More McIlheran Funnies

Local editorialist, calumnist, and champion NRO-hotlinker Patrick McIlheran has his knickers in a twist apparently because Dahlia Lithwick penned a somewhat sardonic column at Slate over the weekend noting that Frank Ricci, the New Haven, CT firefighter whom Senate Republicans plan on calling to testify against Sonia Sotomayor, once sued his employers for discrimination.

And then later for so-called reverse discrimination. Both suits are in the public record, and in fact were reported by the press. Indeed, Mr. Ricci prevailed in both actions, so they were at least meritorious.

This is called "digging up dirt," we are told.

But the exercise has little to do with Mr. Ricci himself — certainly he has a right to object to New Haven's employment practices, and more power to him, obviously — but rather the typically incoherent, contradictory messages promulgated by the Republicans.

First, that Republicans are making a negative issue out of "empathy" against Sotomayor by trying to generate positive empathy favoring themselves; and second, that Ricci's two lawsuits evince a twinge of counterintuitive legal strategies. That's all Lithwick was saying.

For McIlheran, however, this is a "smear campaign."

Yet for all his standard manufactured outrage, McIlheran has few qualms about smearing Judge Sotomayor herself:

Sotomayor dismissed the complaint with an almost contemptuous lack of comment.

This is unadulterated nonsense, of course, and is easily debunked. Still, McIlheran continues to repeat it.

McIlheran has a track record of this sort of thing, and willingly participated in the attempted character assassination of former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler.

And, naturally, nary a squeak from McIlheran of the real smear campaign against Sonia Sotomayor launched by Gingrich and his ilk.