Here’s your next emerging meme. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Blood & Soil) just went on CNN attacking Sonia Sotomayor for belonging to La Raza which he called a “Latino KKK.”
As I said this morning, it’s painfully revealing how conservatives simply cannot helping going hard on the race front with Sotomayor or, as David Kurtz just put it, can’t help imagining that everyone else is as racist as many of them are.
For those who aren’t familiar with it, La Raza is basically a Latino equivalent of B’nai Brith or the NAACP. Garden variety and uncontroversial unless you thinks it’s a public safety issue if more than a handful of Mexicans or Puerto Ricans get together in one place at the same time.
There’s much more of this coming.
According to The Politico, charges that Sonia Sotomayor is a “racist” are picking up steam and must be addressed. At least according to Lanny Davis and Chris Lehane.
Conservatives like John Derbyshire are using the Sotomayor nomination to beef up, in their own minds, their working class white cred:
I get mighty annoyed by the unspoken implication in a lot of commentary that anyone not a member of a Protected Minority must have grown up in a twelve-bedroom lakeside mansion and been chauffered off to prep school with a silver spoon in his mouth. …
Was it really not possible to correct past injustices without creating an entire — and apparently permanent — class convinced that accidents of geography or biology have gifted them with special insight, wisdom, and “empathy”?
Mighty annoyed? Really?
Derbyshire was responding to one of his readers who was eager to “rain on the Sotomayor ‘compelling life story’ parade,” as she put it:
The woman grew up in the capital of the world, went to two Ivy League schools, and was blessed by Providence with the precisely correct right race-gender two-fer for the moment.
This is a story of privilege, dammit, not adversity.
They’re mad, and they’re not gonna take it anymore!
“Some lawyers just don’t like to be questioned by a woman. It was sexist, plain and simple.” — Judge Guido Calabresi, Judge Sotomayor’s colleague on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, on suggestions that her tough questioning from the bench suggests a problem with her ‘temperament.’
This is from an article in the Times with the headline “Sotomayor’s Sharp Tongue Raises Issue of Temperament.” It’s by Jo Becker and Adam Liptak, two of the best, though I’m personally more familiar with Becker’s work since it’s been in areas where I’ve done reporting too.
Read the article. It is, I think, an example where the headline is not quite borne out by the article itself and where — choosing my words carefully — the ‘both-sides’ imperative of conventional newspaper journalism made lead to placing two unequal arguments on equal terms. The piece itself reads like Sotomayor is tough and can be intellectually combative and that her gender leads some to describe those qualities in, shall we say, much less flattering terms. Compare to Scalia. Give it a read. I’d be curious to know what you think.
Now that it seems fairly clear that Benjamin Cardozo has lost any claim on being the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice, we can note that he was the first and one assumes the only Justice to look like Conan O’Brien …
TPM Reader DW condenses the conservative logic: “If the Republicans make legitimate arguments against Sotomayor, they’ll be accused of doing it because of her race; thus, they’re left with only racial arguments.”
War is very cool. Especially for those who survive it. Even more for those who can read about it and watch it on TV.
George W. Bush, defending torture policies last night in Michigan: “The information we got saved lives.” That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.