As Tim Graham has already pointed out on The Corner, this morning’s Washington Post has a large front-page above-the-fold picture of Senators Reid, Leahy, Kennedy, Schumer, Durbin, and Stabenow. For some inexplicable reason, the large title above the picture reads “Judge Alito’s Loyal Opposition”. I don’t see why a title is needed at all (there’s a separate caption under the picture), but the words selected are bizarre at best.

Meanwhile, the Post’s article on yesterday’s committee vote includes this sentence: “As an appellate judge for 15 years, Democrats said, Alito backed broad executive powers, making him a poor choice when the White House needs to be reined in.” Nothing that I have seen in the Democrats’ concocted case against Alito on executive powers relies on anything in his judicial record. Their entire case seems to rest on their distortions of a speech Alito gave in 2000 and of two DOJ memos he wrote in the mid-1980s. Moreover, it seems to me not the best journalistic practice to include a tag like “Democrats said” in the midst of a long compound sentence. The predictable effect is to give the impression that the article is endorsing the last half of the sentence (while of course preserving plausible deniability).