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Bizarre! The URL for the David Stout article about the D.C. gun case now goes to the Linda Greenhouse article on the same subject.

And the David Stout article is nowhere to be found. Here's the URL in question. I'm hyperaware of this switch, because I just wrote a long blog post that criticized the way Stout wrote about the Supreme Court, and I expressly doubted that Linda Greenhouse would have written it like that:

... I wonder how Stout knows Scalia "clearly takes pride in his writing as well as his reasoning." Did the use of the words "frivolous" and "bizarre" somehow imply that pride or is the evidence elsewhere and we're just supposed to know it?....

Oh, no! Reading Stout (and Liptak) today, I'm nagged by the question What would Greenhouse have written? Would Linda Greenhouse have inserted commentary about Scalia pride?

Not to be outdone, Justice Stevens called the majority?s interpretation of the Second Amendment ?overwrought and novel? and said it ?calls to mind the parable of the six blind men and the elephant?...

Would Linda Greenhouse have imputed that competitive motivation to Stevens's choice of words? Stout's writing has something of the problem that plagued Jeffrey Toobin's book "The Nine." For narrative effect, the Court is portrayed as a psychodrama.

I'm not saying they changed it because of what I wrote. But that is curious, freakish, odd, peculiar, strange, unusual, and weird.

And Greenhouse notably and admirably avoids the Court-as-psychodrama problem.

Full post as published by Althouse on June 26, 2008 (boomark / email).