Saturday, July 18, 2009

Big Bird Would Approve


The US Senate held their question and answer period this past week to decide whether or not to confirm New York judge Sonia Sotomayor as this nation's 111th Supreme Court Justice.

Many years ago when judges were nominated to the Supreme Court they could look forward to a short vetting out period where Senators would look into their views and decide if they were qualified and impartial enough to fit the bill.

But these days the proceedings are used to gain face time on television and possible sound-bites on the 24 hour cable news services. Generally the opposition, the party not in power at the time of the nomination will find fault in the candidate even if they have to manufacture it. And manufacturing
truths has become the Republicans middle name ever since Karl Rove showed them how easy it is to do so.

This year was no exception as the Republicans chose to go back into history and take a phrase out of context used by then Judge Sotomayor at a dinner event. The phrase gave the impression that she felt she could make a better decision than a White male because of her background as a Latina. Of course since the Supreme Court has had 110 justices to date and 107 of them have been white males this offended the "Party of No" tremendously.

Their fake outrage was evident on every Fox News owned station and paper.
The Republicans jumped all over this as the single reason to throw out her nomination even though her years on the bench proved her to be more than qualified and in fact among the most qualified to ever hold the post. She is arguably more qualified than a few of the terribly biased Republican appointed judges currently serving on the court.

The entire function was fairly dull because the questions posed to Ms. Sotomayor were repetitious and showed that the Republican Party is lost and has no definitive direction. And when some of the Senators brought up the question of her temperament any sane individual would have to have asked if any of the 108 male justices previously interviewed had ever been questioned in that area. Don't bother to go to the videotape, they had not. I was waiting to hear one of the chauvinistic morons suggest that her time of the month might affect her rulings.

In fact the grilling of Justice Sotomayor could have been written by Sesame Street:

"Today's proceedings are being brought to you by the letters EM and the number 3. Sonia Sotomayor is attempting to become merely female justice
#3 on the Supreme Court out of 111 total in its history. And she appears to have an EMpathetic nature."

The Republicans who are dead set against anything the Democrats are trying to do have pulled out those two letters in their defense. E & M and are the first letters in the word EMpathetic! They claim that Ms. Sotomayor is too EMpathetic to be a fair minded judge.

Of course empathy is what someone has too much of when they rule against you or your friends in favor of the other guy. In this case they are implying that other guy is the common man or woman and very likely a minority and the machine, AK the lobbyists will lose out.

The real reason they are against her is that they do not like the letters EM nor do they like the word EMpathetic. That is because they themselves don't use those letters and are in fact just plain PATHETIC.

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