After I responded to his attack on me, calling it slippery and dishonest, Goldstein issued two responses–one in the comments section of his original post and one new 9-page (!) post. Goldstein says his “personal opinion” of my “levelheadedness was higher” before I responded to him on the Corner. Looking back on it, I do regret the “slippery and dishonest” comment. It’s incomplete! Goldstein is also rock-dumb.

I’m not going to produce a 15-page response to go through every error Goldstein no doubt makes. I’ve only read a third of his endless commentary and skimmed the rest. But that’s enough for me to see that there’s no point in reading the whole thing thoroughly to see if he’s made any valid criticisms of me. Let me select two easy-to-explain examples of the quality of thinking (and reading) we’re dealing with here.

1) Goldstein alleged that my article was an attempt to weaken Tribe in advance of a confirmation fight over Rehnquist’s replacement. I noted, a bit sardonically, that this alleged motivation of mine required me to believe that no other liberal law professors would step forward to play Tribe’s role in such a fight. In other words, Goldstein’s account of my motivation made no sense. Goldstein, totally missing the point, now writes this in his comments section: “[Ponnuru’s] hyperbole does run a little wild with the idea that my post suggested that Tribe was the only person who would oppose Bush’s nominees.”

2) My article, you’ll recall, concerned Tribe’s 2003 claim to have made a daring Ninth Amendment argument to the Supreme Court in 1980, even though he faced pressure from the establishment not to make it. I went through evidence showing that Tribe didn’t do any such thing, while plenty of other lawyers did. At one point in my article, I compared Tribe’s brief to the Court with other briefs, noting that those other briefs made much more extensive Ninth Amendment arguments than Tribe did. I therefore noted some of the points those other briefs mentioned and Tribe’s did not.

For Goldstein, this portion of my article “just represents Ponnuru’s view that he knows better than Tribe how to argue a constitutional law case in the Supreme Court.” He then expands on this idea: “If you believe that, then by nature you’re going to believe inconsolably that Ponnuru is right about all of this and Tribe is wrong. (Tribe did win the case, incidentally.)” First of all, re “inconsolably”: I do not think that word means what Goldstein thinks it means. Second–and Goldstein should read this next passage slowly: Obviously I’m not saying that Tribe made a mistake in how he argued his case before the Supreme Court. He told me, in a comment I quote in the article, that he had figured out a way to argue the case before the Supreme Court without invoking the Ninth Amendment. That, he said, was the wisest thing to do given the prevailing view of the Ninth Amendment. I’m not at all second-guessing that judgment. Listening to the counsels of prudence may have been the right thing to do! But having done that, don’t go around saying how you bravely ignored those counsels. The problem isn’t with how Tribe argued the case, but with how he later misrepresented what he had done.

It’s also worth noting that Goldstein’s zeal leads him to make arguments for Tribe that Tribe has already cut off! Goldstein advances a cockamamie argument that Tribe was trying to talk about the Ninth Amendment at the Supreme Court but was cut off. But this means we now have three different stories. Tribe’s 2003 article reaches its focal point with what he “dared to say” at the Supreme Court (not what he had daringly tried to say but wasn’t quite able to say). In a 2005 interview with me, Tribe said he had figured out how to make the argument without invoking the Ninth Amendment. And then there’s Goldstein’s theory.

Goldstein keeps saying that he never “talked” to Tribe before writing these comments. Let’s hope Tribe comes up with something better when he gets around to refuting my article, as he has promised to do.