Honestly, I’ve been ignoring the Sotomayor confirmation hearings because I know two things. One, she’s going to get confirmed barring a catastrophe. Obama picked a moderate knowing damn full well she’d get confirmed.
Two, I just knew the Republicans were going to sink to the lowest form of racism allowed on 21st century television. It is their nature. It is also their only way to gain power.
I was glad to see this point of view confirmed in Tom Gilroy’s HuffPo article this morning. A very large taste focusing on Beauregard Sessions interrogating Sotomayor:
“The point of putting a ‘racially insensitive’ white man up to question a Latina has nothing to do with bad GOP planning and everything to do with intimidation. Republicans know she’s getting confirmed; what they really want to do is intimidate the White House, the media, and me and you from embracing progressive views.
So, if you’re going to embrace affirmative action, feminism, equal rights, economic fairness, civil rights, — Jesus, even empathy — you stand warned you will be attacked. It has nothing to do with defeating Sotomayer and everything to do with discrediting what most Americans believe and intimidating us from expressing it. It’s also a signal to their dwindling base — disenfranchised, uneducated whites — that the GOP is still the party of the cluelessly and inarticulately disgruntled.
Hence economic fairness is ‘a special interest,’ universal healthcare is ‘socialism,’ and believing in a right to privacy is ‘judicial activism;’ all of it bullshit, but all of it useful.
That’s the goal here; keeping ignorance alive so you can cajole it to the ballot box, the streets, in front of David Letterman’s studio, at the local Board of Ed meeting or the commencement at Notre Dame.
Or outside Dr George Tiller’s women’s health clinic or the Holocaust Museum — carrying a gun.”
Don’t believe that? Then how about Pat Buchanan literally screaming that the GOP doesn’t need Hispanics as long as they can con enough white people to vote for them. That way the GOP Senators should try as hard as possible to paint Sotomayor as an anti-white racist to ensure their ideological purity or some shit.
To be honest, he may actually be right about the numbers if not his racism.
Meanwhle, Maureen Dowd is proud of Sotomayor’s defense of her opinions and career, though may be making too much hay of the white racists in the GOP Senatorial contingent. Not that they aren’t, but they are still in power because someone voted for them.
Even in our next Supreme Court Justice can school Beauregard Sessions.
