The Dumbos are in full-throated howling-mode and they and their hypocrisy are disgusting. This blogger hopes that Judge Sonia (Not Maria as Dumbass Dumbo Mike Huckabee called her!) Sotomayor reads her first opinion from the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court in Spanish! Let the Dumbos froth at the mouth. And, if Judge Sotomayor is aggessive and unpleasant, let her vent her disdain for the 3 Stooges on the Court: Scalia, Alito, and Thomas. She can add a postscript for the CJOTUS. May Justice Sotomayor forever refer to her Dumbo colleagues as pendejos.
[x YouTube/Barsopen1970 Channel]
"Maria" (1999)
By Blondie (Deborah Harry Solo)
If this is (fair & balanced) admiration of Judge Sonia (Not Maria) Sotomayor's excellence, so be it.
[Vannevar Bush Hyperlink — Bracketed Numbers — Directory]
[1] Mad Dog (Mike Madden) On White Privilege & Outrage
[2] Joltin' Joe (Conason) On Real (& Imagined) Affirmative Action
[x Salon]
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The White Man Is Being Oppressed!
By Mike Madden
Tag Cloud of the following article
Imagine a world where the nation's first black president has nominated a long-serving, highly educated judge to become the nation's first Latino Supreme Court justice, and only its third female justice. The president is popular with voters in and out of his political party; the opposition party is struggling to come back from two straight losing elections by showing it's got a vision for the future, as well as hoping not to fall completely out of favor with Latinos, the country's largest — and fastest-growing — minority group.
You might not think, in that world, that early opposition to the court nominee would involve accusing her of being racist and sexist, and steadily questioning her intelligence in a way that implies she's an affirmative action pick. That might seem, in fact, like a fairly self-destructive strategy, one that even the opposition party's most hardcore base would want to avoid. But welcome to 2009.
"White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw," wrote Newt Gingrich — whom conservatives routinely fall over themselves to praise as a driving force of ideas for the Republican Party, and who is also, at least for now, making noises about running for president in 2012 — on Tuesday on his Twitter feed. The ex-House speaker managed to make the sentiment sound even more Neolithic by compressing it to fit Twitter's 140-character limit. "Latina woman racist should also withdraw." He seemed to be grunting, not tweeting. (Gingrich was then forced to fend off questions about whether he had posted that item while touring Auschwitz &3151; which he denies, and which you couldn't make up.)
The GOP establishment has mostly been trying to stay away from a fight many Republicans realize they can't win; with 17 years as a federal judge and a biography that Horatio Alger might have thought too trite to use in his rags-to-riches novels, Sonia Sotomayor is virtually a lock to be confirmed. Though Pat Roberts of Kansas has said he'll vote against her, GOP senators are not rushing to the ramparts. But the base wants a battle, and some conservatives seem unable to resist using Sotomayor's nomination to bring up the resentment-based, racial backlash politics that the country mostly avoided during last year's historic election. The Sotomayor nomination has, at last, unleashed the pent-up id of a faithful, and fearful, GOP demographic — the aging white male. Focusing on a New Haven, Conn., affirmative action case Sotomayor helped decide, a few lines from a 2001 lecture and a New Republic article questioning her intelligence that even the author is trying to back away from, the wingnut and pundit case against Sotomayor isn't particularly subtle. Or smart. But it does seem to involve more than a little of what Freud called "projection."
"This is a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land," wrote the blogger E Pluribus Unum on Redstate.com, in a post that called Sotomayor "an incompetent student of the Constitution" and "a garden-variety race-hustling bigot." "She's demonstrated no qualifications other than being incompetent, activist, and bigoted." Not to be outdone, Rush Limbaugh hit the same themes. "She doesn't have any intellectual depth," he said on his show Wednesday. "She's an angry woman, she's a bigot. She's a racist. In her own words, she's the antithesis of a judge, she is the antithesis of justice, in her own words." And Pat Buchanan, on MSNBC, called her "an affirmative action pick" and compared her to Harriet Miers, who even Republicans agreed wasn't up to the job when former President George W. Bush tried to name her to the Supreme Court four years ago. On National Review's Web site, Mark Krikorian posted a screed about Sotomayor's insistence that people pronounce her name correctly. "Deferring to people's own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits," he wrote. " Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English ... and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn't be giving in to."
