LedeFAIL

Jennifer Rubin’s Weekly Standard cover story on Sonia Sotomayor takes the Marvel No-Prize for nonsensical lede-writing.

Not since Rose Mary Woods made “18″ famous has a number so absorbed the attention of the media and political establishment. But with President Barack Obama’s nomination of Second Circuit judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court to replace retiring Justice David Souter, Washington has become transfixed by “32″–the number of words in a startling passage from the Judge Mario G. Olmos Memorial Lecture that Sotomayor delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law in 2001 and published the following spring in the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal.

A Google search returns 2,020 results for “32 words” plus Sotomayor. Another Google search returns 32,800 results for “16 words” plus Bush, referring to the president’s 2003 State of the Union speech and his claim that Saddam Hussein had sought enriched uranium from Africa. If you want an example of how far the conservative movement’s discussion of Sotomayor has gotten from the actual fight over the court, here you go.