Not a Parody
To be clear, when I say that the conservative movement has a lot to offer people who are convinced that poor Puerto Rican women growing up in Bronx housing projects get a lot of unfair advantages in life, I’m not kidding.
Michael Goldfarb of The Weekly Standard and Stuart Taylor of National Journal are genuinely engaged in an Ahab-like quest to smoke out examples of the “preferential treatment” of which Sotomayor has been such a beneficiary.
Beyond the simple observation that conservatives really and truly are fanatical in their defense of the prerogatives of white people, the obvious observation to make is that everyone in life has been treated preferentially by someone at some point. Sometimes if you face a lot of disadvantages in life, people recognize that and extend you an extra helping hand. Or maybe, like John Roberts, you were educated at a private boarding school before attending Harvard. Or maybe you’re Irving Kristol’s son. Or maybe because your ideology pleases Rupert Murdoch, he agrees to cover the losses of the magazine you work at. The only reasonable question to ask about someone like Sotomayor is whether or not you think it’s reasonable to conclude that, on balance, poor minority women benefit from more special advantages in life than do middle class white men. I think that would be a difficult case to make. It’s hard to look at the composition of the United States Senate, or the Washington Post and New York Times op-ed pages, or the roster of Fortune 500 CEOs and reach the conclusion that the system has been working overtime to promote underqualified Latinos into positions of prominence. Unless, that is, you want to argue that we’re so intrinsically deficient in our ability that we’re structurally underrepresented despite the massive advantages we receive in life. Maybe that’s what Goldfarb really thinks.
My guess, though, is that they haven’t thought this through at all. And that one reason they haven’t thought this through at all is that to the best of my knowledge there are no Hispanics working in high levels at The Weekly Standard and thus nobody around to point out what an ass he’s being.
91 Responses to “Not a Parody”
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May 29th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Amen to that.
I’m just glad the Sotomayor nomination is outing the bigots and making the republicans articulate their rationale for white privilege to an increasingly non-white public.
May 29th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
I don’t think you have to be Hispanic to be able to point out that Goldfarb is an ass.
May 29th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
“And that one reason they haven’t thought this through at all is that to the best of my knowledge there are no Hispanics working in high levels at The Weekly Standard and thus nobody around to point out what an ass he’s being.”
I love reading Matt for gems like this. Part of me wants to believe that that’s all it would take for Goldfarb to change his mind.
May 29th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Well, this is apparently a large port of the argument being used against black firefighters in New Haven, that despite their purely quota-based preferential hiring, a flawless written exam finally exposed their across-the-board low intelligence. So welcome to the club.
May 29th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
I am Hispanic and I’m happy to have the wingnuts pursue this line of thinking and then say, “bbbbbbut we nominated Alberto Gonzales!” with the other side of their mouth. It’s like they think we’re stupid or something…..
May 29th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Whoops, I typed “port” instead of “part.” No promotion for me.
May 29th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
as an immigrant from a third world country and as beneficiary of generosity of the white professors in a university which eventually led me to ph.d. and a faculty position at an ivy league university I can testify to fact there is a lot of undeserved preferential treatment that people like us get.
May 29th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
So Goldfarb wants us to think that because he never had the initiative to do an independent or directed study class that this somehow constitutes “preferntial treatment”? Really this is the best they’ve got?
How do they call that a blog anyway without comments?
May 29th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Why can’t another white male with his wits about him point out someone else less enlightened is an ass? Lack of having the offended class around to point out idiocies doesn’t cut it as far as Goldfarb or Taylor not getting keelhauled within their own editorial offices. Evidently they’re all as patently xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic and bigoted as the next guy down the hall.
May 29th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Have you thought it through Matt? Jeeze talk about a non-sequitur. We’re not talking about people being born into advantageous positions in life (i.e. you), but whether the government ought to single out certain races or nationalities for preferential treatment.
May 29th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
We’re not talking about people being born into advantageous positions in life (i.e. you), but whether the government ought to single out certain races or nationalities for preferential treatment.
When determining if someone is qualified for a job, why does it matter if the preferential treatment comes from private or public sectors?
May 29th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Since I try not to go over to the Corner, for the sake of my sanity and blood pressure, I haven’t answered the question for myself, but I must admit this is the first time in my life that I’ve ever wondered: “How does K-Lo feel about all this?” (Or is the “Lopez” a ruse?)
May 29th, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Goldfarb is an ass of near-mythical standing. Tell me how the hell a nothing like him gets to keep on making an ass of himself, in public, on somebody’s payroll, after the “Obama hangs with anti-semites… you know the ones I’m talking about” crap he flubbed so fabulously in his Sanchez interview during the election.
Maybe I’m a bit old-fashioned, but it seems that when you die such a horrible, gruesome, and extraordinarily PUBLIC death (figuratively) as this inestimable ass did, that decency would dictate that you just stfu from now on.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
I don’t know if you count as a Latino, Matt, Spanish name notwithstanding. I thought your father’s family was Spanish-from-Spain, not Latin American. Am I wrong?