The "racist" charges come partly from a lecture Sotomayor gave in 2001, at Berkeley's law school, where she said diversity on the bench was important because judges' life experience informs their decision making. That may not sound so controversial, but conservatives are pulling out one sentence in particular, where Sotomayor said she "would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." In the context of the whole eight-page speech, it doesn't sound as jarring, but that didn't stop Ann Coulter from pouncing on it. Add that to a case Sotomayor helped decide, which the Supreme Court may overturn this summer, while her nomination is pending, and you've got a potent narrative. The federal appeals court Sotomayor sits on ruled against a white fireman in New Haven who sued the city after it threw out the results of a promotion exam because black and Latino firefighters appeared disproportionately likely to fail it.
Senior administration officials say the case just shows Sotomayor following legal precedent, but conservatives seem to think it shows an angry Puerto Rican on the warpath against the white man. "On September 11, America saw firsthand the vital role of America's firefighters in protecting our citizens," Wendy E. Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, said in a statement Tuesday, minutes after word leaked that Sotomayor was President Obama's pick. "They put their lives on the line for her and the other citizens of New York and the nation. But Judge Sotomayor would sacrifice their claims to fair treatment in employment promotions to racial preferences and quotas." RedState's editor, Erick Erickson, felt compelled to stand up for white men on Wednesday. "I dunno, Sotomayor," he wrote on Twitter. "Considering white males engineered Western Civ, you'd think they'd have a handle on things to be able to make decisions."
Not surprisingly, the idea of trying to block a Latina judge from the Supreme Court by stirring up resentment over affirmative action doesn't strike many observers as the best way to appeal to Latino voters. "If Sonia Sotomayor's name were John Smith, she'd be just as qualified, and no one would be charging affirmative action or reverse racism," said Mark McKinnon, a Republican strategist who left John McCain's presidential campaign last year because he didn't want to help it go negative against Obama. "To suggest as much is itself racist. And I think most Americans see right through the smoke screen."
The White House -- which wouldn't comment for this story -- isn't exactly trying to avoid reminding people of Sotomayor's Puerto Rican heritage, preferably with a soft-focus lens that plays up the historic nature of her nomination. If conservatives overreach in opposing her, the administration won't complain. "Latino voters are responding with a tremendous sense of pride and appreciation," said Fernand Amandi, executive vice president of Bendixen & Associates, a Democratic polling firm that surveyed Latino voters for Obama's campaign last year. "The Hispanic community -- especially after the immigration issue -- is very sensitive to dog-whistle attack politics. During the immigration debate, Hispanics were never directly attacked or called out, but the message they received was they were not wanted here." The dog-whistle line may have already been crossed; it's not exactly a hidden message to call someone a race hustler.
Republicans who actually have to win elections don't seem interested in engaging in the backlash politics. "The approach that many of the senators and leadership is taking is, well, you know, let's give her a fair hearing and see what she has to say," said GOP pollster Glen Bolger. "It's really hard to stop this kind of nomination [with only 40 Senate seats], and then there's the political Hispanic angle." A Republican consultant who advises GOP candidates on winning Latino votes, Lionel Sosa, said he expected most senators to ask plenty of questions about Sotomayor, then support her. "For Republicans to mount a filibuster is foolhardy," he said. "If a Republican doesn't care about getting reelected, and a Republican doesn't care about the image of the Republican Party, they may vote against her, but I think in the end, we'll see who the smart ones are and who the not so smart ones are by how they cast their votes."
But the conservative noise machine has a tendency to bleed into the GOP mainstream; Joe the Plumber went from the accidental hero of wingnut blogs to the centerpiece of the McCain campaign in less than a week last year. The confirmation process could wind up taking up most of the summer, and there's plenty of time for Republicans of all sorts to start calling Sotomayor names by the end of it. Which is probably just how the White House wants it. Ω
[Mike Madden is Salon's Washington correspondent. Madden attended University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1998. He is currently working as a Washington Correspondent at Salon Media Group. He has worked with The Arizona Republic as a staffer in its Washington Bureau, as a correspondent for Gannett, and as a suburban staff writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer.]
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Sonia Sotomayor Is Not Clarence Thomas
By Joe Conason
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For Sonia Sotomayor, nothing could be quite so predictable at this moment as her vicious denigration by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Karl Rove, the denizens of the "Corner" at National Review Online and the myriad squawking noisemakers on Fox News. With instantaneous unanimity, the right-wing verdict against the judge was handed down. She is "dumb," or at least "not that bright," a slur that requires no evidence because she is obviously an "affirmative action" nominee for the high court.
