Pat Buchanan To GOP: Forget Hispanic Vote, Attack Sotomayor On Race
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MSNBC pundit Pat Buchanan, who's fond of warning people that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is a Hispanic trickster who learned English through chupacabra magicks in orations before people who cannot spell words in English themselves had a full-blown panic attack today in the pages of Human Events, as the hour of Sotomayor's confirmation drew nigh. His basic argument is that Sotomayor is the greatest threat to white people since...uhm...well...sorry, nothing's coming to me. Nothing serious, anyway!
Anyway, Buchanan wants the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to really give Sotomayor the business:
What they must do is expose Sotomayor, as they did not in the case of Ginsburg, as a political activist whose career bespeaks a lifelong resolve to discriminate against white males to the degree necessary to bring about an equality of rewards in society.
Sonia is, first and foremost, a Latina. She has not hesitated to demand, even in college and law school, ethnic and gender preferences for her own. Her concept of justice is race-based.
Of course, Pat Buchanan's concept of what cereal he's going to eat for breakfast is race-based, but nevermind. Buchanan's insistence that Sotomayor has a "lifelong resolve to discriminate against white males to the degree necessary to bring about an equality of rewards in society" simply isn't supported by the facts:
Other than Ricci, Judge Sotomayor has decided 96 race-related cases while on the court of appeals.
Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous. (Many, by the way, were procedural victories rather than judgments that discrimination had occurred.) Of those 9, in 7, the unanimous panel included at least one Republican-appointed judge. In the one divided panel opinion, the dissent's point dealt only with the technical question of whether the criminal defendant in that case had forfeited his challenge to the jury selection in his case. So Judge Sotomayor rejected discrimination-related claims by a margin of roughly 8 to 1.Of the roughly 75 panel opinions rejecting claims of discrimination, Judge Sotomayor dissented 2 times. In Neilson v. Colgate-Palmolive Co., 199 F.3d 642 (1999), she dissented from the affirmance of the district court's order appointing a guardian for the plaintiff, an issue unrelated to race. In Gant v. Wallingford Bd. of Educ., 195 F.3d 134 (1999), she would have allowed a black kindergartner to proceed with the claim that he was discriminated against in a school transfer. A third dissent did not relate to race discrimination: In Pappas v. Giuliani, 290 F.3d 143 (2002), she dissented from the majority's holding that the NYPD could fire a white employee for distributing racist materials.
Doesn't seem like much of a lifelong resolve to me, but no matter! What's really at work here is Buchanan's lifelong resolve to get the GOP to stop pandering to ethnic groups and work to build a Caucasian Coalition. And, along the way, he's eager to hit John McCain for not showing fealty to this:
In 2008, Hispanics, according to the latest figures, were 7.4 percent of the total vote. White folks were 74 percent, 10 times as large. Adding just 1 percent to the white vote is thus the same as adding 10 percent to the candidate's Hispanic vote.
If John McCain, instead of getting 55 percent of the white vote, got the 58 percent George W. Bush got in 2004, that would have had the same impact as lifting his share of the Hispanic vote from 32 percent to 62 percent.But even Ronald Reagan never got over 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. Yet, he and Richard Nixon both got around 65 percent of the white vote.
When Republican identification is down to 20 percent, but 40 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservatives, do Republicans need a GPS to tell them which way to go?
I'm guessing that the GPS is directing the GOP to Oildale! Anyway, to Buchanan, McCain's an idiot for not pursuing the obvious winning strategy against Barack Obama:
Had McCain been willing to drape Jeremiah Wright around the neck of Barack Obama, as Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis, the mainstream media might have howled.
And McCain might be president.
So, let me get this straight. McCain needed to pick up three percent more of the white vote, which he could have done if he'd only been willing to jump around on the hustings like a paranoid monkey, shrieking, "BOOGA BOOGA FOO! JEREMIAH WRIGHT! MWAAHAAHA!"
Huh. Seems to me that Buchanan doesn't think too highly of white people, either!
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First Posted: 08/15/09 06:12 AM ET Updated: 05/25/11 02:35 PM ET