Losing the Crucial “White People With Spanish Last Names” Vote
My friend Julian Sanchez, another not-especially-Hispanic blogger/pundit, has an excellent post on Sonia Sotomayor and the baffling tactics of the conservative movement. I’ll just quote the conclusion:
Look, it’s not racist to oppose a Latina judicial nominee, or to oppose affirmative action, or to point out genuine evidence of ethnic bias on the part of minorities. What we’re seeing here, though, is people clinging to the belief that Sotomayor has to be some mediocrity who struck the ethnic jackpot, that whatever benefit she got from affirmative action must be vastly more significant than her own qualities, that she’s got to be a harpy boiling with hatred for whitey, however overwhelming the evidence against all these propositions is. This is really profoundly ugly. Like Yglesias, I don’t think I’m especially sensitive to stuff like this, or particularly easily moved to anger, but I’m angry. I don’t think Republican pundits really appreciate the kind of damage they’re probably doing, for no reason I can discern given the slim odds of actually blocking the nomination. Which, perhaps, goes to Sotomayor’s point: They really have no idea how they sound to anyone else.
One thing conservatives might want to ask themselves is what would they be saying about Sotomayor if she had the exact same background and record but was a middle class white woman from Riverdale instead of a poor Latina from the projects. Of course, they still wouldn’t like her but they’d find a non-offensive way to express that. They’d say things like “she’ll probably vote with Ginsburg and Breyer whereas I would prefer a justice likely to vote with Scalia and Roberts.” That’s a perfectly good reason to be unhappy with a judicial nominee. Instead, they’re freaking out about her name, about Puerto Rican food, about the idea that she’s bitchy, that she’s benefited from “preferential treatment,” that she must secretly be stupid, that she’s a Klan member, and all kinds of other nonsense that’s only explicable as a hostile reaction to her ethnic background.
Conservatives ought to picture an anti-abortion, gun-owning, married, male, prosperous, Cuban-American small businessman living in the suburbs of Miami. Picture him reacting to the news of Sotomayor’s nomination. Perhaps he’s happy in some sense to contemplate a Latina on the bench, but perhaps not. Either way, the guy’s still a solid conservative. Now picture him listening to G. Gordon Liddy say “I understand that they found out today that Miss Sotomayor is a member of La Raza, which means in illegal alien, ‘the race.’” That’s not going to play well.
90 Responses to “Losing the Crucial “White People With Spanish Last Names” Vote”
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May 30th, 2009 at 11:35 am
To be “fair” to the R’s, it appears that this is a consistent cognitive defect and that it affects their reasoning in both directions: when prominent Dems complained about the Alito and Roberts nominations on just the sorts of “he’ll vote in ways I don’t like” grounds that you describe, prominent Republicans heard something completely different: they heard expressions of anti-Catholic bias, and complained vociferously. Comparable aural illusions occurred thing when Republicans encountered opposition to the nomination of, say, Miguel Estrada, or when they heard criticism of Alberto Gonzales.
May 30th, 2009 at 11:43 am
So Sotomayor got where she is because of affirmative action programs & she still hates whitey after generously giving her these opportunities? I can see how that would be a problem.
May 30th, 2009 at 11:47 am
Don’t you mean “White People With Illegal Alien Last Names”?
May 30th, 2009 at 11:47 am
This is a version of the Obama-is-really-a-radical-black-Nationalist-who-wants-impoverish-the-country-to-create-the-conditions-for-socialism disease.
May 30th, 2009 at 11:58 am
This is really not correct. They would be casting ludicrous aspersions of a personal nature, the specifics of which I hardly need to spell out. Principled disagreement is a foreign concept to them.
May 30th, 2009 at 11:59 am
Desperately seeking a wedge issue, even if the wedge is an axe head in their own foot.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Fuck me, I’m gonna have to learn Spanish. Because I have a really strong urge to see how this is being played on Haim Saban’s Univision TV network.
That is a major US news channel that is completely overlooked by many of the DC pundits and political operative class. (Although I suspect some Republican operatives in charge of Hispanic outreach are watching it and are getting a bellyache –as Matthew noted in his earlier post.)
May 30th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Juan Williams was on NPR this morning calling Sotomayor a racist, playing up how everyone is talking about racist she is, and suggesting that she’s an unqualified affirmative action hire. First names must not count. Or Juan Williams is still an idiot.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
I believe the standard GOP line of thinking would be something like this: if you’re a woman or a member of a minority who made your way to the top of the establishment by smarts and hard work, you’d be a Republican, because Republicans value smarts and hard work while Democrats want to take smart, hard-working people’s money and give it to Those People to spend on crack, and pigs’ feet.
Thus, because Sotomayor is the pick of a Democrat, her career trajectory must therefore be suspect, because if you made it to the top and you’re not a conservative as a result, it must have been at some white guy’s expense.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
@ Chrismealy #8
Juan Williams really is a criminal waste of space.
