Is Sotomayer Being “Palined”

The other day The Pink Flamingo warned conservatives that they needed to go easy on Sonia Sotomayor in order to maintain the intellectual edge when defending Sarah Palin.  I don’t give a rip about Sotomayor.  I do care about Sarah Palin (who is amazing) and getting her elected POTUS in 2012.

What G. Gordon Liddy said is absolutely deplorable.

Elaine Lafferty has finally acknowledged that Palin was terribly mistreated last year.  She is also using all of that against conservatives who are doing the same thing to Sotomayor.  Get it?

“…As snazzy and inspiring political nominees go—judicial or vice presidential as it were—Sonia Sotomayor is The UnPalin. Sure, Obama’s choice for the Supreme Court and McCains’s choice for the vice presidency share some key characteristics—chiefly the moving personal narrative known in politics as The Story. Neither woman came from an ordinary middle-class background, and both worked hard to achieve their current positions—Sotomayor a federal appeals judge, Sarah Palin the popular governor of Alaska. Both endured more than their share of life’s challenges, from Sotomayor’s childhood diabetes to Palin’s midlife pregnancy with a special-needs child. No silver spoons anywhere near them, no rich Daddies or easy roads. Scrappy Sonia and scrappy Sarah made it on their own.

But from the graffitied projects of the East Bronx, Sotomayor also made her way to the Ivy League, scooping up the academic credentials and degrees that are supposed to insulate you forever from haughty insinuations of inferior intelligence. Sarah Palin did no such thing, barely graduating college, and heading into the intellectually feeble field of television sportcasting before entering politics. When Palin hit the national stage last year, she paid the price demanded by the intelligentsia; regardless of her politics and with no evidence that she’d ever set foot in any Cambridge anywhere, both the left and the elitists of the right concluded she was simply a ditz. The more Palin spoke of her life experience as the mother of a Down syndrome baby or as a small-town mayor, the dumber she was. The political culture that had previously demanded candidates know the price of a quart of milk ridiculed one who really knew the price of Pampers. Oh, her inexperience in the things that mattered! If she’d had chunky ankles and an even more unfortunate fashion sense, she might have been Maggie Thatcher. A man, she might have been Ronald Reagan.

Back in the Bronx years before, perhaps instinctively, Sonia began the process, familiar to women, of working twice as hard as everyone else. By the time she got to Princeton, she knew she lacked the prep-school education of her peers, and she dove into grammar books. Aside from her degrees from Princeton and Yale, Sotomayor become known for her exceedingly detailed and dreary judicial briefs. Too thorough! Way too detailed. Now we know she won Princeton’s highest undergraduate award; we know she wrote her way onto the Yale Law Review; we know she wrote 380 majority opinions in 3,000 appeals cases. Are we simply cranky feminists to expect that the woman should, if nothing else, be above reproach on the intelligence front?…”

Get it?

Lay off Sotomayor.

Leave her alone.

Finally Palin is getting a little respect, and she deserves every bit of it.  If we want to wage the good war for her, the things that Rush and Newt are saying about Sotomayor are going to seriously damage Palin.

Maybe that’s the whole idea.

A Palin supporter and I have been emailing back and forth this evening.  We’ve come to the conclusion that Rush, Newt, and Glenn Beck along with their brain dead followers need to take a valium, get some therapy, and maybe have a nice spa visit.  Chill guys.

You are making way too much trouble.

“…The rhetoric has been enough to make Republican strategists in heavily Latino states cringe — concerned that such slights could cement Democrats advantages among a growing and increasingly influential political constituency.

“Of course this disturbs me,” said Lionel Sosa, one of the more influential Hispanic media advisers in the GOP. “I’m not surprised at Rush Limbaugh but I’m very surprised at Speaker Gingrich because he is one of the key people who knows the importance of the Latino vote to the Republican Party. He must realize how his rhetoric, if it does influence any Hispanics, how damaging it could be. This [confirmation] is something that is going to happen anyway. For a senator to have strong opposition to her, they are either not aware of the impact Latinos will have on the next election or they don’t care.”

Sosa certainly knows what makes the Hispanic voter tick. He has helped with or worked on seven Republican presidential campaigns since 1980, including John McCain’s and both of George W. Bush’s. He was joined in his lament by several other Hispanic strategists who spoke to the Huffington Post. Even those Republican Hispanics who have served in government said they were deeply worried about the Sotomayor pushback, though they cautioned that it was coming almost entirely from outside the party establishment.

“In the real world, absolutely this rhetoric matters,” said former Rep. Henry Bonilla of Texas. “And that’s why I think, thus far, the key leadership in Washington has been very cautious and thoughtful in their responses, and I hope that will continue… At the end of the day, people will see [these remarks] for what they are. And realize that this is nothing new coming from various opinionated people on the conservative side. It is nothing different than what comes from the liberal side.”…”