President Joe Biden announced that he would be nominating a black woman to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant with the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer. Did the right greet the news with good-natured bonhomie, allowing that, yes, elections do indeed have consequences, and they look forward to thoughtful and measured debate on the candidate?
Sure. Sure, they did. And I'm the king of Narnia.
The right lost its shit. I mean, Where's Waldo level lost it. You'd have to go to the lost and found in Narnia to have even the remotest chance of finding the right's shit. Their shit couldn't be more lost if somebody had developed a cloaking device for shit. The right's shit was so lost that the creators of Lost threw up their hands and admitted that making sense of it was beyond them. That is extreme shit loss right there, that is.
Take Fox inciter-in-chiefanchor Tucker Carlson. His reference to the "casual racism of affirmative action" is rich, considering he has embraced the active racism of the neo-Nazis in the anti-vaccination/anti-democratic/anti-whaddyagot movement. I would try to define the toxic swamp his mind has been marinating in for the last few years, but I would like to be able to hold down solid food for the next few weeks, so I'll leave it to the reader's imagination.
Or Senator John Kennedy, who must secretly harbour a desire to be a judge on Project Runway, criticizing people who wear clothes from the J. Crew catalogue. The fact that he obviously prefers Brooks Brothers is a riot.
As for rewriting the Constitution, better a woke interpretation than a slept interpretation. The Republican super-majority is the first court in decades to get out its red pen and hand down rulings that restrict rather than expand the rights of Americans. By the time they're done, the Constitution will be shorter than the contract between Groucho and Chico in A Night at the Opera!<.p>
In the Senate's race to the intellectual bottom, we mustn't forget Roger Wicker. The list of black women qualified to sit on the Supreme Court is long, and most of them are better choices than recent Republican picks, nominees the senator enthusiastically voted for. Being a white man (and having friends in the Republican Party) is the most effective affirmative action programme there is. Just ask Brett Kavanaugh.
You want irony, Roger? Saint Ronald of Reagan promised to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court with nary a mention of quotas. Even Very Fine Fuhrer-in-Chief Donald Trump said that he would be nominating a woman, getting his lackey turtle in the Senate to confirm Amy Coney Barrett mere seconds before he was diselected from office. My memory may be failing, but Google doesn't remember any talk of quotas when that happened, and Google never forgets.
What could the difference be between now and then? Hmm... Woman. Woman. Black woman. One of these things is not like the others - maybe we need a regular Sesame Street viewer to figure it out...
Then, there is former Ambassadoress to the United Nations and starry-eyed (translation: hopeless) Presidential aspirant Nikki Haley, talking about a litmus test. As if the fact that former President Trump hadn't blabbed in that disarming/unnerving way of his that he would only nominate people to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v. Wade. He didn't need to add: "Or support my efforts to overturn a legal election." It was implied.
Haley's criticism of President Biden's aspiration is pretty rich considering that for his test, former President Trump used a litmus paper the size of Miami!
Remember when lawyer Jonathan Turley was a respected member of the legal community? Yeah, he doesn't either.
If he was really concerned about jarring moments, he would insist that Justice Clarence Thomas be impeached for ruling on issues in which his wife, Ginni, had an interest. (I have never had any interest in listening to their pillow talk, but the FBI might. "Ooh, baby, you know I love it when you touch me in the National Association of Scholars' amicus brief!" Eww, baby!) Calling Turley a partisan hack is an insult to cab drivers everywhere.
Finally (because I didn't have the heart to put any more heads on this Hydra), is it just me, or is Senator Ted Cruz looking more and more like a lounge lizard Lothario? It's not hard to imagine him cruising dive bars, looking for vulnerable women into whose ears he can croon, "Hey, baby. I'm just what you're looking for - and all it will cost you is a $10,000 contribution to my reelection campaign PAC!"
You know what I find offensive? Of the 113 justices who have sat on the Supreme Court since its inception in 1790, all but six have been white men, and none have been black women. That's, what, 0 per cent of the population? Who is it that you really don't give a damn about, Ted?
You may wonder why the right is going on at such lengths to slag a Supreme Court nominee who hasn't even been named yet at a time when the Court has its lowest approval ratings since they started being tabulated. As best as I can figure, the mirrors in the Basket of Deplorables do the reverse of the portrait of Dorian Grey: they see depravity standing in front of them, but they reflect virtue. Circus funhouses ain't got nothing on them!