May 29th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Medrawt, are you implying that the vast sea of white at NRO might come from a particular perspective and not be the be-all-end-all source of objectivity? For shame! White men always know best.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
I find it an odd coincidence that Michael Goldfarb and Stuart Taylor are both white guys.
Has K-Lo weighed in? Maybe Obama and his advisors figured this was a good opportunity to split K-Lo from the movement? I rely on Matt to report on what’s happening at the Corner.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
To a right winger, being accused of being an insensitive ass by someone who doesn’t appreciate insensitive assdom is like receiving some daily affirmation poem.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Well ok, but Matt should really look into exactly who bears the brunt of affirmative action. It’s certainly not the white males that Matt always talks about – the ones with huge amounts of wealth and power (the ones Obama is bailing out). It’s the oafs like Ricci, who was bucking for a freaking firefighter job, not exactly the domain of powerful wealthy whites and ex slave holders. It’s this kind of thing that make affirmative action an easy target.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Squeaky Rat -
Yglesias is (as noted in a previous post) 1/4 Cuban via his paternal grandfather, and not (directly) Spanish; he also noted that he doesn’t have “a strong Hispanic identity,” whatever that means to him.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Squeaky Rat:
Yglesias comes from Spain through Cuba, according to Matt. And according to the census bureau he counts as a hispanic for sure: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1238/sotomayor-supreme-court-first-hispanic
May 29th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
I have to say, I had stopped being offended by Republicans back around Abu Ghraib. I just started assuming that they were hateful evil people, and didn’t bother getting worked up about their evilness any more than I would get particularly worked up about, say, new revelations about the Gulag. But for some reaction, this whole attack on Sotomayor has sickened me in a way that I haven’t felt in years. I’m not quite sure why. I guess it’s just the fact that they feel no shame about viciously, and personally, going after somebody about whom they know literally nothing apart from her gender and last name (not even her first name, as Huckabee proved). If they had just accused her being a “judicial activist”, or claimed that she wanted to create a constitutional right to gay marriage, or anything like that, I wouldn’t have cared. It would have been just as fact-free, but I understand that, on some level, they have to attack her based on something. But they haven’t just gone after her judicial positions, they’ve attacked her on a fundamental level, saying that everything about her life is a fraud, that everything that she worked so hard to achieve (harder than I, a white male, have ever had to work for anything) is meaningless. That after working her ass off her whole life to get into Princeton, get into Harvard Law, reach a spot on the 2nd Circuit bench, and finally get nominated to the Supreme Court, all these assholes who haven’t accomplished half of what she has feel entitled to publicly claim that she deserves no credit, and that every one of those accomplishments was really just a gift bestowed by white males plagued by irrational liberal guilt upon an undeserving, naive little puertorriquena. It makes me sick.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
kafka -
An easy target … for the empathetic!
Seriously, as others have pointed out, Ricci’s personal experience is shitty, and I feel bad for him, but that wasn’t the legal issue before Sotomayor, who did exactly what hardassed unempathetic judges are supposed to do.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
It’s posts like this that keep me coming back Matt!
May 29th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
This is right, although I think it makes sense to make a distinction between zero-sum preferential treatment and “productive” preferential treatment, making your sarcasm about alleged or suggested intrinsic deficiencies a little too glib.
An example of the former would be were the Senate, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Fortune 500 to have under-representation of Latinos because of a direct or indirect preference for whiteness on its own terms (or Murdoch’s political preferences). The average white person almost certainly receives more of these, no matter what Goldfarb et al. who complain about affirmative action (which is not, in the big picture, zero-sum anyway) say.
An example of the latter would be were the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Fortune 500 to have under-representation of Latinos because white people as a class (obviously not every individual white person) receive preferential treatment that makes the average white applicant more qualified or discourages Latinos from applying to these positions (being less likely to live in poverty, I imagine being more likely to speak English as a first-language, I should make clear that I know of no evidence at all that suggests biological differences in intelligence by race). In this case, I am positive that the average white person receives more advantages than the average Latino. (I call them productive preferential treatments only because although it would be nice if the distinction did not exist, it may be better to have some people with the advantages than equality with nobody having the advantage).
Goldfard et al. (at least if they want to think through their prejudices enough to come up with highly strained rationalizations) may deny that the “productive” preferential treatment is really preferential treatment, so I would say that is where the tension is.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
The question is whether you think the Supreme Court would benefit from being only 66% straight, white, male Christian rather than 77% straight, white, male Christian. If you do, then, yes, the government ought to seek out qualified candidates of races and genders and religions and sexual orientations that are currently underrepresented. As long as the Latina is as qualified as some hypothetical white male, I don’t see what’s wrong with the government taking into consideration factors designed to improve the makeup of the Court, like seeking out more racial minorities or, say, bringing in an academic instead of a sitting federal judge.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
You guys think Sotomayor’s record is hurting the Republicans; let’s keep the party going! You’ll win in 2012 with huge majorities and we’ll have universal health care and Obama will be number 1 and liberals rock.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
Well ok, but Matt should really look into exactly who bears the brunt of affirmative action. It’s certainly not the white males that Matt always talks about – the ones with huge amounts of wealth and power (the ones Obama is bailing out). It’s the oafs like Ricci, who was bucking for a freaking firefighter job, not exactly the domain of powerful wealthy whites and ex slave holders. It’s this kind of thing that make affirmative action an easy target.
