Attack dogs in action

Glenn Greenwald has a couple of good posts on the subjectof the attacks on Judge Taylor. The first cites the personal nature of the attacks which he concludes with this observation:

Look at any individual over the last five years who has prominently and aggressively criticized the Leader, and see if you can find one who has not been the target of vicious, personal assaults designed to destroy their reputation and credibility.

In the second, he elaborates on the point he made yesterday that the criticisms are woefully uninformed and "completely bereft of reasoning".

The fact that something is "immensely difficult" for Ann Althouse to figure out does not mean that it is, in fact, "immensely difficult." Most actual legal experts, across the ideological spectrum, have found nothing challenging -- let alone "immensely difficult" -- about concluding that the President of the United States does not have the power to break the law by engaging in the very conduct which the law criminalizes.

Althouse thinks that the President's claim that neither courts nor Congress can interfere in his conduct with regard to national security "is a serious argument, and judges need to take it seriously," but she never says why that argument is "serious" or what the court failed to consider in rejecting the administration's theories of presidential omnipotence. Althouse apparently thinks that repeating the words "serious" and "difficult" enough times will bestow on her little platitudes the scholarly weight which her analysis so plainly, so embarrassingly lacks.

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Althouse did not follow this case and had no idea what happened in it. She formed her views about the court's ruling and then proceeded to express them loudly and publicly without bothering to do the smallest amount of work which would be necessary for forming a responsible opinion -- including even reviewing what the DoJ argued here or finding out what happened previously in this case (she even aggressively criticized the court's opinion while admitting that she only had time to "skim it"). Even after that, it is clear that she just read the opinion and then spat up some trite political slogans attacking the court, exhibiting precisely the intellectual sloth and undisciplined approach of which she thinks she is qualified to accuse Judge Taylor.

But this gaping lack of relevant knowledge did not stop Althouse from writing an Op-Ed, nor stop The New York Times from publishing it, in which she pretended to be some sort of legal expert on the issues decided by Judge Taylor. The fact that someone can be paraded around as an expert on a lawsuit about which they know next to nothing is as good of an explanation as any for the sorry, distortive state of our political discourse.