Yesterday we reported that prominent Sonia Sotomayor critics including Tom Tancredo (“Latina KKK”) and Pat Buchanan (“That woman… is for race-based justice”) were employing, with full knowledge of the events, a young man named Marcus Epstein, who plead guilty to karate chopping a black female pedestrian and calling her a “nigger.”
Dave Weigel of The Washington Independent asked a number of conservative Sotomayor critics what this apparent hypocrisy says about the larger campaign to block her confirmation, and one response, in particular was telling.
Curt Levey, the executive director of the Committee of Justice, has been optimistic about the right’s fight against Sotomayor, but he admitted to TWI that he “underestimated the degree to which a few conservatives would say a few extreme things, and that would be characterized as what all conservatives think.”
As we’ve noted before, the campaign against Sotomayor has exposed and widened a rift between a sensible faction within the conservative movement and die-hard activists. By basing the attacks on charges of racism, while simultaneously lobbing ethnically loaded insults at her, people like Levey have, inadvertently or not, poured gasoline on the embers of this conflict.
