I was prepared for the attacks on Sonia Sotomayor. Jeffery Rosen’s atrocious article, so magnificently castigated by Glenn Greenwald, set the scene: get ready for anonymous smears about Sotomayor’s intelligence and temperament. It’s a fact of life: men like Antonin Scalia, for instance, are “brilliant but sometimes acerbic“; women like Sotomayor are “dumb and obnoxious“, not to mention “sort of a schoolmarm“. (When was the last time you saw a Latina woman described as “acerbic”, anyway? Probably playing a sassy maid of some sort.)
But once again, the Republican party amazes me. Sure, they could settle for the age-old coded messages of racism and sexism, but they’ve strived for more. No, they’ve gone for a new level of absurdity. If this is performance art, if the party is officially being run by trolls, then they’re very good, because this next one’s a doozy:
Sotomayor is a racist.
Media Matters has gathered several examples of the meme spreading from Limbaugh to Levin to Beck to the rest of Fox News, to Newt Gingrich, to Charles Krauthammer and Pat Buchanan, until finally, such claims earn coverage by the Politico and the Post and hat-tips form James Inhofe and Lamar Alexander. That’s great for them. With the steady flow of the right-wing media machine, talking points are easier to spread than I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter on a hot English muffin. And often, those talking points get repeated enough that they become conventional wisdom.
But here’s the problem: this point is so ridiculous, so laugh-out-loud upon hearing it funny, that it won’t gain any traction, even among insulated DC culture. Already, some Republicans are distancing themselves from the idea, perhaps realizing what a loser of an attack it is. After all, it’s completely based around a line from an analysis of her approach to a discrimination case – suggesting that as a Latina woman, she has a unique perspective. To which any rational person would say: of course a Latina woman is influenced by who she is. Are we to believe that Ginsberg is not influenced by being a woman, that she and Breyer are not influenced by being Jewish, that Thomas is not influenced by being black, that he, Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Kennedy are not influenced by being Catholics?
It all comes back around to the Republicans’ real problem: despite having more or less equal power to the Democrats, they’ve become a party representing a very minority view. The only explanation for this clunker of a talking point is that howling about reverse racism has played so well with their base, they’ve forgotten they only represent a bit less than 30% of the country. Perhaps that’s why they tried the same “affirmative action” bit against Barack Obama – and are still trying it – when his popularity remains as steadfast as their disreputation.
Of course, some media types – perhaps so embarrassed by the spectacle the Republican base has turned themselves into – are trying to cover for the right with the usual attacks: Dana Milbank snickers about her intelligence, while Chuck Todd makes an inexcusibly incorrect attempt to paraphrase about her opinion on judiciary’s role in shaping law, all while suggesting his translation of her remarks is what is recorded on tape. Will the Republicans take this gentle nudge in stride and go back to the tried and true classics? Or will they continue to push the envelope of avant-garde self-destruction? To tell you the truth, from both a political and an entertainment standpoint, it’s hard to tell which option I’d prefer.
