Rundown of a nominee

Check this out. It's the last several tweets from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (isn't it a little creepy when creepy guys like Newt Gingrich use Twitter?).

Never mind the gas chamber and Baptist missionary family stuff. Look at this most recent one:

White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.

White male idiot should shut the fuck up.

Really, if you're inclined to take that drivel from Gingrich seriously, let me remind you of his comments before one of his history classes in 1995:

If combat means living in a ditch, females have biological problems staying in a ditch for 30 days because they get infections. ... Males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.

In the Twitter posts, he's talking about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, of course, the president's nominee to fill David Souter's spot on the Supreme Court.

That's the new GOP meme. Sotomayor is a racist. Pretty amazing that they actually have the fucking nerve to fucking call her racist, out loud, in print, on television. These guys have taken the gloves off, boy howdy. I mean, we're not allowed to call Jeff Sessions a racist outloud, even though Sessions, the Alabama senator who is the ranking member of the GOP on the Senate Judiciary Committee, got derailed in his quest for a judgeship for calling the NAACP and the ACLU "un-American" and "Communist-inspired."

That wasn't really enough, though. He also said those two groups "forced civil rights down the throats of people" (a similar argument is used today for gay men and lesbians seeking the same rights everyone else has).

>Sessions is also a former U.S. Attorney who made it a habit to prosecute civil rights workers for election violations.

Please note that Sessions' gesture is very similar to that used by Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in that famous photograph comparison that proved they were linked. Make your own conclusions about that. Oops. At least it was in the other version of this article I posted. But Blogger refused to upload that photograph, so here Sessions is demonstrating the "I'm about to choke the life out of you, you miserable liberal" gesture, which Clarence Thomas is also demonstrating below.

And so it is that this guy, Sessions, will be leading the Republican opposition to Sotomayor, who, incidentally, is quite unAmerican, according to some on the right, because she insists on pronouncing her last name the way it has always been pronounced in Puerto Rico, from which her family hails. It's so-toe-my-YOR, in case you're wondering.

Puerto Rico, just in case these bozos have forgotten, is a part of the United States. Why, they even voted in the general election last November. For Obama, I believe.

Which just goes to prove, of course, that Sotomayor is an unabashed liberal who would push the court hard to the left and completely nullify the votes of John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia all by herself, such is the power of racist Latina women.

And don't forget the empathy thing. Actually, most on the right think that empathy is a pretty good trait to have, just as long as it's not empathy for people who vote Democratic. George H.W. Bush, who nominated Thomas to the court in 1991, had this to say about his nominee:

I have followed this man's career for some time. He is a delightful and warm, intelligent person who has great empathy and a wonderful sense of humor.

Yeah, I was kind wondering if Thomas' empathy ran along the same lines as his Coke can sense of humor.

Of course, the argument goes that Thomas doesn't use his vaunted empathy in his decision making. No, for that he and the other conservatives on the bench use their robotic charm to follow the party line, because we all know that only conservatives rule correctly from the bench.

All the sound and fury about Sotomayor is a whole lotta bullshit, but of course, you knew that. The right is on the offensive trotting out out-of-context statements and selective judicial rulings to prove their point. They leave out, naturally, any statements or rulings that might indicate they are wrong.

For example, bet you didn't you know that Sotomayor ruled against an abortion rights group that had argued the "Mexico City rule," which barred federal funds used in international aid from organizations that "promoted" abortion, violated their right to free speech. Of course not, because the right isn't talking about that, and my colleagues only talk about what the right wants to talk about. That's what gins up controversy, you know, and controversy is what those colleagues of mine live for. Even if they have to make it up, which they do on an almost daily basis.

Hell, I'd be more worried that Sotomayor would be the court's sixth Catholic if she's confirmed. Of the remaining three, two are Jewish and one is an avowed atheist.

Still, Bill "watch my chins quiver with outrage" Donohue, the one-man-band who runs the Catholic League, says he's pretty sure that Sotomayor will be a lot more liberal than the other Catholics -- Roberts, Alito, Thoma, Scalia and Anthony Kennedy. Probably more like those Jewish liberals, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

And oh, did I say John Paul Stevens is an atheist? I'm so sorry. I meant to say he's a protestant. And very liberal.

What all this boils down to, of course, is that Obama could have nominated Jim Inhofe and the right would have gone off half-cocked about how liberal he is until they remembered that Inhofe is the guy who said he was "outraged by the outrage" over the Abu Ghraib scandal and once called the Red Cross and "bleeding heart" organization. He's also on record as supporting the "rights" of employers not to employ gay men and lesbians if they so choose.

Here he is on the Senate floor, pointing to a photograph of his sizable family while he proudly tells his fellow senators no one in his family has ever gotten a divorce or turned out queer.

So, there's Newt "Here you go honey, i know you're hospitalized, but I want a divorce" Gingrich openly calling Sonia Sotomayor a racist, while the real racist, Jeff Sessions, will lead the Republican opposition to her nomination during her confirmation hearings.

There's Bill "I never met a liberal I didn't hate" Donohue, hating up the world as only he can do, and there's the crazy guy who doesn't like the way Sonia Sotomayor pronounces her own name and thinks my colleagues should ignore that and use the more Americanized pronunciation.

And there's so, so much more, beginning with the Republican National Committee falling all over itself saying it was gonna oppose whoever Obama nominated. And we won't even mention the ayatollah. Oh, yeah. We just did. Sorry.

What all that points to is no indication whatsoever that the GOP is willing to dial back its headlong rush into irrelevance. That big tent thing? Pretty much history, and false history at that. The Republican big tent never did sleep mmuch more than 8 or 10, all perfectly normal heterosexuals with normal names and good, solid conservative values.

Sotomayor's confirmation hearings are likely to be a total farce. I could probably sit back and write the questions she'll face right now, and put in stage directions for the smirks and sighs that will accompany her answers.

The Democrats, grateful that Sotomayor really isn't a raging liberal, will play down whatever actual liberalism she does show and insist that she's a centrist who will play fair with the law.

Of course she will play fair with the law. She's not a federalist.

Me, I kinda like her smile. That tells me she'd make a really good judge, dontcha know.

But just the same, I was kinda hoping Obama would pick Anita Hill.

Now that woulda been a lot of fun.


AWOP Political Contributing Editor


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Peace Y'all