ALITO AFTERMATH: I've been fairly single-minded about the hearings this week; it's hard to resist such a dramatic display of the fundamental paradigm wars being played out across a variety of issues across the culture. Mainly I'm struck by the extent of the Democrats' obsession with unrestricted abortion; how else to explain why they would bring in Kate Michelman of NARAL today as one of their key witnesses? Here's Michael Novak's take on the hearings:

The pompous rhetorical indignation of Kennedy has become merely pathetic. He was once a heroic figure, but he now seems like the lion of Alice in Wonderland — threadbare, tame, and roaring every so often only out of nostalgic habit. Chuck Schumer drones on like a little spoiled boy who becomes a schoolyard bully just by his superior tone of voice, boring in upon others, coercing them verbally, trying to make them feel as worthless as in his mind they are. It is painful to watch the ruin of a great party. A great party has come to this. And most of it happened because of commitment to a policy that cannot be maintained without lies and malicious euphemisms. That is, the killing of innocents in what is supposed to be the most welcoming, safest place on earth — a mother's womb. (Isn't the posture of wishing one were safe the fetal position?) This radical lie — that what is destroyed in abortion is not a human individual, endowed with human rights — has poisoned a great party, induced a great rationalization in the place of constitutional reasoning in the Supreme Court, and divided a nation unnecessarily over an issue that ought at the very least to have been left to the consent of the people in diverse jurisdictions. No lie so basic to one's own identity goes unpunished.