We Republicans are like Wile E. Coyote and Barack Obama is like the Road Runner.
Just when we think we have him, he “beep beeps” to a fawning press and he leaves us in the dust.
Just look how he finessed his selection of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to become a member of the Supreme Court. He first softened us up by saying he wanted a person who had empathy.
Now what the hell does empathy mean? What it means is he was looking for a judge who was an out-and-out Liberal. Empathy being the code word for Liberal.
Naturally I got it wrong and immediately thought, when he said empathy, he was describing my late Aunt Mary, who had gallons of empathy oozing out of her 200-pound body. Now there was a woman who had empathy.
If a young man from the neighborhood was caught holding up a store, Aunt Mary would always say, “It’s not fair—he’s Italian. He just got into a car with some bad boys. They should let him go. I hate when they pick on us Italians.” That’s ethnic empathy.
But then the word came down that Obama wanted to appoint the first Latino woman to be in the Supreme Court. Once again I got ahead of myself. A Latino woman? Who else would Obama select to serve in the Supreme Court than my old friend Chita Rivera, who starred in West Side Story?
I could just see it, Chita in her sexy black robe and high heels singing to a solemn Justice Clarence Thomas, “I want to be in America, OK by me in America.”
But in the end, Obama selected the candidate he wanted all along. Will Sonia Sotomayor be any good? The media is fawning over her. And after 233 years we finally have introduced empathy into the Supreme Court, and that roaring sound you hear is the brilliant framers of our Constitution rolling over in their graves.
Thank goodness The Wall Street Journal had the courage to say this about Sotomayor’s “empathy”:
“The danger inherent in this judicial view is that the law isn’t what the Constitution says but whatever the Judge in the ‘richness’ of her experience comes to believe it should be.”
But for the most part the media is all for her and the Democrats are pulling for her and saying only a bed-wetting, Capitalist, lackey freak would dare vote against her. Republicans in Congress are quaking in their boots. And “Chuckie” Schumer is doing a victory dance in the end zone of his mind.
No one has yet brought up the name of the man who was once destined to be the first Latino in the Supreme Court. In 2001, President George W. Bush nominated former Justice Department lawyer Miguel Estrada to a seat on the Federal Court of Appeals. The next step was to bring him into the Supreme Court.
Like Sonia Sotomayor, Estrada was a brilliant Hispanic with a compelling story and excellent qualifications. He even received a unanimous “well-qualified” rating from the American Bar Association.
Some of the same people who are today praising Sotomayor spent their time devising extraordinary measures to kill Estrada’s chances. They filibustered him out of contention. Make no mistake, liberal Democrats treated Estrada with hostility. Not because he was a minority—it was because he was a Conservative minority, a threat to the idea that minorities should only think and vote and go along with the wishes of a politician who is a Democrat.
In all his speeches praising Miguel Estrada, George Bush never once presented him as a person who had empathy. Just as a person who had respect for the law and the Constitution, which, these days, obviously is not enough.
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