Liberalism at its worst: Mike Lupica on the Sotomayor nomination
(Note, 2:40 p.m.: this entry has been changed since it was posted at one o’clock.)
If David Brooks’ endorsement last week of the multicultural idea that judging is about our personal feelings was not offensive enough for you, try Mike Lupica’s column in the New York Daily News attacking the critics of Judge Sotomayor. Lupica is just about the lowest PC thug I’ve ever seen. He started as a sports reporter. He is standing proof that sports journalists are among the most extreme liberals in the country, the most bent out of shape about race. Covering black athletes all the time, they just can’t get over the fact that blacks were once excluded from major league baseball. It’s a continuing horror to their conscience and a continuing spur to hate white America. Here is the Lupica piece, with my bracketed comments.
Gingrich and rest of far right are scared of Sotomayor—and who can blame them?
Mike Lupica
New York Daily News
June 1st 2009
Here is all you really need to know about the opposition to Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court: One of its leaders is Newt Gingrich. [You mean that Gingrich is so evil that the fact that he, a Republican, opposes Sotomayor, a leftwing Democrat, automatically discredits all opposition to Sotomayor? Meaning any opposition to Sotomayor is illegitimate?]
Gingrich used to run on family values all the time, maybe because he was under the impression that the more families you have—he is working on his third—the more of an expert you are on the subject. [Gingrich was never a social conservative and never laid stress on family values. To the contrary, he is is a techno-utopian and disciple of the manic futurist Alvin Toffler. Further from family values you cannot get. All this is beyond Lupica’s ken. All he knows is that Gingrich is an evil Republican.]
You may also remember that Gingrich was once forced to admit to having an extramarital affair, about the time the second Mrs. Gingrich was coming out of the game and No. 3 was warming up in the bullpen. It turns out this happened while he was leading the charge against Bill Clinton on Monica Lewinsky. [Gingrich never led any charge on the Lewinsky issue; except for one brief comment in early summer 1998, which, in typical Gngrich fashion, he immediately dropped, he had nothing to do with the issue. The Republicans in the House never did anything to make the investigation of Clinton happen. They were presented with a federal prosecutor’s report showing illegal activity by the president and they responded properly to it.]
So Gingrich isn’t just a scrub, he’s a frisky one at that. Only now he thinks he has somehow earned the right, after a sketchy life like his, to assess the virtues of Sotomayor, a brilliant judge from the Bronx whose life is a hymn to this country’s possibilities—and its greatness. [Assuming that Gingrich has had the most disgraceful private life in the world, what does that have to do with Sotomayor’s qualifications to be on the Supreme Court? Lupica’s underlying message is that since Republicans promote family values, any falling short by a Republican in the family values department shows that person to be a hypocrite and disqualifies him from making judgements on any person’s qualifications to be on the Supreme Court, or, it would seem, by the same logic, on any public matter involving judgements of right and wrong, better and worse.]
Gingrich wants to make this all about race with Judge Sotomayor, the same as radio idiots like Rush Limbaugh. This is all because Sotomayor once suggested that as a Latina woman she might be able to make better judgments than white males. [More leftist bullying mentality here. Consider this step by step: (1) Sotomayor and the left introduce race consciousness into constitutional thinking; (2) conservatives, shocked by Sotomayor’s blatant racialism, oppose this introduction of race consciousness; and (3) Lupica accuses the conservatives of “making this all about race.”]
As you can imagine, this sent the league of frightened old white guys into a tailspin. [Lupica viciously demeans conservatives as “frightened old white guys,” while accusing conservatives of “making this all about race.” That’s the leftists’ thuggish mentality for you: our whole liberal system gets in the faces of white conservatives, constantly telling them that they’re guilty for existing, that their time is up, that they’re going to be displaced and lose everything they have; and then these same liberals, having done everything they can to scare and intimidate white conservatives, ridicule them as “frightened old white guys.” (For another example of this mentality, which I call totalitarian, see Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s mocking comment about BNP members whose names were improperly published.]
