Conservatives really do appear to be imploding over the Sotomayor nomination. Let’s play a medley of their greatest hits, shall we?
• First, we have Tom Tancredo, calling Sotomayor a racist:
I’m telling you she appears to be a racist. She said things that are racist in any other context. That’s exactly how we would portray it and there’s no one who would get on the Supreme Court saying a thing like that except for a Hispanic woman and you’re going to say it doesn’t matter!
• Then we have Pat Buchanan, saying:
"She is not that intelligent,"
leading a parade of conservatives comparing her to Harriet Miers, facts to the contrary.
• Karl Rove, who once thought Harriet Miers would have been a splendid Supreme Court justice, is uncertain about ”how intellectually strong“ Sotomayor would be.
• At least he didn’t call her Maria like Mike Huckabee did. Common mistake, I know; most Latinas are named Maria, right?
• Or even worse, all of those references to her “judicial temperament.” Of course, we women are so emotional, hormonal, irrational. We really can’t be trusted to make sound decisions. Why, we might have really bad PMS one day and just on a whim ban puppies or something. We’re really unreliable that way. And Latina women, well, everyone knows how “hot tempered” they are.
Right.
Much of this criticism has come from Jeffrey Rosen’s anonymously-sourced hit piece in The New Republic. Yesterday, Rosen himself backed away from the criticism, saying his words have been mischaracterized:
"Conservatives are already citing my initial piece on Sotomayor as a basis for opposing her," Rosen notes. "This willfully misreads both my piece and the follow-up response. My concern was that she might not make the most effective liberal voice on the Court--not that she didn't have the potential to be a fine justice."
Someone alert the media, because CNN and MSNBC have been quoting that piece non-stop. We still don’t know who these anonymous “liberals” were that supposedly found Sotomayor unacceptable.
Anyway, I don’t see Republicans coming out of this a winner. They already look like asshats with their racist, misogynistic attacks.
