I thought last night’s “60 Minutes” on Judge Pickering was astonishingly fair, even pro-Pickering. Sen. Chuck Schumer came across as precisely the sort of ass he is. At the end of the day, Schumer’s point was Pickering is unqualified because the context of his career, the context of the case itself, the context of everything else is irrelevant in the face of the fact that Pickering tried to be fair to a defendant in a flag burning case . I don’t need to recount the facts again, but it does seem to me that some journalist really needs to ask Schumer whether he thinks Senator Robert C. Byrd would be qualified to be a Federal judge. After all, Byrd’s record on racial sensitivity is far, far, far worse than Pickering’s.