This, from Larison on Sotomayor, is brilliant:
No less remarkable are the descriptions her critics offer about her. According to Shelby Steele, who writes on almost nothing except for subjects related to race, she is “race-obsessed.” Andrew chimes in and refers, apparently without any irony, to the “constant, oppressive consciousness of her identity” and goes on to say that “the harping on it so aggressively so often does strike me as a classic mode of victimology deeply entrenched in her generation.” What evidence do we have that her consciousness of her identity is either constant or oppressive, or for that matter where is the evidence that she “harps on it” aggressively or otherwise? She talks about it, she refers to it, she takes pride in it, she thinks that it matters–this is not obsession or aggression.
Jim
I assumed “Andrew” meant Sullivan, but I followed the links and the rest of that post is amazing
I must say that, to my mind, Steele has a point. It isn’t the judicial rulings that trouble me so much as her non-judicial opinions and mindset. The constant, oppressive consciousness of her identity – racial and gender – and the harping on it so aggressively so often does strike me as a classic mode of victimology deeply entrenched in her generation. I don’t think it’s disqualifying and I don’t see any crude racialism in her rulings, but I do think it shows that for Obama, this kind of racial/ethnic view of the world is so endemic [etc, etc…]
So, he admits, twice, that this “constant, oppressive” consciousness of her “victimology” doesn’t effect her work as a judge… how “constant” and “oppressive” could it be then, Andy?
Sullivan’s a moron. The same moron who called those of us who saw Bush for what he was, even in the smoke and dust of 9/11, decadent fifth columnists. If I had my life to live over again, I would be born in England, so I could polish up my vocabulary and use that and my accent to persuade intellectually insecure Americans that my lazy-ass, halfwit opinions were worth high paying, high profile jobs in journamlism, like Sully and Hitch.
cleek
with Sullivan, it’s not just the gay thing, either. he does a huge number of posts about his conservatism: what conservatism is, what it means to be conservative, how his conservatism makes him think about Obama, what a real conservative should think or do in this or that situation, conservatives through history, what dead conservatives can teach conservatives today.
which is fine, whatever. it’s interesting (to me anyway). but dude, if anyone is obsessed about their own identity…
Comrade Stuck
Wingnuts are desperate for a “they are too” example to counteract the Limbaugh/and others, effect on their image. They welcomed racists 40 years ago into their party to win elections, and now are reaping the downside. Too fucking bad.
eric
when i see this stuff from these white-wingers, this is what i really hear because this is what they have all said in the not so distant past:
if only black people would stop seeing things with a them versus us mentality. It is really demeaning to King’s dream of measuring people by the content of their character.
I mean, slavery ended 150 or so years ago. poor european imigrants started with the same as the former slaves and you do not see their descendants seeking reparations or crying about the past injustices of living in the irish ghetto or the italian ghetto or the jewish ghetto.
In fact, in the 60s, ‘we’ built whole inner city housing projects for these people to live in for free only to have ‘them’ destroy the housing projects to live off the government and hard working white america.
if this is what my white ear hears, i can only imagine what “non-white” people hear. my guess is that they hear things with more “color” if you excuse the pun.
eric
steve s
Sullivan: “I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay.”
Sotomayor: “I’m latina.”
Sullivan: “GOD, WILL YOU SHUT UP ABOUT BEING LATINA ALREADY. SHEESH. YOU’RE OBSESSED.”
bperk
I deleted Sullivan from my favorites after that post, and I haven’t been back since. That post was downright offensive. He has absolutely zero evidence to make a case that she is obsessed with her ethnic background. And, I’m quite sure he wouldn’t be too pleased if anyone told him that he was obsessed with his sexuality.
gwangung
Um, Sully, could this POSSIBLY have something to do with the deep, entrenched RACISM embedded in her generation?
Gahhhhhhhh.
Wile E. Quixote
I read the Larison piece, which has a link to something Andrew Sullivan wrote.
