Please Don't Throw Me in That Briar Patch

Pat Buchanan has a lovely little column on a conservative site, Human Events. In it, he not only exhorts the GOP to attack Sotomayor as a racist, but also claims that the key to GOP victory is further shoring up their portion of the white vote. Example:

If John McCain, instead of getting 55 percent of the white vote, got the 58 percent George W. Bush got in 2004, that would have had the same impact as lifting his share of the Hispanic vote from 32 percent to 62 percent.

And:

Why did McCain fail to win the white conservative Democrats Hillary Clinton swept in the primaries? He never addressed or cared about their issues.

These are the folks whose jobs have been outsourced to China and Asia, who pay the price of affirmative action when their sons and daughters are pushed aside to make room for the Sonia Sotomayors. These are the folks who want the borders secured and the illegals sent back.

Had McCain been willing to drape Jeremiah Wright around the neck of Barack Obama, as Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis, the mainstream media might have howled.

And McCain might be president.

So, yeah, this is repugnant stuff. But, it's also delightfully wrong-headed. For one, Buchanan assumes that all white people are as narrow-minded as he is. Second, the kind of people who are charged up about this stuff make up a shrinking portion of our overall population. If anything, the GOP needs to moderate itself or it risks becoming a powerless fringe group.

Ultimately, I think the crazy right will find themselves marginalized. Moderate Republicans will realize that they need to cast the wingnuts out of the party and our whole political spectrum will correct its course. I can dream, right?

Sonia Sotomayor

So, what do we know about our latest SCOTUS nominee? I don't have much to add to the e-mail that Seana circulated. We know she'd be the Court's first Latino, it's third woman, and that the Repugs are trying to label her as an intellectual lightweight even though she graduated from Princeton summa cum laude and was an editor on the prestigious Yale Law Review.

From what I've read, she's pretty direct in her opinions, generally writing about law and precedent rather than lofty ideals. However, we'll likely only hear about one of her decisions: Ricci v. DeStefano, in which she and her colleagues upheld a decision to invalidate a promotion exam on which minority firefighters scored disproportionately low. That's the one Limbaugh's pointing to when he calls her a "reverse racist." It could also be overturned by the SCOTUS soon, which would be awkward (granted, Alito also had a big lower court decision overturned). Anyhow, Slate's Emily Bazelon has an interesting analysis of the Ricci case.

For those who want more information on her, Slate has a number of features here and SCOTUSBlog has a series analyzing her decisions: part 1, part 2, and part 3.