Overlawyered gets a mention today in a New York Post editorial today, but the greater credit should go to Prof. Larry Tribe for his willingness to be swayed by the evidence on the Internal Revenue Service targeting controversy (earlier). In a Cato post largely adapted from previous coverage here, I note in a P.S.: “If word of the D.C. Circuit panel decision has not gotten around as widely as it should, one reason is that some major news organizations have still, nearly three weeks later, not seen fit to cover it.”
4 Comments
It would be nice if the press would consider what the IRS did more important than what Mr. Tribe thought about it. However, that would be asking more than one could expect, I expect.
Bob
From what I can see, the elements in the press that do consider the IRS scandal significant are the same ones who find Prof. Tribe’s change of heart to be worth noting. The elements in the press that have tended to downplay or ignore the scandal have, as of this writing, taken no interest in Prof. Tribe’s comments about it.
Good for Mr. Tribe, I guess, but why was he publicly calling it false in the first place if he hadn’t even reviewed the evidence? I’m glad he finally did make an effort when encouraged, but am hardly inclined to offer him credit for something that should have been routine.
Ras, that’s an important point. I hope I don’t look at these things differently as an attorney than I would as just a logical person, but my standard response when asked to comment on a media-driven court case (Trayvon Martin, or Hillary’s email scandal before the FBI Director laid it out, etc. etc.) is “I don’t know. I don’t know all the evidence because I’m not in the courtroom.” Unfortunately, for pundits, agnosticism is death. You have to have an opinion, or else you’re not going to make it onto TV. And opinions 90+ percent of the time split along ideological lines, evidence be damned.