Today in the bad faith industrial take complex
By 
Get ready to have your intelligence insulted for weeks now:
Hmm, let’s see — did Democrats try to “assassinate the character” of Roberts or Alito or Gorusch? Why, they did not. So what this argument amounts to is a claim that the Democrats broke the judicial nomination process by…not nominating justices who were credibly accused of sexual harassment or assault by third parties to Republicans could get some tit-for-tat? By just assuming that Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford were lying and not even giving them a hearing? I wish he would clarify exactly what transparently indefensible argument he’s making here. Although I must concede that there was little in the way of character assassination at the hearings for Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination.
And also LOL at the idea that there was no attempt to assasinate Sotomayor’s character:
Gingrich and Tancredo called Sotomayor an anti-white bigot. Limbaugh said he’d send her some vacuums so she could clean. National Review demanded she Anglicize her name. John Yoo called her an affirmative action pick. Glenn Beck called her a racist *while interviewing you.* https://t.co/hS6VBGfRTC— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) September 22, 2020
The National Review called Sotomayor (Princeton, Yale Law, 17 years experience as an Article III judge) the equivalent of Harriet Miers (SMU, SMU Law, 0 experience as a judge or scholar, no expertise in constitutional law whatsoever, seemed unclear on the difference between Earl Warren and Warren Burger.) And some centrists got in on the racist and sexist action too!
It seems ridiculous that reactionary public intellectuals are going to come up with so many silly rationalizations for their power play. But the problem is that what they’re really doing — “we have the votes and the formal power, so fuck you” is a norm they may need to go away starting in January 2021, so they need to pretend there’s some kind of “principle” involved here. But you’d have to be brain dead to find one.