Wingnut Implosion:Bring the Popcorn Edition

I have to say, watching the disgusting, ugly, racist, rude & angry angry angry reality of the repuglican party utterly exposed, finally, is kinda fun. Actually, it's one of the most entertaining things I have seen in my 55 years. And then there is this . . .

Marshall: The Horror

Catching fire on the right-wing websites, here's the Young Cons rapping the "Young Con Anthem." Basically two nerdy right-winger twenty-somethings preachin' it to liberal power-structure, yo ...

Seriously, you have to see it.

Krugman: But no sharks!

Yglesias, discussing the woes of right-wing think tanks, alerts us to quality Heritage research: “Pentagon Should Battle Pirates and Terrorists with Laser Technology”.

But the research is sorely lacking — not a mention of putting the lasers on sharks.

You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with [bleep] laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here! What do we have?

Think Progress: Tancredo: ‘I don’t know’ if the Obama administration ‘hates white people.’

Recently, Rush Limbaugh declared that the way to get promoted in the Obama administration is “by hating white people.” On MSNBC this afternoon, when David Shuster asked right-wing extremist Tom Tancredo whether he agreed, Tancredo refused to object to Limbaugh’s characterization:

SHUSTER: Mr. Tancredo, do you agree that the Obama administration hates white people?

TANCREDO: Oh [sighs], I don’t know. But I’ll tell you this –

SHUSTER: You don’t know? In other words, they might?

TANCREDO: What do I — I have no idea whether they hate white people or not!

Shuster also asked Tancredo whether he wanted to apologize for calling the the nation’s largest Hispanic civil rights organization a “Latino KKK.” Tancredo laughed at the idea of an apology. Watch it:

Marshall: Draining the Fever Swamp Jefferson Morley explains how Judge Sotomayor helped puncture the Vince Foster conspiracy theory bubble.

Kurtz: So Many What Ifs ... The American Spectator: What If Sotomayor Were White?

Benen: PLAYING GROWN-UP....

The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan today referred to some of Sonia Sotomayor's far-right critics as "idiots." She went on to offer her party some reasonable advice.

"Let's play grown-up." When I was a child, that's what we said when we ran out of things to do like playing potsie or throwing rocks in the vacant lot. You'd go in and take your father's hat and your mother's purse and walk around saying, "Would you like tea?" In retrospect we weren't imitating our parents but parents on TV, who wore pearls and suits. But the point is we amused ourselves trying to be little adults.

And that's what the GOP should do right now: play grown-up.

I'm trying to decide which part of this is more interesting: Noonan's assumption that Republican Party would have to pretend to be grown-up, or that Noonan thinks there's still time for the GOP to, as John Cole put it, "dial back the crazy" on the Sotomayor nomination.

Marshall: Putting Out Fire with Gasoline

We explained earlier how the Sotomayor battle has blown up the until-now simmering fight between GOP pragmatists (want to get reelected) and fire breathers (want to fundraise and burn heretics at the stake) by injecting the explosive issues of race, nativism and gender into the equation. Now Newt Gingrich has responded to Sen. Cornyn's call to basically shut the hell up by turning the volume way up on the Sotomayor as anti-American racist freak by invoking the Civil War, civil rights and arguing that American civilization itself may be at stake if her brand of 'racism' isn't defeated.

• Kleefeld (TPM): Gingrich Digs In On Sotomayor-Bashing

  Newt Gingrich does not seem to be deterred by the new message of the Republican leadership, such as Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), that he and Rush Limbaugh should stop calling Sonia Sotomayor a racist.

  Gingrich has now sent out a fundraising e-mail, asking for help to send blast faxes to every member of the Senate demanding that the Sotomayor nomination be defeated. He even says that she shouldn't even get a vote in the Senate, but should just have to withdraw.

  Gingrich warns that all of American civilization is at stake here. "If Civil War, suffrage, and Civil Rights are to mean anything, we cannot accept that conclusion," he writes. "It is simply un-American. There is no room on the bench of the United States Supreme Court for this worldview."

• Sudbay: Rush fires back at GOP Senator Cornyn and compares Sotomayor to David Duke

  This morning, I wrote about Senator Cornyn's criticism of Rush and Newt. It wasn't a very strong condemnation, but Cornyn ventured into that dangerous territory for Republicans -- criticizing Rush:

  How long before Cornyn has to apologize? The new commandment for Republicans is that no one shall ever criticize Rush. And, it's perfect that he complained about Rush and Newt on NPR, a station which most conservatives loathe.
  
  Try as he might, the Texas Senator doesn't deliver the GOP message. Rush and Newt do. And, there's nothing Cornyn can do about it.

  No surprise, Rush didn't take it well. He clearly has Cornyn in his sights. Courtesy of Media Matters:
  
  
  Rush is just playing with Cornyn now. It's going to get uglier. Keep in mind, Cornyn runs the campaign committee for the Senate Republicans. He needs to have a happy base of contributors -- and for most of them, Rush is their one true leader. We all know Cornyn is going to have really get on his knees and beg for Rush's forgiveness. No Republican can ever defy Rush. No Republican ever really will.
  
  Meanwhile, Rush upped the ante of ugliness today, too. He compared Sotomayor to notorious white supremacist and former GOP candidate, David Duke. Seriously.
  
  UPDATE: Noting that Rush compared Sotomayor to David Duke, Eric Kleefeld at TPM asks the right question:

  So why isn't he supporting her?

Benen: JEALOUSY IS SO UNATTRACTIVE...

Stuart Taylor, one of Sonia Sotomayor's more enthusiastic detractors, offers this anecdote from the judge's time at Princeton.

