People here have discussed her recent screed about the unfairness of the “far right” toward Obama nominee Harold Koh. But somehow we’ve let the most remarkable passage slide. She writes, “If we cannot bring ourselves to loudly support nominees like Koh and Johnsen, we deserve whoever it is that actually can be confirmed in this climate. (I was about to suggest that possibly Dora the Explorer might squeak through a confirmation hearing, until it occurred to me that she’s a foreigner, a transnationalist, and a woman.)”

“In this climate”? The current conjunction of a liberal president and a liberal majority in the Senate is the most favorable environment legal liberals have enjoyed for at least thirty years, and Lithwick is still whining–and implying, grotesquely, that conservatives are against female nominees (in an article the very topic of which would seem to refute the charge). But being Dahlia Lithwick means never having to make sense.