My Bad, I Just Meant She Was Mildly Incompetent

TNR's Jeffrey Rosen attempts to apologize for Tuesday's hatchet job on Sonia Sotomayor's qualifications for being the next Supreme Court Justice.

Some readers have also questioned my confession at the end of the piece that I hadn't read enough of her opinions to make a fully confident judgment. Perhaps I conceded too much: I had read enough of her opinions to find them good but not great--like much of the competent but not especially distinctive writing that characterizes most federal appellate opinions. In the past few days, I've read many more opinions, and nothing has called my initial judgment into question. For what it's worth, that judgment is consistent with that of the lawyers in the Federal Almanac:

Lawyers interviewed said Sotomayor writes good opinions. "Her opinions are O.K, by and large." "She writes very clear and careful prose in her opinions." "Her writing is good." "Her opinions are generally well-reasoned and well-argued." "She writes well." "She is a very good writer." "Her writing is not distinguished, but is perfectly competent."

Some readers have questioned my account of how "a conservative colleague, Ralph Winter, included an unusual footnote in a case suggesting that an earlier opinion by Sotomayor [United States v. Samaria] might have inadvertently misstated the law in a way that misled litigants." Indeed, the footnote is hardly a model of clarity-and I can see why readers might not come to the same conclusion I reached. But the careful observers of the Second Circuit I talked to, who were familiar with the case, said Winter was widely assumed to be making an effort to be polite, avoiding direct criticism of his colleague while trying to distinguish Sotomayor's holding in Samaria from some loosely written dicta. In their view, Sotomayor's dicta in Samaria could indeed be read to call the earlier cases into question, just as the litigants suggested, and they believe Winter was trying to contain the damage to avoid embarrassing his colleague.

Translation: "She's just meh. Her mehness is simply common knowledge in my circles. I don't understand why Obama is even considering her, and I completely don't understand why anyone is bothering to defend her."

So he stands by his opinion that she's unqualified. She just, after all, is according to his buddies. This is his explanation and apology by way of being even more condescending then he was on Tuesday.

Nice.

[UPDATE] Score: Double G, 2. Jeffrey Rosen, zip.

Getting a few people to chatter with the promise of anonymity is certainly the least burdensome way to get people to say bad things about someone. It's easy to understand why an extremely slothful "journalist" with no standards would opt for that path. But to claim that this is the only way to obtain candid assessments of a judge is clearly untrue.

Even if that claim were true, Rosen's mentality illustrates the decay that lies at the core of modern journalism. In his view, it's better to write a story using completely unreliable and discredited methods than it is to simply refrain from writing the story at all (well, the alternative to writing an unreliable piece was to write nothing, he argues, as though that's exonerating). Publishing a hit piece on someone's character and intellect using unreliable methods is infinitely worse than refraining from writing a story at all until you can get people to speak on the record and thus ensure there's accountability. But if you're desperate for attention and care only about being the first person to write a story, then standards of truth and reliability don't matter.

Frame the argument to a narrow scope where people are fighting over whether or not you got heads and won, or you got tails and everyone else lost. Classic Rovian "catapult the propaganda" here...Rosen tries to play the "Am I right and Sotomayor's a total bitch, or am I overreacting and she's just stupid?"

And Glenn just utterly reams the guy. It's well worth reading the whole thing.