It must totally suck having to serve two diametrically-opposed masters. On the one hand, John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison from Hispanic-laden states such as Texas have to tread carefully and carry a small axe handle lest they incur a blowback from both their Latino voters.
On the other hand, they also have to be careful not to alienate
Big Daddy Pimpstick Rush Limbaugh and his sidekick Alternate History Boy Newt Gingrich. It's an amusing linguistic balancing act, watching the GOP try to craft language with the care and deliberation of so many Alzheimer's-afflicted Doctors of Divinity: They're trying to tone down their own racism and misogynism yet just can't seem to distance themselves too far from the Talking, 300 lb. Sweat Stain from Missouri nor from the man with the biggest unused cranium in the Deep South.
What makes this partnership of common hatred between Limbaugh and Gingrich comical is just last March this dyspeptic duo was
publicly trading potshots over Rush's gut-wrenchingly despicable desire to see Obama fail. But in Bizarro World, partisan harmony is only possible when at least two have a common enemy like Sonia Sotomayor.
So now we're watching the political Lilliputians of the GOP trying to tie down Gulliver yet again despite not having enough thumb-sized warriors or thread to hold down Gulliver. This has every bit to do with grudges as new animosities. Republicans who weren't even within hailing distance of Capitol Hill way back when are still grinding axes over the rejection of Robert Bork and the downfall of Richard Nixon and perhaps even the serious grilling that Clarence Thomas got from committee Democrats during his own confirmation hearing. What's the harm in a little sexual harassment and pornography?
Of course, completely lost on the irony-deficient Republicans of today is their seeming obliviousness of
Sam Alito's former Princeton affiliation with CAP or Concerned Citizens of Princeton, a racist, misogynistic organization that was dedicated to the proposition that women and minorities ought to be banned from that Ivy League campus. Alito was so proud of his association with these David Duke wannabes and so eager to suckle at the withered teat of Ronald Reagan that Sammy had put his CAP membership on an application for deputy assistant Attorney General.
But in Republican World, that's a lot less egregious, a youthful indiscretion at most, when compared to Sonia Sotomayor's opinion that her racial background may make her a little more sensitive and insightful regarding discrimination than a white male judge and former CAP alumnus like Alito. We ought to be reminded here that if Sotomayor tried matriculating at Princeton in 1973 as an 18 year old, the year after CAP was founded, Alito's former running buddies would've been doubly inspired to keep her off campus.
I'd love to see committee Democrats bring that up the minute Newt or Rush's surrogates bring up the racism angle, however delicately. But we all know the timorous Democrats won't because we're all one big happy family, a family in which irony is politically incorrect and way too partisan.