To a large extent, the conservative defense of Pickering comes from people who know him in Mississippi and cite his support for the rights of minorities. Pickering supporters then use this description, which ignores legitimate criticisms of his record, to justify jargon-filled attacks on the motives of opponents. A White House source told National Review Online, for instance, that Pickering is the victim of "character assassination." Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Ethic and Religious Liberty Commission, described the opposition to Pickering as a "despicable smear campaign and character assassination." CNN's Tucker Carlson even brought up a name that has become synonymous with character assassination, saying, "just to trot out this, 'Oh, he's a racist extremist,' it is so Bork-like. It's so tired."

Conservatives have also sometimes focused on the controversial nature of the liberal groups involved in the Pickering opposition rather than the substance of what they have been saying. The Wall Street Journal devoted an entire editorial< to this issue last month, accusing People for the American Way President Ralph Neas of being the "real chairman" of the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Pickering. "He gives them their attack themes, and they then repeat them to skewer some hapless nominee...", the Journal wrote, also accusing Neas and his "Democratic followers" of not recognizing the Constitution. Hatch also made this accusation in a Judiciary Committee hearing when he said opposition to Pickering was "the product of engineering by extreme left Washington special-interest groups who are out of touch with the mainstream and have a political ax to grind."

While some liberals hinted at Pickering being a racist and sexist, conservatives have only worsened the situation by mechanically reversing these attacks into smears against liberals. Instead of criticizing liberals for hinting at racism, they instead describe the attacks against Pickering with racially inflammatory terms. Hatch has already been condemned by some for doing just this when he described the opposition to Pickering as a "lynching" (the conservative group Concerned Women for America used the same language).The Wall Street Journal also engaged in it in a broadside against liberal opponents of Pickering: "Mr. Neas and [NAACP Chairman] Julian Bond and their fellow liberals [are] the real heirs to Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond and the Democrats who played the race card during the 1950s and 1960s. They're the new Dixiecrats." The worst example, however, came from Charles Evers, the brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, who compared the tactics of Pickering opponents to those of white segregationists from the past: "I'm not going to sit here and allow black bigots to do the same things to the good folks in Mississippi, what white bigots did a few years ago."

As the use of the word "Bork" in the current debate and the echoes of Clarence Thomas with the word "lynching" demonstrate, the Pickering rhetoric is just the latest example in a disturbing trend. Discussions of judicial nominees' records and behavior quickly devolve into inflammatory attacks that stimulate emotions, but add nothing to the debate except acrimony.

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