Harry Reid on Clarence Thomas
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Bill_Sev
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 Posted: 12/08/04 - 13:06 Post subject:
| RexRacer wrote: | Y'know Bill,
It's always fun to witness conservatives whip out the race card. The fact is, I don't think there's much of a judicial literature out there that considers Thomas more than a mediocre-at-best justice. Scalia, I don't agree with him much, but he's brilliant, I'll give him that.
Which, I believe, was Go's point. |
Show me one example of conservatives whipping out the race card. The liberals always talk about advancing minorities but the fact is they dont. Look at what the Bush Administration is doing by putting well qualified minorities in positions of power!
I put liberal in there for one simple fact.....It was a pre-emptive strike. Just like they did with CT with Ms. Hill. 3 weeks prior to that deal she was singing his praises in Atlanta.
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Bill_Sev
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Posted: 12/08/04 - 13:07 Post subject:
| Pug wrote: | | I don't have a citation, but I heard an interview on NPR where it was being bandied about. |
Correct....same place I heard it too....
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copteacher
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Posted: 12/08/04 - 17:25 Post subject:
If Bill Frist said something like that about Ron Brown (*RIP) Clinton's commerce secretary he would have been blasted by the media.
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RexRacer
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Posted: 12/09/04 - 12:49 Post subject:
I guess history showed us how easy the Dole and Gingrich Caucuses went on Clinton. 
And I guess I look at this post as not being about Reid per se, but a discussion of the merits or motivation behind those statements.
I think, as I said before, his comments are widely held by most court-watchers and legal scholars with regard to both Scalia and Thomas. It would hold if their races were switched as well.
Just follow the transcripts. I don't like Scalia politically, but look at him rip apart lawyers defending positions against his, and look at him interject comments both oral and written that can be used as the starting point for changing law that he finds offensive. The guy is good. Reid apparently agrees.
Now look at Thomas. He was nominated in part at least because he had such a limited paper trail of decisions (no 'Borking' here). He doesn't speak at all in the Court, by accounts often looks distracted or even inattentive while the Court is in session. And he's written surprisingly few decsions at all. In fact, it was huge news when he interjected a brief question into a recent affirmative action case.
He's not the best guy for the job currently sitting on the Court. Truth to tell, he's probably a bit down the line except for his age and political leanings.
Put it another way, if Antonin gets passed up, I'd be pissed if I were him.
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sonnylax
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Posted: 12/09/04 - 14:12 Post subject:
Ann Coulter has an interesting spin on this topic in her latest column:
| Quote: | The New And Improved Racism
December 8, 2004
Still furious about the election, liberals are lashing out at blacks. First it was Condoleezza Rice. But calling a Ph.D. who advised a sitting president during war "Aunt Jemima" apparently hasn't satiated the Democrats' rage. Even the racist cartoons didn't help.
So this week, they've turned with a vengeance to Clarence Thomas. Only the Democrats would try to distract from their racist attacks on one black Republican by leveling racist attacks against a different black Republican. If Democrats don't nip this in the bud, soon former Klanner and Democratic Sen. Bob Byrd will be their spokesman.
In the past few weeks, there have been nasty insinuations all around about Condoleezza Rice's competence for the job.
Democratic consultant Bob Beckel – who demonstrated his own competence running Walter Mondale's campaign – said of Rice, "I don't think she's up to the job."
Joseph Cirincione, with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (so you know they don't have an agenda or anything), said Rice "doesn't bring much experience or knowledge of the world to this position." This was reassuring, inasmuch as that was also liberals' assessment of the current president before he took office and he, to put it mildly, has been doing rather well.
The Kansas City Star editorialized that Rice "has not demonstrated great competence in the last four years," which is to say, Dr. Rice failed to be sufficiently clairvoyant to predict the events of Sept. 11, 2001.
Columnist Bob Herbert sneered of Rice's nomination in the New York Times: "Competence has never been highly regarded by the fantasists of the George W. Bush administration." For example, these are the bumbling nitwits who conquered Afghanistan, the "graveyard of empires," and toppled Baghdad in less time than your average Jennifer Lopez marriage lasts. (Wait, I can't remember: Was it the Bush administration that hired Jayson Blair?)
So far, Dr. Rice has demonstrated her abundant competence only in academia, geopolitics, history, government, college administration, classical music and athletics. I eagerly await the Bob Herbert column in which he lists the subjects and pursuits he's mastered. If only Rice talked about her accessorizing like Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, she might impress the sort of fellow who writes for the New York Times.
Liberals at least give white Republicans credit for being evil. Rumsfeld is a dangerous warmonger, Paul Wolfowitz is part of an international Jewish conspiracy, Dick Cheney is "Dr. No." But Dr. Rice? She's a dummy.
In fact, after spending the last four years telling us that President Bush was an empty suit, a vessel for neoconservative fantasies of perpetual war, liberals have now found someone who is Bush's puppet: the black chick.
It's all so eerily familiar.
