*See update.

Hey, remember when The Nation magazine ran this tasteless anti-Bush take-off of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring one of his Children” last summer?

The Left cheered the bloody cannibalism imagery as inspired and profound.

But when a conservative uses similar rhetoric in a far less inflammatory way, all of a sudden it’s unacceptably “extremist.”

Earlier today, in attempting to portray Judge Janice Rogers Brown as said “extremist,” I heard Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on the Senate floor peddling a quote from Brown in which she accused “senior citizens of blithely cannibalizing their grandchildren.”

Scary! Scary! How could she write such a thing from the bench?

The meme has become entrenched.

On his Senate website, Reid claims:

Brown says Seniors are Cannibalizing their Grandchildren. Brown wrote, “Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ‘free’ stuff as the political system will permit them to extract.” [pfaw.org; Dissenting opinion in Stevenson v. Superior Court, 941 P.2d 1157,1177, 1187 (Cal. 1997)]

But: It’s wrong. As ConfirmThem.com notes, Brown never wrote that in any court opinion. It comes from a speech giving her personal opinions, titled “Fifty Ways to Lose Your Freedom,” at the Institute for Justice in 2000.

In any case, Brown’s sentiment about seniors, the entitlement mentality, and the impact on younger generations, is hardly “extremist.” Pete Peterson has said much the same for years, and it was a theme in his national best-selling books “Will America Grow Up Before It Grows Old” and “Running on Empty.”

Perfectly reasonable people on both the left and right agree on the matter. Not that Sen. Reid would know reason if it landed on him like a Massive Ordnance Air Blast.

***
FYI, Sen. Russ Feingold raised the quotation and questioned Brown’s views on the elderly and age discrimination cases at her confirmation hearing in October 2003. The full transcript is here. Here’s how the exchange ended:

Senator Feingold. And then what would you say to seniors
who would appear before you in court who have expressed concerns about your positions in these cases and your statements?

Justice Brown. I would say to them that they should have no concern because when they come into a courtroom or when their case is presented at an appellate court of which I am a member, I am going to look at their case, I am going to look at the law, I am going to look at exactly what’s happening, exactly the remedy that we have, and I am going to try to resolve that case correctly, and that is what I have always done, and I will continue to do that.

Update: Well, well, well. Sen. Reid’s office has changed its website without acknowledging the correction. They have now included a link to Brown’s speech instead of the above incorrect citation. If you look at the first trackback, a blogger named Asheesh Siddique claims I’m “lying.” Yeah? Go ask Sen. Reid’s webmaster.

Here’s the cached page to prove it.