Althouse: "I basically thought of it as a blog entry."

June 1, 2009

"I basically thought of it as a blog entry."

Blaming blogging for what wasn't even blogging.

11 comments:

traditionalguy said...: When first we start to decieve what a tangled internet smear we weave. Rosen's defense to his pre-emptive hit piece was that he was merely working for Liberal king makers who were trying to knock out a moderate. So we can't blame him for conservatives using his creative slanders against the same target now that Obama has picked her as the nominee. He wasn't trying to help out the conservatives at all, he was just doing a standard hit piece with a totally liberal agenda. So when he fell into the same hole that he dug and covered for Sotomayor to fall into, it only proves that life is being unfair to him. Damn those bloggers; it's all their fault.; 6/1/09, 6:40 AM
J. Cricket said...: Ah, that acute case of Rosen envy lives on!!!

Your apparently uncontrollable need to bitch and whine about the often-published Rosen is, well, delicious!!; 6/1/09, 7:54 AM
goesh said...: Nawww, I don't see it that way at all, JD.; 6/1/09, 7:59 AM
rhhardin said...: Rosen is just saying he'll defer to political correctness from now on.

That's all the left wanted.; 6/1/09, 8:00 AM
traditionalguy said...: Pardon the analogy, but our Professor is like a Drug Sniffing Dog. She is the greatest danger to people who ship loads of slanderous BS in pretentious tones over the internet. She always points them out and barks, like a good guardian should.; 6/1/09, 8:02 AM
KCFleming said...: AJD, nonresponsive as usual.

'Juris Dentist' appears to describe a legal abscess.; 6/1/09, 8:14 AM
Zach said...: Mickey Kaus has a word for a screwup where you accidentally tell the truth.

Rosen looked Sotomayor up in the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, which would seem like a good impartial source. It interviewed lawyers who don't know she's going to be nominated to the Supreme Court, it interviewed them about lots of judges at once, and it let them choose their own words.

He quoted the almanac fairly: a page from the entry is linked from the article. The page is a printout from Westlaw, so it's not like nobody would have ever found it if Rosen hadn't dragged it to the fore.

Rosen might have made a tactical error from his own perspective, but I think he should stand by his article. The issues raised are legitimate, and somebody would have eventually thought of looking up Sotomayor in a legal reference even if Rosen had never written anything.; 6/1/09, 10:09 AM
AlphaLiberal said...: Dude was not even writing for a blog. It was a special feature article, over 1,000 words long.

Glen Greenwald notwithstanding, that doesn't count as blogging. It's an article published to the web.; 6/1/09, 10:13 AM
AlphaLiberal said...: The article was a bunch of anonymous comments ripping on the nominee. If he couldn't find someone to say this stuff on the record, he should not have written the piece.

In the end, Rosen lacked the proper temperament.; 6/1/09, 10:14 AM
Zach said...: AlphaLiberal, if you were evaluating somebody for promotion, would you ever interview a subordinate without guaranteeing anonymity? It's not like your boss is going to forget the time you called her "not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench."

I'm sometimes skeptical about anonymous sources, but in this case the rationale for anonymity is so obvious I wouldn't trust anybody who went on the record.; 6/1/09, 10:35 AM
John Althouse Cohen said...: From the article:

he's swearing off blogging for good. ... He won't be blogging any more.

What is this supposed to mean? Since this article seems to assume that writing articles in The New Republic is "blogging," does this mean Rosen won't be writing any more articles for TNR? For any publication?; 6/1/09, 2:38 PM