Are you now, or have you ever been ...

... a member of......
This singular phrase resonates echoes of Joseph McCarthy and undoubtedly, if you have even a smidgen of historical knowledge, you are waiting for the other shoe to drop... the rest of the sentence.... "... a member of the Communist Party?"

However, our favorite UBoat commander and drunken senior senator of Massachusetts, Teddy Kennedy has revamped the phrase to ".... a member of the Concerned Alumnus of Princeton?"

In over 4000 cases and over 300 opinions, the liberals can't find a SINGLE issue on which to hang a reasonable objection to Supreme Court Samuel Alito's confirmation.

And so, they go after a single sentence on a 25-year-old job application and a cursory membership to an Alumni group at Princeton. This would be acceptable liberal politics of mass distraction if Teddy hadn't tried to turn it into a bigotry based McCarthyesque witch-hunt by suggesting that:
A) One opinion piece in a C.A.P. newsletter reflected the opinions of the ENTIRE membership
and
B) Since this one article reflected ALL Concerned Alumnus of Princeton, it must reflect Judge Alito's position as well.

Once you learn your debating fallacies, it's not so difficult to read most Democrat demagoguery. This particular fallacy is two fold. 1) Guilt by association. and 2) False premise.

Guilt By Association: Because an individual is a member of a particular organization, it holds (by the fallacy) that the individual is comfortable or associates himself with ALL aspects of that organization. Teddy Kennedy, for example, is a strong supporter of the ACLU (as was Justice Ginsburg). The ACLU is now defending a group called NAMBLA. This is the "North American Man Boy Love Association" which advocates the legalizing of man-on-boy(down to age 12) sex and the legalization of what is currently considered child pornography. To follow Senator Kennedy's own logic, one must assume that as a supporter of the ACLU, Kennedy must also support man-boy sex.
False Premise: First false premise was that the quoted piece was CAP policy - IT WAS NOT! Actually, the entire article was satire (or "tounge-in-cheek" for those of you that went throught the California public school system). The CAP organization fought against quotas at Princeton. It did not fight against admitting women or minorities, only arguing that standards of entrance regarding grade-point averages, test scores, and class ratings shouldn't be lowered just to allow less qualified (but ethnically and gender-ly diverse) applicants an easier chance at entering Princeton. CAP had no problem with admitting more minorities and more women who qualified under the stringent educational standards... they just didn't want those educational standards lowered. This did NOT mean they were discriminatory against minorities... they just discriminated against those without high educational standards regardless of race, color, creed, or gender. The second false premise was that Judge Alito considered this as "standing policy" of CAP and joined to support those standards... WHICH IS EQUALLY UNTRUE!

Where the insinuations and allusions went over the line and became more McCarthyesque than even Senator Joe McCarthy would have gone was in that in the 25+ years since this ONE mention on ONE job application, Judge Alito has hundreds of opinions and written case law, thousands of co-workers, employees and judicial appointees that testify to his integrity and LACK of bigotry in ANY manner. Senator Kennedy ignored those THOUSANDS of pieces of evidentiary material and went for the smallest of notations as his basis for argument. He then took that imaginary ant hill and built it into a mountain RANGE of delusional and imaginary machinations to support his faulty assumption - Judge Alito is a bigot. Even Joe McCarthy never built so much accusation out of so little!

Once again, Senator Kennedy is "all wet" .... ummm .... so to speak