Still, it’s especially funny that he’s criticizing affirmative action: his first rise to prominence of which I’m aware was as a strong advocate for affirmative action and related programs while working iirc for the Washington Post; at any rate, he had some job in journalism and was quite outspoken on a panel show on C-SPAN some time in the late 80’s or early 90’s, before he was on NPR and long before FOX existed.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
I am stunned. Rational people would take a step back, analyze mistakes of the past election cycles, and come up with something better than obstruction. Of course, these people are not rational. The GOP has clearly lost its collective mind and has decided to substitute governance with temper tantrums.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
God, Matt is such a fucking idiot. There’s, what, one blog comment about how others pronounced her name, and one funny attempt to push her identity politics to its logical extreme and which Matt thinks is about food. And then there’s Rosen’s article, which says she’s not a very good judge, a proposition there’s some evidence for, which Matt has somehow converted in his little head to be an article by a conservative. And there’s the fact that she’s benefited from preferential treatment. I say that’s a fact, because liberals have made the same assertion about Justice Thomas based on the same sort of record, and Matt has never had a problem with that. Apparently the inference of preferential treatment is easy to draw, and it’s a bit late to object.
In other words, Matt is both making shit up and acting like a huge fucking hypocrite.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
MattY – five-time recipient of the Amanda Terkel Award for Clear Thinking Award and recent recipient of a 2000 Chip (for wearing his Soros[TM]-brand shock collar for 2000 days straight – does it again! Carefully amassing huge quantities of straw, he builds his case and then knocks it down.
Meanwhile, over at volokh.com they’ve discussed problems with her “wise Latina” comment, two other Latino judges at the same conference where she said that disagreed with her, and she had joined not just one but two far-left racial power organizations.
Go take a look at my extensive summary of the NCLR, one of those two groups. I’ve got almost 150 posts involving them since 2004, and if I can get others to ask her completely fact-based questions about that group things should get interesting.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Re: Republicans value smarts and hard work while Democrats want to take smart, hard-working people’s money and give it to Those People to spend on crack, and pigs’ feet
Huh? Are pig’s feet generally concidered an African-American or Latin American food? I tend to associate them more with working-class, Rust Belt white people of an older generation.
Seriously, Sotomayor is a woman of exceptional intellectual and legal credentials, whether or not you like her views, and she will be an inspiration to Latino young people. If the Republican Party knows what’s good for them, they will support her wholeheartedly, as Rod Dreher has done over on his blog. I hope she gets confirmed, and I hope freedom from political constraints allows her to hear the voice of conscience and to embrace social moderation.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
What Warren Terra said at #1. The Republicans are tribal and completely irreconciably alien to liberas and Democrats. You will not be able to understand them, you will not be able to work with or deal or compromise with them. For your entire life after the Reagan election, Matthew, you have seen Republicans when they thought they were winning or could win.
How crazy are they? Abe Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural crazy, civil war crazy, die first and take you with them crazy, nuke the whole world crazy. What you are seeing is not yet conservatives at their worst, by any measure. They are still on good behavior, still invested in the system, still believe they can win. Watch out when the Republicans despair. They can, and I think will, get several factors worse than this. They are mortally dangerous.
Oh dear lord people, please listen to me, or just really listen to them. They are not putting on a show. They mean it. The Republicans will not accept defeat gracefully.
Carl Schmitt despised liberal democracy precisely because he knew liberals would not defend themselves.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
“In other words, Matt is both making shit up and acting like a huge fucking hypocrite.”
Projecting much, Thomas?
May 30th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
There are so many pathetic things it’s hard to get a hold of.
Republicans and Conservatives: Are you really that dumb that you’ve never heard of one word being used in multiple ways? If I say ‘people’ it means everyone. If I say ‘our people’ it means our culture. If I say ‘you people’, it means Im damned an entire category of people. How the fuck is the word for ‘race’ any different when it’s used the exact same way?
Democrats and Liberals: Your President is covering up for rapists. Spare me your phony outrage that a bunch of old white men are racists. You clearly wouldn’t care if they weren’t Republicans, or you’d care about what a scummy piece of shit Obama has turned out to be.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:27 pm
In other news about things that conservatives are saying that people aren’t going to like…
“Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when [Sotomayor]’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then.” G. Gordon Liddy.
Seems like Liddy has crawled out of the oozing pit he breeds himself in to show his ugly face to the world.
Interesting hypothesis: We’ve seen Anonymous appear suddenly here. He cropped up around the same time Liddy has. Could they in fact be the same people?
May 30th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
ok, i made a big mistake, i clicked through on 24ahead’s link just to see how stupid he is in long form, and i’m still recovering. what’s fascinating is to see just how poor the thought quality is from someone who insists he’s dealing with fact-based matters; this is typical of the contemporary right-wing cohort, who quite truly don’t know how to think.
which is to say, the underlying basis for the phenomenon that our host is writing about, demonstrated so vividly in the mindless blather of 24ahead, is that these are people who quite simply don’t know how to think.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
Lonewacko wastes 134 words on bullshit and blogwhore. I’m sure he amuses himself, but he’s still remarkably unsuccessful in enlisting anyone to do the legwork for his campaign of hate.
The batshit crowd is talking in a language that only resembles English these days.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
This reminds me of the hysterical reaction to Michelle Obama’s “proud of America” comment. She too hated whitey, there was even a tape to prove it. There’s something incredibly threatening about smart, accomplished, dark-skinned women.
And now she’s a very popular First Lady, with favorables higher than her husband’s. hah!
May 30th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Instead, they’re freaking out about her name, about Puerto Rican food, about the idea that she’s bitchy, that she’s benefited from “preferential treatment,” that she must secretly be stupid, that she’s a Klan member, and all kinds of other nonsense that’s only explicable as a hostile reaction to her ethnic background.
