I'll Never Love This Way Again

Or, in Jeffrey Rosen's case, he won't lie, distort, and smear, via blogging, again.

Rosen, writing for the The New Republic, posted a diatribe ("The Case Against Sotomayor") on Judge Sonia Sotomayor, oh, about two-weeks before President Obama actually named her as the nominee.

Glenn Greenwald, at Salon, Brad DeLong, on his Brad Blog, and Brian Beutler, on TPMDC, immediately jumped all over Rosen, for using anonymous smears against Sotomayor, while freely admitting, that he hadn't actually studied any of her cases.

Darren Lenard Hutchinson, in his "Hatchet Job: Jeffrey Rosen's Utterly Bankrupt Analysis of Judge Sonia Sotomayor", delivered the haymaker.

But wait!



Jeffrey Rosen responded to his critics, weakly, to which Greenwald picked apart the non-apology apology.

So, for the fact that he wrote a sloppy, lazy, shoddy post, Mr. Jeffery Rosen disparages blogging, and is throwing in the towel on it;

The article was used to bash the judge's prospects even before her formal nomination. But its author, the noted legal writer Jeffrey Rosen, says he's been burned by the episode, too — enough that he's swearing off blogging for good.

"It was a short Web piece," Rosen says now, sounding a little shellshocked. "I basically thought of it as a blog entry."

[snip]

Above all, Rosen says he's drawn a lesson from how his initial essay was treated by people of both ideological stripes. He won't be blogging any more. He wants to spend more time with the material before hitting "send."

Greenwald, again;

In that grand accountability-free tradition, Rosen blames everyone but himself for what he did, but then melodramatically announces that he will no longer "blog" -- as though it's the medium, rather than his own standards and choices, that are to blame for what he did ,,,

[snip]

Moreover, the excuse that Rosen was merely "blogging" is, just as a factual matter, so obviously false: his Sotomayor piece wasn't on any of the TNR "blogs" (as happens when Rosen is actually "blogging") but instead was presented as a stand-alone article; it was, as NPR notes, "more than 1,000 words"; and TNR touted it as "the first in a series of reports by TNR legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen about the strengths and weaknesses of the leading candidates." Does that remotely sound as though they intended it to be a "mere blog post"?

[snip]

Rosen can give up blogging and every other perceived vice all he wants. But until he renounces the defining practices of what Sullivan calls "standard Washington reporting" -- indiscriminately granting anonymity and thus producing accountability-free claims -- he'll still be the same Jeffrey Rosen producing the same sorts of reckless pieces. The effort to depict Sonia Sotomayor as "dumb and obnoxious" was notable only because of how extreme it was. Otherwise, there was nothing unusual about it. To the contrary, as Sullivan says, the unreliable, misleading methods it used were perfectly common for blogging Washington "reporting."

Well, as we have done, so many times, for those in distress, Jeffery Rosen needs a song to drown his tears of blogging in ...

Hit it, Dionne!

Dionne Warwick - I'll never love this way again