Voyeurs on the Hill

Under what can only be classified as, "Um...gross," Justice Sotomayor talks about the confirmation process for single female judges.

After pre-approved questions from two Northwestern University School of Law professors, she was most revealing during questioning from law students, especially when one woman suggested that the questioning Sotomayor and the most recent other appointee, Elena Kagan, faced was laden with male-driven assumptions.

"You know, and I don't mean to be graphic, but one day after I'd been questioned endlessly, for weeks at a time, I was so frustrated by the minutiae of what I was being asked about and said to a friend, 'I think they already know the color of my underwear,'" the justice said.

"There were private questions I was offended by. I was convinced they were not asking those questions of the male applicants," Sotomayor said, alluding to questions about her dating habits. It was unclear if she was referring to private sessions, prior to her formal nomination hearing, with individual senators.

Continuing the conversational thread about dating questions posed to her, she declared, "I wondered if they ever asked those questions of the male candidates. But the society has a double standard."

"An intense disliker," aka, A racist prick

I laughed when I read this last week.

"He became ground zero among the neo-cons, but he's vastly smarter than most of them," said Time's Joe Klein, an admirer and critic who praised Krauthammer's "writing skills and polemical skills" as "so far above almost anybody writing columns today."

[...]


"Charles is not a hater, but he can be an intense disliker," he said.

Because I could practically predict reading this today.

UPDATE: Charles Krauthammer is already snarling on Fox News, warning viewers of the possible danger that -- as he put it -- Sotomayor's "concern for certain ethnicities override justice." He said that although her confirmation is certain, conservatives should oppose her nomination on principle and highlight that the type of justice Sotomayor allegedly represents -- justice that is unfair to white people in favor of "certain ethnicities" -- is deeply pernicious. That is a such a baseless and ugly attack on her, but almost certainly what will be a focus of the right-wing strategy.

Unfair to white people. Now there is some kind of "polemical skills."