There must be something in the New York City water — something that makes Manhattan's media elite think that they can pass off character assassination and personal caricature as informed commentary and reasoned analysis.

We have long lambasted the editorial page of the New York Times for being little more than the largest printing press for left-wing talking points and knee-jerk liberalism, but we have ignored the Big Apple's equally egregious magazine, The New Yorker.  No more.

Last week, The New Yorker's long-time staff writer and so-called legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin published an unforgivable smear of Clarence Thomas under the guise of reviewing the Supreme Court Justice's best-selling memoirs.  Toobin's faux review — entitled "Unforgiven: Why is Clarence Thomas so angry?" — pays the sitting Supreme Court Justice all the respect of waiting until the fifth paragraph to make the outrageous accusation that "throughout his judicial career Thomas has ... shown a distinct solicitude ... for employers over employees, for government over individuals, for corporations over regulators, and for executioners over the condemned."

Indeed, Toobin would have discovered quickly and with fairly little legal research that his bald assertion that Justice Thomas adheres to a carefully constructed jurisprudence of favoring the powerful over the powerless can be not only easily dismissed but just as easily destroyed.  Any number of cases decided by Justice Thomas disprove Toobin's sweeping statement that the Justice consistently and intentionally uses his seat on the High Court to prop up the haves and push down the have nots.

Take, for example, Justice Thomas's opinion for Court in Swierkiewicz v. Sorema N.A., in which he ruled that a lower court could not dismiss an employee's discrimination claim for failing to allege enough specific facts in the complaint.  Thomas sided with the "little guy" (the employee) against the "big guy" (his corporate employer) in that case, holding that the employee was at least entitled to discovery on his allegations before being thrown out of court.

Or, what about Thomas's consistent opinions in the campaign finance realm where he has set forth his views that the government should not be in the business of telling American citizens, any of them, whether individuals or groups, what they can and can't say about their elected representatives around election time.  This is favoring the individual over the government not the reverse as Toobin asserts.

Or, even further, what about Justice Thomas's similarly consistent opinions in the so-called Apprendi line of cases, ruling criminal defendants cannot be sentenced to longer times in jail than proved by a prosecutor before a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.  Again, that isn't favoring the executioner over the condemned as Toobin claims, but rather just the opposite.

Toobin's reckless disregard for the legal truth is part and parcel of his pointed portrait of Justice Thomas as a vengeful opportunist — or as Toobin writes of Justice Thomas, "in short, a black conservative in an Administration with very few of them.  That's why he got the job."

It is in furthering this despicable theme — namely, that the only way the black Clarence Thomas can be reconciled with the professional Clarence Thomas is to describe the latter as "self-delu[ded] or dishonest[ ]" — where Toobin fully exposes the fact that not only does he get far too many facts wrong, but he also doesn't get Justice Thomas himself right.

In his memoirs, Justice Thomas tells the story about how he priced his Yale Law degree with a 15-cent sticker after deciding that was its devalued worth based on the rest of the world's perception that race-based affirmative action made the degree and Justice Thomas's other accomplishments possible.  In relaying that story, Toobin writes: "Thomas never explains what Yale did to him that was so terrible."  As Toobin sees it, "Thomas's career looks like a model of how affirmative action is supposed to work."  Or, as Toobin asserts more bluntly, "Thomas made the most of his opportunities, opportunities he was given ... because he was black."

But the very fact that Toobin has written this piece now — more than a decade-an-a-half after what Toobin describes as President George H.W. Bush's "self-evidently preposterous statement" that Thomas was "the best qualified" nominee for the highest court in the land — demonstrates what elites have done to Thomas and continue to do to him and other black success stories.  In fact, that is the very point of Justice Thomas's memoirs: that the cost of race-consciousness is that its winners can never reap their rewards because there is always the nagging question in the background about how they won — through racial preference or real talent.

That Toobin misses this obvious point is a tragedy, but that he does so to continue to smear a sitting Supreme Court Justice is unforgivable.