The editors of the New York Times today rally to the defense of the irredeemably ideological American Bar Association, pretending—in the face of facts exhaustively assembled by Ed Whelan in these columns and in NRODT—that an ABA rating is still the gold standard for assessing the qualifications of judicial nominees. For good measure, they gratuitously smear Fifth Circuit nominee Michael Wallace, using Timespeak to denounce him as a racist. After all, if one makes legal arguments with which the Times disagrees, one is guilty of “insensitivity to civil rights,” isn’t one? And in the Times style guide that is the preferred euphemism for “closet Klansman,” right? Two minutes of hate, anyone?