@Sullivan
I wonder if this means that Andrew will stop writing about being a gay, Catholic, British and HIV positive bear. I mean he’s constantly harping on it to the point where it seems as if he’s indulging himself in a classic mode of victimology deeply entrenched in gay, Catholic HIV positive bears.
So here’s an idea for Sullivan, go an entire week, from 0000 on Sunday to 2359 the following Saturday without mentioning the following subjects:
homosexuality, his or anyone else’s
gay marriage
HIV
Beards and bears
Catholicism
I mean if Sullivan can’t go an entire week without indulging himself by writing about these topics it must mean that he suffers from an oppressive consciousness of his identity and is obsessed with wallowing in some sort of weird, well I don’t know what you’d call it; bloggovictimology? “narcissistic blogging disorder”? that seems to affect bloggers at The Atlantic, as witnessed by McMegan McArdle’s endless posts about her
boyfriend
how her relationship with her boyfriend is nobody’s business even though she kept referring to it in her blog.
her washing machine not working
her inability to accomplish simple tasks like renewing her driver’s license and car registration without subjecting herself to a major tsuris
various and sundry kitchen appliances
iPhone.
SGEW
Sometimes the irony of Sullivan’s prominent Orwell quote is a little too much, no?
Struggle harder, man!
Calouste
@cleek:
Sullivan never got over the fact that he had to take down his Maggie Thatcher special edition fanclub poster in 1991.
Betsy
@SGEW:
Win.
Rosali
AFAIK, the Sotomayor speeches that are being picked apart are mostly ones where she was invited by a Latino legal organization precisely to talk about her experience as a Latina jurist. No wonder she was talking about her ethnic background. That was the whole point of inviting Judge Sotomayor to give a speech. I’m sure that if she was invited to speak at a conference on eminent domain, she’s talk about the topic at hand and wouldn’t even mention her Latina background.
Pudentilla
i got 3 words to say to you:”South Side Irish.” You go to Chicago and you can’t swing a Plantain without hitting some pudgy white girl like me, obsessesed with or at least proud of, her ethnic identity which the entire f’ing city celebrates. f’er pete’s sake, it was michelle obama who brought the tradition of turning the fountains green to d.c.
all those white boys need to settle down and eat a dunkin donut.
Jager
would that be the poster of Maggie in a dominatrix outfit?
The Grand Panjandrum
I do like Larison’s take but I thinkTNC provides the best criticism of Sully, and more generally conservatism, with this:
(My empshasis added)
This might be the best summation of why I don’t call myself a conservative either.
The Grand Panjandrum
@Pudentilla:
Somewhere out there the Doughy Pantload just had a thrill run up his leg.
Brachiator
Crappadoodle. I posted a little about some of the reaction to Sotomayor in the open thread, but it is more appropriate here.
Didn’t see that this had been covered here before, but Ta-Nehisi Coates is having big fun with a truly stoopid David Brooks column.
I don’t know why he went out of his way to denote this period as ending in the early 1960s since this would have eliminated Sotomayor from being admitted to Princeton, which did not admit women until 1969.
Brooks appears to make an appeal for the good old days when non-whites and women knew their place and accepted that they would be excluded from some colleges. This also allows him to hypothetically extinguish Sotomayor’s record of achievement at Princeton. Ironically, Brooks seems to think that Sotomayor was “scarred” by multiculturalism, but presumably would not have been scared by sexism.
He also doesn’t understand the deeper irony that even his stunted view of multiculturalism should not be compared to a fantasy of meritocracy, but to the fetid white male privilege that Princeton and other colleges had to outgrow (per Wiki’s Woodrow Wilson bio):
It’s almost typical that Brooks’ column is positive towards Sotomayor, and yet still drips with condescension and paternalism. “I’m obviously not qualified to judge the legal quality of her opinions. … To my eye, they are the products of a clear and honest if unimaginative mind.”
