ED WHELAN: Blogging Levels the Playing Field: Refuting attacks on John Roberts before they gained traction. “As we saw last week, George W. Bush and his strategists drew from the defeat of Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination years earlier the general lesson that the White House needed to wage an intensive political campaign in support of its own Supreme Court nominees. I drew a particular additional lesson: the need to refute falsehoods about, and distortions of, a nominee’s record before they gained traction and became much more difficult to counter. And I perceived that the Internet provided a valuable new vehicle that was unavailable to Bork’s defenders.”

If only Roberts had been better.