More Dumb Things Were Said

Hey, Someone Noticed

Atrios:

Craig Crawford:

They are coming across as a bunch of snarky and bitter old white men who cannot bear the thought of their kind losing power.

Wanker Of The Day

Atrios:

Jeff Sessions

Sessions Treats White Male Nominees Differently Than Female Latina Nominees

Third Branch, C and L:

For Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, white men deserve preferential treatment. Given his stated sympathies for the KKK, this is hardly surprising. But it is worth noting. [...]

Sessions demands preferential treatment for white men. He clearly applies a stricter standard to persons who are not white men. Given his history, this is hardly surprising. But it is also the perfect embodiment of the Republican philosophy.

That's Going To Leave A Mark

BarbinMD:

In a variation of the old admonition that a lawyer should never ask a question if they don't know the answer, today Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) learned that it's not a good idea to use someone to make an argument without making sure that the person being used isn't in the room:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), seeking to discredit Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy, cited her 2001 "wise Latina" speech, and contrasted the view that ethnicity and sex influence judging with that of Judge Miriam Cedarbaum, who "believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices."

"My friend Judge Cedarbaum is here," Sotomayor riposted, to Sessions’s apparent surprise. "We are good friends, and I believe that we both approach judging in the same way, which is looking at the facts of each individual case and applying the law to those facts."

And what does Cedarbaum think about Sotomayor's judicial philosophy?

I don’t believe for a minute that there are any differences in our approach to judging, and her personal predilections have no affect on her approach to judging."

Oops. That has to be embarrassing.

Sotomayor, Dems, turn the Republicans' table

P.M. Carpenter:

On the first day of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, Republican senators uttered approximately 12,000 words in opening statements. Of these, precisely 11 made sense: "Unless you have a complete meltdown, you're going to get confirmed," said Lindsey Graham, South Carolina's missionary of world-weary wisdom housed always so humbly in cracker-barrel folksiness.

That rhetorical sequestration conveniently stood out as the Republican soundbite to be aired by the media time and again, because, as suggested, those other 11,989 words were an audible blur of banality and base-pandering, proving only that the Beltway GOP had learned not one thing since eight months and nine days ago.

They tried their best to circle the ideological wagons and obfuscate, confuse and terrify the innocent -- as though these cartoonish little figures from Monsters Inc. had any believable terror left in them.

Frankly, it was a bit sad to see such once-mighty demagogues go so flat; but flat they were, beginning at the beginning, with ranking member Jeff Sessions, whose spooky "dangerous crossroads" opening statement sounded like a $5 séance complete with rattling plastic bones, lugubrious organ music and prerecorded apparitional hoots and hollers.

Barbara's Daily Buzz

07/14/2009:

After listening to all the Repuglican grandstanding today during the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, I am convinced she is absolutely right that "....a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." Sorry to say the Repuglicans are still the Party of just say NO, they still care more about Party Power than what's good for America!

* * *
My grandmother used to say, "vanity thy name is man" and it couldn't be more relevant than it is today -- the Repuglican male ego has been bruised and they have their boxers in a knot because "a Latina woman is wiser" than the whole lot of Repuglican males! Their egos "can't stand the truth" and so they go about tearing her down piece by piece, misrepresentation by misrepresentation. It's business as usual for the Repuglicans, slander the opponent in order to try and appear superior. It'll never happen, won't work, the Repuglicans have become so predictable that it makes them boring white males.

The 10 Dumbest Things Republicans Have Said About the Sotomayor Hearings

A list of the most ridiculous questions, jabs and rants by GOP lawmakers and other conservatives.

AlterNet Staff:

At her Senate confirmation hearing yesterday, judicial nominee Sonia Sotomayor had to keep a straight face while Republicans heaped shame upon their party with a flood of ridiculous questions, unjustified jabs and tangential, pointless rants.

From sexist attacks about Sotomayor's "temperament" to a rigorous interrogation about the definition of nunchucks, GOPers came up with a multitude of embarrassing ways to try to hinder the Supreme Court nominee's confirmation.

The craziness and incompetence on display at the hearings has been more than matched by the absurd smears leveled at Sotomayor in the conservative media. The shining lights of conservatism -- such intellectual heavyweights Pat Buchanan, G. Gordan Liddy and Rush Limbaugh -- have outdone themselves with uninformed, offensive rants about the nominee.

AlterNet has compiled the 10 dumbest, most ridiculous statements about Sotomayor to issue from the lips of GOP lawmakers and other conservatives in the past few weeks.