Apparently Judge Sotomayor lies about baseball, too. What’s amazing about these kinds of casual lies is that they’re so unnecessary. It’s not like anyone’s going to really care whether or not she’s a baseball fan. It’s not a requirement for the highest court. It almost makes you wonder if her lies, like the Clintons’, are almost pathological.
Her nomination process reminds me of Obama’s campaign, in which she pretends to be mainstream, with a wink to her supporters who know that she’s lying, but are happy about it. And as James Copland points out, the fact that she feels that she has to lie about her judicial philosophy in order to be confirmed is a huge political victory for strict constructionism. I also hope that her lies are sufficiently transparent that even if she is confirmed, it is with a bare minimum of votes.
[Update in the evening]
The reviews are in:
What do these bad reviews for Sotomayor mean? It doesn’t mean she won’t get confirmed. The White House has no intention of closing this show now and admitting defeat, and the Senate Democrats won’t let Sotomayor fail in order to protect their new President. However, her performance adds fuel to the Republican argument that Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor not because she was the best possible candidate and not because she was a moderate, but strictly for political purposes. None of this will affect her tenure on the Supreme Court, but it will provide further evidence that Obama has a big problem in selecting people for his administration, and that there seems to be little effort at vetting nominees for important positions.
In short, every prevarication and stumble Sotomayor makes deepens the impression that Obama is not a competent executive.
And we can expect it to continue, and for him to continue to keep digging because…well…he’s not.
I would note, though, that I hope (and there’s some reason, at least for now, to hope) that Charles Bolden will be an exception. And NASA administrator is traditionally one of the toughest jobs to fill.
The one thing about Sotomayor that is striking to me is that she is aware of what a judge should be yet chooses to be something else. For example, when she says I shouldn’t say that on camera it’s very revealing. She’s not a deluded true believer. Her deviation from what’s right is intentional. Her lies are intentional. To say it doesn’t matter because she’s replacing another liberal might be missing the point that she is so activist that she will have a much larger influence than the person she’s replacing.
FWIW, I wouldn’t be surprised if longtime DC residents themselves don’t often misrefer to the Nats as the Senators — apparently early in the first DC team’s existence there was a name change from Senators to Nationals that the fans didn’t go for.
Still, she ought to be “wise” enough to have her story straight.