Matt’s just pointing out that Taylor and Goldfarb are hypocritical for only getting worked up over “preferential treatment” in this instance, when there are a whole set of more egregious examples obvious to anyone with an objective view of things.. What you’re complaining about would require a longer discussion.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Right on, Ohio Boy.
God, I hate feeding trolls, but Affirmative Action has nothing to do with the Ricci case, kafka.
Goldfarb really proves tokenists right. By tokenism, I mean the idea that having a single black person on SCOTUS would’ve prevented the Dred Scot ruling.
And I don’t consider Sotomayor to be remotely token–she has an almost identical educational and professional background as Alito, except that she was valedictorian and summa cum laude and he was neither.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Matt, there’s no controversy here. Again, the left has said for nearly 20 years that Justice Thomas wouldn’t be on the court without racial preferences, and has rejected the suggestion that saying that is racist. What’s changed?
Matt might have noticed something was wrong when he lumped Taylor in with the conservative movement. Soon I hope Matt will lump everyone who opposes racial preferences into the movement.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Do you know how much talented minorities are in demand in fields like law if they even show a glimmer of promise? 100% guaranteed that a minority who makes it into an Ivy League undergrad and T14 law School has an easier time of it making the prestigious BIGLAW jobs and federal clerkships than a similarly situated white male.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Seriously, as others have pointed out, Ricci’s personal experience is shitty, and I feel bad for him, but that wasn’t the legal issue before Sotomayor, who did exactly what hardassed unempathetic judges are supposed to do.
As Matt has pointed out endlessly, more whites than blacks live in poverty, but they get nothing under affirmative action, while at the same time white males born of privlege (Matt for example) pay no price. If you really can’t see why this breeds legitimate resentment, then don’t talk about lack of empathy.
Affirmative action should be based on circumstance, not race and gender. This in fact is what the New Deal amounted to, and its programs were favored by blacks and whites alike.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
i agree with many others here that you do not need to have someone of the race/class/etc. represented to confront people when they make ignorant and not at all thought out arguments – in fact, it is especially the role of someone NOT from the group to point it out – since there is always going to be the assumption that the person is doing so out of ulterior motives. and it’s not fair for the one minority person to always have to bring up minority issues. also, it is not impossible (though sadly not common) for white people to notice and draw attention to idiotic statements like this.
i think the fundamental problem is that the dominant majority starts off with the assumption of a level playing fied – so that whatever they get, they deserve. they don’t have the idea that socially/structurally/etc. others start out at a different position and go through different challenges, so they have no conception that they are privilaged. i’m from a a pretty poor family and ended up somehow going to an ivy league school, and was pretty surprised at how most people took being there (and for the most part a lot of other pretty big advantages in their lives) completely for granted. i thought people in general sort of realized that being in a certain social class/educational background not even to mention race gives you a huge advantage, but apparently not.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Here is an article from 2003 detailing this truth from MSNBC:
“As one of only 192 blacks who scored higher than 1450 on the SAT this year, Alice Abrokwa is being wooed by some of the nation’s most elite colleges.
BOSTON UNIVERSITY held out the likelihood of financial aid for the shy high school senior from Alabama before she had even applied. Massachusetts Institute of Technology paid her to attend a six-week summer program. Washington University in St. Louis and Amherst College in Massachusetts flew her to their campuses as part of special student outreach efforts…
The competition is particularly ferocious for blacks and Hispanics with SAT scores that put them on par with the most talented white students. According to the College Board, only 1,877 black students (about 1.5 percent of blacks who take the tests) scored higher than 1300 out of a possible 1600 on the SAT in 2003. Only 72 scored higher than 1500.”
Etcetera, etcetera.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
What you mean “we,” white man?
I mean, I know what you mean, but seriously.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
ATTENTION!! For eveybody’s mental health this thread will not turn into a flame-war with ThatDonkeyBenjamin!
May 29th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
I’m sorry, but it’s ridiculous that they’re suggesting a person who graduated second in her class at Princeton, got the Pyne prize, went to Yale Law, and has spent nearly two decades as a judge is by definition unqualified because she’s Latina and so there’s a chance people might have been a little bit nicer to her because they thought she had great potential and they wanted to see a Latina succeed.
I could certainly argue that there’s an equal chance a handsome white man like John Roberts only got where he was because people were a little bit nicer to him because he looked the part of a successful smart guy, or he reminded them of themselves at that age, or because he reminded them of a smarter and more capable version of their own son, so they gave him that little bit extra and that little push and they assumed he was up to the job well before they gave it to him because, you know, he looked the part.
