Obama really buttered them up in Cairo. He thanked them for everything from algebra to the pen, though he curiously failed to mention that they often throw people in prison for using it.

Sept. 14, on the ACORN scandal, in a column titled “Lefty Crooks Laugh at You”:

No wonder Charlie Rangel and so many people considered for jobs in the Obama administration didn’t pay their taxes — they know better.

Oct. 9, on the Nobel peace prize:

The committee clearly has cast itself into the dustbin of irrelevancy by making this move. People will joke about this for years.

Nov. 4, on the elections:

Obama and his political team are watching the results very carefully to see just how much power they have squandered in 12 short months. And they are considering just how imperiled their political agenda is now that skittish House Democrats have learned that Obama has no coattails unless he is in the race.

Nov. 9, on the health care vote:

[L]ike Gettysburg and the Confederacy, the vote will mark the beginning of the end for Pelosi and her doomed crew.

The senators know that, of course, but that doesn’t stop them from asking lots of inane questions they know Sotomayor won’t answer. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) at times barely stopped peppering her long enough to let her start her answer before he moved on to the next subject: from racial preferences to gun rights to publicly funded abortions.

Perhaps most disturbing about the hearings wasn’t the political posturing, which is to be expected.  It’s the dishonest way in which the debate has taken shape between Republicans and Democrats, as if Democrats are squishy touchy-feely people who let empathy guide judicial decision-making, and Republicans are automatons who miraculously apply the law to the facts without letting any trace of humanity get in their way.

Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe aptly describes how a historic and arguably important debate about constitutional interpretation and judicial processes in this hearing has become completely disingenuous:

Attending to one’s prejudices and doing one’s best to set them aside is admirable. Convincing oneself that one can render judgments in a way that makes one’s personal experiences and views irrelevant is dangerous self-deception. Why, after all, do the justices so often disagree about what result “the law” commands? What accounts for their different perceptions of the rules of law that govern disputes and of the facts involved in those disputes? Justice Antonin Scalia, among others, has publicly said that his own background and upbringing necessarily influence how he decides cases. How could it be otherwise?

Tribe was actually criticizing Sotomayor for flip-flopping on her previous positions that acknowledged she and every judge would be influenced by her background and experiences. But I don’t see Sotomayor as changing her tune so much as having to over-simplify an inherently complex and delicate concept to a bunch of aggressively tone-deaf senators, now themselves sitting in judgment and arguably abusing that power.

Sotomayor has obviously been practicing patience: Despite what Graham called her “nasty” judicial temperament, even as she dodged the slings and arrows, on Tuesday she was often smiling.

Senator Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), just spent much of his questioning time asking Judge Sonia Sotomayor whether she a) believes there is a right to privacy, as the Supreme court has ruled there is; b) whether she thinks Roe v. Wade is still good law; c) whether she agrees with the Supreme Court’s decision that allows a government to take land by eminent domain and turn it over to a private developer; and d) whether the Supreme Court’s decision in an antitrust case that allowed vertical price-fixing was right or wrong.

Kohl knows full well that no candidate to the Court can or would testify that she believes a recent Supreme Court decision is wrong, or that she’s intent on joining the court and then urging her colleagues to reverse their own precedent.  So why is he wasting his time?

Not to beat up on Kohl in particular, but it’s a perfect example of how nomination hearings are as much (or more) about political posturing for the senators’ constituents as they are about actually learning more about the nominee. In this case, it was also an easy way for Kohl to hand Sotomayor a golden opportunity to display that she would join the Supreme Court without biases or preconceptions and faithfully apply the law (just as Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito, nominated by President George W. Bush, promised to do before her).

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It turns out Schmidt, who complained that, “any time the Obama campaign is criticized at any level, the critics are immediately derided as liars,” wasn’t telling the truth — about pretty much anything.

From Politico:

Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called “liars.” They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.

The errors in McCain strategist Steve Schmidt’s charges against Obama and Sen. Joe Biden were particularly notable because they seemed unnecessary. Schmidt repeatedly gilded the lily: He exaggerated the Biden family’s already problematic ties to the credit card industry; Obama’s embarrassing relationship with a 1960s radical; and an Obama supporter’s over-the-top attack on Sarah Palin when — in each case — the truth would have been damaging enough.

A brief summary of the untruths: Schmidt said Biden’s son was a lobbyist for the credit card and banking industry; the truth is Hunter Biden works for MBNA, but was never a lobbyist. Schmidt said Obama adviser Robert Wexler called Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin a “Nazi sympathizer,” the truth is Wexler called former GOP presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan a “Nazi sympathizer,” and said Palin supported him in 2000 — which appears to be untrue. Schmidt said “Obama began his political career in its early stages raising money at [former Weatherman William] Ayers’ house”; the truth is that Ayers did host a campaign event for Obama at his home when Obama first ran for the Illinois state senate, but it was not a fund-raiser, and Ayers “did not contribute money to Obama’s first campaign, according to Illinois records.”

One McCain aide, Michael Goldfarb, said Politico was “quibbling with ridiculously small details when the basic things are completely right.”

The problem is, Schmidt’s transgressions might be forgivable if they didn’t fit so neatly into the McCain campaign’s apparently compulsive inability to be honest and forthcoming with the facts.

The real kicker: when Smith contacted the McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers, to comment on all of Schmidt’s false information, what was the response?

“You are in the tank,” he e-mailed.