Sotomayor Drives the GOP Into the Desert:
There's something viscerally thrilling about watching the GOP die not with a bang, but a whimper. In attacking Judge Sonia Sotomayor for her ethnic identity and her education, the Republican Party hasn't just gone over a cliff. Oh, no. They plunged off that craggy fucker in 2004 like Wile E. Coyote on a sputtering rocket, landing on the canyon floor with a cactus shoved up their ass and their bones broken. Sure, they could have dragged themselves to the highway and flagged down some help, but given the choice of heading to the road or the dust, they turned their back on civilization and crawled on shattered knees into the desert. All we're really seeing now is the vultures feeding on their sad, burnt flesh.

The comical bungling of the response to Sotomayor demonstrates not only how out of touch the American right has become, but how they're so enamored of the scent of their own shit that they don't care who steps in the piles they're leaving. So, for instance, if someone like Senator Pat Roberts, who is a motherfucker, sure, but generally not a nutzoid motherfucker, says, as he did, that he opposes Sotomayor because "I think that you should be judging people on their qualifications, whether they will follow the Constitution, and if they do that and they follow the Constitution and they don’t make laws, they simply follow the Constitution and interpret it, I will support them," sure, we could argue whether or not Roberts is correct in his view of Sotomayor.

But the problem is the biting bitch of context. See, when Democrats in the Senate opposed, for instance, Miguel Estrada as a circuit court judge, there weren't dozens of screeching Democratic white men and women running around, saying how Estrada's love of beans might get in the way of his judgment on the bench. The only ones saying racist shit were his supporters, and they were accusing anyone not supporting him of being racist. As Dahlia Lithwick wrote at the time, "In the end, Miguel Estrada's supporters cannot see past his skin color, and his detractors cannot see past his ideology." You can have a conversation about only one of those. (By the way, the Alberto Gonzales confirmation hearing was second verse, same as the first, except Democrats caved.)

So Roberts and any Republican who might want to vote against Sotomayor are automatically lumped in with the titanic assholes who are hogging the microphones of America like a Nebraska twink hogs sailor cock on his first trip to Fleet Week in New York. Roberts is stuck now having to explain how he's not with Rush Limbaugh or Tom Tancredo in thinking that Sotomayor is racist because she said that on discrimination cases, actually having been a victim of discrimination would give you a perspective that being a white male wouldn't. (And, seriously, Tom Fucking Tancredo?)

If they were rational, GOP Senators would be condemning Limbaugh and Gingrich and all the others who have gone loco over Sotomayor. Indeed, something like this ought to demonstrate to the mainstream media that virtually all of the gabbling mongrels on the right are merely appealing to the most hateful, spite-ridden fuckers of our society, and they deserve the exile that's coming. Of course, that presupposes rationality on many levels.

By the way, the other story here is the huge influence of bloggers on the process as it plays out in the media. Out here in Left Blogsylvania, we immediately hit our Nexis bookmarks and went to searching, finding how utterly inane and/or hypocritical the attacks on Sotomayor have been, whether it's digging up the context for her quotes, finding out how Republicans overlooked the very same things she's said when spoken by or about Republican-nominated justices, and more. Everything they put up, we can hit down quickly. It's damned impressive.

(The Rude Pundit's still agnostic about Sotomayor. He doesn't think she'd've been nominated unless Rahm Emmanuel asked her point blank about Roe v. Wade and got the answer he wanted [and if she fucks Emmanuel over, well, remember: he is Shiva, the Destroyer], so there's no use in getting one's panties in a wad about it. Remember how the right was nervous that Roberts might not support the pro-life position? But, with barely even looking, she's a fuck of a lot better than either the Chief Justice or Alito.)