Sullivan is as blind, or willfully ignorant on these complexities as is Brooks. He’s stuck, as a conservative, defending a tradition which was long tainted with exclusionary practice and which was far more corrosive with respect to its identity politics than any multicultural organization.
With friends like these …
As for Shelby Steele, he thought that Obama could not possibly be elected president and seems unable to get out of being little more than the conservative’s go-to guy for black self-hatred, stuck in trying to minimize Obama while the rest of the country just tries to get on with their lives with Obama as a popular president. Another Coate’s piece nails it:
steve s
Can someone let me know if they discover a conservative columnist with brains? For years, the last holdouts I knew of were Sullivan, Brooks, and Will, but now I can’t even stand listening to them anymore.
Lisa
Good post. I have been wondering if anyone else noticed the race-obsessed villaigers screeching without irony about Sotomeyor’s (or indeed any non-white male person of note) race-obsession.
And damn, that Burkean Bells tag never fails to crack my shit up.
geg6
I got so infuriated by that post on Andrew’s blog that I sat right down and wrote him an email (and what a coward he is for not allowing comments, may I say). And I said what everyone here is saying: what kind of stupid, blind asshole says something like this about Sotomayor when she was talking about being a Latina judge at a conference that was ABOUT HISPANICS AND THE LAW while at the same time spending pretty much every post in his blog opining about how being gay and being Catholic and being conservative affects every fucking aspect of his life. And how we must all take his gay, Catholic, conservatism into account every fucking second of the day and so should the entire American political process. I sent him a similar email about a week back when he was opining about us dirty women wanting to control our bodies and fates, which is obviously not acceptable, but it’s quite okay for him to advocate control over his body and fate by screaming continuously against sodomy laws and DOMA and such.
I’m done with him. He’s an idiot 90% of the time and the 10% he isn’t is not worth wasting my time on.
SGEW
@steve s:
Um . . . the blockquote in the post is from Daniel Larison, who writes for American Conservative. No liberal he. And brains he’s got.
Llelldorin
Sullivan exhibits the worst of the British educational system. In my experience, Oxford produces people very much like Harvard grads here in the States. The best went in smart but insecure, and left smart and self-confident. The worst–like Andrew Sullivan–went in smart and arrogant, and left with blindingly large egos that prevent them from entertaining the slightest possibility that their worldview might not be correct.
Every so often Sullivan has his nose rubbed in the essential wrongness of his worldview. To his credit, he does sometimes change his mind when it happens. Maddeningly, though, he seems to see every one of these as rare one-off events, and never connects the dots to see that his conservative worldview is fundamentally at odds with reality.
Blue Raven
That, folks, is racism. Call it what it is. White Privilege Man, AKA Andrew “Tory ass-kisser” Sullivan (ETA: got lost it was Larison who fired the salvo that started this post, so the sobriquet and following text applies to him at least as much if not more), is upset about being reminded that people with more melanin in their skin see the world differently because the people with less melanin in their skin treat them differently than they do each other. So it’s her fault for not being a good mamacita and keeping her boca shut.
steve s
I might try Larison. But then, people used to tell me that Sullivan had brains. And Brooks. And Buckley. And Dreher….
Ash Can
Actually, the only “constant, oppressive consciousness of her identity” I’ve encountered so far is the direct result of these blowhard assholes making shit up about her and carrying on endlessly about it. Anytime they’d care to STfuckityFU about it would be fine and dandy with me, and then we could all have a nice rest from the constance and oppressiveness of this identity-consciousness with which they’ve saddled her and annoyed the living shit out of the rest of us.
Waingro
Jesus, that shit is beyond tiresome. I just loathe that type of punditry- every issue is reduced to an agonizing, soul-searching struggle about the writer’s personal journey of discovery. I mean, really- these people should take a personal journey to remove their swelled heads from their asses. Bunch of chin-stroking douchebags.
