You know how you remember odd things—things you’re not even sure actually mean something—but they never full resolve in your mind. Well, one of them for me was Harret Miers. Do you remember her? George W. Bush nominated John Roberts to fill Sandra Day O’Connor’s seat, but when Chief Justice Rehnquist died, Roberts became the nominee for Chief Justice. Harriet Miers was then nominated as O’Connor’s replacement.

It was a complete mystery as to why Bush did that because Miers was completely unqualified. Back then the only explanation I could come up with was that she was someone who constantly flattered Bush and made him feel special based on the story of the birthday card she sent him:

Of course Miers was completely unacceptable and bipartisan pressure meant she only lasted as the nominee for a few weeks. Her replacement nominee was…Samuel Alito. And it was still nuts because on paper he was completely suitable (except for his ideology, but that was already baked in) so it only seemed weirder that she was chosen at all.

As we all got acquainted with the little shop of horrors that is Alito’s judicial philosophy I realized why W first nominated Miers:  to soft pedal this right wing extremist. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.

Which brings us to this week when Alito began complaining at a Heritage Foundation event about how the Dobbs leak made the justices targets for assassination. He had some other complaints, too:

The leak last spring before the court eliminated the nationwide right to abortion was a “grave betrayal of trust by somebody, and it was a shock,” he said. The threat to the justices, he added, was not theoretical because it “gave people a rational reason to think they could prevent that from happening by killing one of us.”

OK. The leak is what put them in danger—not the idiotic, sexist, and extremist language in the ruling itself—but the leak…of a document that was going to be released anyway.

He had another thing to whine about, too:

When asked about criticism that the court has strayed too far from public sentiment and risks appearing partisan when it overturns precedent, Alito said he has no problem with the public, the media and academics criticizing the court’s legal reasoning in its rulings. But he took issue with those who have questioned the legitimacy of the court.

“To say that the court is exhibiting a lack of integrity is something quite different. That goes to character, not to a disagreement with the result or the reasoning. It goes to character,” Alito said.

I can’t even with this nonsense anymore—we’re all supposed to defer to him I guess. Well, I’m guessing that part of his outburst is rooted in the nationwide response to the Dobbs decision, and the huge turnout we are already seeing, touched off by that decision. Stay mad, Sammy.

I started off by quoting Cartman from South Park, so I’ll let Cartman and his band sing us out: