Sotomayor, Jeffrey Rosen, The New Republic & National Review, right-wing punditry in general

A lot of folks are talking about this article from The New Republic. Here’s one of the paragraphs that they’re discussing:

But despite the praise from some of her former clerks, and warm words from some of her Second Circuit colleagues, there are also many reservations about Sotomayor. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking to a range of people who have worked with her, nearly all of them former law clerks for other judges on the Second Circuit or former federal prosecutors in New York. Most are Democrats and all of them want President Obama to appoint a judicial star of the highest intellectual caliber who has the potential to change the direction of the court. Nearly all of them acknowledged that Sotomayor is a presumptive front-runner, but nearly none of them raved about her. They expressed questions about her temperament, her judicial craftsmanship, and most of all, her ability to provide an intellectual counterweight to the conservative justices, as well as a clear liberal alternative.

And the second:

The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was “not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench,” as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. “She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren’t penetrating and don’t get to the heart of the issue.”

A few things I ponder:

If no one whose words are cited is willing to take responsability for their criticisms of Sotomayor, isn’t this “heresay”? The article is called “The Case Against Sotomayor”. It sounds like a dubious case, given that the only attributed criticism of the nominee in question is this:

In 2001, for example, a conservative colleague, Ralph Winter, included an unusual footnote in a case suggesting that an earlier opinion by Sotomayor might have inadvertently misstated the law in a way that misled litigants.

A footnote, which includes the word “might” and is written by a “conservative” judge. Rosen doesn’t investigate what it was that Sotomayor said that might have inadvertantly misstated the law. Why is The New Republic publishing this, and not The National Inquirer? Was there not enough salaciousness?

The last paragraph is money in the journalistic bank:

I haven’t read enough of Sotomayor’s opinions to have a confident sense of them, nor have I talked to enough of Sotomayor’s detractors and supporters, to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths. It’s possible that the former clerks and former prosecutors I talked to have an incomplete picture of her abilities.

Neither have I, but I wouldn’t think about writing an article defending her to be published in a major political journal unless I’d done the requisite research, and had more than anonymous critics to cite. And is that second comma really necessary?

Isn’t it funny how places like this only take articles seriously when they happen to aid them in their war on Obama? Otherwise, I don’t think they’d quote TNR to back up an argument. Conservatives have built up a very strong defense mechanism against the reality which is changing faster than they’d like it to. As long as they raise furor about the left-wing press, they don’t have to come to terms with anything that happens in the world which might cause them to rethink their myriadly entrenched beliefs.