Hrmm, fire-eaters, anyone?:
They think liberals are wimps, that the USG should be called ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government) and so on. So they think they can win, as long as they keep trying different combinations of attacks until they find one that works. In the meantime, they can echo what their base is mumbling.
They figure they can bring along someone like your conservative Cuban with tax cuts and whatnot, since the Cuban in question is ‘assimilated’ (that is, he agrees with the R’s about everything else). They particularly think so, when we’re in the middle of a monster recession and there will probably be only two parties on a given ballot.
So why not go for the maximum program, particularly when you personally resent people like Sotomayor?
max
['They [Dixiecrats] have always been like this, and they have a entire worldview to go along with it which is more or less internally consistent.’]
May 30th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
I’m reading a lot people on the left warning the people on the right about the dire consequences of opposing her nomination. I’m reading a lot of racist remarks from the right. I’m reading a lot free advice from the left on how the right “ought to” conduct themselves. I’m not interested in any of this crap.
What I am interested in, but not reading a lot about, is evidence of Sotomayor’s brilliant legal mind. Why should this woman be elevated to the Supreme Court?
May 30th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
I’ve been thinking about the Michelle Obama and Sonia Sotomayor connection. Anytime a female member of an ethnic minority enters into the public sphere, the Right goes batshit crazy and try to fit them into the same profile–ugly bitchy ranting emotional harpies who hate America and whiteys. Might be some interesting gender semiotics here.
Or, maybe not. It could equally be the case that they would go just as batshit crazy against a male member of an ethnic minority. God knows they did against Obama.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
[i]And there’s the fact that she’s benefited from preferential treatment. I say that’s a fact, because liberals have made the same assertion about Justice Thomas based on the same sort of record, and Matt has never had a problem with that. Apparently the inference of preferential treatment is easy to draw, and it’s a bit late to object.[/i]
This from someone who had just called Matt an idiot.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
I think some Democrats are grinding the racist ax for political benefit just as much as Tancredo. Tancredo hardly represents the Republican party — his Presidential bid in 2007 went nowhere and polls suggest he doesn’t even represent the views of Republicans in his district.
That’s not my opinion — that’s what this Univision article says: http://www.univision.com/content/content.jhtml?cid=1493362
May 30th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
t is in the national interest to have a clear debate re illegal immigration –with ALL sides allowed to present their opinion. A recent talk by Tancredo at the University of North Carolina was shut down within 5 minutes due to violence by protesters led by a gringo graduate student.
Ironically, the head of the UNC Hispanic Students Association expressed regret –noting that in silencing Tancredo, the protestors had silenced the Hispanic rebuttals as well.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/immigration/story/1486087.html
May 30th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
This is really profoundly ugly.
Indeed it is. It is your modern Republican party in action. That’s how they’ve rolled since Nixon. Where has J-Sanch been? What else was he expecting?
May 30th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
The best way to refute Tancredo is to show that his views have little to no support. You don’t do that by hyperventilating and playing him up to be a much more powerful figure than he really is.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
What I am interested in, but not reading a lot about, is evidence of Sotomayor’s brilliant legal mind. Why should this woman be elevated to the Supreme Court?
If you were really interested in such evidence, you would know where to find it and wouldn’t be calling for it in a blog comments section. Her cases are part of the public record and are there to be dissected by anyone who knows a ‘brilliant legal mind’ when they see one. They’ve been linked on many blogs. One suspects, though, that you’re not really interested.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Re just Karl
She could not possibly be more incompetent then Clarence “Long John Silver is my favorite actor” Thomas.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
The effectiveness of the sniper is far greater than those who fire wildly in all directions with a machine gun — aka “spray and pray”. You can not destroy the Republican Party as a whole.
That is why a clear, bright line should be drawn around Tancredo and his supporters — to separate them from the Republican mainstream.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
What Bob McManus Said
I live in a Southern, mostly red state, and I decided a year ago that local conservatives thought processes, as evidenced by their lte’s in our local paper, had been corrupted by years of listening to talk radio and watching to Fox News. The result since the elections last fall is that there is an even greater presence of Fox News and talk radio in our doctor’s and dentist offices,our local banks, even, and even in our local kid’s consignment shop. Really, as my Democratic friend said at lunch the other day,
“Republicans/Conservatives CANNOT handle being out of power.” It’s as if they ARE entitled to be at the helm and this nomination of Sotomayor has caused many of them to go totally unhinged. I also agree that there is a risk of mortal danger from some of the more extreme ones and I really hope that Obama and family take great care.
And note to Hector, pig’s feet, as well as pickled eggs, are mostly sold in stores typically frequented by African Americans. They are an acquired taste, just as chitlin’s are. I’m white and my Grandmother made chitlin’s;no one in my extended family has engaged in that exercise for many, many years. The distinct smell from frying them is like no other.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
32:Rush, Douthat, Gingrich, Liddy…Tancredo is the Republican mainsteam, Williams.
May 30th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Few things make me happier than the intersection of the Flat Earther Heroic Randian Confederate party’s raison d’etre and the intensification of said party’s hemorrhaging of voters.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Don, I see what you’re saying, but I’m not sure of your tactic.
