Blogito, Ergo Sum - 3 June 2009

U.S. Releases Secret List of Nuclear Sites Accidentally

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

The federal government mistakenly made public a 266-page report, marked “highly confidential,” that gives detailed information about hundreds of nuclear sites and programs.

They are so happy to tell the world that news that you can expect to read a full copy of all 266 pages tomorrow.

Bob Herbert seldom fails to disappoint me with his open bias while apparently totally unaware of it:

Newt Gingrich, who never needed a factual basis for his ravings, rants on Twitter that Judge Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist,” apparently unaware of his incoherence in the “Latina-woman” redundancy in this defamatory characterization.

Karl Rove sneered that Ms. Sotomayor was “not necessarily” smart, thus managing to get the toxic issue of intelligence into play in the case of a woman who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, went on to get a law degree from Yale and has more experience as a judge than any of the current justices had at the time of their nominations to the court.

It turns the stomach. There is no level of achievement sufficient to escape the stultifying bonds of bigotry. It is impossible to be smart enough or accomplished enough.

The amount of disrespect that has spattered the nomination of Judge Sotomayor is disgusting. She is spoken of, in some circles, as if she were the lowest of the low.

I always felt the same way when Liberals like Bob spoke of President Bush the way that they did...beginning with the fact that a Texas cowboy was no longer someone to be admired but actually equal to a moron, if not an idiot. Gene and Roy rolled face-down in their graves as they realized that the effete East had finally won.

Bush may not have graduated summa and I don’t know how much the family name might have helped, but he had better grades at Yale than Kerry did, an unhappy fact the MSM did their best to overlook, and Bush got into Harvard for his MBA and then learned how to fly a solo jet fighter, and flight school is no snap course plus the final is a tough one.

I figure that since Herbert had so little problem denigrating Bush’s intelligence and lifestyle and mannerisms that if poor little Ms Sotomayor has to suffer a few disrespectful bumps on the road to equality that she’ll just have to learn how to handle them.

Herbert suffers from the soft bigotry of the Liberal Elite towards all others less qualified by his standards, but bigotry is bigotry no matter what the source or the target.

And prejudice ‘for’ is every bit as bad as prejudice ‘against’ but we’re seeing a lot of the former these days as we’re told that criticism of an individual ‘of color’ is automatically racial in nature. Questioning Sotomayor’s intelligence is toxic, per Herbert, whereas questioning Bush’s was not. And, of course, we are supposed to accept as a given the notion that people of color can never be racist themselves. Like the Pirates of Penzance, being orphans yourselves is enough to indemnify you from that charge.

Ms. Sotomayor is a member of the National Council of La Raza, the Hispanic civil rights organization. In the crazy perspective of some right-wingers, the mere existence of La Raza should make decent people run for cover. La Raza is “a Latino K.K.K. without the hoods and the nooses,” said Tom Tancredo, a Republican former congressman from Colorado.

Here’s the thing. Suddenly these hideously pompous and self-righteous white males of the right are all concerned about racism. They’re so concerned that they’re fully capable of finding it in places where it doesn’t for a moment exist. Not just finding it, but being outraged by it to the point of apoplexy. Oh, they tell us, this racism is a bad thing!

Are we supposed to not notice that these are the tribunes of a party that rose to power on the filthy waves of racial demagoguery.

Mr Herbert, who cannot distinguish between education and intelligence but knows enough Spanish to tell us that the term ‘Latina” carries within it the sexual connotation somehow forgets to translate “La Raza” as other than a civil rights organization. To the extent that is even remotely an appropriate description for an organization named “The Race” then the same description is equally appropriate for the K.K.K. in that they are both advocates for only one race, not all. And if Tancredo cannot make that description of La Raza, who can?

I lived in California a lot of my life and was born in Los Angeles, so when I see the demonstrations on television with La Raza waving Mexican flags and arguing that they want to re-take southern California and Texas, et al, I have a difficult time thinking of them as a civil rights organization. And I wonder if they are even really concerned with Latinos or Hispanics? I live in Costa Rica now and I’m VERY well aware of the prejudice the locals here feel towards Nicaraguans, for instance.

Prior to Obama, the highest levels of government previously attained by black people of either sex had been under Texan George W. Bush, a man with personal Latino friends he has been criticized for elevating beyond their capabilities. Odd how Herbert prefers to go all the way back to when the Republicans rose to power in the South, where the only K.K.K. member sitting in the Senate today comes from the left side of the aisle.

Bob sees only what he wants to see, or perhaps only what he is capable of seeing, through distorted lenses. For instance, one final quote:

Where were the right-wing protests when Ronald Reagan went out of his way to kick off his general election campaign in 1980 with a salute to states’ rights in, of all places, Philadelphia, Miss., not far from the site where three young civil rights workers had been snatched and murdered by real-life, rabid, blood-thirsty racists?

Aside from the fact that “‘states’ rights” and “civil rights” both contain one word the same, the two are equivalent only in the minds of racists like Herbert. He would denigrate every single person who believes that the Constitution was designed to protect the rights of the individual states against encroachment by the new federal government by branding them as “rabid, blood-thirsty racists”.

Such demagoguery turns my stomach, finally, and I have to turn away here. What a sad specimen he is.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s decision not to run for re-election as Governor of Minnesota is bad news for Al Franken and Senate Democrats. Had he decided to seek re-election, Pawlenty would have had to respond to the increasingly angry calls of Minnesota Democrats, many Independents and even some Republicans to end the lunacy of a recount without end. At some point, Pawlenty would have told Republican Norm Coleman that enough is enough will all these court challenges. As Chris Cillizza notes, “If Coleman decides he wants to take the case to the federal level if he were to lose at the state court level, there's now a significantly higher likelihood that Pawlenty would be receptive to such a move.” No kidding, since all Pawlenty will be thinking about from here on out are Republican Presidential primary voters, many of whom would be happy to have Franken blocked for five and a half more years. If Franken wins in the Minnesota courts, Democrats in the Senate will start playing much tougher. This can’t go on. Pawlenty, in the meantime, might consider that his image as a reasonable and agreeable conservative could actually be hurt if he allows the obstruction of a Senate result to go on and on. What are your thoughts?

My thoughts are easy and simple. The whole recount process is clearly filled with errors, mistakes, miscounts, deals both above and under the table, and outright malfeasance that the only rational solution is to hold the election again. The argument that this would take too much time and money is clearly not valid compared with what has already happened and what could happen in the future.

I don’t think there’s now any way to perform an accurate and fair re-count. Run a special election and get it over with.

Saudi Arabia -- with its vast oil wealth and supreme religious importance in the Islamic world as the site of Mecca and Medina -- has long been a leading Sunni Arab player in the region, an influence Abdullah has sought to deepen in recent years.

Abdullah has asserted Saudi diplomacy aggressively in Lebanon and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was the first to propose broad Arab recognition of Israel in return for its withdrawal from all territory occupied in the 1967 Middle East War, and he has sought in the past to broker unity government agreements between rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah.

And here I thought it was George Bush who had failed over there. Also from the same column:

Shortly after Obama landed in the Saudi capital, the television network Al-Jazeera aired a new audiotape, reportedly from al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, saying Obama was planting seeds for "revenge and hatred" toward the United States in the Muslim world.

Will this finally convince some of the blame-America-first crowd that bin Laden’s attitude is not really a result of any American behavior beyond simply existing and being there?