Medary.com

The Alito hearings may be remembered primarily as the point at which the Democrats' tactics of smear and innuendo became self-evidently ineffective.

Several observers are seeing a parallel in the Democratic Senators' antics with Tailgunner Joe McCarthy's anti-Communist hearings of the 1950's. This analogy is of course profoundly offensive to the Left, secure in their righteous belief that the Right has a monopoly on strident over-the-top Senatorial witch-hunts.

Peggy Noonan comments:

Either liberals like Ted Kennedy really believe that conservatives harbor deep in their hearts an animus toward women, and blacks, and Hispanics, and everyone who is not a white male, or liberals simply enjoy, for reasons that are cynical and perhaps also psychological ("The people I fight are bad; this buttresses my belief that I, in spite of what I know about myself, am good"), suggesting that conservatives are full of narrow-minded bigotry and hatred.

As a matter of fact, Peggy, yes, the Left really does believe that. And that belief blinds them and cripples them, resulting in the sorry spectacle of the Alito confirmation hearings.