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 hatever
happened to Michael Kinsley? His career peaked years ago and has
been in steady decline ever since. First he swapped the civil and
thoughtful debate format of Firing Line for the professional
wrestling-like atmosphere of Crossfire. Then he left that
show to become a corporate shill for Microsoft's fledgling online
magazine. Now, he occupies his days writing nasty columns for the
Washington Post — including a March 18 screed disparaging
Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Kinsley, with
poison pen in hand, took after Mrs. Thomas for the sin of defending
the nomination of federal-district-court judge Charles Pickering
to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — who, like her husband,
was subjected to contemptible and baseless personal attacks intended
not merely to defeat his nomination, but to destroy his reputation.
Even the Washington Post editorial page couldn't stomach
them.
Kinsley also
found evidence for the vast Right-wing conspiracy in the fact that
the Wall Street Journal editorial page published Mrs. Thomas's
defense of Pickering. That would be the same editorial page that
last week featured an opinion piece authored by Kenneth Roth, executive
director of the Left-wing group Human Rights Watch, and carries
a regular column by the notoriously liberal Albert Hunt.
Mrs. Thomas
didn't say, as Kinsley asserts, that anyone who opposes Republican
judicial nominees represents the "hard left." But it's
undeniable that the cabal of nonprofit groups aligned against President
Bush's nominees — including People for the American Way and
the Alliance for Justice — are on the extreme left of the political
and ideological spectrum, the same place where Kinsley hangs his
beanie.
And despite
Kinsley's protestation that "'hard left' is not an accurate
description of the average Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee,"
the term is more than fitting. The committee is led by Patrick Leahy,
and its second ranking member is Ted Kennedy. It also includes such
chest-beating Leftists as Charles Schumer, John Edwards, Dick Durbin,
Maria Cantwell, and Russ Feingold.
Kinsley finds
nothing particularly troublesome about the smear tactics used against
Pickering. Smash-mouthing conservative nominees as racists is standard
operating procedure. Kinsley reads the Senate's constitutional role
of "advice and consent" to mean "slash and burn."
He makes no distinction between principled opposition to a nominee
and the McCarthyite tactics used to defeat him.
But at the
root of Kinsley's rant is his contempt for Justice Thomas. The Thomas-haters
simply cannot abide a black Supreme Court justice who does not conform
to their racial stereotype but instead adheres to what Kinsley ignorantly
dismisses as "a few magic words such as 'judicial restraint'
and 'strict constructionism.'"
And Kinsley
and his ilk damn a lady with Mrs. Thomas's class, who proudly stands
with her husband, while they praise the likes of Hillary Clinton,
who exploited her husband's position to fulfill her own ambitions.
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