I was disappointed by his unwillingness to supply candid, forthright answers and the WH's usual "dog ate our homework" douchebaggery with their stonewalling, and destruction and loss documentation etc.

Alito is a religious extremist, and to permit the WH to game the system even more outrageously was unforgivable. I gave the Dems the "dry powder" benefit of the doubt on the Iraq supplemental and other important measures, but I won't forget this:

Republican senators, aided by 19 Democrats, cleared the path yesterday for Samuel A. Alito Jr. to join the Supreme Court and for President Bush to put his stamp firmly on the nine-member bench. [...] Alito is poised to make a larger impact on the court because he will replace Sandra Day O'Connor, the deciding vote in numerous 5 to 4 decisions over the years. [...] (01/31/06 WaPo Babington)

The religious makeup of any judiciary or govt body (and candidates for them) shouldn't be an issue except where a candidate has an explicit agenda to use the office for religious activism. Alito and Roberts aren't Catholic in the same way. Critics were attacked for being anti-Catholic, which is crap. The radical right selectively uses extremists both to carry forth their agenda and to act as human shields on the tip of the phalanx. It's an old Roman / fascist tactic in both military and rhetorical strategy that any historian or people who have seen Mad Max the Road Warrior instantly recognize.

The intellect Roberts, and his cohorts, put on display is on the level of a high school sophomore debating student, wearing a fancy suit, speaking with faux but servicable authority, and yet still -- in every idea and word and manner -- completely at the mercy of coddled adolescence and its always infant-sized security blankets of ignorance and prejudice.

Such 'sensible liberals' refused to see the danger that these ultra-conservative (translation: neo-con) justices represented: they are little more than political human 'doomsday weapons' meant to function long after the circumstances that led to their installment have passed. They will use their ideological roots to obstruct anything that doesn't adhere to their rather warped beliefs regarding individual rights as opposed to control over those rights by The (Corporate) State...which they have shown a nasty predilection to prefer.

Here, in a nutshell, is the division between the Court's conservative minimalists and its visionaries. In the context of a particular case, which can be resolved without reference to fundamental principles, Alito (along with Roberts, and also Kennedy) does not question past decisions, avoids the most fundamental disputes, and avoids theoretical ambition. By contrast, Scalia (along with Thomas) is not cautious about objecting to a "chaotic set of precedents" and rethinking them from the ground up. We can see the same disagreements in the many other areas, including abortion and campaign finance, in which Alito and Roberts worked within existing precedent while Scalia and Thomas urged that Roe v. Wade and important campaign finance decisions should be jettisoned immediately....

It is harder to predict what will happen down the line. Suppose that the continued vitality of Flast v. Cohen or Roe v. Wade is raised in the near future--how will Alito and Roberts proceed in that event? It is clear that the two justices do not like to overrule precedents when it is not necessary to do so in order to resolve the case at hand. What is less clear is how the minimalists will proceed when a case cannot be decided without taking a stand on a precedent that they reject in principle. The minimalists and the visionaries have been able to agree on how to resolve the key cases this term. It remains to be seen if their alliance will fracture when the question of fundamental constitutional change simply cannot be postponed.

As a useful service, could you point out who some of the worst people on the democratic side about this were?  I am interested to know who I should be pissed off about.  I know these guys:

Joe Lieberman, Connecticut
Robert Byrd, West Virginia
Ben Nelson, Nebraska
Mary Landrieu, Louisiana
Daniel Inouye, Hawaii
Mark Pryor, Arkansas
Ken Salazar, Colorado

gave into the pressure and might as well be republicans for all the good they've done protecting us from reactionary crap like that.  But I wonder if I should be pissed off at more people, like other politicians and pundits?

I am one of those people that likes to look at what people said, then see how their advice turned out.  It looks like you were right, and so I'm interested in your opinion about who the other bad guys here were.  In particular, who supported the move and now is still blathering on as if their opinion deserved any credibility.

Also, who else was right on our side?  They deserve our support and recognition for their prescience.  They also deserve our continued attention.