Interesting back and forth between White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs and media members when discussing a Newt Gingrich blog post that said,
“Imagine a judicial nominee said ‘my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman’ new racism is no better than old racism.”
“White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw,”
Click here to view the RealClearPolitics.com video
So people should be “exceedingly careful” if they are considering a critique of Sotomayor nomination as a SCOTUS justice?
Of course, the reasonable, freedom- and First Amendment-loving American, will then ask, “or what?” What happens if we aren’t exceedingly careful?
Was that a threat?
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As a bit of background to the discussion. Gingrich was responding to Sotomayor’s statement that tweaked Sandra Day O’Connor’s statement that “a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases.” Sotomayor updated that statement by claiming that,
“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
(On that note, Gingrich’s comment is accurate. If a white male nominee to the SCOTUS had said the same thing but had switched “Latina woman” with “white male” and “white male” with “Latina woman” (or “African-American male,” or “Asian-American woman,” or …), he would be quite rightly pilloried and made to step down.)
More here – Worldnetdaily.com has linked to an American Bar Association bio of Sotomayor that notes she is a member of La Raza. At the very least, La Raza (meaning “the race”) has to be described as an extreme separatist organization that aims — through the support of even more radical groups like MEChA — to fragment the nature and composition of the country as we know it.
From the Sotomayor bio on the ABA website,
In addition to her work on the bench, Judge Sotomayor is an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law and a lecturer-in-law at Columbia Law School. She is a member of the American Bar Association, the New York Women’s Bar Association, the Puerto Rican Bar Association, the Hispanic National Bar Association, the Association of Judges of Hispanic Heritage, and the National Council of La Raza. She has received many honors including, most recently, an award from the National Association of Women Lawyers.
Of course, many are suggesting that if the Republican Party even sniffs around the edges of opposing Sotomayor, then they will suffer horribly in the upcoming election; the notion being that they will have voted against her, solely because of her race and/or gender and they will have stopped the first second third Hispanic nominee to the SCOTUS.
One quick question suffices to answer that concern. If opposition to a person of color or a woman for any reason is proof of racism, why is it that the Democrats, who vilified and slandered Miguel Estrada, Clarence Thomas, Alberto Gonzales, and Condoleeza Rice have suffered no ill effects at the ballot box?
(Remember folks that Democratic memos from Dick Durbin’s office famously opposed Estrada because his Latino heritage made him “especially dangerous” as an appointment to the SCOTUS. Remember also that it was Vice President Joe Biden who famously stated that, “I think that the only reason Clarence Thomas is on the Court is because he is black. I don’t believe he could have won had he been white. And the reason is, I think it was a cynical ploy by President Bush.”)
Update: I completely forgot about the vicious racist attacks that were leveled against Janice Rogers Brown by the Democrats across the country. Perer Kirsanow describes some of those attacks in this NRO post,
The black sharecropper’s daughter, born in segregated Alabama, has been excoriated as a closet member of the Ku Klux Klan who, at least according to the Senate minority leader, would like nothing better than to return America to “Civil War days.” Left-leaning political cartoonists depict her as an Aunt Jemima on steroids, complete with exaggerated physical features typically found only in the racist literature distributed by hate groups. She’s been called insensitive to the rights of minorities, the plight of the poor, and the difficulties of the disabled. Her opponents warn that she is “the far right’s dream judge” and that “(s)he embodies Clarence Thomas’s ideological extremism and Antonin Scalia’s abrasiveness and right-wing activism.” And her opponents are plentiful, a who’s who of Left-wing advocacy groups: Planned Parenthood, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, NAACP, NOW, People for the American Way, National Abortion Federation, Feminist Majority, and the American Association of University Women, just to name a few.
