In case you missed it, the race-based attacks on Presiden’t Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, got very, very ugly last week.
Yesterday’s editorial in the New York Times, Judging Sonia Sotomayor, stated it succinctly:
Some of Judge Sotomayor’s detractors seem uncomfortable with her Puerto Rican heritage. Tom Tancredo, a former Republican congressman, raged about her ties to the National Council of La Raza, calling it, absurdly, a “Latino K.K.K.” A writer on the National Review Web site fretted that the accent on the final syllable of Sotomayor might mean she is insufficiently assimilated. […]
Clearly, conservative groups and Republican elected officials see this nomination as a way to score points off wedge issues that excite their base. It diminishes everyone when a nomination process deteriorates into character assassination and ethnic intolerance.
While it may be too late for Latino-KKK-Tancredo and She-Should-Change-Her-Name-To-Be-More-Anglo-Krikorian to change course, it’s certainly not too late for Repbulican Party Leadership to chart a new direction on this and the coming debate about immigration reform, which has tended to spill over with exactly the same brand of hateful, race-based rhetoric.
In “America changes, GOP retrenches,” kos (founder of Daily Kos) argues that the Republican Party needs a new strategy if it wants to survive in the face of rapidly-changing demographics:
Now, they’re in the process of losing Latinos with their opposition to comprehensive immigration reform and Judge Sotomayor. And even Asians — projected to be over 9 percent of the population by 2050 — gave Obama a 62-35 margin in 2008. Without winning back some of those non-white voters, Republicans simply can’t win. The numbers aren’t there.
Yet rather than rethink their approach on issues of race, the GOP is doubling down on this policy of failure, staying the course toward electoral irrelevancy. Their continued opposition to comprehensive immigration reform, coming to a debate near you sometime later this year, will only reinforce what people will see during the Sotomayor confirmation process — a Republican Party that hates anything brown, and panders to its angry white male base.
In a more humourous take on the whole Sotomayor attack absurdity, NPR chimed in with “The dipute over Habeas Porkus” on “Wait Wait… Don’t tell me!”
You’ll have to listen for yourself.
