This week’s cartoon is about Mrs. Scalito’s crying jag for the cameras last Wednesday. Other bloggers have remarked on its patently staged smell, but to get an accurate sense of the moment from our Mainstream News Media you have to read between the lines, as they’re not actually going to say outright what everyone in that hearing room knew…

The most dramatic moment of the day came when the judge’s wife, Martha-Ann Bomgardner, who had been sitting behind him, left the hearing room in tears. She left when Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was apologizing to Alito for his treatment by the opposition. Graham, who was present at a White House preparation session for Alito, mocked Democrats for their relentless questioning about the Princeton group by asking Alito rhetorically if he is "really a closet bigot." After Alito replied that he is "not any kind of a bigot," Graham continued: "Guilt by association is going to drive good men and women away from wanting to sit where you’re sitting…. Judge Alito, I am sorry that you’ve had to go through this. I am sorry that your family has had to sit here and listen to this." After a break, the judge escorted his wife back in. Conservatives seized on the incident to complain about Democratic "bullying," and said they plan to make the incident a cause celebre. "When will the media shame these people for their behavior?" Sean Rushton, executive director of the administration-friendly Committee for Justice, asked in a blast e-mail to journalists. The always-alert Creative Response Concepts, a conservative public relations firm, sent this bulletin: "Former Alito clerk Gary Rubman witnessed Mrs. Alito leaving her husband’s confirmation in tears and is available for interviews, along with other former Alito clerks who know her personally and are very upset about this development." In case that was too much trouble for the journalists, the firm also e-mailed out a statement from the Judicial Confirmation Network calling "for the abuse to stop."

Creative Response Concepts is the right wing media outfit that first began hyping the Swift Boat Veterans. Funny how they had that bulletin about Mrs. Scalito’s tears hitting the fax machines within moments of the event itself. Oh…and they’re available for interviews… Sympathy. You could almost have some for American fascists, when you realize that gestures of sympathy are all they can manage, the real thing being completely incomprehensible to them. When a lawyer for the family of a 10 year old girl who was strip searched without a warrant in a small Pennsylvania coal town in 2003, brought their case before the federal Third Circuit Court, Alito snappishly asked him, "Why do you keep bringing up the fact that this case involves the strip search of a 10-year-old child?" His defenders claim it was about his dedication to applying the law, not sympathy for one small brutalized child. Yes. Just so. The appeal to sympathy pisses them off because it exposes that empty void inside of them, where a human heart would otherwise be. We meet them first in school, then in adult life…the ones that always seem to have a blind spot when it comes to sympathy and compassion. The gentle pull and tug of daily human interaction is a frightening mystery to them. All their lives they take refuge in the structure and form of tradition and religion and law, because without them they’re utterly lost and rudderless in the human community. Over time they may learn how to fake it, but they hate having to do so at a moment’s notice because they have no reflex for it. It’s all an act, and one that as they get older, and achieve some measure of status and power, seems more and more pointless. But it can have it’s uses. Like tears for senators.