You know, the right-wing obsession with comic books and Robert Heinlein novels has gone so far that next week I expect to see Peggy Noonan wandering around on the tarmac at the DC airport with his arms outstretched trying to find Wonder Woman's invisible plane. I get this from the list of right-wing grievances against the next Supreme Court Justice wherein if she can't fly a jet while reciting the Book of Genesis verbatim and dancing Swan Lake in a suit of armour, she shoudn't be on the court.
The latest bitch is that she sometimes interrupts lawyers, especially when they try to defend torture. Go figure.
Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s Supreme Court choice, has a blunt and even testy side, and it was on display in December during an argument before the federal appeals court in New York. The case concerned a Canadian man who said American officials had sent him to Syria to be tortured, and Judge Sotomayor peppered a government lawyer with skeptical questions.
“So the minute the executive raises the specter of foreign policy, national security,” Judge Sotomayor asked the lawyer, Jonathan F. Cohn, “it is the government’s position that that is a license to torture anyone?”
Mr. Cohn managed to get out two and a half words: “No, your hon—— .”
Judge Sotomayor cut him off, then hit him with two more questions and a flat declaration of what she said was his position. The lawyer managed to say she was wrong, but could not clarify the point until the chief judge, Dennis G. Jacobs, stepped in, asking, “Why don’t we just get the position?”
This, apparently, proves that she's "combative, difficult, and nasty". Gosh. Whoever heard of a male judge who was all those things? Yes, but besides Fat Tony?
We know what this is and it was perfectly predictable. She's a Hispanic woman who isn't particularl;y deferential to white males. She is therefore a shrill racist bitch unfit for the bench who feels too much and will give her demographic special consideration, thus endangering white male privilege even further.
Uh-huh.
David Brooks, bless him, seems to think his right-wing confreres have maybe gone a little too far down the slam-empathy road (given that their attitude tends to prove they don't have any) so he tries to eke out a little middle ground, and there's nothing funnier than a wingnut in the middle of the road.
People without emotions cannot make sensible decisions because they don’t know how much anything is worth. People without social emotions like empathy are not objective decision-makers. They are sociopaths who sometimes end up on death row.
Or running political parties from their radio booths while swallowing L'il Blues like they were M&M's.
But apart from the Lesson on Empathy for Emotionally Restricted 10-Yr-Olds, Mr Brooks seems to be suffering from a typical conservative malaise. (As in, "advocating torture and protecting privacy are equally valid stands that need to be balanced against each other". As if.)
As Dan Kahan of Yale Law School has pointed out, many disputes come about because two judges look at the same situation and they have different perceptions about what the most consequential facts are. One judge, with one set of internal models, may look at a case and perceive that the humiliation suffered by a 13-year-old girl during a strip search in a school or airport is the most consequential fact of the case. Another judge, with another set of internal models, may perceive that the security of the school or airport is the most consequential fact. People elevate and savor facts that conform to their pre-existing sensitivities.
I don't know who Kahan is (Brooks may have made him up; he does that sometimes) but if he thinks a judge is OK who says the strip-searching of a 13-yr-old girl because some hysterical Limbo fan started imagining Muslim terrorists were hiding in the stalls of the high school's "Girl's Lavatory" (cf Tom Coburn) is a legitimate and legal reaction by authorities, he is most likely a) so not a Constitutional lawyer, or b) a Fat Tony student acolyte. In either case, Mr Kahan might want to consider a new career because he doesn't belong in the one he's got.
But I doubt that was the kind of example a law professor would actually use. I suspect that that particular comparison was all David's own. Brooks has made it clear over the months he's been a thorn in all our sides that he really doesn't get that there's no left/right equivalency there.
Put all these attacks on Sonia from the Right together and what you've got is a mishmosh of conservative nuttiness from Dan Quayle's Murphy Brown moment to Michelle Malkin's crush on Bush's flight package the Glenn Reynolds/David Brooks/entire Republican Congressional delegation/RWNM motto, "If we don't understand it, it must be wrong."
If only they understood and could hold in their feeble brains a concept more complicated than "See Jane run." But we know that's too much to ask.
So how much of this weak-and-lame-when-it's-not-crazy right-wing opinion is the MSM going to trumpet in its pages/news shows before it dawns on them that nobody's listening to John Cornyn or Jon Kyl or "Li'l Dick" Cheney. How obvious does it have to be that we don't care what they think?
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