The late Mary McGrory, a white liberal, called Scalia "a brilliant and compelling extremist" – as opposed to McGrory herself, a garden-variety extremist of average intelligence. But Thomas she dismissed as "Scalia's puppet," quoting another white liberal, Alvin J. Bronstein of the American Civil Liberties Union, to make the point. This is the kind of rhetoric liberals are reduced to when they just can't bring themselves to use the n-word.
Most recently – at least as we go to press – last Sunday Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, had this to say about Justice Clarence Thomas: "I think that he has been an embarrassment to the Supreme Court. I think that his opinions are poorly written." You'd think Thomas' opinions were written in ebonics.
In the same interview, Reid called Justice Antonin Scalia "one smart guy." He said that although he disagreed with Scalia, his reasoning is "very hard to dispute." Scalia is "one smart guy"; Thomas is the janitor. If Democrats are all going to read from the same talking points, they might want to get someone other than David Duke to write them.
On the Sean Hannity radio show, Democratic pundit Pat Halpin defended Sen. Reid's laughable attack on Thomas by citing Bob Woodward's book "The Brethren," which – according to Halpin – vividly portrays Thomas as a nincompoop.
I return to my standing point that liberals don't read. Harry Reid clearly hasn't read any of the decisions Justice Thomas has written, and Pat Halpin clearly hasn't read "The Brethren."
"The Brethren" came out a decade before Thomas was even nominated to the Supreme Court. The only black Supreme Court justice discussed in "The Brethren" is Thurgood Marshall. That's one we haven't heard in a while: I just can't tell you guys apart.
How many black justices have there been on the Supreme Court again? Oh yes: two. It's one thing to confuse Potter Stewart with Lewis Powell. After all, there have been a lot of white guys on the court. But there have been only two black justices – and Democrats can't keep them straight. Two! That's like getting your mother and father confused. I can name every black guy on a current National Hockey League roster: Is it asking Democrats too much to remember the names of the only two black Supreme Court justices?
In "America (The Book)," by Jon Stewart and the writers of Comedy Central's "Daily Show," the section on the judiciary describes how to make a sock puppet of Clarence Thomas and then says, "Ta-da! You're Antonin Scalia!" On grounds of originality alone, Mr. Stewart, I want my money back.
But reviewing the book in the New York Times, Caryn James called the sock puppet joke one of the book's "gems of pointed political humor." Funny how the liberal punditocracy all parrot this same "sock puppet" line about Thomas year after year, almost as if they were sock pu-- oh, never mind.
Curiously, of all the liberals launching racist attacks on black conservatives I've quoted above, only two are themselves black: the two who write for the New York Times. So I guess there are still a couple of blacks taking orders from the Democrats. Isn't there an expression for that? I think it begins with "Uncle" and ends with "Tom." |
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Pug
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Posted: 12/09/04 - 14:19 Post subject:
That's offensive. Coulter, I mean.
It seems to me that the Democrats and the "liberals" have more of a problem with President Bush and the Republican Administration that they necessarily do with two individuals who happen to be black. Wouldn't it be more fair to say that the democrats are attacking the republicans because they are republican? And that Coulter doesn't accept the possibility that Scalia may very well just be that much more competent than Thomas is? Or that from a democratic perspective, Rice has not done a very good job? Why does it have to be about race just because someone happens to be black? Why can't it be perception and competency and a differing opinion?
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cherylpf
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Posted: 12/09/04 - 14:29 Post subject:
There was a time when I could at least respect (and sometimes even agree with) Ann Coulter. That time is long gone.
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Gogirlgo
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Posted: 12/09/04 - 15:07 Post subject:
I have to think that the missing of the point by people like Coulter has got to be intentional.
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sonnylax
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Posted: 12/09/04 - 15:08 Post subject:
| Gogirlgo wrote: | | I have to think that the missing of the point by people like Coulter has got to be intentional. |
And what point would that be Go?
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cherylpf
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Posted: 12/09/04 - 15:21 Post subject:
| Gogirlgo wrote: | | I have to think that the missing of the point by people like Coulter has got to be intentional. |
That is what all of her writing is anymore, leading, intentional, filled with between the lines (and not so between the lines) insenuations, I feel so she can go back and say "What? I'm reporting what 'the liberals' are saying! Attack them"
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Gogirlgo
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Posted: 12/09/04 - 15:26 Post subject:
| sonnylax wrote: |
And what point would that be Go? |
Let's not deal with the actual problem of racism, no no. Let's point at people who are dissing on people who are black and make the assumption that it's because they're black that people are dissing on them. After all, that's what we do all the time. In fact, that's why our Senate Majority Leader is now the Former Senate Majority Leader. He let his racist view shine through and got nailed for it.
The comment of Reid nowhere implies it's about race. Coulter's vicious and ridiculous assumptions about ebonics and being the janitor are what's truly ugly here, because as long as she can keep spewing innuendo, she and the rest of her crew won't have to do a damn thing about the actual issue of racism. And that's the intentional point.
It was Rush who said, "The people who are against Lott are being petty." One wonders whether he would say the same about Coulter's comments.
Coulter is the Joan Rivers of the political world--nasty, trite and ultimately void of any real insight.
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