People who are receptive to Tancredo’s extreme anti-Hispanic message are very common in the Republican Party. Perhaps even the majority. Now, if you’re saying the strategy should be to celebrate Republicans like the Maine sister, Steele, etc. you run the risk of making them the mainstream voice the Republican Party. When elections come, the nutroots will still vote for them, while they’ll also have the opportunity to reach out to moderates and independents.
On the other hand, if you work to marginalize them and try to portray Tancredo as representative of the Republican Party, you’re not going to be able to eliminate it, obviously. You probably will force marginally more Republicans in his camp.
But having 24AheadDotCom as the prototypical Republican in the public mind is well worth that, I’d suggest.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Rereading my comment, it’s terribly written. Basically, given a choice between having Snowe, Steele, and Martinez giving the Republican Party a relatively tolerant, non-white supremacist cast to marginalize the Tancredos and having the Liddys and Limbaughs run the Republican Party, it’s much better to have the latter.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Watch out when the Republicans despair. They can, and I think will, get several factors worse than this. They are mortally dangerous. Oh dear lord people, please listen to me, or just really listen to them. They are not putting on a show. They mean it. The Republicans will not accept defeat gracefully.
Scary thoughts, and I must admit I’ve had them myself lately on occasion. America is no more exempt from some of the nastier attributes of human nature (and their effect on history) than any other nation. I’ll tell you one thing, I’m glad Gates is running DOD.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
@ Bill
Please feel free to provide links to blog posts that reference her brilliant mind. All I’ve seen are charges from the right that she’s been overturned > 50% of the time. That a Clinton appointee wrote a rebuke of the Ricci decision that stated, “[it] contains no reference whatsoever to the constitutional claims at the core of this case.” That she’s questionable on civil liberties, the 2nd Amendment, eminent domain, and abortion. You are correct Bill, I am not a legal scholar. Therefore I need people who are to interpret her decisions for me. So far, I’m not finding much.
@ SLC
I couldn’t agree more. I don’t think Alito has shown himself to be particularly brilliant, either. But of course what can you expect of a man who was the second choice behind Harriet Meyers?
May 30th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
No, they’d just be offensive on fewer levels– I promise that there would be a lot more stuff out there along the lines of the NYT ‘temperament’ piece, because that’s how they hit women. However…
… this sort of thing only applies to Democrats or their associates. Women, regardless of ethnicity, are bitchy, hormonal, man-hating, and generally unaccomplished. Ethnic minorities are intellectually inferior and undisciplined and only reached elevated positions due to affirmative action. And all, all liberals/progressives/Democrats are hateful, prejudiced, and despise true meritocracy. Oh, and Democratic men are pussies.
I think that covers it, really.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Signs your political movement is not to be taken seriously:
John Cornyn is your voice of reason –
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-sotomayor30-2009may30,0,2014583.story
May 30th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
I’ve decided (and I’m The Decider) that the arguments against Sotomayor are nuts because they’re insincere. They don’t need to make sense simply because they’re entirely pro-forma. So far Obama has been a disappointed retread of George Bush. Where he’s been different he’s been facilely different. The uproar about Sotomayor (and Obama in general) is just there to make it seem as if Obama were different. It’s all theater.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Do people like Matt really not get this, or are they just faking ignorance for rhetorical effect?
These nominally-Republican pundits are actually entertainers fighting amongst each other for shares in a media market which rewards this kind of extremism. So they don’t care if what they say about Sotomayor is counterproductive to the GOP’s national political aspirations: it is all about their personal fortune as derived from these market shares. Accordingly, all this talk about whether they realize the political effects of what they are doing is beside the point from their perspective.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
“So far Obama has been a disappointed retread of George Bush. Where he’s been different he’s been facilely different. The uproar about Sotomayor (and Obama in general) is just there to make it seem as if Obama were different. It’s all theater.”
Jeffrey: You’re saying this now, of all times? Now that Obama is nominating a liberal (not an extreme liberal, granted) to the Supreme Court, rather than a Roberts or an Alito, you’re saying that Obama is the same as Bush? I guess, according to you, elections really don’t have consequences.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Re Zephyrus at 38: “Basically, given a choice between having Snowe, Steele, and Martinez giving the Republican Party a relatively tolerant, non-white supremacist cast to marginalize the Tancredos and having the Liddys and Limbaughs run the Republican Party, it’s much better to have the latter.”
—————–
I can how that is very tempting is your only interest is to promote the political fortunes of the Democratic Caucus.
Unfortunately, that approach will greatly increase the power of Tancredo and his like within the Republican Party. In part, because if you falsely accuse large numbers of people of being racists when they are not, you eventually piss them off enough to become racists.
That , I contend, is not in the interest of my fellow countrymen who are Hispanic. It is a dangerous game to play, Especially if Obama’s economic rescue fails. Republicans still make up almost –what ? –45 percent of the voters. You do NOT want to convince them that to be a Republican is to be anti-Hispanic.
The Weimar Government decided that if they gave Adolf Hitler enough rope, he would discredit himself — and conservative factions. How did that work out?
May 30th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
It’s probably true that the people making these bigoted statements, & the ones defending them, are unmindful of the impression they’re making on the rest of us, but they’ve made similar statements before & effectively gotten away with it, notwithstanding the current difficulties of their party & movement. Their sentiments aren’t so stigmatized that they’re no longer listened to without disapprobation by millions of people, & there’s a fair chance that they’ll sooner or later return to power. So the fact that these repulsive attacks on Sotomayor are likely to alienate more & better people than they attract can’t be the most important fact about them. Even successful political movements sometimes take unpopular positions on particular questions without ceasing to be successful. The thing for the rest of us is to increase the price they pay.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Is Juan Williams a Real Hispanic? Is Clarence Thomas a Real Black Person?
