I call bullshit

Rosen responds, weakly here. He starts off with the "The other guy did it" defense.

As soon as the piece was published, I regretted the headline, which I hadn't seen in advance.

and then this, which is just pure bullshit.

The piece was not meant to be a definitive "case against" Judge Sotomayor's candidacy. It was intended to convey questions about her judicial temperament that sources had expressed to me in the preceding weeks.

The peice was called "The Case Against Sotomayor". He goes on to use his explaination peice as a way of continuing the hit job on Sotomayor except this time he tries to lend more power to it by stressing the lefty creds and a few non specific details of his anonymous sources. Glenn Greewald's response is stellar and dead on and worth a complete read. Click here. Pwned:

Why couldn't these "eminent legal scholars" who have such close familiarity with Sotomayor's work speak on the record and express their concerns? How cowardly are they? They care enough about smearing Sotomayor to call Rosen out of the blue, "express concerns" about her behavior, and do the legwork of putting Rosen in touch with their handpicked friends who also don't like Sotomayor -- but they're afraid to speak publicly on such a matter of public interest? They don't sound like "eminent liberal legal scholars" to me; they sound like cowardly character assassins carrying out a vendetta that Rosen eagerly helped to advance.

and....

In other words, Rosen did what the modern journalist of the Respectable Intellectual Center does by definition: he wrote down what Serious People told him to say, agreed to protect their identity, and then published their very purposeful chatter without doing any real work to verify, investigate or scrutinize it. As a result, a woman who spent the last four decades of her life using her talents and intellect and working extremely hard to reach amazing heights in the face of great obstacles is now widely viewed as an intellectually deficient, stunted, egotistical affirmative-action beneficiary who has no business being on the Supreme Court -- all thanks to the slimy work of Jeffrey Rosen, his cowardly friends of the Respectable Intellectual Center, and The New Republic.