Telling It Like It Is

A blistering editorial at NYT on the Republicans and Sotomayor. This is one of the more polite parts:

[T]he Sotomayor show was still rich in historical significance. Someday we may regard it as we do those final, frozen tableaus of Pompeii. It offered a vivid snapshot of what Washington looked like when clueless ancien-régime conservatives were feebly clinging to their last levers of power, blissfully oblivious to the new America that was crashing down on their heads and reducing their antics to a sideshow as ridiculous as it was obsolescent.

The hearings were pure “Alice in Wonderland.” Reality was turned upside down. Southern senators who relate every question to race, ethnicity and gender just assumed that their unreconstructed obsessions are America’s and that the country would find them riveting. Instead the country yawned.

These people are a joke, and the New York Times, at least, has finally figured it out. I'm not so sure of the Washington Post, which just doesn't seem to get it. Get this quote from Sen. Jeff Sessions:

Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the Senate Judiciary Committee's ranking Republican, said the White House and Democrats have been hobbled because, despite Democrats' strong victories in recent elections, public attitudes have not moved correspondingly. "The left's view of judges is not supported by the people," Sessions said.

WTF? This was plopped down into an article about the "liberal" reaction to the nomination and the confirmation hearings, and it's another example of the reliability of WaPo in acting as a stenographer for the right. (Anytime a right-winger like Sessions says something about "the people," you know he's making it up. The fact that our Democratic president got damned near a landslide, and the Republicans have lost 11 Senate seats in the last two elections doesn't seem to say much to Sessions about what the people think.)

(Oh, about Jeff Sessions: Matt Yglesias has has this to say:

I would pay good money to hear Sonia Sotomayor say, “Senator Sessions, I think it’s ironic to be facing these questions from a man whose judicial nomination was rejected by this very committee on the grounds that he’s a huge racist.”)

Full disclosure: I have not been watching the confirmation hearings, nor really following the news reports all that closely, so I'm not giving out any opinions on Sotomayor or her ability to serve on the Court. I think she's probably competent, and pretty mainstream, and not nearly the judicial activist that Roberts and Scalia are. Bottom line: I'm as lukewarm about her as I was about Obama.)