May 30th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
You realize that doesn’t make any sense, right?
This entire kerfuffle has become an exercise in conservatives drawing maps of their own psyches. In today’s episode, Thomas shows us that he determines what is factual based on what will allow him to accuse Matthew Yglesias of something.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
We don’t have to. They’re taking care of that for us.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
Just Karl,
Sotomayor’s basic resume is available on Wikipedia. You can also check the resumes of the other Supreme Court Justices on Wikipedia, which is relevant in case you want to factcheck what I am about to tell you, which is that Sotomayor has more overall breadth and depth of legal experience than anyone else currently on the Court at the time they were nominated. In a nutshell, that is the objective case for her qualifications.
To refine this much more, you really need to dig into her opinions, and evaluating the overall merit of her opinions is really impossible to do well in any sort of objective way. But if you just want a detailed review of her opinions, I recommend SCOTUSblog, which has an ongoing series of posts on Sotomayor’s opinions (which in fact started before she was nominated).
Finally, for what it is worth I am going to link Eric Posner’s attempt to do an objective evaluation of the merits of Sotomayor’s opinions relative to other prominent judges rumored to be on Obama or Bush’s short lists, using citation data. As previously implied, there are all sorts of problems with any project like this, but this is the best such attempt I have seen:
Posner Data on Sotomayor
You should read the whole thing if you are interested, but here is his conclusion:
So hopefully that is enough pointers to get you started.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
DTM,
Newt Gingrich is not a mere entertainer like Rush Limbaugh. He is working to engineer a political comeback and a presidential run, and has already demonstrated that he is not interested in a doomed vanity run.
National Review and the Weekly Standard (both of which hemorrhage money) are not entertainment magazines doing this for the subscription dollars, but serious opinion magazines which provide the intellectual heft to the Republican message machine.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Limbaugh’s not a mere entertainer either. Not when politicians have to backtrack on even relatively innocuous things that meet with Rush’s disapproval, as Cantor did with the listening tour. The GOP has allowed Limbaugh to secure a position as an important thought leader in the conservative movement.
May 30th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
joe from Lowell,
Suppose Newt was just another entertainer, but part of his marketing shtick was the perpetually unrealized notion that at some point he might run for President. Could you tell the difference between that hypothetical Newt and the real one we see?
As for National Review and The Weekly Standard, as I understand their finances, they are basically kept afloat through subscriptions and fundraisers to make up their losses. Meanwhile, the people writing for those outlets get a paycheck and some marketing for the books they are often trying to sell, and I believe they make money off personal appearances as well. None of that is inconsistent with those writers fundamentally being entertainers competing for market share with each other.
May 30th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Limbaugh’s not a mere entertainer either. Not when politicians have to backtrack on even relatively innocuous things that meet with Rush’s disapproval, as Cantor did with the listening tour. The GOP has allowed Limbaugh to secure a position as an important thought leader in the conservative movement.
Suppose we hypothesize that “the conservative movement” has become more interested in entertaining itself than in thinking seriously about how to be politically succesful on a national level (noting they may not think of it in those terms, but that in fact would be what they are doing). Again, could we tell any difference between the hypothetical Rush as one of the lead entertainers in this scenario and the actual Rush?
Now it is true that there are real politicians still left in the Republican Party, and notably they have not been as vicious in attacking Sotomayor. But they also cannot survive primaries without having the support of people loyal to these entertainers. So they are in an impossible bind.
Again, this all depends on the hypothesis that “the conservative movement” simply isn’t serious about actual political success and instead is more focused on entertaining itself. But I think that handily explains the behavior we are observing.
May 30th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
It’s not that Newt is an entertainer, or a perennial future presidential hopeful, it’s that he’s a pompous self-adulating fuckwitted media whore and self-anointed ‘revolutionary’. He thinks of himself as a one-man movement.
May 30th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Right: You may not necessarily be a racist for opposing any kind of “affirmative” assistance program of one sort or another, but it helps!
May 30th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
1. If soullite knew what it was talking about, it would know the different meanings of “raza”, and know that it refers to one group that’s in almost all cases defined by racial or ethnic characteristics rather than anything else. For instance, would MattY be “raza”?
2. Everything “howard” said was simply an ad hom, and he didn’t attempt any sort of counterargument. If anyone has a valid counterargument to this page, let me know. As we see, liberals aren’t capable of doing that.
3. MattY’s anti-Irish bigot shows up.
4. Zephyrus in #36 lies about Tancredo… and me: I’m not a Republican.
If there are any adults out there, check out my link above and compare it to what MattY says. Bear in mind that while – of course – it has a strong POV and concentrates on the negative, every fact is fully sourced. And, as a bonus, here’s David Shuster trying to shush up Tancredo when Tancredo discussed an NCLR award recipient who’d earlier proposed genocide. If the Dems won’t take the NCLR to task over giving an award to someone who’d earlier proposed genocide, why should any reasonable person – “gringo” or not – give the Dems the time of day?
