Even Howie Kurtz sez: SCOTUS Nominee is Hard Right

A great post on dailykos.

The Failure of the Media

The Media's failure in the runup to the Iraq Debacle is well documented. DSM, "mushroom clouds," Plame, et al. make this abundantly clear.

History repeats itself, now on the Roberts nomination, as Howard Kurtz observes:

As you plow through the blizzard of memos he wrote as a government lawyer, you get the sense of a man who is more conservative, more combative and more sarcastic than he has been portrayed in these walk-on-water profiles. It's no surprise that this Harvard man clerked and lawyered his way to a Supreme Court nomination.

You will, by the way, hear almost none of this on TV. Understanding the memos requires walking through the background and legal context of each controversy at the time, and television has no inclination to do that unless there's an inflammatory phrase that the pundits can argue about. (TV people keep talking about the battle over the documents while saying very little about what's in them.) It is, in short, a classic newspaper story.

Roberts is quite familiar with bureaucratic dodges and the art of Washington insincerity, the documents suggest.

Kurtz misses something though, the utter failure of the New York Times, AGAIN. The Administration line is repeated practically verbatim in their Roberts coverage. A classic newspaper story this may be, but the New York Times has proven it is no longer a classic newspaper.