It would have taken seconds to fact-check.
Months after the New York Times let crybaby Jacobins overhaul their entire opinion page, the Gray Lady let contributing writer Linda Greenhouse make a claim so egregiously falsifiable that her entire piece ought to be retracted. Greenhouse, a Yale Law School lecturer, claimed that Amy Coney Barrett not only has a resume “quite thin for a Supreme Court nominee,” but in fact, “I’m hard pressed to think of a Supreme Court nominee in modern times who has brought such limited experience to the job.”
I’m many decades younger than Greenhouse, and even I am old enough remember when Barack Obama appointed Elena Kagan, a career law professor with barely one year’s experience as U.S. Solicitor General and no time as a judge of any kind, to replace a Republican Supreme Court appointee, and also that five Republicans voted to confirm her nomination.
The thrust of Greenfield’s “just-asking-questions!” piece follows the usual genre of left-wing histrionics about a Republican Senate exercising its constitutional power to confirm a Republican appointee to the Supreme Court. The other reasons for hand-wringing that Greenfield asks about, of course, touch on Barrett’s Catholic faith and her personal opinion on abortion.
Journalists let factual errors slip through the cracks every once in a while. But for the New York Times to publish such an obviously dishonest assertion is ridiculous. And it’s doubly ridiculous because, not half a year ago, the New York Times ousted multiple editors and completely overhauled its opinion page because James Bennet dared publish a sitting U.S. senator’s widely shared opinion. Supposedly, Tom Cotton’s assertions violated standards of some kind. The truth doesn’t appear to be one of the standards the New York Times editors go by.
Right now, the Republican White House and Senate have nothing left to lose, and the Democrats have no bullets left in the gun after their failing and baseless smear campaign against Brett Kavanaugh as a serial gang rapist. If the best they have now is outright historical revisionism about the experience of Obama appointees and the Republicans who confirmed them, then Barrett’s confirmation is surely a lock.