May 30th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Goodness, after reading some of these posts from what I presume are persons of whiteness, it is clear that the privilege of having white skin does not necessarily translate into the ability to make a coherent argument. What America needs is a good “affirmative” assistance program for those mediocre and substandard whites who ride the coattails of those whites who make something of themselves. Let us not paint all white people with a broad brush: Some of us are really f**kin’ dumb. And many our dumb-as-a-doorknob brethren have found their way into the Ivy League, even those who have found themselves scaling the heights of privilege in the US. (Know you know-alls, I am not just talking about GWB.)
May 30th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Ha! My dumbness has reared its head: I meant “No you know-alls,” not what is written above. Sorry.
May 30th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
My God, Operation Gringo is actually underway. It’s breathtaking.
May 30th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
ah, dickhead.com, if you had a brain in your head or some kind of morals, you wouldn’t pretend ‘almost alway’ is the same as ‘only’.
Obama can choke a pretzel for all I care, he’s fucking lower than scum. He’s what scum shits out. I don’t see why you punish Sotomayer for that, though. She’s in no position to inser secret ‘hide the rape photo’ ammendments to the appropriations bill, and she has no power to prosecute the offenders.
May 30th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
The phrase “la raza” with regard to Mexican peoples began being used after the Mexican writer Vasconcelos in 1925 was pointing out that maybe Mexico and Latin America offered the world something special because they were blends of all the world’s “races”.
Thus, “the race” referred to by Vasconcelos was specifically a multi-racial mix of what was then seen as the major ethnicities / races of the world — White Europeans, Black Africans, and the Indigenous of North America which were seen as being Asian-descended.
And Vasconcelos was doing so from the point of view not from some super-modern progressive disbelieving in racial theory, but from his hope that cross-breeding and cultural influence was more important than racialism.
He even believed in speculations of an ancient Atlantis-based civilization (Lemuria), so certainly he was no common-variety humanist hipster.
Now, however the phrase tended to be used after Vasoncelos’ efforts, if one is going to discuss the phrase itself and the origins of its popular use, then it is worthwhile to note that its major public user privileged the mixing of ethnicities and cultures over racial and cultural separatism.
May 30th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Like Matt, I’m a part-Cuban “white person with a Spanish name” (and part-Gallego to boot), and I’ve lived most of my life unaffected by this fact. I grew up in Miami and was thus inevitably immersed in Cuban-American culture, but once I left Miami (to “cosmopolitan” college and post-college settings) it was pretty easy to forget that part of me; like Matt I assume, nobody could guess my ancestry unless I were to tell them. I think of my Cubanity the way most Italian-Americans think of their Italian heritage: a set of foods made by my grandmother, some cousins who don’t speak English, a lot of old photos, a pre-literate fluency in the language of the Old Country, a residual affection for Catholicism, but not that much else. I never thought of it as either a handicap or a special advantage.
But this Sotomayor fiasco is bringing what seems to be a pretty notable degree of anti-Hispanic racism to the surface, and it’s disturbing and offending me – and it makes me wonder to what extent people have noticed my Spanish first and last name as I’ve advanced my career (a career in a field of academia which is dominated, incidentally, by foreigners, but definitely not Hispanic-Americans). In the long run of my career I don’t think I’ll be personally affected, because of my field’s particularities; but nevertheless it’s a frightening reminder that I may be considered alien to many Americans. It’s also interesting how rote and stereotyped the anti-Sotomayor slurs have been: they have nothing to do with her specifically, but have been taken out of an old playbook (”dumb” “lazy” “emotional”) of anti-Hispanic racism which was written long long ago (maybe the in the days of the Zoot Suit Riots, maybe the Mexican War, maybe the Spanish Armada).
But it’s not just about me: there are hundreds of thousands of people of similar backgrounds in Miami, who are now newly reminded that they are not welcome in certain circles. Many of them (maybe even most) had culturally aligned themselves with American conservatism, and are now surprised that someone who looks like them, with a name like them, is considered some sort of weirdo unworthy of everything she has earned.
And many people I knew in high school were generally conservative in political attitudes, but nevertheless identified more strongly than I did with what the terms “Hispanic” or “Latino” are taken to mean. Their conservatism was much softer than their ethnic identification – and when the two are pitted against each other, their conservatism must lose.
May 30th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
@12 Thomas
I say that’s a fact, because liberals have made the same assertion about Justice Thomas based on the same sort of record
Let’s see:
Sotomayor. Princeton summa cum laude
Thomas: Holy Cross (a good school, but not Princeton)cum laude
Sotomayor: Yale Law, law review
Thomas: Yale Law, “middle of his class” (Wikipedia)
Sotomayor: Served as a DA, federal bench for 17 years, including six years as a trial judge; appeals court for 11
Thomas: Less than two years on the federal bench; no experience as a trial judge at any level
To call this the “same sort record” is to say that Abe Lincoln and either of the Bushes were Republicans who got elected president, and therefore had the “same sort of record.”
To suggest that Bush1 would have appointed any white judge with Thomas’ record to the court was laughable at the time, and still is.
@ Zephyrus and Don Williams
The only people who can marginalize Tancredo (or Liddy, or any other of the wingnuts) are the GOP. As long as they have credibility and influence within the party, they will be seen to be the face of the party.
May 30th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
If it was a white woman, she would be accused of having a lesbian affair with Hillary Clinton while murdering Vince Foster to hide their interracial abortion. Or something like that…….
May 30th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Oh, poor Lonewacko: he still has nothing.
