Character Assassination 2009

Glenn Greenwald's column in today's Salon speaks to the despicable strategies persons devoted to the right wing are using in their efforts to block highly qualified persons from--what? even being CONSIDERED by President Obama for the Supreme Court? It's all very unfair and very disheartening.

Here's a good part of the article:

Friday May 8, 2009 06:08 EDT
Puzzle: to whom might the NYT be referring in its Editorial?

(Updated below - Update II )

In an Editorial today on Obama's selection to replace David Souter on the Supreme Court, The New York Times writes:

It’s never too early, it appears, to start the character assassination, especially against one possible candidate, Judge Sonia Sotomayor. . . .

Supreme Court vacancies have long been political fights, sometimes intense ones, but generally, they begin when a candidate is picked. This time, the attacks have already begun, many aimed at Judge Sotomayor and beyond the pale of reasonable debate. She is being called insufficiently intellectual despite her stellar academic credentials. Her temperament is being assailed, generally by anonymous detractors. . . .

When President Obama makes his decision, he should ignore the uninformed and mean-spirited chattering and select the best person for the job.

Congratulations to Jeffrey Rosen, TNR and Rosen's Eminent Legal Scholar friends for their uncredited appearance in today's NYT Editorial. The mini-scandal over the Rosen/TNR assault on Sotomayor is packed with ironies, most prominently the fact that Rosen's criticisms of her work were characterized by extreme intellectual sloth and even deep confusion over simple legal issues (as even his own fellow law professors pointed out in unusually stinging critiques), all as Rosen proudly held himself out as the crusader on behalf of so-called "concerns" over Sotomayer's intellectual abilities.

But today's NYT Editorial underscores another glaring and significant irony. Consider one of the prime complaints from people who snidely dismiss online commentary, as Rosen obviously does (as I noted yesterday, he can't deign to name any critics to whom he's responding; he strangely refers to those who wrote criticisms of his article as "readers"; he subtly mocks the criticisms which he provoked as "an enthusiastic response in the blogosphere"). From that condescending circle, it is frequently heard that online and blog commentary is "unreliable" and even harmful because it has no standards, because the online rabble can say anything they want, because anonymity permits reckless attacks and breeds mean-spirited gossip. Apparently, though, if that exact same anonymous, standards-less, malicious, fact-free chatter is placed under the banner of The New Republic (or the NYT or The Washington Post or NBC News) and endowed with the byline of a Serious journalist, then it's magically transformed into "reporting."

Thus we have The New York Times today condemning "character assassinations beyond the pale of reasonable debate" and "uninformed and mean-spirited chattering" by "anonymous detractors," and they're not referring to anything coming from blogs. Instead, all of that came from one of the leading lights of the Respectable Intellectual Center, in an establishment journal, purporting to carry out the dirty work of Eminent Legal Scholars while calling it "journalism." Note, by meaningful contrast, that those who generated the so-called "enthusiastic response in the blogosphere" to Rosen's smears actually attached their names to what they said -- and used verifiable facts and documented evidence when doing so. For all the hand-wringing about the harmful effects of anonymity and fact-free, unaccountable gossip from blogs, such things are actually found far more often in the very establishment venues where those complaints are so self-righteously voiced, decorated with the label of "reporting."

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On a related note: I received the following email last night from Berkeley Law Professor Melissa Murray:

Dear Glenn,

As a former Sotomayor clerk, I just wanted to thank you for your responses to Jeffrey Rosen's recent "article" about the judge. My year clerking for her was one of the most challenging and exhilarating experiences of my career. Her intellect, professionalism, and diligence were remarkable and inspiring. In researching a case, she never left a stone unturned, nor did she allow us to take shortcuts in our work. It's too bad Jeffrey Rosen never benefited from her example.