It Takes My Breath Away

I remember carefully watching the hearings when Alito was being confirmed for the U. S. Supreme Court. With so much at stake it seemed so important. When I later learned that before T.V. coverage of these things they never even held hearings, I realized what a ridiculous waste of time it was. These politicians prancing and pandering and pretending to 'grill' the future Justice. It was all nonsense and not worth my time.

I've never had any doubt that Sotomayor will be confirmed as the next Supreme Court Justice. I'm delighted that she is a wise Latina woman who came from working class roots. Although many conservatives have yelped and carried on because she was able to get into Princeton through Affirmative Action (opening slots specifically for minorities and underprivileged)I ignored them. After all, she still had to pass the classes and she did that and more. She also has the most judicial experience of any of the Justices currently on the court.

I am a big fan of Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann. Both have shows on MSNBC. This network is almost the 'anti' Fox News. Instead of making up news, or turning facts upside down to suit their agenda, most of what appears on MSNBC has credibility.

One person that appears on many of their shows is Pat Buchanan. Pat has been around forever. He worked for Nixon and Reagan. He's a religious conservative. He even ran for President in 2000. Once in a while Pat tries to sound balanced and reasonable. I assume that is why MSNBC lets him on the air.

But his true colors were there for everyone to see last night. Spouting his 'affirmative action is discrimination against white men' rhetoric he tried to paint Sotomayer as an intellectual lightweight, not worthy of the Supreme Court. That was ridiculous enough. Then he took my breath away...

He started claiming that only 'white men built this country, white men stormed the beaches of Normandy, white men wrote the Declaration of Independence, white men fought in the Civil War'.............it was beyond ridiculous. I don't know if Jefferson and those guys had any help on the Declaration of Independence. But in all other cases cited and thousands of other examples there were women, blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, and Asians there at the sides of those 'white men'.

That wasn't bad enough. Then he actually said that different people have different talents. That just as our Olympic track team might be all blacks, there is nothing wrong with the Supreme Court being all white. He gave other examples too but I was too stunned to remember them all.

This kind of thinking started to disappear from public discourse in the 1960's. The idea that a grown man, a man who claims to be more intelligent than Sotomayor, would actually proclaim it on an internationally broadcast show is just incredible. It is hard to believe that the past fifty years have not impacted his thinking one bit.

It was disgusting. Rachel Maddow did a great job of showing him for what he truly is inside. I see his ugliness as a cancer, and he and others that still think like him need to be cut out from access to any serious media from this day forward.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Buchanan and people like them represent the ugliest of Ugly Americans.