In October 1974, Princeton allowed Sotomayor and two other students to initiate a seminar, for full credit and with the university's blessings, on the Puerto Rican experience and its relation to contemporary America.

Now, I look at that as pretty impressive. Willow Rosenberg notwithstanding, students are rarely offered opportunities to teach before they graduate. That Princeton extended Sotomayor a chance to lead a for-credit seminar, in addition to her summa cum laude degree and the prestigious Pyne Prize, suggests she must have been quite remarkable young woman.

The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb doesn't see it that way. His headline reads, "More Preferential Treatment?"

I went to Princeton but somehow I never got to teach my own class, or grade my own work. One wonders how Sotomayor judged her work in that class, and whether the grade helped or hindered her efforts to graduate with honors.

Hmm. When a prestigious university offers a Latina student an opportunity to teach, and fails to offer a white male student the same opportunity, it could be the result of "preferential treatment" relating to the Latina student's ethnicity. Then again, it could have something to do with -- and I'm just throwing this out there as a possibility -- the fact that the Latina student was simply smarter and more impressive than the white guy. Really, it happens.

Where Goldfarb sees evidence of "preferential treatment," I see evidence of excellence. Chalk it up to competing worldviews, I guess.

Post Script: Also, note Goldfarb's suggestion that Sotomayor's seminar may have "helped" her graduate summa cum laude. The argument seems to be that she may have graduated with honors, but that was made possible by her "preferential treatment," such as the chance to "grade [her] own work."

In other words, we're to believe Sotomayor's summa cum laude honor is less than what it appears to be. How sad.

Update: Making matters worse, it looks like Goldfarb's criticism isn't even based on fact -- Sotomayor didn't teach her own class.

• John Cole: Get This Man a Column
  

  I’ll note with glee that Bill Kristol’s jockstrap, Michael Goldfarb, appears to be just as fast and loose with the facts as his boss:

  So Goldfarb’s snide comments about Sotomayor teaching her own class and grading her own work seem to be completely baseless: she didn’t teach the class.

  It is, however, increasingly clear why Goldfarb’s Princeton career didn’t go the way Sonia Sotomayor’s did, and it has less to do with Sotomayor receiving “preferential treatment” than with Goldfarb’s limited reading comprehension abilities.

  With Goldgarb’s history of accuracy, I simply have no idea why Fred Hiatt is not paying him for an occasional column.

JedL (DK): Sean Hannity, judicial activist

Conservatives like Sean Hannity love to rail against judicial "activism" — unless it means they won’t get their way.

Transcript:

HANNITY: Why doesn’t he get the promotion?

JULIE MENIN: Because you have to apply the precedent that’s in front of you, and the second circuit...

HANNITY: No, they don’t have to. A judge does not have to.

MENIN: But then you’re an activist, if she overturned that...

HANNITY: You don't believe in equal justice under the law, and I do.

MENIN: Oh, that's true at all.

So...Hannity believes in equal justice under the law? Well then, he must support marriage equality, right? Who knew Hannity was so progressive? (Or maybe he's just a lying sack.)

Benen: LEAVE IT TO LIDDY....

And here I thought Tom Tancredo, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh would be the most offensive conservative critics of Sonia Sotomayor. How could I forget this clown?

Yesterday on his radio show, conservative host G. Gordon Liddy continued the right wing's all-out assault on Judge Sonia Sotomayor. [...]

"I understand that they found out today that Miss Sotomayor is a member of La Raza, which means in illegal alien, 'the race.' And that should not surprise anyone because she's already on record with a number of racist comments." [...]

"Let's hope that the key conferences aren't when she's menstruating or something, or just before she's going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."

So, according to this prominent conservative media personality, the Spanish language is synonymous with "illegal alien," and women are, by nature, poorly suited to serving as justices.

I'm not sure what I expected, exactly, from the right during this confirmation process. It was easy to imagine them attacking Sotomayor, but I more or less assumed they'd be subtle. The racist and misogynistic attitudes would be there, I assumed, but they would be vague, indirect, and phrased in a way to make deniability plausible.

But here we are, just a few days after Sotomayor's introduction, and some corners of the right just can't seem to help themselves. They know it's hateful, they know it's offensive, they even know it's likely to do long-term damage to their party.

And yet, they do it anyway. It's like a sickness.

John Cole: Direct Fail

Richard Viguerie:

“The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor unites all wings of the conservative movement—economic, foreign policy, social, traditional, neocon, and libertarian—in a way we haven’t seen since the early Clinton years.

“Judge Sotomayor frightens all conservatives. As the debate over her nomination heats up, conservatives will provide the primary opposition to Sotomayor and will quickly launch a massive educational campaign using direct mail, the Internet, talk radio, cable TV, You Tube, and other forms of new and alternative media.

That was two days ago. Pretty impressive collapse since.

John Cole: Unpure of Heart and Weak in the Knees

Time to fire up operation leper and throw John Cornyn out of the party:

A top Senate Republican is taking aim at recent statements from conservative commentators Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich suggesting Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is a “racist.”

“I think it’s terrible,” Sen. John Cornyn, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, told NPR’s “All Things Considered” Thursday. “This is not the kind of tone any of us want to set when it comes to performing our constitutional responsibilities of advise and consent.”

I love the write-up there, CNN. They haven’t been suggesting it, they have been SCREAMING it for days now.

At any rate, what will happen to John Cornyn, now that he has crossed Dear Leader, El Rushbo? He was already on the hot seat because of his support for Crist over Rubio in the primary. Will Rush stick the shiv in today, or will he spare his life? Will Cornyn be forced to crawl back and kiss the ring?

Also, I’m taking this opportunity to once again link that ridiculous Cornyn campaign video from last year:

We’ll see who is big and bad shortly.