Oppressed minority. As I've remarked to my friends and family, a Supreme Court nomination is kind of like March Madness for news junkies, only you can't count on it every March; it will instead sneak up on you whenever it damn well wants to. When I found out that Rehnquist had croaked during my junior year of college, I was exceedingly hung over and still forced myself to stare at Wolf Blitzer for hours while that whole situation unfolded. I think Sam Alito is a douchebag and John Roberts, um, yeah, but that doesn't make the process any less interesting. It's nerd food, really.
I expected Obama to nominate Sotomayor and I'm happy with that outcome. I don't need to rattle off her accomplishments and the whole South Bronx to Supreme Court thing, but I do want to comment. It's very easy to blow the cultural significance of her nomination or to diminish it as some kind of liberal ass-patting because they're so proud that they nominated a Latina, but to be blunt, that assertion strikes me as intellectually vacant to a rather astonishing degree.
We went through this very nice and fuzzy period after Obama's victory when we congratulated ourselves for entering the post-racial society and while it was a nice thought, it's obviously horseshit. A lot of the conservative backlash is thinly cloaked racism, but I'm not going there with Obama because I've been there and it's still ridiculous.
Presumably, nobody needs me to bring them up to speed about the vapidly racist and sexist conservative backlash against Sonia Sotomayor. Oddly, I'm reminded of the Salem witch trials, wherein citizens of Salem protected themselves against witchcraft accusations by accusing other people of witchcraft. Except that tactic isn't working here. Rush Limbaugh can spend two weeks of airtime calling her an incompetent bigot and I won't even hesitate before labeling him an ignorant loser with nothing intelligent to say. Glenn Beck is throwing the racist barb as well, which is kind of ironic since he referred to Sotomayor as "Hispanic-chick-lady" on his radio show this week. G. Gordon Liddy just hopes she won't be "menstruating during key conferences."
Yes. Menstruating. You read that correctly.
The "reverse racism" argument is pretty hard to stomach, since all it really means is that middle-aged white men are uncomfortable that they now only hold about 80% of all elected offices instead of 100%. Tom Tancredo made a number of shrill cable news appearances this past week, all of which were very entertaining. His claims that Sotomayor belongs to a "Hispanic KKK" just crack me up, mostly because he's the honorary chairman of a white pride organization. The Hispanic KKK of which he speaks is the National Council of La Raza, which is a Latino advancement group in the same mold as the NAACP. If you visit their website, you'll find that their activities include supporting at-risk youth, helping Hispanic families buy their first homes, assisting with health care information and a number of other activities, which I'm sure are just as racially charged. The name, incidentally, means "the community" and not "the race" as Tancredo claims. He would know this if he knew how to use Google. I assume he does not.
Regardless, it's important to give credit where credit is due, thus I should indicate that Republican senators appear to be avoiding this nonsensically hateful discussion because they evidently know better. John Cornyn, of whom I am not especially fond when it comes to regular legislative matters, made a sharp public statement condemning the GOP noise machine and Rush Limbaugh in particular. Limbaugh slapped back, of course, but thus far Cornyn seems to realize that when you apologize to Limbaugh, you look really bad to the 79% of Americans who don't identify as Republicans.
