LIBERTARIAN BULLSHIT OF THE DAY. Elena Kagan is apparently averse to answering direct questions about specific legal cases in her Senate hearings. At Reason Jesse Walker headlines his pick-up of the Daily Caller story "Free Speech for Thee, But Not for Me." Walker was going for a subtle joke here, but you couldn't tell it by the commenters, who gobble up the slam on the liberty-hating socialist Obama and other aspects of modern life that displease them:

Fat Jewish lesbians need a voice too, you insensitive clod. Especially if that voice sounds exactly the same as every other liberal from Harvard.

That was mean of me, she's a woman, not an "it". But then, the tests results have not come back yet....

My favorite part is when some of the brethren make fun of Nixon's disrespect for the Constitution, and an Old Guard type comes in to remind them that bastard Lincoln started it.

No wait -- this is my favorite:

Could we just exclude anyone who has worked as an attorney for the current administration from consideration? I think this is a reasonable standard that in no way constrains the Executive branch from putting their kind of people on the Supreme Court (which is definitely the administration's Constitutional privilege).

I believe there is precedent for this in the Court of Narnia Under My Sheets With A Flashlight.

(Revised to be less dumb.)

UPDATE. Making everything worse as usual, Megan McArdle:

I haven't generated great interest in the Elena Kagan nomination.

Why was she trying to generate interest in the Kagan nomination? Oh, right: Words, meaning, Humpty Dumpty, etc.

But I do think that David Brooks is onto something when he notes that her relentless careerism, her pitch-perfect blandness, are a little creepy... the driven, hyperachieving spawn of the Ivy League meritocracy...

What's disturbing is that this is what our nomination process now selects for: someone who appears to be in favor of nothing except self-advancement.

Rich as this was from Brooks, from McArdle it's a fucking tub of Double Devon Cream.

"What say you, Weenie? Shall we be vegan today? It would be rawther uplifting."

I'm sitting here writing this in my underwear in goddamn Texas, and Eloise at the Atlantic is talking about careerism. Fuck me.