These same people somehow managed to hold it together when Justice Samuel Alito, an Italian-American, said he considers the discrimination his family faced when he gets a case about discrimination. [One, Alito probably made that reference in response to a question from senators, and was probably, in a cowardly fashion, appeasing leftist demands that he show “sensititiviy”; and two, saying that he thinks about the discrimination his family faced is not the same as Sotomayor’s remark that as a “wise Latina” she would be a better judge than a (frightened old) white male. Three, what kind of discrimination have Italians faced? I mean serious discrimination?]
“What [Sotomayor] said is that based on her life experiences … somebody with her background would make a better judge than me—a white guy from South Carolina,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday, on another Sunday morning when he wasted perfectly good oxygen on television. “It is troubling, and I hope she’ll apologize.”
If Sotomayor does issue an apology and Sen. Graham understands it, we’ll all have a big story. Another white guy worried about race only when he gets his feelings hurt.
And, by the way, when did “Latino” become a race instead of a language group? If the debate about Sotomayor, so much of it driven by overheated talking heads, is this dumb this fast, imagine how much worse it can get by the time she sits down in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. [Lupica talks about dumb? In any case, shouldn’t he be directing his complaint about the word “Latino” to Sotomayor?]
On Saturday, there was a front-page story in the Times headlined this way: “A Judge’s Focus on Race Issue May Be Hurdle.” That story includes the following quote from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), another real beauty:
“As we see people like Barack Obama achieve the highest office in the land and Judge Sotomayor’s own nomination to the highest court, I think it is harder and harder to see the justification for race-conscious decisions across the board.”
Right. The African-American who’s President and the Puerto Rican-American he wants on the Supreme Court are in this together, ready to play race cards like it’s Texas Hold ‘Em. So Cornyn is another deep thinker who’s apparently decided that Sotomayor, because of where she comes from and who she is, is out front now for a brand new race. [Can you see any connection between Cornyn’s reasonable statement and Lupica’s take on it?]
Reasonable people do not take any of this seriously, especially one line from a lecture Sotomayor gave years ago. [Meaning, there are no reasonable objections one can make to Sotomayor’s statements. No opposition to us liberals is reasonable. All opposition to us is sick and evil.] But then Senate Republicans have been worried about Sotomayor for more than a decade, ever since Clinton nominated her to the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. She was smart and a woman and didn’t look anything like them. Some already saw her as a Supreme Court nominee back then. It made her a threat. [Notice his constant accusations of a racial motive on the part of Sotomayor’s Republican critics, without the slightest evidence. It cannot be pointed out often enough that the race consciousness in this case was introduced entirely by Sotomayor. She is the one who felt herself so different from the people at Princeton that, in her words, she felt as though she had “landed on another planet” when she arrived there. She is the one who was so race conscious that as a Princeton student she immediately began agitating for more hiring of Puerto Ricans and Hispanics in numbers proportional to their share of the U.S. population. She is the one who said that as a “Latina woman” she is a wiser and better human being than a white man. Yet Lupica blames the Republicans for introducing invidious racial concerns into the situation! For more on this, see, below, the excerpt from a 1998 speech in which she called America “this sometimes alien land.”]
They finally got out of her way then and should get out of her way now, this woman who came out of a single-parent home in the Bronxdale Houses and Co-op City. Who went from there to Princeton to Yale Law, to a seat on the bench of the Southern District, finally to the Court of Appeals. [Right. Get out of her way. No opposition to a nonwhite (if he or she is a liberal) is allowed.]
Eventually she will be appointed to the Supreme Court and honor it with her presence, her brains, her fairness.
And her splendid story.
The ones who come after her can’t attack her character or credentials. So they come at her with ignorance and fear.
Guys like Gingrich don’t just make her look smarter than he is because of this. They make her look better.
[end of Lupica column]
The column was published on Monday, June 1. A couple of days later, Sotomayor apparently told Sen. Feinstein that her word choice in the “wise Latina” comment was poor. So how does Lupica feel about that? Doesn’t this indicate that conservatives’ objections to the statement were correct?
* * *
Today’s New York Times has an article on Sotomayor, based on her published speeches, that shops how fixated on race she has been through her entire career:
Unlike Mr. Obama, who as president has largely avoided overt discussion of his racial identity, Judge Sotomayor has made her ethnicity a regular theme of her public addresses, touching on it to make points with audiences that were sometimes largely Hispanic and sometimes not. At times, she portrayed herself as a stranger in a strange land.