The difference between them, of course, is that no one would suggest John Roberts got where he was because people were a little bit nicer to him due to the accident of his birth. Whereas Sotomayor shows up with a far more appropriate and far impressive resume for the exact same job, and people suggest she got that resume due to an accident of her birth.
Nope, no double standard here.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
It is not like Michael Steele was the most qualified liar the RNC could find…
May 29th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Does this post actually work towards that end, or are you just trying to employ childish rhetorical tricks to pretend you have psychic support?
Flame on, brother! I lose nothing to see you sputter.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Thomas @ 29:
Wow, I never thought I’d see the day when a Justice on the highest court in the land stooped to dredging up his 20-year-old grudges in the comments section of a Blog.
But, let me say a hearty, “Welcome, your honor.”
Now, to the “substance” of the comment. I remember the Thomas confirmation hearings quite well, as I followed them with quite a bit of interest. Not once, did I hear any public figure on either side of the debate mention racially-preferential treatment. The issues raised about now-Justice Thomas were focused almost exclusively on his alleged sexual-harassment of his former subordinate, Anita Hill. The popular right-wing meme that he underwent a “high-tech lynching” is just cover for the overt sexism of Republicans who didn’t (and still don’t) see sexually degrading behavior towards women in the workplace as a serious problem.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
My flame was not for Ben.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Hardly anyone believes or practices identity politics except white Republicans. Most people are smart enough to support candidates they actually like, not just any old fool who happens to share a similar skin pigment. To a first approximation, nobody opposes racial tokenism more strongly than people born to the token’s own race.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
Indeed, it would have been interesting to see what would have happened in New Haven if all the blue-collar shmoes involved had been able to take six months off work and drop a thousand bucks on a test-preparation course. Instead, we find ourselves with yet another case of Mayor DeStefano continuing the decades-long trend of beating up on powerless New Haven Italian-Americans, all in order to help out his objectively unqualified black homies.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Sigh.
Getting equal treatment as white males who perform equally isn’t preferential treatment.
If poor whites face the same problems as poor Hispanics, shouldn’t poor whites be glad that there’ll be a child of poverty on SCOTUS?
That’s really my only support for her, because she’s less liberal than Souter.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Hello Donkey,
1. It is true I see no reason to believe my comment you find so objectionable will work to that end.
2. I do not think it is especially childish or self-serving. I just wonder whether or not you and those who will argue with you will be made any better-off by arguing (especially when you probably know that many of the people who will argue with you won’t accept the SAT as an indicator of anything. Is introducing evidence you know the validity of which will be immeidately disputed a childish rhetorical trick on your part or did you just fail to account for it?)
3. But don’t let me stop you. If other people want to argue with you that’s fine.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
I fear K-Lo may be the model from which they are drawing these conclusions.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
There’s an angle about the Ricci case that the Right (and much of the left) has missed.
Sotomayor, by upholding Title VII, is weirdly deemed a “judicial activist”, hellbent on screwing over poor dyslexic, white Mr. Ricci.
Does the name Lily Ledbetter ring a bell? She discovered that she had been the victim of sexual discrimmination in her paychecks for several years. However, because she didn’t file a lawsuit within 180 days of the initial incident, her lawsuit was thrown out. Did the Supreme Court remedy this obvious injustice to Ms. Ledbetter? Hell no. They said, them’s the breaks, that there’s the law. Have a nice day. Not a single solitary pundit currently crying crocodile tears over Mr. Ricci said a damn thing about John Roberts’ actions in THAT case.
Both Sotomayor and Roberts upheld current law, both decisions negatively affected the plaintiff. Yet, somehow Sotomayor is the “activist judge”?
May 29th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Is there a way I could buy myself out of my privilege? Like, as the leftist argument goes, if we paid Blacks $X amount of money for educational equity, would we able to finally take objective tests again for comparative purposes secure in the knowledge that our privilege won’t rear its capricious head whenever the other side does badly?
Rhee, make it so.
May 29th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
As Matt has pointed out endlessly, more whites than blacks live in poverty, but they get nothing under affirmative action, while at the same time white males born of privlege (Matt for example) pay no price. If you really can’t see why this breeds legitimate resentment, then don’t talk about lack of empathy.
Poor whites don’t but poor blacks do. Affirmative action should be based on circumstance, not race and gender. This in fact is what the New Deal amounted to, and its programs were favored by blacks and whites alike.
Yeah but in the meantime affirmative action will have to do to help blacks, etc. And I don’t think it breeds legitimate resentment, given historical inequalities. It does breed resentment, which Taylor and Goldfarb are trying to whip up in order to divide and conquer and focus on a nice red herring/strawman.
Yes it shouldn’t be the be all and end all, but your argument gives a sense that you lack empathy for black and females, etc., who have historically suffered. Should we deny any affrimative action until it’s based on circumstances? No I don’t think that will help.
