There are lies, damned lies, and fact-checker stories.
ProPublica, a so-called “fact-checking” publication, has just published the latest hit piece of a well-financed campaign that it and other
Left
-wing organizations are waging, with the help of
Democratic
politicians, to discredit members of the
Supreme Court
’s 6-3 conservative majority.
THE ENDURING DAMAGE OF THE SUPREME COURT’S TRANSGENDER RULING
Traducing conservative judges has been the work of the Left for decades, starting long before originalists and textualists were, thank God, being confirmed in greater numbers to America’s highest court.
That is why even dusty copies of the political lexicon include the verb “to bork,” which means to destroy someone’s reputation by deliberate defamation. This neologism was coined after the persecution of Judge Robert Bork, whom the blackguard Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy attacked viciously in 1987, alleging, among other absurdities, that he was a racial segregationist.
Denigration of conservatives has escalated recently in response to the Supreme Court shifting decisively toward those who stick to the original meaning of the Constitution rather than improperly extrapolating from it to accommodate congressional and executive overreach. This blocks or slows the Left’s undemocratic advance, so adverse rulings and justices responsible for them must be discredited. Hence the hit pieces.
Justice Clarence Thomas, defamed by the Left throughout his exemplary career, is perhaps the Left’s top target — ProPublica did its
hit job on him
in May — but he is closely followed by Justice Samuel Alito, author of the Dobbs decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion. Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch, also suffer their unfair share of Left-wing denigration.
The
latest travesty
follows the usual pattern. In a disingenuous just-the-facts-ma’am tone, it includes and excludes selectively so nothing can be said to be flat wrong, but the end result is deceptive and amounts to what the authors clearly want readers to take as an open and shut case of judicial corruption.
The essence of this week’s accusation is that Alito accepted three days of hospitality fishing in Alaska, flew there on a private jet owned by billionaire Paul Singer, did not declare this in financial disclosures, and did not recuse himself when cases came before the court in which Singer had an interest. The story struts and frets its minutes upon the stage, full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.
The pattern of most such denigration campaigns relies on the truth of the maxim that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. Exculpatory context emerges only after the poison of the allegations has had time to sink in. Pro Publica had Alito’s counter-narrative before publication, but it first mentions it only after building a supposedly damning narrative for 11 paragraphs.
None of this quite captures the essential dishonesty of such journalistic smears. Nor does it give a proper whiff of the critics’ piquant pettifogging as they unconvincingly imply that a justice might change his interpretations of the law in gratitude for a few pissant recreations.
Focus for a moment on a sentence ProPublica wrote about Alito’s travel on the Singer jet. The story proclaims: “If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.”
To which the reply should be, “So what?” Does the price tag mean Alito received the equivalent of such a sum? No, it doesn’t. Was the seat worth $100,00 to him? Obviously not, for it is inconceivable that he would have hired a private jet to take him to Alaska had the vacant one not been offered. He also understood that the seat would have remained empty had he not accepted it. An empty seat, as any airline will tell you, is worth nothing.
The only good thing that can be said of ProPublica’s latest smear is that this time around the normal pattern of the smear job didn’t pan out. The victim didn’t sit back and wait for the attack before slashing and burning it. Alito didn’t give ProPublica the comment it requested, which would doubtless have been truncated and distorted. Instead, he laid out his case in hundreds of his own uninterrupted words in a
prebuttal article for the
Wall Street Journal
, which appeared hours before Pro Publica published.
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The headline was “Pro Publica misleads its readers.” Now, that is true. Alito made it plain that he interpreted disclosure rules in the ordinary way and could not reasonably have known Singer had any interest in the cases cited. That, apparently, is all he intends to say on the matter. And it is all he needs to say.
It is significant that he chose to say it before the attacker landed its first blow. It is good to see the victim going on offense. The Left’s efforts to wreck the Article 3 branch of the federal government because it cannot control it demand such robust rebuttal and rejection.