And we all know what that means, don't we? Just ask Clarence Thomas.
The conservative campaign to dismiss Sotomayor's accomplishments and diminish her qualifications follows a pattern that is by now all too familiar. Yet she is measurably smarter than most of her critics — if a summa cum laude degree from Princeton and a spot on the Yale Law Review are worth anything — and overcame disadvantages that suburban sons and daughters of privilege (such as Coulter and Limbaugh) probably cannot imagine.
So why do some of Sotomayor's nastiest adversaries imagine that the public will accept these false characterizations of her intelligence and credentials? Perhaps that instinct follows from the right's own sad experiences with Republican affirmative action — most notably in the matter of Justice Thomas, who embodied all of the problems that conservatives perceived in the pursuit of ethnic diversity. When the wingnuts attack Sotomayor with inaccurate stereotypes, they're projecting onto her the shortcomings of their own beloved Clarence.
Eighteen years ago, the Senate confirmation of Thomas earned historic notoriety for its bizarre descent into conflicting recollections of sexual harassment and pornographic banter. But the lingering question about the man selected to replace the legendary Justice Thurgood Marshall was whether he fulfilled the White House description of him as "the most qualified [candidate] at this time." As Thomas confessed in his memoir a few years ago, "Even I had my doubts about so extravagant a claim."
So extravagant was Bush's assertion as to verge on comical. Far from being the "most qualified," Thomas was a nominee with no experience on the bench beyond the 18 months he had served on the U.S. District Court of Appeals. He had never written a significant legal brief or article. He had achieved no distinction in private practice or law enforcement. He had never even argued a case in federal court, let alone at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Indeed, his entire career had resulted from affirmative action, beginning with his admission to Holy Cross College, continuing with his acceptance by Yale Law School, and including his first job as an assistant attorney general in Missouri. Thomas later insisted that he had been damaged by the stigma of affirmative action, especially when he tried to find a job after graduating from Yale Law. (To the extent that minorities were stigmatized at Yale, of course, much of the blame was owed to right-wing figures such as law professor Ralph K. Winter, the Federalist Society eminence who was quoted back then complaining that none of the minority students at Yale were truly qualified to be there.) Still, when Missouri Attorney General (and later Republican senator) John Danforth came to Yale, his legal alma mater, in search of African-American employees for his office, Thomas stepped right up.
Flash forward now to the discussions within the first Bush administration over how to replace Marshall, the liberal lion whose departure provided conservatives with a chance to spin the direction of the court. Every account of those deliberations indicates that Bush and his aides went through a list of potential African-American nominees to the high court — and rejected politically moderate judges with better qualifications than Thomas, such as Amalya Kearse. They picked him because they had to fill a "black seat" on the court, and because he was prepared to enforce their ideology on the court — a function he has reliably performed in lockstep with Justice Antonin Scalia.
In other words, Thomas was chosen from a Bush [41] White House shortlist that excluded white males — supposedly a profound sin when committed by the Obama White House in selecting Sotomayor.
Yet the right can never bring its corrosive racial skepticism to bear on Thomas, a man who had proven his willingness to parrot reactionary bromides. He is the single most prominent beneficiary of the quest for diversity in American history, but he is their diversity candidate — and thus deserved elevation, if not as a distinguished jurist, then because he had suffered discrimination as a conservative.
It is a curious worldview that would validate Thomas and denigrate Sotomayor, when the contrast in their records reflects so well on her and so poorly on him. It is strange, too, that the same conservatives who found the saga of Clarence Thomas and his rise from obscurity so inspiring seem to find no such inspiration in the very similar story of Sonia Sotomayor.
In his memoir, Thomas recalls the innocent delight of old friends and family, who "saw my nomination as an affirmation of the American dream: a poor black child from the segregated South had grown up to become a Supreme Court justice. Who could be against that?" The same question can be turned around now — with considerably greater justification. Ω
[Joe Conason writes a weekly column for Salon and the New York Observer. Conason received a B.A. in History from Brandeis University in 1975. He then worked at two Boston-based newspapers, East Boston Community News and The Real Paper. From 1978 to 1990, he worked as a columnist and staff writer at The Village Voice. From 1990 to 1992, Conason was "editor-at-large" for Details magazine. In 1992, he became a columnist for the New York Observer, a position he still holds. Conason has written a number of books, including Big Lies (2003), which addresses what he says are myths spread about liberals by conservatives. His new book is It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush.]
Copyright © 2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.
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