WANKER OF THE DAY

I'll say it before Atrios does: It's Jake Tapper of ABC News, for telling us on his blog that Samuel Alito was unfairly smeared as a racist because Dinesh D'Souza says so:

...D'Souza worked for CAP [Concerned Alumni of Princeton] from 1983 to 1985, editing CAP's controversial Prospect magazine. He said a number of the Democratic attacks on Samuel Alito were based on falsehoods.

First off, D'Souza says, one of the two stories from Prospect that Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-MA, read this week at the confirmation hearings was intended as a satire.

The 1983 essay "In Defense of Elitism" by Harry Crocker III included this line, read dramatically by Kennedy: "People nowadays just don't seem to know their place. Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they're black and hispanic..."

The essay may not have been funny, D'Souza acknowledges, but Kennedy read from it as if it had been serious instead of an attempt at humor.

"I think left-wing groups have been feeding Senator Kennedy snippets and he has been mindlessly reciting them," D'Souza said. "It was a satire."...

Yeah, because satire can't possibly be racist, can it, Dinesh?

Under D'Souza's editorship, the [right-wing campus newspaper] Dartmouth Review ... published a parody titled "Dis Sho Ain't No Jive Bro," which mocked the way African-American students supposedly speak. ("Dese boys be sayin' that we be comin' here to Dartmut an' not takin' the classics. You know, Homa, Shakesphere; but I hea' dey all be co'd in da ground, six feet unda, and whatchu be askin' us to learn from dem?") Also during his tenure as editor, according to a September 22, 1995, article in The Washington Post, the Review "published an interview with a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, using a mock photograph of a black man hanging from a campus tree."

(Via Memeorandum.)