Over at MeFi, there's quite the obnoxiously braying chorus around Dahlia Lithwick's recent essay about the Samuel Alito nomination. Apparently Lithwick's strong (and to my mind completely appropriate) rhetoric toward the conclusion of her piece are damning in the eyes of even posters who ostensibly agree with her main position.

Lithwick has been an absolutely indispensible writer on SCOTUS throughout the entire Bush administration; the fact that she's been allowed so much room to work is in fact a tribute to Slate's strong commitment to covering the courts. Few newspapers or magazines have featured such consistent attention to the courts, in a readable style, when there isn't a nomination fight going on. And when there is, Lithwick's attack is always to question the nature of the narrative being obsessed over by everyone else -- and what that reveals.

As for the pile-on of cavils over at MeFi -- one of the ironies of the age of the blog is the frequent criticism of journalists for their excursions into anything other than just-the-facts reporting by...wait for it...amateur non-journalist opiners who not only don't have personal expertise in the area under discussion, but show resolutely little interest in reading anything other than punditry.

I'm not saying that Lithwick's writing is wholly "objective," and her biases -- which are toward a significantly more moderate vision of jurisprudence than is embodied by the current nominee -- are not hard to discern. But she's no simple ideological warrior, as this informative Rehnquist retrospective makes clear.

Those who can't distinguish a fundamentally useful blend of analysis and opinion, based in actual reporting and expertise, from the standard level of position-taking one finds on, say, the Op-Ed page of the paper of record, might please shut the hell up long enough to read a bit and learn to make the distinction.