Right and yet wrong
That would be Mona Charen, here:
The nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has already achieved a boon for our political culture: It has helped leading liberals and Democrats to discover that being tarred as a racist on flimsy grounds is unfair and deeply unpleasant. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., for example, when asked on “Face the Nation” to respond to Rush Limbaugh’s and Newt Gingrich’s comments about Sotomayor, said, “That’s an absolutely terrible thing to throw around. Based on that statement — that one word ‘better than’ (sic) — to call someone a racist is just terrible and I would hope that Republicans would not do this.”
Of course she does. Democrats will, of course, continue to consider themselves exempt from any such courteous restraint. Translation: “I would hope Republicans would continue to abide by the rules we have set for framing the debate, and will continue to meekly accept our smears against them without ever responding in kind, or challenging our outrageous assertions about them in any truly effective way.”
Screw her.
Sen. Feinstein is right as far she went. She avoided one undeniable fact though. If a white male nominee had been discovered to have said something similar — that he was better situated to judge due to his background and life experiences than a Latina woman — he would be cashiered so fast as to induce whiplash. Those are the unwritten rules that Limbaugh and Gingrich are attempting, one suspects, to expose for their one-sidedness. Nevertheless, the instant labeling of the woman, based on one unwise remark, is hardly fair. If Democrats are learning this now, that’s excellent news. One hopes they will remember this discovery when the wheel turns and a Republican nominee is before the Senate.
If you think they will, you’re a fool. Yeah, I know Charen ain’t me; there are limits to what she can get away with saying and how she can say it; limits that I, as a non-professional and a relative pipsqueak in terms of influence, am not bound by. I really wouldn’t have it any other way.
But if anyone believes — and I doubt Charen does — that the Dems will be chastened and repentant to even the smallest degree by having their hypocritical malfeasance thrown in their faces, he or she needs to wake up and smell what they’ve been shoveling at us for so long now. Doesn’t mean we oughtn’t throw it in their faces, of course; we should, hard, every chance their core intellectual dishonesty affords us. But expecting them not to keep bulling right on using the same old sleazy tactics that have so unfortunately brought them to power again is a mug’s game.
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