As Steve Sailer says, Sotomayor spent a good part of her adult life giving boring speeches at various “diversity” events where she extolled the values of diversity, the “Latina soul,” and the need for aggressive affirmative action in institutions of power. Then, when in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she basically repudiated it all, along with her vaguely nihilistic ideas about the influence of race and results on judicial reasoning. In order to get through this process, she pretended to be a moderate, middle-American story of success and a paragon of moderation. This, indeed, is exactly what Obama did during his campaign, where no one really asked him about his first book, Dreams of My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, nor did he get questioned about his record as a South Side Chicago politician. The only slight problem were the rantings of his long-time pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, which Obama deflected by giving long and complicated speeches about why Wright was like a loveable, crazy-old-Uncle, until eventually abandoning him when Wright went out of his way to show the world what it’s all about at Trinity Church.
There is an odd tendency of our public life where a great number of the media and other observers are all wanting to be fooled and are overly credulous when leftists deny what they have said and done for their entire public life until the point where national power may be in reach. Those who dare to think critically and note contradictions are castigated for negativity, bad faith, and generally for spoiling the party.
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David Frum has already said the same thing, quite concisely and elegantly. He also had a brilliantly concise interpretation of the implications of the Ricci decision.
Frum is someone that paleo types oughta read. That is, read in order to learn from, not read in to sneer at. He can obviously be very wrong, but he’s a very smart critic of our common adversaries. I haven’t found any other contributors to his website worth reading, though.
I read anyone who says something worth reading including, from time to time, Frum, Krauthammer, The New Republic, etc. I don’t like the group-think tendency to say, “So and so is generally wrong, therefore he’s evil and should always be mocked, ignored, etc.”
The paleos got angry at Frum when he read them all out of the conservative movement in the lead up to the oh-so-conservative Iraq War.
[...] Sotomayor’s “Bait and Switch” Posted in mansizedtarget by nhiemstra on July 19, 2009 via: mansizedtarget [...]
I wasn’t talking about you, sorry if I mistakenly gave that impression. I was thinking more of the puerile slurs on the neocons that you see at Chronicles and Takimag, both in the articles and in the comments. I’ve been called a neocon propagandist, and worse, for trying to give Frum, Krauthammer et al. their due and to correct some paleos’ distortions of their positions. The narcissism of small differences, I guess. As I’ve said before, I always appreciated your sane perspective, as opposed to the lunatic paleo fringe which seems to be getting loonier every day.
I understand all too well what neoconservatism is, but would somebody please explain to me the meaning of paleoconservatism, if it is different from what some of us just think of as conservatism? Thanks.