by Matt Barr

Thumping Dahlia Lithwick

I've both challenged and defended Dahlia Lithwick here. Time to break the tie! Beldar quotes this passage from a recent Slate piece on Judge Roberts:

He doesn't appear to be crusading for a wholesale national retreat to the good old days of executing miscreant 'tweens (although he seemingly finds arresting them for French-fry possession to be a cornerstone in good parent-child relations).

Busted! "Regular readers of my blog will know that I don't use the term "liar" lightly. But I assert that you, ma'am, have told an outright lie in the parenthetical quoted above, and I call you on it.... I therefore say that you, ma'am, are just a liar."

Are her pants on fire? Beldar vows to make Lithwick notice him and invites her to comment on his blog. Why didn't I think of that?

Now, if you scroll down or click over to this week's Carnival of the Vanities, hosted here, you'll find me describing Justice Kennedy's selection as the result of President Reagan pointing blindfloded at the Martindale-Hubbell directory, and describing Justice Scalia as "a theocratic tyrant who wants to kill pregnant women and turn the rest of the country over to Pope Nazi McHitlerburton for reprogramming." Come here. Closer. I don't mean it.

Lithwick is a talented writer and a fine analyst of the Court. One thing that is interesting in the Slate "breakfast table" exchange linked above is this:

I don't know if either of you are on the mailing lists for the many, many D.C. advocacy groups seeking to influence the outcome of the John Roberts confirmation, but if an inbox could shiver, mine would. Roberts has been the nominee for less than 24 hours, and scores of interns at dozens of organizations have already been set to work mining every opinion this man ever wrote, every brief he ever authored, and every law-school paper he ever touched.

I bet! Both right and left interest groups are slinging e-mails, blogads, commercials, talking heads and press releases around, aren't they? An hour after Justice O'Connor announced her retirement I got something from Progress For America. But Lithwick probably didn't:

All this in order to prove that Roberts is the worst thing that's happened to women/the environment/the Commerce Clause/the Guantanamo detainees, and yes, to the ineffable arroyo toad, since Robert Bork.

All this? Well, I guess Lithwick is only signed up for a certain kind of interest group's e-mails. She's an analyst more than a reporter, so no problem, I guess, but I thought it odd she'd let it slip that she's involved with a bunch of liberal legal causes but won't so much as accept e-mail from the right. If I had her gig, I'd have everyone in the world sending me their Supreme Court related stuff. I'd ignore most of it, but still.

Anyway, the french fry crack -- for background, read this -- should hardly be the kind of thing that makes you try and rouse the blogosphere to an anti-Lithwick crusade. I say leave her to Cathy Young!

We Supreme Court buffs are lucky to have someone with Lithwick's clever sense of humor covering the Court. Honestly, if it weren't for the kind of snark everyone's suddenly exercised about all the Supreme Court coverage we read -- except here! -- would be pretty dull.

Browse books from Amazon.com:
Supreme+Court