I think yours is a short-sighted vision. Perhaps b/c you’re a white guy.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
Pete,
The legitimate criticism of Sotomayor is that she saw fit to turn away Mr. Ricci with merely an unsigned opinion affirming the lower court’s decision, which was a shirking of her legal duties by failing to examine the compelling Constitutional issues raised by the case, so much so that her fellow judge Cabranes on the Second Circuit felt need to censure her panel in a sharply worded dissent. Moreover, the fact she didn’t indignantly strike down this discrimination in a rousing defense of Equal Protection suggests that the vaunted quality of “empathy”, which Obama asserts is necessary to the art of jurisprudence, is only a cheap liberal crock.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Anoymiss has a good summary.
The old joke about George HW Bush being born on 3rd base and thinking he hit a triple is both a funny line and a pretty good summary of the mentality of these guys.
The good follow up joke is that W was born on 3rd base and promptly stole 2nd:-)
May 29th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
I think it makes people bitter. It seems to have made the Donkeyfaced Boy bitter.
Hey, Donkey, if you had done as well on your SAT, then you would have gotten the same treatment as these smart black kids. AND you got the preferential treatment of having a standardized test that is slanted toward your ethnic group!
Don’t cry to me because black people that are smart than you do better in life.
Also, Ricci’s case is imbecilic. I feel bad for the guy, but if all the white guys were ACTUALLY better qualified, wouldn’t they have done better on the second test? And he clearly got screwed by Kaplan (or wherever) if the skill set only applied to one test, but not another.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
49, Donkey, so why are you so silent about John Roberts denying Lily Ledbetter HER Equal Protection under the law? Oh, that’s right. Lily Ledbetter was a white woman, which to you is probably no better than a black or a Latino.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Pete, seriously? That was too easy. We are all equal under the law. Duh Lily Ledbetter is no better than a black or a Latino or a !Kung.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Donkey, seriously? What I see is that you are substantially more concerned about Mr. Ricci’s equality under the law than you are about Lily Ledbetter. Two cases. Both judges upheld the existing law. Both plaintiffs got a bad break. Yet, you are only mad at ONE judge…
May 29th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Luke,
What second test? Make yourself clear, there was “no” second test. The fire department saw the results, and threw ‘em out.
And I know this might blow your mind, but I am in fact black, and thus your insult makes absolutely no sense at all. I fight incessantly against the zoo-like prism that privileged white liberals analyze Blacks through.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Pete,
Once more, the relevant criticism isn’t the actual decision of the case. It is the ill-regard by Sotomayor of the usual custom which, in a charitable reading, suggests that she is dense or unqualified, or by a less charitable one, suggests that she actually malicious in her racialist views. And of course there’s the stunning hypocrisy in the rhetoric of “empathy” so recently beloved by the Left.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
Yglesias is (as noted in a previous post) 1/4 Cuban via his paternal grandfather, and not (directly) Spanish; he also noted that he doesn’t have “a strong Hispanic identity,” whatever that means to him.
I imagine that identity gets strengthened when he sees Sotomayor people complaining about how to pronounce Spanish names.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
May 29th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
What a bunch of sound and fury signifying nothing. Obama got elected. The opposition only has 40 votes in the Senate. Obama appointed someone who has been an appellate judge for many years, and as such already made it through a confirmation hearing, and has done nothing since of note which is disqualifying. She is going to be confirmed. If the opposition had 49 votes, she would have had a much harder time of it, like, say, Janice Rogers Brown did when she was nominated to the D.C. Court of Appeals.
Nomination debates are about principles about as much as debates pertaining to how to direct agriculture subsidies. Like nearly eveything in our political culture, it is all about grabbing and consolidating power, with which to force political opponents to submit. It’s an ugly process that is mitigated somewhat when done with elections and legislative votes, as opposed to other means.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
I don’t think I’ve ever met a black dude who insisted we needed to work harder to appreciate the motivations of whites who lynched blacks in the segregated South. There’s always a new unique perspective in this world.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Moral Panicker,
It was a legitimate, almost rhetorical, question, asked if I were an Everyman. I don’t wear my identity on my sleeve, it doesn’t define me, it doesn’t shape my political views; my experience is no better and no worse than anyone else’s because of the color of my skin.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
What a bunch of sound and fury signifying nothing.
True, but Republicans had a choice about what type of sound and fury they would resort to in this kabuki theater. I’d say they made a rather … strange … choice, but the truth is that the nature of those objections were designed specifically to appeal to the sentiments of their southern white base.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
El Cid,
Indeed. When a person sees liberal proscriptions fail time and time again within his community, he tends to reject wholesale their folk myths and investigate reality, as it really is and not as others wish it to be, for himself.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Donkey,
The irony is that New Haven followed Title VII to the letter when they determined that the promotion test was too flawed to stand up to judicial muster in the event a lawsuit was filed.
Of course, now you say that the outrage isn’t that Sotomayor upheld Title VII, but that her decision making process to uphold Title VII somehow indicated that she was an ignorant racialist? I’m dying to know how do you figure a High School Valedictorian, Summa Cum Laude from Princeton, and Top of her class at Yale Law accomplished all of those things without being smart?