As for Sullivan, his main issue is his raging narcissism combined with a complete lack of self-awareness (a typical trait of narcissists).
People who think they’re such special snowflakes really irritate me.
SGEW
Sullivan struggled again today, and saw past the end of his own nose (by reading his fellow Atlantic blogger, natch):
Keep struggling, Sully! I’m rooting for you!
kay
I’m convinced the Sotomayor-induced mental illness is about class.
They don’t like the way she talks, they don’t like the way she dresses, they don’t like how “aggressive” she is. She’s talkative and opinionated and blunt, and she drafts straightforward technically precise opinions without any excess pontificating.
Her brother describes her as “hard as nails”.
She doesn’t look, act or sound like their narrow-minded image of “Supreme Court Justice”. They just…..can’t….see…that portrait hanging on the courthouse wall, alongside the exalted…Justice Roberts!
So crass, that Sonia, or Maria, whatever her name is.
They tell themselves these silly stories about the reality of the various institutions in this country and then expect real people to play the assigned roles that exist only in their head.
She is what she is, and she’s going to be confirmed. That Court could use a little shaking up, IMO. They’re out of touch.
Allan
I’ve observed that to the white males who own America, they can only imagine that to exist as one who is not a white male who owns America like them is to obsess on their non-white-male-who-owns-America-ness.
Every morning, when Sonia Sotomayor looks down in the shower and fails to see a penis, she obsesses over her non-penis-having condition. And when she looks in the mirror and sees cafe au lait skin and Hispanic features, it must come as a shock to her not to see a white male face staring back.
And when she put herself through school, she couldn’t stop thinking about how she didn’t arrive via legacy and have a banker who took care of those tuition checks from her trust fund.
Why, if I put myself in her shoes, that’s what being Latina would mean to me!
HyperIon
@steve s:
Check him out. I regularly jump to his blog from here. But often I don’t stay long because Larison can pursue some fairly arcane points. He’s a very good thinker but his writing is frequently too dense for my taste. (Translation: Sometimes I cannot tell WTF he is talking about.) Also he’s a hardcore Eastern Orthodox Christian and writes about his religion occasionally, which is not interesting to me at all.
Gregory
Imperial Bedroom reference ftw.
gex
With Sullivan the rule is: If he likes it, it is conservative. If he doesn’t, it is liberal. I see him eventually coming around to lauding things that I, as a liberal, have always thought to be good. But he uses his painful probings of his conservative conscience to twist a topic around and around until he can find a way to call it conservative and thus approve of it. Whatever.
At this point, I guess I’d rather have people come around to what I consider to be sensible ideas while putting whatever label on it they want than insisting that they actually reject whatever label they cling to for dear life.
robertdsc
After the Tiller murder, Sully’s in the “I read these morons so you don’t have to” category. You guys can read him and report back because I don’t want to see his crap in person.
KS in MA
@Wile E. Coyote:
“So here’s an idea for Sullivan, go an entire week, from 0000 on Sunday to 2359 the following Saturday without mentioning the following subjects:”
May I add another?:
Balls, his own or anyone else’s, especially women’s
Mnemosyne
@kay:
That’s a large component of it. My husband pointed out the other day that white people (including us) are extremely conscious of class even when they pretend not to be. That’s part of our racial problem — there are certain class assumptions tied up in the different ethnic stereotypes, and people can’t disentangle them because we’re in denial about the fact that, yes, we have social classes in the US and only white people are allowed to jump class barriers. Everyone else is stuck in the social class that their skin ties them to no matter what they achieve. Hence the numerous stories from well-known black men like Colin Powell about being mistaken for a valet or waiter.
steve s
Sullivan is just maddening. He totally goes off the rails accusing Sotomayor of being obsessed with her identity despite the glaring facts that 1 She isn’t and 2 he is. But then he listens to critics and rescinds some of it:
“Maybe I have more in common with Sotomayor than I realize. ”
andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/on-identity-politics.html
I have to give him credit for being willing, almost uniquely among conservatives, to reconsider and admit error. But it would be nice if he just didn’t shoot his mouth off so quickly, and so often, in the first place.