In the meantime, he can add another dozen posts to his shitty blog and another hundred blogwhores, pursue an obfuscatory guilt-by-association game that doesn’t apply to himself, and beg assistance for a campaign of hate conducted in an argot that only he now understands. What a way for someone to piss away a decade.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
My guess is that a DNA test would show Sonia Sotomayor’s ancestry to be at least 90% to 95% European. If she has any African ancestry at all, it’s minimal in the extreme.
While she looks somewhat Asian, that’s probably just happenstance; Seth MacFarlane is even more Asian-looking but has no known Asian ancestry.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
If she has any African ancestry at all, it’s minimal in the extreme.
I’m not an anthropologist, but this strikes me as fairly unlikely.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Look, if Sotomayor concluded, from her humble beginnings and subsequent amazing journey, that she did it all on her own with no help from nobody, and therefore everyone else should just quit your whining because you’ll get no sympathy from THIS bench, then she would be a bigger conservative heroine than Clarence Thomas and Sarah Palin COMBINED.
May 30th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
She’s Puerto Rican. It’s not exactly unlikely that she’s got some African ancestry in her past. She almost certainly has native ancestry as well.
Sometimes I wonder, haven’t some folks ever actually seen people from Spain? They are white in all but (made up) title. Don’t they ever wonder why people from South/Central America are so damned dark?
May 30th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
The person from Mexico City with fair skin, red hair, and green eyes is probably of Spanish descent with no native ancestry.
May 30th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
A while back, about a century, quite a few observers, including many in the U.S., considered the Spaniards and Italians and Portuguese as the dark & swarthy races of Europe. Times change.
May 30th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
Re: However, the Compromise of 1850 and other moderate counsel, including that from President James Buchanan, kept the Fire-Eaters cool for a time.
Ouch! Someone go over to Wikipedia and correct this. Buchanan did not become president until 1856.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
The Hispanic backlash is about to begin any second now. I’m reporting from the front lines and it looks like Republicans are really losing this battle on the blogs and on the airwaves and on the news shows. We’re in serious trouble – how exactly do you guys recommend we save ourselves? I’m thinking that as racist as we are, many of us don’t deserve to live, so the leadership is thinking that some of the white males should commit seppuku so we have a better racial balance in order to understand minority concerns. What do you guys think?
May 30th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
What does this have to do with whining about white males? I’m a white male. What I want is for Republicans to keep shooting themselves in the feet until they’re gone and the entire last 40 years of Southern Strategy idiot-baiting fades away, replaced at best by a sane opposition.
White males who whine about how oppressed they feel by minorities are idiot, feckless losers.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Opposition? What on Earth possibly for? No, you will enjoy permanent majorities starting in 2012. We’ve already irreparably lost the entirety of Hispanics and thus, the Republican Party is doomed. The Democratic Congress already has everything under control in the economy anyway and once Universal Health Care is passed everyone will love Democrats so much we might not even need to raise funds to elect a presidential candidate. It feels so good to relegate oneself to defeat.
May 30th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
[...] lefty commentary on right-wing reaction. I don’t have much to add, except that I think Matt Yglesias is letting them off a bit too easy here. He points out that conservatives shouldn’t be racist morons because it will hurt them [...]
May 30th, 2009 at 8:46 pm
One can only hope that your reassuring vision of the future will come true. I just fear that today’s idiot Dixie uprising theme of the Republican Teabaggers for Palin will fade too quickly before they’ve burned off enough of their own support.
Thank god, though, that the days in which the national agenda of the nation is set by the idiot redneck Republicans of the revanchist South and West appear to be over, given the inordinate damage that arises from the deep and abiding Republican commitment to treason and harming the nation at every opportunity. Even a temporary reprieve may be enough.
May 30th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
DTM,
Thanks. Posner was indeed an informative starting place. From there I found this post about why reversal rates are misleading, and this post about why brilliance is overrated.
May 30th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Most of the comments after my last one are hilarious, but then I felt guilty about laughing about people who obviously have certain issues. There are even a couple of Dem concern trolls… on a Dem site. Epic LULZ, I tells you.
In case anyone wants to compare and contrast, here’s David Shuster trying to drown out talk about someone who’d proposed genocide and then had received an award from a group to which SS belonged, and here’s more about a Hispanic GOP consultant who’s upset over SS not being waved through. Guess which government he wanted money from.
The reader is invited to compare those posts and the others at my site to the MattY’s posts and the comments from most others at this site.
May 30th, 2009 at 10:58 pm
El Cid,
Thank you! I’ve been trying to point that out for several days now. “La Raza” doesn’t refer to a biological race, it refers to Latin American cultural identity. I could be a member of ‘La Raza’ if I immigrated to Santo Domingo or wherever and became a partisan of the Latin American identity(actually it’s been suggested to me that I do). If La Raza is a broad enough concept that it can encompass my very white Puerto Rican friend and my very black Dominican friend, then there is assuredly nothing ‘racist’ about it in the Sailerite sense at all.
May 31st, 2009 at 12:02 am
This is all very interesting, but isn’t anyone concerned that we might be adding another conservative to the court? A lot of people voted for Obama just because there would be Supreme Court appointments and one more conservative would be a disaster for liberals.
The fact that the Republicans are slandering her doesn’t mean liberals should be rooting for her to be confirmed. We don’t know enough about her yet.
