The subjective question of a nominee's fitness to serve on the Supreme Court is one that perennially gets too much attention, but that should ideally fall to respected and trained legal thinkers, capable of evaluating complicated writings and other signs of merit. So, naturally, cable news channels are leaving it to panels of law professors obscure Democratic and Republican "strategists" to evaluate of Sonia Sotomayor.

Chris Wilson--the Republican strategist--cited the Rosen article directly but it didn't get him very far; a sign perhaps that, at least on MSNBC, they've come to understand the anatomy of the Sotomayor whisper campaign. Or, perhaps, it's a sign that Wilson isn't as savvy a smear artist as are other GOP strategists. He also claimed, for instance, that Sotomayor was originally nominated to federal district court by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but, of course, that power belongs to the President alone (at that time George H.W. Bush) and not to members of the Senate.