Maybe it’s a problem with the format. In order to have a popular blog you have to do a huge number of posts per day, and you can’t think them all through.
Jim-Bob
Somewhat OT, but if the NYTimes HAD to fill the affirmative action wingnut chair on their Op-Ed page, whyowhy couldn’t they have picked Larison instead of Douchehat?
And even that comparison is unfair to Larison, who’s one of the best out there in any opinion-sphere.
Allan
@Jim-Bob: I assumed it was a passive-aggressive response from the liberal management. If we have to have a conservative, then get me the most ineffective conservative available to make them look weak and intellectually bankrupt.
You know, like the way Fox uses Alan Colmes and Lanny Davis?
Charon
@robertdsc:
While I certainly agree that Sullivan’s position on abortion is both myopic and idiotic, I have to say that his “It’s So Personal” series (the following link is to the latest) has been one of the most thoughtful and honest conservative looks at the pro-choice position in the wake of Dr. Tiller’s murder.
Jim-Bob
Sullivan accusing someone else of being “identity obsessed” is like Mr. T accusing somebody else of pitying too many fools.
steve s
I guess i’ll have to give larison a shot. adding him to the bookmarks now.
DougJ
I agree.
Charon
@steve s:
Great move. I would like to echo Hyperlon’s recommendation above, but with slightly different emphasis. When Larison is discussing political conservatism he is fascinating and I actually think that his density and attention to detail is what makes him stand out (in a positive sense) from other rightish bloggers. When it comes to religious conservatism, on the other hand, in his case Eastern Orthodoxy, he tends to use the density of his prose to disguise ridiculously poorly founded reactionary ideas that would make Douthat blush. Read him on politics. Skip him on religion.
A caveat: some of this view may come from a greater tolerance on my part for political conservatism than religious conservatism, so take the above with a grain of salt.
Jim-Bob
Allan:
I think it’s more like the NYT Op-Ed page editors’ Stockholm Syndrome.
Charon
@Jim-Bob:
Does it still count as Stockholm Syndrome if you entered into captivity willingly?
Jim-Bob
@charon
You’ll have to ask Mrs Jim-Bob about that …
Jim-Bob
@kay
Well I’m totally NOT obsessed with class. Because that would be as tacky as wearing white after Labor Day.
kay
@Mnemosyne:
Good for your husband. Class gets ignored, IMO.
To be blunt, I think the stuff that they’re seizing on is such trivial bullshit that their objection has to be to something else.
I can’t help but notice the frequent use of the word “aggressive”.
Justice Scalia is aggressive. I went to see him lecture during his 2001 Bush v Gore apology tour and he ripped into some first year law student in the cheap seats who had the temerity to ask him a question. Not only that, Scalia misunderstood the question. Excuse us lowly peons, your fucking highness, is what I was thinking.
Great. A pompous, entitled windbag AND a poor listener. Not stellar qualities for a judge. Yet, no one ever sniffs or tsk tsk’s and says Scalia is “overly aggressive”.
What exactly is the objection to Sotomayor? They’ve danced around with this ridiculous racist meme for a month now. Can we get them to just state what the hell the problem is? It isn’t in her decisions. They’ve admitted that. So what is it?
Charon
@kay:
She’s not a reactionary white male.
SATSQ
robertdsc
Sullivan’s being grossly disingenuous with the picture of a fully-formed fetus alongside the heart-breaking stories of families who went to Dr. Tiller and other stories of late-term abortion.
What makes things worse for me vis a vis Sullivan is that he’s anti-choice at the same time as he’s fighting for marriage equality. He’s advocating taking rights away from people while fighting for rights of others.
