BY JONATHAN SKRMETTI
ONCE AGAIN, THE NEW YORK Times has demonstrated that its primary interest lies in serving as a channel of Democratic propaganda. In an editorial on February 9, the Times made three dubious factual claims about the Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee scandal. I did not realize Jayson Blair had moved to the editorial page.
The Times has been prattling on about “Republican hackers” for some time and continued to do so in the editorial. The reality, as has been explained over and over, is that the Democrats stored their incriminating documents in a public folder on a shared server. It’s the technological equivalent of posting the documents on a public bulletin board.
If, as the Times claims, double-clicking on a folder now constitutes “high tech espionage,” I demand an honorary Ph.D in Computer Science. I hope they don’t sue me for opening their web page with my elite hacker skills. The world would be a better place if the paper boosted its security so that nobody could visit nytimes.com.
The next factual inaccuracy is the claim that Republicans changed their story after it broke and took the offensive, chiding Democrats for not having enough security. The fact is that the Republicans said from the outset that the Democratic memos were available on shared space and were not secured; this is not a Clintonian case of “blame the victim,” no matter how much the Times wishes it to be so.
The third distortion is the related suggestion that Republicans are trying to throw up a cloud of smoke by accusing the Democrats of unethical behavior based on the memos. The whole reason Republicans publicized the documents was because they contain evidence of, at the very least, serious misjudgments by Democratic Senators.
Holding up a nominee to influence the outcome of a case, as the Democrats actually did to a Sixth Circuit nominee during the Grutter affirmative action litigation at the request of the NAACP, reeks of inappropriateness. The memos also unequivocally reveal that, as has long been suspected, Democratic committee members are the willing pawns of People for the American Way.
The documents also confirm that Miguel Estrada was targeted for filibuster because he was Latino. It is unthinkable that in this day Senators would decide to keep a judicial nominee off the bench on the basis of his race, but apparently Democrats prefer to prejudge a nominee based on the color of his skin rather than the content of his character.
The litany of specific instances of Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee members pandering to special interests contained in those documents is damning, but in the eyes of the Times the fact that they came to light is the real sin.
Jonathan Skrmetti’s column appears biweekly.