Again, where do you stand on the Lily Ledbetter case. It would have been pretty obvious that she should have had the right to sue for sexual discrimmination, but Roberts, Alito, Scalia et. al held firm that the 180 day rule should have trumped equal protection (never mind that such a small window would enable businesses to discrimminate freely as long as they weren’t caught within six months, which is absurd).
I’m curious, did the other judges up and down the line other than Sotomayor ALSO uphold Title VII because they were “racialists”?
May 29th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Lucky for me, I’m a crazy, ultra-fringe lefty, so I’m completely unburdened by having to respect any liberal proscription I didn’t like.
Such as, I would have kept up the New Deal jobs programs and we never would have even had to have a debate on the conservative-favored ‘welfare’ programs pushed by the segregationist South so that public jobs wouldn’t go to blacks, we would have spent far less money, and we would have trillions of dollars more invested in our national physical and other infrastructure.
But the liberals felt (maybe accurately) that they had no realistic choice but to give into the segregationists and anti-laborites, so instead we got an inferior replacement.
Maybe someday your explorations will result in a coherent argument. You never know.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
Donkey, so you don’t like “liberal proscriptions” for the AA community. So you are throwing in with the “oh, well, sucks to be you” philosophy of race relations that typifies modern conservatism?
If you hadn’t noticed, the REAL victim mentality is the conservative party. Their own ideas aren’t good enough to win in a straight up election, so they have to play on fears to split the electorate just enough to snake through. Fears of the “unqualified minority” did Jesse Helms good in the 1980’s. 9/11 was like Christmas to the GOP, because it gave them the ultimate two-fer in fear, non-Christian, brown people. If the 9/11 hijackers had been a bunch of white guys, would Bush have been able to plunge the US into a perpetual war.
I feel sorry for you Donkey. You’re throwing your lot in with a political movement that sees you as a N**ger, and you sit there and praise them.
fuck you.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Yes, because Judge Cabranes (appointed by CLINTON!) disagrees with seven of his Circuit Court colleagues and the District Court, and he’s the smartest judge EVAR! At least according to a bunch of fuckwits who had never heard of the guy before he started touting results-based judicial activism that they approve of.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
MDS,
RAWR! I’ve got my crypto-ring of self-righteousness on too. With our powers combined….
Unfortunately for you, I know that Cabranes was one of the most prominent figures on the Second Circuit and a genuinely smart conservative judge.
Erasmus,
I knew one of you would be first to pull out the Uncle Tom card. Nothing highlights the intemperate attitude of the Left toward dissent whenever one of their pet classes turns against their rhetoric, I’ve experienced it many times. No, you go fuck yourself, and go dance your jigaboo elsewhere.
Someone else said it better at another blog I read. Seriously, who’s more dangerous to my liberties nowadays, grizzled old segregationists or bright-eyed progressives who as busy as beavers setting up the country for failure via immigration, massive deficits, and divisive Supreme Court jurisprudence…
May 29th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Donkey, seriously, it’s not an Uncle Tom card. The point is that the modern conservative party often invokes black boogeymen in order to whip up their base and poach off swing voters. Remember when Reagan gave his “state’s rights” speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, home of one of the most notorious Civil Rights murders in the name of “state’s rights”?
Why, we’d have a balanced budget if it wasn’t for those “inner city welfare queens” getting food stamps while wearing fur coats (never mind that the vast majority of people on public assistance are actually rural whites).
Even though we have a thirty second clip of Rev. Wright saying something that was probably partially true about chickens coming home to roost, that thirty seconds was inflated by your beloved conservatives as “Twenty years of anti-white hatred”
As for “personal liberties”, remember that conservatives argue that the President should have the power to pick up an American citizen, put them into a de facto Gulag, deny them due process, and TORTURE them only on the basis of an ACCUSATION of terrorism. Never mind that to a conservative, “keeping the government out of your life” is always temporarily suspended if a gay man does as much as pull a piece of lint off his boyfriend’s coat.
May 29th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
I believe Sotomayor is quite qualified to be a Supreme Court Justice. She is obviously not the best qualified amongst the short-list, because the polling I saw suggested that most liberals viewed Diane Wood as more so. However, she has long been accustomed to the notion that she is on the defensive from the white man, so she won’t be bothered by the aspersions that will follow her that she was purely an affirmative action candidate, unlike the genuinely sympathetic Clarence Thomas.
In any case, her liberal philosophy is not why I oppose her, per se. After all, it is not “my side” who is inheriting an often intemperate and loud-mouthed judge. It is mainly her racialist thinking that I fear will do the country in. Her writings in the Daily Princetonian do little to dissuade the idea that she sees many of society’s resources as spoils to be divvied up according to ethnicity. When Hispanics matter enough demographically, will the country fall apart when she intuits some penumbra of rights that guarantee hard quotas in hiring? You can argue that I am being hyperbolic, but liberals never seem to draw a firm line between say, nationalizing an oil company, and full-scale Chavismo. The transitions between technocratic corporatism and full-blown socialism is always unforeseeable and distant. The affirmative action of South Africa could never happen here…just because.