“Somewhere all of us Puerto Ricans and people of color have had a defining moment when we were shocked into learning that we were different and that American society treated us differently,” she told the National Puerto Rican Coalition in 1998. “The shock and sense of being an alien will never again, I suspect, be as profound for any of us as that first experience, because I know from personal experience that our education and professional training have equipped us to deal better in this sometimes alien land.”
Notice how she starts talking about how people of color were treated differently; but then she switches and calls America this “sometimes alien land.” So, the sense of differentness does not come from America, it comes, at least in part, from her. She is the one whose own race makes her race conscious and who as a federal judge intrudes her race consciousness into the law. So, how are conservatives to respond to this? Ignore it? They are not the ones who introduced race here.
At the same time, I haven’t forgotten what a commenter said the other day, that Sotomayor may actually be less an extreme liberal than some other judge Obama may appoint if she is turned down. But still, can a person who is this racial in her thinking, in matters judicial and non-judicial, be allowed on the Supreme Court?
The Sotomayor situation points to one of the central themes of The Path to National Suicide and my other writings on immigration. The more racially different a minority group is from the majority people of a country, the more they themselves feel the difference and feel that they don’t fit in. They resent the lack of fit and insist that the country change its institutions, culture, and identity in order to accommodate them. And the more of them there are, the more power they have to back up that demand. At the same time, many sympathetic majority members have the same reaction. They too see and feel the racial difference, they see that the traditional culture of the country does not “fit” the new and expanding minority population, and they start calling for the country to alter its identity so as to represent the minority people better.
Thus, even in the absence of any pre-existing multicultural ideology, the mass intrusion and numerical expansion of peoples of conspicuosly different race in a previously homogeneous or largely homogeneous society will inevitably bring about the demand for multiculturalism, which means the dismantling of the majority culture of that country. At that point it becomes a zero sum game. Is the country going to keep its culture, or give it up? It can only keep it if the majority begins to act in a concerted way against the pro-minority pressures, whether they come from the minorities or their majority allies. This battle cannot be won by majority members who resolutely ignore the facts and dynamics of race. If the majority is race-blind, and the minorities (and their majority allies) are race conscious, the minorities will win and the country’s historic culture will go the way of Nineveh and Tyre.
- end of initial entry -
Stephen T. writes:
Thanks for noting the phenom of sports writers being elevated to positions of enraged liberal political commentators. Again you’ve pointed out concretely a trend I’ve only just barely, subliminally, perceived. We’ve got several of them in L.A.—Keith Olbermann got his start here after all. In my experience, many sports journos began as the guy in high school we all remember who wasn’t talented or game enough to actually make it in sports himself, stewed deep inferiority feelings because of this, and tried to compensate by desperately seeking the acceptance and company of the guys who did play—as a sort-of clingy hanger-on who wrote about them. Naturally, many/most of his idols would be minority athletes. He worshipped (& darkly envied) their physical prowess, their popularity, their ease at getting girls, their cool, etc—none of which he could manifest for himself. This must produce, inevitably, a sense of inadequacy and a very internally ANGRY guy. Honestly, can anyone watch Keith Olbermann and fail to sense that, behind the glibness, this is a small man who is literally seething with inner wrath about something? Naturally, all that stored-up mental magma comes spewing out and the usual repository for redirected youthful rage is the established order, the predominant class or race, etc. Yes, Lupica is furious about all these racial injustices—but not really. And it’s not really us he’s mad at. If ONLY he’d made the team…
David B. writes:
I was a very big sports fan in my younger days and can confirm your opinion that sports journalists are among the most extreme liberals in the country. Yes, they never have gotten over the fact that blacks were once excluded from baseball. A sports columnist will write at least one hand-wringing piece on the subject every year. Previously, I told you that the search for the Great Black Quarterback has long been a preoccupation with sports writers.
Sports IIlustrated and ESPN attacked the Duke lacrosse players full force when the Duke Hoax started. They wanted to make it look like white athletes are breaking the law all the time, rather than black football and basketball players.
Jim C. writes:
Went to college with him at Boston College. A*****e. Good sportswriter, bad writer, 3d-rate thinker.
All the makings of a modern-day celebrity.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 05, 2009 01:05 PM | Send