I can’t deal with him anymore.
kay
@Jim-Bob:
“Gregarious”. That means she talks too fast, too much, and too loud. It probably doesn’t help that she has a broad accent.
In the Hallowed Halls ‘O Justice, we must be pompous, self-important wise men. No chit chat, or God forbid, gregariousness.
She’ll upset Justice Roberts! He’s thinking.
asiangrrlMN
@Allan:
You may be joking, but I actually think you’re right. I have heard the ‘you’re obsessed with your _____ identity’ more times than I care to count.
I think the problem for Sully is that essentially, he is still of the privileged class. I have run into many white LGBT people (mostly men) who still look at the world through the lens of the majority.
It’s partly the lack of empathy thing. For those of us not in the majority, we HAVE to know what the majority is thinking in order to get along. Those in the majority don’t have to know what anyone else is thinking in order to live. I have always wanted to take someone, say, like Sully, and plop his ass in a place where he is surrounded by poor people of color for a month. Let’s see how well he would survive.
asiangrrlMN
Duplicate deleted now that my first comment went through moderation.
Mayken
@steve s: ROTFLMAO! OK, that made me do a spit take. Where do I send your bill for my new keyboard? ;-)
Mayken
@asiangrrlMN: I like it but would add poor women of color. Just my .02.
numbskull
I know John likes Larison, but really, I think the only reason Larison appeals is that, in comparison to other “conservatives,” he is better.
In comparison to the rest of the world? Not so much.
Fulcanelli
All the racial-tinged hyperventilating over the Sotomayor nomination boils down to is that it’s becoming more and more obvious to arrogant White Caucasians that White Caucasian isn’t the default color in America anymore and they’re scared. (Take a bow, Pitchfork Pat Buchanan) And with good reason.
This is seriously fucking with the Inner Chi of all the “Who, me? Race conscious?” White Caucasian crowd, because there’s a little voice deep in the back of their heads whispering: “Jesus H. Christ, I hope these bastards aren’t as ruthlessly violent, vicious, racist and ignorant as we are, or we’re soooo fucked in the not too distant future”.
They hear the distant drums and they’re skeered.
Farah
While it is unfair to pile on Sullivan but when I read his comment about Sodomayor, I immediately recalled when Ford Magazine included him in their most annoying list of liberals. This is what they wrote about him at the time:
And how did Sullivan react,?
Anne Laurie
Because Larison would have made the established TimesPundits like Brookes and Dowd look even weaker & sillier than they actually are. Remember, the people doing the hiring think that “Grey Lady” nickname is a mark of fvckin’ honor.
Kay, you’re absolutely right about the class thing (says the broad from the Bronx). The more the Reasonable Media parrots the conservatards’ whining, the more I hear “Every time Sonia Sotomayor laughs out loud, John Roberts fear-piddles his starched boxers a little.” (Of course, he does the same thing when Scalia snarls, but at least Roberts can be sure that Fat Nino is on *his* side.)
Steeplejack
@Brachiator:
Jeebus. What kind of Pleasantville parallel universe does David Brooks live in? Back in the late ’50s or early ’60s, Sotomayor probably would never have gotten within cleaning-lady distance of Princeton, much less matriculating and being “encouraged to assimilate.”
But maybe what he says is true, if by “assimilate” you mean “successfully ‘pass’ as white.”
It’s things like that this that mark Brooks as so completely out of touch that it taints his writing on everything. I mean, after reading the above, if Brooks’s next column was about how apple pie is good, I would be strongly tempted to go off dessert forever.
Steeplejack
@Llelldorin:
And he always bends over backward to pat himself on the back for being so “open” and “non-dogmatic.”
tavella
Sullivan’s been a useless sack of shit for years; my tolerance for him, never high (he was always far more interested in himself than anything else), disappeared entirely when he called me a traitor fifth columnist. Why anyone bothers reading him, I do not know. Do you *really* need endless drama queening about how hard it is to be him?