May 29th, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Guys, remember: DFT! (Don’t feed the Trolls)
If any of you actually believe that DonkeyBoy is african-american, then I’ve got some prime open-land just outside of Miami that you’d really love.
At best he’s some disaffected white dude (See his earlier “reparations” remark and his last comment about “setting up the country for failure via immigration”–as if we weren’t a nation composed almost-entirely of immigrants and their descendants), or, more likely, a paid troll.
Yes, people really do get paid to hijack online political discussions–I know, because that was one of my jobs as “Assistant Director of Communications” on one of the campaigns I worked for back in ‘06. This is one of the main reasons that I’m trying to get a PhD and a think-tank job–the life of an in-the-trenches political operative is just too ugly.
Ok, all of that was a really long way of saying “don’t feed the goddamn trolls!”
May 29th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
It really isn’t about the color of Sotomayor’s skin, it only matters because of her warped thinking. If Cabranes, another Hispanic, were picked to the USSOC I’d be jumping for joy. If Janice Rogers Brown were lucky enough I’d be probably be doing the ethnic canvassing on the cable news shows myself. Her ethnic background only matters because she has made statements that make it clear she considers that the foremost reason for her accomplishments. She deserves to be attacked at confirmation because she has made it clear she sees her ethnicity as central to her legal interpretation, which I believe is very, very wrong.
May 29th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Sahu,
Are you stupid? If I were indeed a troll, is the best way to silence me to call attention to me as such?
May 29th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Will, your opposition to such sound and fury would be admirable, especially given your tendency towards the same and worse your love of exported real violence, if you hadn’t already been here lying in order to call Sotomayor a racist. Indeed, if you were really interested in reducing the amount of sound and fury you would simply have not posted anything at all. No one and nothing obligated you to read or write on this blog. Just your love of seeing your own name in pixels.
May 29th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
she has made it clear she sees her ethnicity as central to her legal interpretation,
Ladies and gentlemen, I refer you again to the title of this blog post: “Not a Parody”! We have some bona-fide earnest stupidy, ignorance, and/or rank dishonesty right here!
May 29th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
“I would hope that a Latina judge would often reach a better conclusion than a white male judge who hasn’t lived the same life…”
Tyro,
My previous statement in an entirely understandable interpretation of this one. But you know little else but to insult and be high-fived for that shallow wit within your echo chamber.
May 29th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
That’s not an exact quote: “… 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.”
From Rod Dreher:
May 29th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
My previous statement in an entirely understandable interpretation of this one.
Only if you’re being wilfully ignorant in an effort to parrot right-wing talking points. Which would be funny as an exercise in parody, but in this case rather stuns the readers in that you are “Not a Parody.”
Meanwhile, between this and the torture issue, Rod Dreher is having an outbreak of logical thinking. I predict he will realize, sooner or later, than Republicans don’t have much use for supporters who have more interest in serving the moral standards of his own Orthodox Christianity than self-lobotomizing for the purpose of propagating talking points or merely having blind interest in infinite tax cuts.
May 29th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
TPm has a post up with a link to Alito’s conifrmation hearing:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/05/flashback-alito-knows-a-thing-or-two-about-empathy-also.php?ref=fpblg
We’ve got video of Sam Alito’s 2006 confirmation hearing where he goes on at some length about how he he can’t help but relate immigration and discrimination cases before him to his own family’s experiences. “I do take that into account,” Alito told senators.
What he is saying is no different than what Sotomayor is saying and is so banally common sense the fact that this is all the right wing can come up with must mean her closet is impeccably clean.
May 29th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
What he is saying is no different than what Sotomayor is saying and is so banally common sense the fact that this is all the right wing can come up with must mean her closet is impeccably clean.
Yeah they’re just trying to twist her words. It’s the old “southern strategy” but you’d think after the election of Obama they’d realize it won’t work too well any more. Maybe it’s the only play they got.
May 29th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
The penny drops that the these people really are not capable of making sense of the snarks without it being spelled out…
They really, really should read this blog regularly–it might help them to think better (well it keeps me coming back).
May 29th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Oh, good grief, she is going to be easily confirmed, and rightly so. Is it also necessary to lie, by saying that only those who consider Tom Tancredo sane would find Sotomayor’s remarks problematic? Look, if somebody wants to be as charitable as humanly possible, and maintain that all she was saying was that a court made up of justices with a diversity of experiences will tend to make better decisions, or that she was just saying that her decisions will be informed by her life experiences, fine. There are Knicks fans who still buy season tickets, after all. Don’t pretend, however, that only a hard core Republican would fail to do the same. Again, for a rather more reasoned discussion by non-Republicans….
http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/05/about_that_wise_latina_statement.php
May 29th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Is it also necessary to lie, by saying that only those who consider Tom Tancredo sane would find Sotomayor’s remarks problematic?
