Lookee Here! Ann Coulter's In The Trib!

Remember this?

Well Ann Coulter graces the pages of Richard Mellon Scaife's rag once again. And in doing so participates in yet another right wing smear.

Here's Ann:

When, as dean of the Harvard Law School, Kagan disagreed with the Bill Clinton policy of "Don't ask, don't tell" for gays in the military, she open-mindedly banned military recruiters from the law school, denouncing Clinton's policy as "discriminatory," "deeply wrong," "unwise and unjust."

Not true, of course. But before I get to that I do want to point out a subtle sleight of hand. She opens her piece with this:

In The New York Times' profile on the family of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, her aunt was quoted as saying: "There was thinking, always thinking" at the family's dinner table. "Nothing was sacrosanct."

Really? Nothing was sacrosanct?

So what should we believe when we read this a few paragraphs down?

As Kagan herself described it, on the Upper West Side of New York where she grew up, "Nobody ever admitted to voting Republican." So, I guess you could say being a Democrat was "sacrosanct."

You might think that that quotation is from the Times profile, right?

Wrong.

This is from the Times profile:

(Ms. Kagan and her brothers declined to be interviewed for this article and have not spoken publicly since her nomination.)

So where does that quotation come from?

1980 - From an AP story this past June.

In the summer of 1980, Elena Kagan worked for Liz Holtzman, a Democrat running for U.S. Senate in New York. That fall, after Holtzman was defeated and President Ronald Reagan was elected, Elena wrote in The Daily Princetonian, "Where I grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side, nobody ever admitted to voting Republican." She added that the "real Democrats" she had known were "motivated by the ideal of an affirmative and compassionate government. Perhaps because of this background, I absorbed such liberal principles early."

That's going a long way for a smear, isn't it?

But back to Harvard. The New York Times reported:

For nearly a quarter-century, Harvard Law School refused to help the nation’s military recruit its students, because the armed services discriminated against openly gay soldiers. But in 2002, the school relented to pressure from the Bush administration and agreed to allow recruiters on campus.

When Elena Kagan became dean of the law school the next year, she faced a moral dilemma over whether to continue that policy.

She said she abhorred the military’s refusal to allow openly gay men and lesbians to serve. And she was distressed that Harvard had been forced to make an exception to its policy of not providing assistance to employers that discriminated in hiring.

But barring the recruiters would come with a price, costing the university hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money.

And:

Because of the military’s policy against openly gay soldiers, the law school in 1979 barred military recruiters from using its Office of Career Services, the central clearinghouse through which employers from all over the world seek to recruit top-notch law students.

But in the mid-1990s, Congress approved several versions of the Solomon Amendment — named for Representative Gerald B. H. Solomon, a conservative Republican from upstate New York — denying federal funds to schools that barred military recruiters.

The amendment forced many law schools to carve out a military exception to their recruitment policies, which said they would not help employers that discriminated in their hiring practices.

Harvard reached its own accommodation in 1996. While the school did not allow military recruiters to use its main placement office, it did allow them on campus through the Harvard Law School Veterans Association, a student group. The recruiters met with students in the same classrooms, just under different sponsorship.

Christopher Cox, then a Republican congressman from California who supported the move, said at the time that it was a scandal that Harvard and other schools banished military recruiters “while cashing Uncle Sam’s checks for billions of taxpayer dollars.”

The change meant that Harvard faced a loss of $328 million in federal funds, or about 15 percent of its operating budget, almost none of which went to the law school. At that point, in 2002, the law school, under Dean Robert Clark, relented and permitted the military recruiters in its placement office.

And:

Ms. Kagan did join more than half the faculty in January 2004 in signing an amicus brief when a coalition of law schools challenged Solomon in an appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia.

In November 2004, the appeals court ruled, 2 to 1, that Solomon was unconstitutional, saying it required law schools “to express a message that is incompatible with their educational objectives.”

The day after the ruling, Ms. Kagan — and several other law school deans — barred military recruiters from their campuses. In Harvard’s case, the recruiters were barred only from the main career office, while Ms. Kagan continued to allow them access to students through the student veterans’ group.

But the ban lasted only for the spring semester in 2005. The Pentagon told the university over the summer that it would withhold “all possible funds” if the law school continued to bar recruiters from the main placement office. So, after consulting with other university officials, Ms. Kagan said, she lifted the ban.

But wait, didn't Ann say that Kagan banned the military from the law school?

Yep.

And is that true?

Nope.

I guess since Ann is a "perfected Jew" and Elana Kagan, (being Jewish) is thus an imperfect Christian, it's OK for Ann to bear false witness about her.

And good for the Trib to be a part of the show.