May 31st, 2009 at 12:43 am
Being expected to care or to be aware of how you might sound to anyone else is the essence of racism, or reverse racism, or something like that involving racism.
May 31st, 2009 at 1:14 am
I am shocked to return to find that AssForAHeadDotConned found some other bullshit to put on his website and then come here to tell people he had put something on his website.
I think I prefer the spambots that just say “Thank You! Great Post, You Make Interesting Point, Click Here To Get Prescription Enhancer!”
May 31st, 2009 at 10:38 am
@64: and, of course, there’s the fact that Thomas openly claimed to have benefited from affirmative action at Yale, using that as part of his case against it. So there was no “inference” required. And every account of his nomination that I’ve seen makes clear that Bush never considered appointing anyone but an African American for Marshall’s seat.
Mind you, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. Thomas has been an able judge, making a much more interesting contribution than the more lauded Scalia. Having a lily-white Court would have been a bad idea. Thomas the blog commenter, on the other hand, is a complete fucking idiot and hack.
May 31st, 2009 at 11:30 am
Not permanent; just for a generation. In twenty or so years, a new generation of Republicans, who aren’t so comfortable with racism, are capable of operating in a modern, multi-cultural society, and didn’t have their formative political years dominate by white backlash politics, will come to the fore in your party, and you’ll be competitive again. Heck, I’ll bet a lot of them will be Latino.
Until then…I don’t know, start looking for Eisenhowers?
May 31st, 2009 at 12:36 pm
What is so astonishing about the racism we are seeing from Gingrich, Hannity, Limbaugh and many others on Right is how obvious their racist attacks are. I thought the right had learned to disguise its bigotries far better than this over the years. So, it leaves me asking: Why? Why have the leading spokesmen of the Right decided that ginning up white male rage and resentment against an obviously qualified Latina justice is a winning strategy? Maybe they don’t care if it is a winning strategy or not. Maybe winning isn’t what this is about. Limbaugh, for example, has never shown any symapthies with the needs of Republican professionals to expand their base if it means moderating Rush’s cruder appeals. But their attack on this nominee lacks so much finesse and is so crude that you have to wonder what’s going on with the Right that they just don’t care the rest of us know they are playing hard for white resentment.
May 31st, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Let’s face it, much of the GOP’s far right base are littered white supremacist and the “mainstream” GOP is very keen on racial code words such as rants against “multiculturalism” (ie. a multiracial society).
Throughout the 1990s they courted Pat Buchanan, David Duke, Conservative Citizens Councils (Trent Lott: big supporter), had associations headed by people who had once been members of the National Alliance, Liberty Lobby or the holocaust denying Institute of Historical Review.
Considering all of that, is the GOP’s “sudden race baiting over Latinos” hardly a surprise?
And I’m not making a shrill argument that George W. Bush or Lindsey Graham burn crosses on the weekend. But it is an established fact the GOP trades on the political currency of angry, borderline (in not tacitly) racist white people.
Why is this most recent outburst any surprise? Did you think that these people are a bunch of principled statesmen who won’t race bait even if cost them polling points?
May 31st, 2009 at 10:22 pm
Kropotkin,
Is littered white supremacist some kind of fancy term for white trash?
They’d gotten better, at least in public. Remember Karl Rove putting all of the black and Hispanic faces on the stage at the 2000 and 2004 conventions? Trent Lott getting demoted? Under Bush, the GOP made an effort not to be the Southern Strategy, white backlash party it had been for the previous three decades.
So much for that.
June 1st, 2009 at 6:57 pm
“Is littered white supremacist some kind of fancy term for white trash?”
No, it refers to the both current and former straight-up white supremacists who have been active in the Republican party since the late 1980s. For more background you might want to check out Leonard Zeskind’s Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream .
They’d gotten better, at least in public. Remember Karl Rove putting all of the black and Hispanic faces on the stage at the 2000 and 2004 conventions?
A couple of token faces in an ad or on a convention stage doesn’t really count for a fundamental shift. Though I don’t the Rove/Bush wing of the party isn’t racist unless it benefits them politically. But remember at the same time that was going on, Republican anti-immigration advocates were reaching a fervor in suggesting that we station the National Guard on the border and give them orders to shoot to kill.
Trent Lott was only demoted after he was caught red-handed. First there was a controversy when it was reported that he had attended gatherings of the Council of Conservative Citizens (renamed white Citizens Councils of the 1960s, aka “downtown Klan”) He denied it. Then pictures of him under a CofCC banner at a gathering surfaced, he said that he didn’t know at the time what the organization was about (even though his uncle was a former grand poobah in the local chapter) and then an audio tape of the gathering surfaced were he was quoted as saying (paraphrasing here):”if the Dixie crat has won in ‘48, we wouldn’t have had a lot of the problems we’ve had in the past years”. Once he was caught lauding a segregationist party, he had to resign grudgingly. It wasn’t as if the GOP fired him while filled in a sense of moral indignation.
Trent Lott getting demoted? Under Bush, the GOP made an effort not to be the Southern Strategy, white backlash party it had been for the previous three decades.
So much for that.
I agree. This latest row will completely lose them the hispanic vote for as long as I’m alive at least, if they haven’t already.
But I think they are trying to sink Obama the way they sunk Clinton in ‘92: get a wedge issue and portray him as a liberal anti-christ. But Obama is a too smart for that.