The radical rightists are fighting Harold Koh.

[blueclown]

http://www.slate.com/id/2215142/pagenum/all/

It's 11:45 a.m. on April 1, and if you run a Google News search on Harold Koh, dean of Yale Law School and President Obama's pick for legal adviser to the State Department, here's what you'll find: 13 pieces on far-right Web sites characterizing Koh as dangerous and anti-American; several Fox News stories, updated several times daily, one of which describes the anti-Koh screeds as "burning up the Internet"; and a measly two blog posts defending Koh from these attacks. By the time you read this, I suspect that Fox News will have a scrolling red banner that reads, "Obama's Koh pick imperils us all" (and … wait for it … BINGO!), the anti-Koh pieces will number 18, and the pro-Koh blog posts will number three.

And yet by my most recent tally, every one of the anti-Koh rants dutifully repeats a canard that first appeared in a hatchet piece in the New York Post by former Bush administration speechwriter Meghan Clyne. She asserts that Koh believes "Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts." The evidence for her claim? "A New York lawyer, Steven Stein, says that, in addressing the Yale Club of Greenwich in 2007, Koh claimed that 'in an appropriate case, he didn't see any reason why Sharia law would not be applied to govern a case in the United States.' "

Needless to say, if the future lawyer for the State Department wanted to apply sharia law willy-nilly in American courtrooms, it would be a terrifying prospect. And so Daniel Pipes can title his post "Obama's Harold Koh, Promoter of Shari'a?" … OMG, people! Dean Koh wants to see women executed in the middle of the town square for wearing the wrong color burkha.

But, of course, Koh believes nothing of the sort. And the only real revelation here is that truth can't be measured in Google hit counts or partisan hysteria.

Harold Koh is a brilliant legal mind, and my pick for the next U.S. Supreme Court justice. We as liberals need to fight for him against the tiresome but expected right-wing smear machine.