Blogs & the Supreme Court Nominee

Soon it is likely that the President will name his Supreme Court nominee. And then all hell will break loose; and the blogs, including this site, will be in the thick of it as they were in the thick of the last presidential election. Blogger Hugh Hewitt who blogs at this link published earlier this year an insightful book on blogging with the no-nonsense title of Blog (Nelson Books, 2005). (The book does have problems, though, especially because of its overdone analogy of the blog revolution with Luther's revolt against the Catholic Church. I gather from the tone and other references in the book that Hewitt is an evangelical Protestant. He overplays the analogy with Luther primarily because Luther actually did the opposite of what good blogs do. Good blogs uncover truth and evidence that has been ignored in order to present a more complete picture. Luther did the opposite: he created the Western paradigm for selectively distorting Scripture by imposing personal ideology and taste on the sacred books apart from a balanced and "catholic" (in the sense of wholistic) tradition of interpretation. That type of distortion is exactly what so much of the mainstream media also does today. We call it media bias. I plan to discuss the book in more detail in a future book review at Catholic Analysis.)

Here is an excerpt on what lies ahead, written presciently by Hewitt earlier this year before the Supreme Court vacancy actually transpired:

What is coming soon--perhaps even in the summer of 2005--are clashes between competing blog camps. The perfect interblog storm is brewing and will break when the next Supreme Court nominee is sent from the White House to the presidency [here Hewitt means the "Senate"]. . . . Because there are so many accomplished lawyers and law professors who are blogging, they will quickly establish story lines and mine and excerpt the nominee's opinions, articles, and internet-available after-dinner speeches. . . . Becuase the stakes are so high with such a closely divided court, the energy that will be expended on trying to shape public opinion will be enormous. . . . The blogs will move much more quickly, and with much greater authority than MSM [the mainstream media]. They
will make or break the nominee.

Hewitt, pp. 103-104 (my additions in brackets).

Whether blogs will make or break the nominee is beyond me at this point in time. But I agree with Hewitt that there will be an "interblog storm." I hope to do my part here and at Catholic Analysis to defend a qualified nominee who will vote pro-life on the Supreme Court. My assumption is that our pro-life President will do the right thing, and thus that pro-life blogs will join the battle on behalf of the nominee. As noted above, Hewitt's book has a serious problem with its main historical analogy, but my guess is that many Catholic blogs will be happy to join him in defending the President's pro-life nominee.