Samuel Alito’s opening-statement observation that while at Princeton in the 1960s, “I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly” has touched some apparently raw nerves on the left. In Slate, writer Dahlia Lithwick suggests that when the statement is parsed closely, it reveals that Alito never really belonged at Princeton — or in his times. Lithwick put her own insights in parentheses:

After I graduated from high school, I went a full 12 miles down the road, but really to a different world when I entered Princeton University. (Damn snobs.) A generation earlier, I think that somebody from my background probably would not have felt fully comfortable at a college like Princeton. (And as I shall now illustrate, I was not.) But, by the time I graduated from high school, things had changed. And this was a time of great intellectual excitement for me. Both college and law school opened up new worlds of ideas. (Ideas, love ‘em. It’s the people I hate…) But this was back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a time of turmoil at colleges and universities. (Damn hippies.) And I saw some very smart people and very privileged people behaving irresponsibly. (Smart and privileged people who went on to become yourselves, ladies and gentlemen of the Senate.) And I couldn’t help making a contrast between some of the worst of what I saw on the campus and the good sense and the decency of the people back in my own community. (And so that is why I joined Concerned Alumni of Princeton and why, moreover, I am still so inflexible and judgmental today!)

Just as intriguing is the reaction of the popular left-wing blogger Atrios, who is a senior official at David Brock’s Media Matters for America website. Atrios pronounces Alito a “Freeper” and directs readers to an article written by another popular lefty blogger named Digby, who concludes that Alito “came off as an a–hole.” Echoing Lithwick, Digby writes that Alito’s “behaving irresponsibly” comment was “so revealing” because it showed that Alito belonged to a group of campus conservatives who later became “chickenhawks.” Digby referenced an article that he, Digby, had written last year in which he analyzed the “chickenhawk” phenomenon to understand why conservatives seemed so “pathologically irrational” in their desire to defeat international terrorism and prevent future terrorist attacks. Why is that so? The answer Digby reached was that conservative baby boomers — among them Samuel Alito — failed to prove their manhood in the 1960s, something that Digby argues could be accomplished equally by joining the counterculture or going to war in Vietnam:

And I think there is an even deeper layer to this as well and one which is vital to understanding why the right wing baby boomers and their political offspring are so pathologically irrational about dealing with terrorism. Vietnam, as we were all just mercilessly reminded in the presidential election, was the crucible of the baby boom generation, perhaps the crucible of America as a mature world power.
The war provided two very distinct tribal pathways to manhood. One was to join “the revolution” which included the perk of having equally revolutionary women at their sides, freely joining in sexual as well as political adventure as part of the broader cultural revolution. (The 60’s leftist got laid. A lot.) And he was also deeply engaged in the major issue of his age, the war in Vietnam, in a way that was not, at the time, seen as cowardly, but rather quite threatening. His masculine image encompassed both sides of the male archetypal coin — he was both virile and heroic.
The other pathway to prove your manhood was to test your physical courage in battle…

Alito did neither, Digby writes: “In other words, he’s a freeper. I say filibuster the creep.”