corrente

So lemme get this right: Alito claims he has no recollection of being a member of Concerned Alumni of Princeton. Claims to have had "no active involvement" with "the group". Claims he would have no part of an organization which expressed the views of CAP. Yet he indicated that he was a member of Concerned Alumni of Princeton when applying for a job with the Reagan Justice Department. So, now what, he's claiming he lied on his job application when seeking employment with the Justice Dept? Falsified his job application?
Is that what he's telling us?

Was he lying about his membership then or is he lying about his membership now? If he lied on his job application then why should anyone think he might not be lying on his job application now? Anyway you turn this one he's a liar. Ain't he? What am I missing?

Obsidian Wings (Nov. 27, 2005):

The fact that Samuel Alito was a member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, and cited that fact on his 1985 job application, has been in the news recently; and it occurred to me that since I was a Princeton undergraduate (class of '81) while CAP was active, I might be able to provide some useful background on this one.

CAP is generally described as 'a conservative group'. But this is as misleading as calling the John Birch Society a 'conservative group' would be. There are lots of conservatives who are thoughtful and intelligent, and who have real intellectual integrity. Conservatives like this did not tend to join CAP. CAP was dedicated to finding outrages that it took to be caused by the horrible fact that women and minorities were being admitted to Princeton. The need to find outrages generally came first; any encounter with facts came later. For this reason, CAP tended to attract not conservatives per se, but the sort of conservative who is forever getting deeply hysterical about some perceived threat to a supposed previous golden age, who sees such threats everywhere, and who is willing to completely distort the truth in order to feed his (and it generally was 'his') obsessions.

[...]

CAP was not about opposing affirmative action. It supported quotas that favored white men. CAP was about opposing the presence of women and minorities at Princeton. Period. Moreover, its tactics were despicable. In retrospect, it was one of the first instances of what has now become a familiar pattern: an extremely well-funded organization dedicated to spreading lies about some opponent in an effort to force that opponent to change course through the sheer volume of vitriol and harassment that a lot of money can buy. Samuel Alito pointed with pride to his membership in CAP in 1985. What relevance this should have now is open to debate; I just wanted to clarify what exactly it was that he was proud to be a part of.

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