Saturday, May 30, 2009

Best we get a better shovel

Gibbs and his staff needs to read Political Animal three times every day. If he did, this kind of stupidity would never ever happen . . .

Gregg Levine: Late Night: Elephants on Parade

Compare and contrast, if you will.

First, here is how the White House, or, more accurately, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, handled a question about the already explained and dismissed criticism of Sonia Sotomayor’s comments about how her Latina background would influence her legal opinions: "I think she'd say that her word choice in 2001 was poor."

Way to go, Gibby! Revive a dead argument, reify hot air, restate a rightwing frame. . . and much, much more!

Now, second, take a look at this miserable excuse for a public figure, former US Representative and Republican presidential wannabe (and current a-hole) Tom Tancredo, when he is asked if he wants to walk back his unbelievably offensive statements about Sotomayor and the National Council of La Raza:

Shuster: Would you like to take this opportunity to apologize?

Tancredo: [Laughs] No.

Notice the difference there? Look again, I know it’s subtle.



The Democrat in the White House, a member of the majority party, part of an extremely popular administration, is confronted with a bit of faux controversy, and shows doubt. Where there was nothing but widely recognized smoke and mirrors, he creates the perception of real, stinky smoke (and thus potential fire).

The Republican, no longer in elected office, member of the minority party, the holder of ideas less popular than elective amputation, spews his filth, is then asked if maybe he just, you know, “misspoke,” and he looks right into the camera and says, “No.”

It is one of the biggest problems of the last eight years (30 years?) in micro-view. Most Americans don’t have a lot of time for parsing and parrying, and so certitude often looks a little like the truth. You’d think our current administration, so very good at message management during the campaign, would know that.

At the end of the day, I expect the Tancredos of the world will lose this fight. Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, but other battles remain, and, sure as shit, the elephants are not going to stop flinging this kind of dead-certain dung.

Best we get a better shovel.

Jamison Foser: Suddenly it's OK to call a judicial nominee a racist

When the nation learned in 2005 that Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito had belonged to a Princeton University alumni organization that advocated a cap on the number of women and minorities allowed at Princeton, the news media quickly circled the wagons to protect the Bush nominee.

When Alito was asked by Senate Democrats about his membership in the organization -- which he touted while applying for a job in the Reagan administration -- the media denounced them for going too far. The merest hint of a suggestion of an implication that Alito was a member of a racist organization was shouted down as an unfair slander; Democrats were pilloried for making Alito's wife cry with their inappropriate questions (though Mrs. Alito didn't actually start crying until Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham took to the microphone).

Gloria Borger, for example, said that the pertinent question was not whether Alito agreed with the Concerned Alumni of Princeton's clearly racist and sexist stance on university admissions, but "whether the Democrats took this a step too far today." Katie Couric added: "Too much to take: Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's wife driven to tears after Democrats question his integrity. Did they go too far?" The media consensus that Democrats went "too far" in questioning Alito continues to this day. Fox News' Megyn Kelly recently claimed that during Alito's confirmation hearings, his wife was "crying hysterically after Ted Kennedy made her cry."

So it seems the news media treat even a suggestion that a Supreme Court nominee might be guilty of involvement in a bigoted organization as a vile slur. Even if the nominee touted his membership in a group that sought to limit the number of women and minorities accepted into his alma mater. Even then, such questions are treated as inappropriate and abusive scrutiny that have no place in civil discourse.

As long, that is, as the nominee in question is a conservative white male, nominated by a conservative white male president.

But as we learned this week, if the nominee is a progressive Latina nominated by a progressive African-American president, you can just come right out and call her a racist -- based on nothing more than a distorted quote and a ruling nobody has read -- and the media will take you seriously. They will amplify your complaints. Far from denouncing you for going "too far," they will pretend that your false descriptions of her comments are accurate.

Eight years ago, Sonia Sotomayor said that she would hope that in judging cases involving discrimination, a Latina woman would reach a better decision than would a white man who hasn't had her experiences. Past Republican Supreme Court nominees like Samuel Alito have said similar things, and it really isn't particularly controversial.

But if you change what Sotomayor said a bit -- drop a word here and there, change a few others -- to pretend that she said Latinas are better than white men ... well, that's racist!

And that's just what the right wing did. Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and other conservative media figures quickly insisted that Sotomayor is a racist and a bigot. They even compared her to David Duke. (Now, at first, you might think that if Rush Limbaugh is calling someone a racist, he must mean it as a compliment. But if you listen to his tone of voice and the full context, it's clear he means it as an insult.)

And the media, particularly cable news, took their complaints seriously. They quoted them, and they adopted the right's inaccurate shorthand version of Sotomayor's comments in order to explain why the conservatives were upset. News reports that explained that conservatives are distorting Sotomayor's comments were few and far between; reports that noted that conservatives have said similar things in the past were even rarer.

Just a few years ago, the mere suggestion that Samuel Alito should explain his membership in an organization that sought to limit the number of women and minorities at Princeton was met with outrage by the media. How dare the Democrats! They've gone too far! But now, with conservatives explicitly calling Sotomayor a "racist" based on manufactured evidence, the media can't even be bothered to point out that they are distorting her comments. Instead, the conservative complaints get taken seriously, as though they are a reasonable and fair interpretation of what Sotomayor said.

So it seems that lying about a Latina in order to call her a racist is just fine, as far as much of the media is concerned. Just don't you dare question why a white male belonged to an organization that sought to keep women and minorities out of his college. That's over the line.


Over the top May 29: Conservatives are escalating attacks on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor and conservative radio hosts are taking it a bit further, criticizing her race and gender. Rachel Maddow talks about their comments with Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.
Swing and a miss May 29: The current Supreme Court is likely to rule on one of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's cases involving racial discrimination in the New Haven fire department. Rachel Maddow talks about the New Haven firefighter case with Stanford University law professor Richard Thompson Ford.

This is an excellent, political discussion. O'Donnell is always very sharp - and increasingly fearless . . .
GOP steps up attacks on Sotomayor May 29: MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell talks about the right wing's continuing attacks on Judge Sonia Sotomayor, including comments made about her being raised in public housing.

Really very good chapter and verse on the truth about what is known about effective traditional interrogations leading to essential intelligence, and what is known about results from torture . . .
Bush continues to defend torture May 29: Four months after leaving office, former President George W. Bush has joined his former vice president's campaign to defend their torture of people held in U.S. custody. Countdown's Keith Olbermann explains.

Waterboarding hoax? May 29: WSL radio host Erich "Mancow" Muller responds to conspiracies brewing on the Web that he was not actually waterboarded.

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)