I’m shocked that you, of all people, Will, would be stepping up to the plate to defend Republican talking points. I mean, really, for once in your life could you be intellectually honest and dismiss these jokers for the lying trash that they are instead of saying, “well, they may have a point…” ?
May 29th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
“It’s the oafs like Ricci, who was bucking for a freaking firefighter job, not exactly the domain of powerful wealthy whites and ex slave holders.”
If New Haven is anything like Chicago, Ricci is an “oaf” who probably has several generations of his family preceding him in the fire department, and is the beneficiary of willful exclusion of minorities and of nepotism dating back many, many decades.
May 29th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
Will, you’ve been a dishonest hack from the moment I first encountered your noxious self. Here you took up, without ever bothering to think about it, the dimwitted Republican talking point that her statement was somehow disturbing. Now that there is no chance that anyone who has seen a bit of the context will ever do anything but mock you mercilessly for falling for the talking points of dimwitted Republicans, you are trying to back-pedal.
It reminds me of when I finally backed you into admitting that your fear of “millions dead” if there were no invasion of Iraq was based on, well, nothing.
I don’t post as “not as stupid as Will Allen” because I’m smart, but because you are so mind-numbingly stupid that even a beauty school dropout can see through your intellectual pretensions.
May 29th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
the corporate tool couches his derision of the proles
as an attack on racism and nepotism
how Progressive
If Lakeview East is anything like Chelsea, brewmn is a fucking twat
May 30th, 2009 at 2:46 am
Is self-delusion really so satisfying? Evidently, yes.
May 30th, 2009 at 5:40 am
Has no one taken a history class? Does anyone know the actual context or history of affirmative action?
It started with FDR, expanded under Truman, and *really* expanded under Eisenhower (with Nixon at the helm). 1957/1960/1964 Civil Rights Acts (Title VII!). A big win for colorblind equality; equal protection under the law and all that good stuff.
Bloody Sunday – March 1965, firehoses, dogs, death. Wow.
LBJ says “hmmm we need to more” and gives a speech at Howard in June 1965 (written by Moynihan, no less) called to secure these rights: http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/650604.asp
Passes the Voting Rights Act in August 1965, Watts riots happens a few days later. Race riots rack the country for more than 3 years. Kerner Commission determines in 1967 that the problem is white attitudes toward black people and black frustration with the failures of colorblind equality. You can’t solve a race problem with a colorblind solution. It doesn’t fix racism in the hearts and minds of men, nor does it fix 400 years of discrimination that’s built into the very fabric of the nation.
LBJ passes E.X. on affirmative action in 1966; opens the Office of Federal Contract Compliance; quotas, timetables, tries it out in 4 cities – more race riots and failures. Comptroller rules it illegal in late 1967 under Title VII since it’s preferential treatment. Party over.
But not really! Department of Labor, under Richard Nixon, revives it in 1969. Philadelphia Plan goes into effect.
http://www.nixonera.com/library/domestic.asp. Nixon has quite a few nefarious reasons for putting it into effect (hello divisionary politics!) but George Schultz and Arthur Fletcher genuinely care about giving minorities an economic chance. They start w/federal contractors. John Mitchell & Nixon muscle it through Congress, and in 1970 the plan is extended to allllll industries doing business with the feds, under Order Number 4. 1971 SC rules it constitutional (booyah!). In 1978 – Bakke – they rule that quotas and timetables are illegal BUT affirmative action (i.e. preferential compensatory treatment for underrepresented minorities given their shitty life) deal is LEGAL and should be encouraged.
Of course all this gets muddled once you hit the late 1980s, but I digress.
If anyone is interested, check out John David Skrentny,The Ironies of Affirmative Action or Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era.
Funny enough, Arthur Fletcher envisioned affirmative action as a 10 year plan. He argued that if white people let underrepresented minorities have “their fair share” from 1970-1980, then minorities would be on equal economic ground and we could start off fresh. Well in 1980, minorities still didn’t have their fair share so the policy stuck. If you get a chance, you should reach Schultz & Fletcher’s remarks on the opening of the Philly Plan (June 1969). Both men say that colorblind equality only works in an idealized vacuum. But that in real life, America is not colorblind – it’s color obsessed. The point is not that all minorities need to be middle class and wealthy – their point is that minorities should have a fair share of the national pie.
May 30th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
[...] couple of more points on the allegedly “preferential treatment” that Michael Goldfarb thinks Sonia Sotomayor received during her Princeton years. First, as Michael O’Hare says: I remember arriving at Harvard (a [...]
May 31st, 2009 at 5:14 pm
As a Latina myself I believe that the abuse is being directed toward her race, but its venom is as sharp as it is because of her gender. Double whammy! But the latter is so intrinsic in this culture nobody ever notes it really.
June 1st, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Love it! Thank you for writing this so clearly and perfectly to the point.
Who even cares if she was nominated because of her race? Why is that even an issue?? Is that any worse/different than the reasons most people get good jobs i.e family ties, the right connections, playing golf with the right people, etc etc. Pretty hard to do any of those things from the projects in Bronx.