My old colleague at the Columbia School of Journalism, Adam Weinstein, has a great piece up at Mother Jones looking at the military witnesses the GOP has called to the Kagan hearings. A taste:
There's also Flagg Youngblood, a Yale grad who has complained on the talk-show circuit about the unjust hardship of attending ROTC drills on another college campus, 70 miles away, when Yale shuttered its military cadre over the service's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy barring gays and lesbians from serving openly. (What Youngblood has failed to mention, though, is that his university provides free transportation to the military evolutions, and his ROTC scholarship subsidized 100 percent of his Ivy League education.) He now works full-time as a military outreach coordinator for the conservative Young America's Foundation (YAF), whose treasurer is a former RNC deputy chairman and a key player in the creation of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Youngblood's views on Kagan are well-known: He's called her "an anti-military zealot" and a "Supreme Court sleeper agent," and just Monday, he used Oath Keepers-style language to paint the nominee as an insidious extension of President Obama's executive power: "In the last 18 months, the president and his plotting comrades have dragged the United States to the edge of Constitutional oblivion. America's in the eleventh hour, and Elena Obama must be stopped from pushing us over the cliff."
Republicans were shamed into disinviting Lt. Gen. William "Jerry" Boykin, who was fired during the Bush administration for publicly and wholly embracing the idea of a holy war with Islam, but there's really no point at which saying something crazy about the president or Kagan is disqualifying among Republicans. As I noted earlier this week, the list of GOP invites includes National Review blogger Ed Whelan, who compared Kagan to a prostitute. He claims it was an innocuous statement.
I've got a challenge for Ed: Pull that one out in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and see how the audience reacts. I'm sure it'll be a laugh riot.
