Judicial Nominee Blogs

When President Bush announced the now defunct nomination of Harriet Miers for associate justice of the Supreme Court, he took serious political heat from both sides of the aisle. Progressives thought her positions were amorphous. Conservatives thought she wasn’t qualified. Nobody was in favor of Miers. Nobody - it seems - except for the comedians.

In the space of a few weeks - as Miers made the rounds on Capitol Hill - the pundits made the rounds on the comedy talk shows. In one very memorable moment that will endear her to me forever despite my political views, Ann Coulter called Harriet Miers “the cleaning lady” on Real Time with Bill Maher.

With all the satirizing going on, it’s no wonder that the blogosphere picked it up. Almost immediately after the nomination was announced, someone started Harriet Miers’ Blog!!!! - a witty play on people’s perceptions of Miers as less than scholarly.

It now appears that the blogosphere has struck again. This time at current Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. Since his intellect really isn’t up for debate, The Right Honorable Samuel A. Alito, Jr. plays on the conservative reputation that has earned him the nickname “Scalito.”

Why is this important? After all, politics in the blogosphere is nothing new. Neither is satire. But if the blogosphere is a microcosm of our society at large, then these blogs represent an emerging phenomenon. We’ve rapidly seen the dissolution of boundaries between entertainment and news in the mainstream media, and the blogosphere has come to reflect that. These blogs deftly cover all the news that’s fit to print about each nominee while maintaining a bitingly sarcastic voice. If you wanted to get up to date on either nomination, they would be your hilarious one-stop shop. If anything, these sorts of blogs could be where the lines between journalism and blogging blur the most.