per-pupil spending, but that wouldn't necessarily have been a better holding. Alito knows the law, but he doesn't seem to know, or care about, The Law. Every issue in the hearings was immediately reduced by the nominee to a technical question of almost bureaucratic rule manipulation. This approach is a good one for nearly all the cases courts hear, but it's not what the Supreme Court is about.

He doesn't have a screw loose; what he has is a piece missing, conspicuously, radiantly, displaying the absence of any sense of, well, justice. Not a case came up for discussion in which he registered that one or another outcome was just wrong, outrageous to a sense of decency, or to him. He's on record in a memo as believing that to shoot an eighth grader, known not to be armed, who was trying to climb over a fence in escape, is a proper use of deadly force by a policeman. In a discussion of immigration cases that have been regularly occasioning inexcusable, vile, un-American heartbreak on people who missed obscure deadlines or violated arcane requirements, all he could say was that the courts get bad transcripts and it was hard to find translators for some of the plaintiffs, but that was a problem for Congress. It wasn't exactly Pilate washing his hands, but the man appears to be completely comfortable dealing with frightful social wrongs by moving the issue down the hall to another office. Sometimes the Court has to do this, but to Alito it's an especially good day's work, not a disappointment.

Focusing on strictly qualifications without looking at the real person is a way of obscuring the real agenda here: to get someone on the court who will accept whatever Bush (the executive Branch) wants to do, while pushing an actively right wing agenda. That is why he should be fought tooth and nail. Saying the guy's not Bork (i.e.: not insane) is really not good enough.