NEOAVATARA

“I would hope that a wise WHITE MALE with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a LATINA WOMAN who hasn’t lived that life.”

What do you think would happen if a Supreme Court nominee had said the above?

They would be called a racists, and thrown out the door.

Now switch the two bolded words, and you have our current nominee, Sonia Sotomayor.  She said those comments at the University of California, Berkeley’s law school.  So rightfully, people have called her comments racist…and in turn have been called racists.

Now, in all fairness, I don’t think Ms. Sotomayor is a racist, a charge that is being led by Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, who both didn’t shirk from the obvious avalanche of attacks that would come from such a frank statement.  Rush doesn’t care, and loves the attention. Newt, well, maybe not so much.  However, Rush is playing the same game Democrats play; if someone says anything a little wrong (and Ms. Sotomayor is wrong on this), that does NOT make them a racist.  Trent Lott wasn’t a racist for congratulation Strom Thurmond on his birthday, and neither is Ms. Sotomayor.

Sherilyn Ifill, a  CNN guest columnist, today makes a similar point:

It is an insult of unimaginable proportion to unleash this charge on her, based on one sentence from her Berkeley, California, speech. It is not just irresponsible to make this charge against a sitting federal appeals court judge based on this flimsy record; it is — and here I’ll break the taboo — racist to do so.

Here is the nonsense…she wants us to give Ms. Sotomayor a break for making a racist comment, which I am perfectly happy to do.  But those criticizing the racist comments are racists; that is hypocrisy.  Statements from Ms. Sotomayor and her accusers may both be ignorant, but to call either racist, based on a single sentence here or there, is hypocrisy.  Additionally, question for Ms. Ifill:  would Trent Lott’s comment bar him from a judgeship in your mind?

To prove my point, Liberals are using the argument in reverse.  Political hack Michael Hogan of Vanity Fair called Gingrich a racist for bringing up the point:

In a perfect meritocracy, maybe that would be enough to level the playing field. But we don’t live in a perfect meritocracy. Legacy matters, family matters, connections matter, and inevitably, unless the law insists otherwise, skin color matters. Maybe not to you, but to plenty of people.

So, yes, it’s preposterous to call advocates of affirmative action and all its sibling policies racist. If you think they’re illogical, or counterproductive, that’s your right. We can have an adult conversation about it.

But if you’re going to call brown people racist because they believe in protecting other brown people from white racism, I don’t have anything to say to you.

Except this: You’re the racist.

What complete idiocy.

Hogan basically is defending reverse racism.  Because the world is NOT PERFECT, we must accept racism in reverse of historical standards.  To ‘level the playing field’, we must basically be prejudiced.

What is preposterous is the idea that people like Hogan believe they are fair minded, when they are anything but.

For those of you that don’t know, I am NOT white.  My parents are from India.  I was born and raised as a proud American. Have I suffered from racism?  Certainly.  And yet, my family and I have all become successful and happy in our careers. Hogan would like you to think that people like me would never make it other than for liberal idiocy of reverse racism; nothing could be further from the truth.

Here is what angers me even more.  When did Ms. Sotomayor really achieve success?  Under Republican Presidential Administrations. It was Republicans who didn’t care about her ethnicity, or the color of her skin; for that matter, didn’t even care about her political ideology.

The Supreme Court is the highest court in the land.  And they swear an oath when they take that sacred office:

“I, [NAME], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as [TITLE] under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.”

Read that again.

‘I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform’…yet, Sotomayor is clearly telling us she will do no such thing.  She will purposefully and intentionally be partial…to the delight of idots like Mr. Hogan.

First. let us stop the name calling.  We as Republicans should confront Sonia Sotomayor, ask her to defend ther statements and rulings, and then provide her a vote on the floor of the Senate.  Charles Krauthammer has an excellent piece on this strategya.  That is more gentlemanly than the Democrats were the last several years to Bush appointees, I may add.

Janice Roberts Brown, an African-American justice nominated by George W. Bush, was viciously attacked by Democrats a few years ago.  Do you remember why Democrats attacked her?  Because she was accused of putting her opinions above the law…sound familiar?  Does anyone remember how Samuel Alito was so disparaged during his nomination, that his wife had to leave the chamber, her face flooded in tears?  The media convenient forgets that, as Republicans have behaved much more responsibly than Democrats ever had.

Alan Colmes of Fox attacked people for questioning Sonia Sotomayor’s ‘judicial temperament.  He called it sexist; another bomb thrower.  Yet, Colmes had no problem when Democrats questioned Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and Samuel Alito…on you guessed it, ‘judicial temperament’.  The hypocrisy is raining down, and it is bipartisan.

Then, there are liberal hypocrites like Charles Blow of the New York Times.  In an Op-Ed, he states Republicans are the racists because they are taking Ms. Sotomayor’s words were taken out of context.  And then, he proceeds to spend the next 11 paragraphs doing the exact same thing to Republicans, as well as now deceased William Rehnquist (who can’t defend himself, obviously) and Chief Justice John Roberts (with allegations that have never been proven, only rumored).  Um, Mr. Blow, you may not be a racist, but you certainly are no intellectual, if you don’t realize your own hypocrisy.

Second, let us have a civil debate.  I like Rush, but he is a little shrill, and we all know it.  Newt should know better. People like Tom Tancredo really should go away, because they don’t have the ability to have a civil conversation.   Calling anyone a racist is like throwing a bomb into a room.  Was the comment that Sotomayor made racist?  Yes, it was; but I by no means think she is a racist from one single comment.

Please, people, on both sides:  Let’s grow up.

UPDATE Tom Goldstein of ScotusBlog has a great the 96 race-issue cases Ms. Sotomayor reviewed as a judge.  In most of them, she was against findings of racial discrimination; more often than not, she found against the plaintiff when claiming racial discrimination.  This goes a long way to prove she is not the extremist on racial issues that we had thought.  As others have argued, she isn’t a conservative…but heck, from the Obama Administration, we could have gotten a lot worse.  Others, like Lanny Davis, have argued that she is even a strict constructionist.  I wouldn’t go that far.  First of all, do you really think Barack Obama would have nominated Sotomayor if she was a strict constructionist?  Obama is from the ‘living document’ wing of lawyers…strict constructionism is a dirty term to them.  I think Sotomayor is certainly a liberal, may be a fairly left wing one…but the more I hear about her, the more she seems more like Souter (who was virtually a nonentity on the court, other than for his liberal votes) than the next Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

Also, an ironic flashback:  then Senator Barack Obama said Samuel Alito and John Roberts were qualified…but voted against them anyway.   Great precedent, huh Mr. President?

UPDATE #2:  Newt Gingrich finally got it right…he withdrew his statements calling Ms. Sotomayor a racist.  Again, I don’t think the Justice is racist, but I think she has made statements that could be construed as racists.  Those are two very different things; one can apologize for a statement, but can’t really apologize if they inherently are prejudiced against a whole group of people.