Dressed for Success, Primed for Failure

Peggy Noonan says Alito "appears to be a serious man with a nice mother from a good place (Trenton, N.J.). It is good to see nominees who come from America and who are not creatures of Washington. His record is now being aired; soon he will be questioned in public. Everyone seems to agree that both sides, right and left, are now forced by the media environment to respond within 24 hours to a nominee to the high court--'He's the end of the world as we know it!' 'He's a brilliant man and an incredibly wise choice!' Halos and devil's forks must be put in place quickly. But I'll wait and keep reading. I wonder if we all shouldn't. The men and women on the high court have way too much power and way too much impact on daily American life. When we can wait, when the nomination is legitimately debatable, why not wait to support and denounce when we have the information to do so?"

But what would cable put on?

In the New Republic, Andrew Siegel says, yeah, Alito may be nice--too nice:

"Those familiar with Alito stressed that his even-keeled temperament, collegiality, and lawyerly writing style distinguished his professional demeanor from that of the volatile, sarcastic, and often hectoring Scalia. The nearly universal conclusion was that Alito was less of a Scalia clone than some of the other federal judges considered for the post, most notably the rumored runner-up, Judge J. Michael Luttig.

"The implication of this conclusion was that liberals should breathe a sigh of relief, since Alito is no Scalia 2.0. The reality, however, is much more complicated. While Scalia's bellicose tone and general lack of civility have long been fodder for his left-wing critics, they have also served to hold back his judicial agenda, both by alienating potential allies within the Court and by marking his ideas as extreme in the court of public opinion. But Alito, who marries Scalia's conservative jurisprudence with tact, politeness, and a deferential writing style, is infinitely more dangerous to liberals. In Alito, they may have met their worst nightmare."

Jack Shafer says The Post bows and scrapes to Charles and Camilla, while Columbia Journalism Review chides The Post for disclosing the CIA's secret Eastern European prison for al-Qaeda captives without saying where it is (as now Financial Times has now done) at the request of U.S. officials:

"One Washington foreign policy analyst, Peter Kornbluh, told us, 'This is probably the most important newspaper capitulation since [the New York Times] yielded to JFK's call for them not to run the full story of planning for the Bay of Pigs. By withholding the country names, the Post is directly enabling the rendition, secret detention, and torture of prisoners at these locations to continue. That is a ghastly responsibility.' . . .

"What we do know is that the Post is trying to have it both ways: Getting credit for breaking the story, without breaking the specific details that might have caused it grief from the CIA."

On the other hand, no one would know about it without Dana Priest's story.

It's fine with me if Arianna wants to rip Carville for being too soft on Cheney:

"Can somebody please, please, please shut Carville up -- especially about Plamegate. His takes on the scandal are utterly compromised by his marriage to Mary Matalin."

But isn't that an odd position to take for a woman who was once married to a GOP congressman? Did she not speak her mind because Michael Huffington was her husband? I doubt it.

The recent news about newspaper belt-tightening doesn't draw much sympathy from Jeff Jarvis :

"Every time we hear about another cutback in newspapers -- and there are plenty of them these days -- we automatically hear the notion that journalism jobs must be saved to save journalism. I'm afraid it's time to challenge that assumption.

"Saving journalism isn't about saving jobs or even newspapers. In fact, the goal shouldn't be just to save journalism but to grow it, expand it, explode it, taking advantage of all the amazing new means to gather and share news we have today.

"Start with the real goals, which are informing society, keeping power in check, improving people's lives, making connections (right?) and then ask what the best ways are to do that today. After that, you can ask what the role of journalists and newspapers should be.

"Maybe we need fewer people in newsrooms and need to take money to hire a lot more people outside newsrooms to gather more news."

Hey, citizen journalism is great, unless you're one of the citizens who loses his job.