at the Sonia Sotomayor Confirmation Hearing1. Let us be able to praise those Reublicans who actually wanted
to talk about the law and cases and not whether or not wise Latinas are going to make pernil out of white men: Chuck Grassley, who engaged in an unbearably dull conversation about property rights, and Orrin Hatch, who talked about discrimination and gun rights, but through cases and not speeches. Yeah, they're still fuckers, but at least they didn't act like they were ready to move because a Latino family moved into the neighborhood (see Jeff
Sessions' questioning - a view of a man shitting himself that Hispanics are walking on his side of the street).
2. Lindsey Graham's a creepy motherfucker who sounds like every child-molesting uncle in Charleston; to hear him say, as he did yesterday, the phrase "Kind of touchy-feely stuff" would send a chill into the loins of a good many people. Even though he was as twitchy and bizarre as monkey that got into the meth stash, Lindsey Graham was right when he said: "If Lindsey Graham said that I will make a better senator than X because of -- my experience as a Caucasian male makes me better able to represent the people of South Carolina, and my opponent was a minority, it would make national news, and it should."
But remember: when Trent Lott wrecked his career by saying that the nation would have been better off if Strom Thurmond had been president, it brought up every other shitty, racist thing he had done and said and voted on. In other words, you could prove he believed Thurmond's segregation-lovin' candidacy was what the nation needed. You can't do that with Sotomayor's career. As she keeps saying, "Look at the record." When you did that with Lott, it was a bloody beatdown of the redneck. And they can't lay a glove on Sotomayor when it comes to her actual judging.
3. So the Republicans are left with portraying her as some kind of Manchurian judicial candidate, ready to finally reveal the tentacled liberal inside as part of her nefarious plot throughout her life to get on the Supreme Court so that she could weave her relativistic, Latina ways into the American mainstream. So said John Cornyn today, sounding like every laconic donkey fucker ever to come from the prairie.
4. Graham was just a vicious bastard in attacking Sotomayor with evidence that probably would not have been allowed in court: "One thing that stood out about your record is that when you look at the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, lawyers anonymously rate judges in terms of temperament, and here's what they said about you: 'She's a terror on the bench.'" And he quoted a bunch of other shit that, if said about a man, would have been seen as mostly praise.
5. Essentially, the Republicans' argument by focusing on the
Ricci case and the "wise Latina" remark is that they are against diversity. Jon Kyl made an idiotic point by mocking the notion that "There's no neutrality" as "relativism run amok." That's because "neutral" to Kyl and others is "what white men say it is." Because if you say that your experiences and background shouldn't matter, then why bother with diversity on the court? Or, more appropriately, you're saying that you want to put some chilies in your stew, but just for color, not flavor.
6. By the way, mostly, this shit is boring.
7. In this hearing, Republicans pretty much just fucked themselves for the Latino vote. They are so clearly the party of rural and Southern state whites, and they have done nothing to try to mitigate the racial politics of this entire process. They have set up a color line. And the whites that vote for them have to figure out what side they want to be on.
8. Maybe it would be better for Republicans if Sotomayor's mother cried at their questioning.
9. Let's end with another line from Sonia Sotomayor's "wise Latina"
speech, a remark that is about being humble and self-aware as a judge: "I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations."
What Judge Sotomayor was saying was that, as a non-white and as a woman, others were always looking at her to see if she was being biased, in a way that they would not look at white male judges. She was saying that the paradigm is wrong, that all biases need to be on the table. Unfortunately, those questioning her cling to that sinking raft of false objectivity.
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