In case you didn’t know it, Linda Greenhouse covers the Supreme Court for the New York Times. Not surprisingly, her coverage has long been infused with her leftist agenda, during which she has sometimes confused her personal beliefs with her professional obligations, leading to her 1989 reprimand by the Times for participating in an abortion-rights march and her own domestic conflicts of interest via her husband, Eugene Fidell.

An honest newspaper would have fired her long ago, or re-assigned her to the bridge column or the Mets, but no: today she is the Times’s “emeritus” Supreme Court correspondent.

Now she’s weighed in — in an utterly impartial New York Times sort of way — on the Arizona “illegal aliens” controversy. And guess which side she’s on?

I’m glad I’ve already seen the Grand Canyon.

Because I’m not going back to Arizona as long as it remains a police state, which is what the appalling anti-immigrant bill that Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law last week has turned it into.

What would Arizona’s revered libertarian icon, Barry Goldwater, say about a law that requires the police to demand proof of legal residency from any person with whom they have made “any lawful contact” and about whom they have “reasonable suspicion” that “the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States?” Wasn’t the system of internal passports one of the most distasteful features of life in the Soviet Union and apartheid-era South Africa?

Right… Arizona is now a “police state,” akin to the U.S.S.R. and South Africa. On the Upper West Side, maybe, but OK…

The intent of the new Arizona law, according to the State Legislature, is “attrition through enforcement.” Breathing while undocumented, without a civil liberties lawyer at hand, is now a perilous activity anywhere in Arizona.

Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, a Democrat from Tucson, has already called on the nation’s business community to protest the law by withholding its convention business.

Right…


So what to do in the meantime? Here’s a modest proposal. Everyone remembers the wartime Danish king who drove through Copenhagen wearing a Star of David in support of his Jewish subjects. It’s an apocryphal story, actually, but an inspiring one. Let the good people of Arizona — and anyone passing through — walk the streets of Tucson and Phoenix wearing buttons that say: I Could Be Illegal.

Right…

That’s the king, above, riding his horse, not driving. And the Danes did resist Nazi dictates regarding Jews, not symbolically but by ferrying them across the water to safety in neutral Sweden. But at least she got the “apocryphal” part of the story right:

There is also a famous story of the Danish King Christian X having brazenly worn the Star of David in defiance of the German-enforced policy of identifying Jews. This alleged act of bravery inspired thousands of non-Jewish Danes to wear the Star, thereby rendering the German order defunct. The events even inspired a Disney television movie… but it never actually happened. The Germans never enforced the wearing of the Star of David in Denmark and King Christian X never made any such gesture. During the war, however, the King did remain a symbol of Danish resistance–defiantly riding his horse in the streets and meeting regularly with the Danish people. On one occasion, he sent a letter of regret to the Jewish rabbi of a vandalized Copenhagen synagogue, but this was as far as his activism went.

Well, at least it fit the narrative. And that’s the level of the reporting you can expect from the New York Times these days: a column spun out of whole red-diaper cloth and based on a Disney fantasy.

There’s a postscript to Ms. Greenhouse’s story in the Times:

Correction:

An earlier version of this Op-Ed essay referred incorrectly to the provisions of the new Arizona immigration statute. The version of the bill signed by the governor no longer includes a section under which undocumented immigrants would be guilty of trespassing for being on Arizona soil.

Caveat lector.