Just Say No to Absurdity

It looks like Mickey Kaus was the first to get on record with my quick reaction -- the best way for Obama to get out of this without setting himself up as a joke is to turn it down, saying that he appreciates the thought and hopes to achieve things for world peace that will justify the committee's faith in him.

As they note on NRO's the Corner, Nobel nominations were due February 1 -- so Obama was nominated on his accomplishments for less than a month in office.

So When Did You Stop Beating Your Spouse, Judge Obama -- I Mean Sotomayor?

Steve Sailer wants the GOP to go after Judge Sonia Sotomayor by hammering her on her decision denying promotion to the white firefighter plaintiffs in Ricci and her longtime aggressive support for racial preferences for Hispanics and affirmative action generally.

Sotomayor can extricate herself on Ricci quite easily by stating that she was simply applying the precedents in force at the time as she was required to do, that the majority decision in the Supreme Court chose to alter legal doctrine as they alone have the right to do, and that she herself as a 2nd circuit judge would not have had the power to alter legal doctrine that way even if she wanted to. (GOP Senators and witnesses may say otherwise but the interchanges will degenerate into an inconclusive and dull debate on the state of existing precedent before Ricci). When asked if she agrees with the majority decision in Ricci she need only repeat the formula: she cannot prejudge questions that may come for her if she is so blessed by God as to be confirmed to the position of justice of the United States Supreme Court.

She'll need to talk her way out of the (repeated) wise Latina statements. She may take the line of least resistance which is to say that she believes that a bench that is more representative of the diversity of the population will provide better justice to everyone than a bench that is not. This is not of course what she said in the Wise Latina statements but may be her first option for defusing the situation. If pressed she may retreat to the position that she was referring to discrimination cases where it may be useful to have judges who have experienced discrimination or at least seen it up close and first hand. The GOP will have to keep after her and point out that most of the times she made the comment there was no connecrion at all with discrimination cases. I suspect that Sotomayor will be able to play rope-a-dope on this one for as long as she needs to.

But Sotomayor is going to be confirmed and it doesn't particularly matter that the GOP can turn the public against her position on affirmative action. She's never going to have to run for re-confirmation. And besides, even if she could be defeated and filibustered it's not in the Republican interest to do so. Her replacement nominee would likely be a more effective advocate for liberalism and thus more dangerous. For the GOP there is a more important purpose to the hearings:

Will they forego their best opportunity to point out that Obama not the post-racial uniter of David Axelrod’s imagination, but is merely Sotomayor with a more oleaginous prose style ?

The objectionable effects of Sotomayor's legal philosophy need to be pinned where they belong: right on the collar of Barack Obama. Don't ask her what she thinks of racial preferences. Ask her what she thinks of the Obama Administration's mandated racial preferences. Don't ask her whether she agrees with the reverse discrimination imposed by "disparate effect" doctrine; ask her whether she agrees with the reverse discrimination imposed by the Obama-administration-supported disparate effect doctrine. When discussing the Wise Latina comment, pause to generously acknowledge that the statement is a fair reflection of the Obama Administration's judicial philosophy.

I expect not so much a grilling next week as a light toasting.

The Unbearable Lightness of Obama

I’m still working on what may be my great composition, a set of theses explaining Barack Obama and all the mysteries surrounding him. Is he a hard-line progressive or a closet centrist? Does he really dream of a new post-partisan commitment to consensus or is this just a ruse to sneal behiud the city gates a legion of standard left-liberal politics?

Tony Blankley examines Obama’s early blunders and sets out their possible causes. Obama took the fall for the inept vetting of Cabinet nominees, saying that he “screwed up”.

But from a management perspective, the unanswered question is: How did he "screw up"? Did he actively design the failed vetting process and actively assess the various negative pieces of information and fail to see their significance? Or did he "screw up" by letting others design the failed system and assess the data inflow? The former would show poor substantive judgment. The latter would show he wasn't paying sufficient attention to a presumably vital matter.

Then we have the preening display of signing an executive order closing Gitmo -- not now, but within one year. And what is to be done with those present inhabitants too dangerous or unwanted by other countries to be released, but not susceptible to conviction through the mechanism of the criminal law, which is designed to regulate offenses between members of the same community who have committed themselves to upholding the same set of social values?

Thus, it was breathtaking that at the signing ceremony, President Obama didn't know how -- or even whether -- his executive order was dealing with this central quandary.
President Obama: "And we then provide, uh, the process whereby Guantanamo will be closed, uh, no later than one year from now. We will be, uh. ... Is there a separate, uh, executive order, Greg, with respect to how we're going to dispose of the detainees? Is that, uh, written?"
White House counsel Greg Craig: "We'll set up a process."
To be at the signing ceremony and not know what he was ordering done with the terrorist inmates is a level of ignorance about equivalent to being a groom at the altar in a wedding ceremony and asking who it is you are marrying.

But the critical clues must be found in Obama's handling of his stimulus package. Here is a mystery packed with satifactorily intriguing puzzles. Was Obama's desire to reach a genuine consensus with a substantial number of Republicans real or charade? Was the decision to delegate preparation of the package to Speaker Pelosi and her minions an inevitable byproduct of Obama's newness to office, a sign of irresolution and weakness, or a clever ploy to ensure that his fingerprints would not appear on a package full of social liberalism and plain silliness that was desired by Obama but known by him to be unacceptable to Republicans? FWIW, I believe that Obama's desire for post-partisan consensus, if arrogant and ill-considered, is sincere. It's arrogant because Obama's belief is that everyone should abandon their petty grievances, outworn notions and unthinking allegiances. Republucans and Democrats should sit down and think things through practically, whereupon they will come to the same conclusions that Obama does, which also happen to be the conclusions of standard fossilized progressive ideology 98.7% of the time. Republicans accepting the conclusions in principle are welcome to toss in a few ideas -- for example if they had had a few ludicrous projects for which they desired excessive government funding, those ideas would have been welcome. Everyone then votes for what Obama wants; that's what's called "postpartisan consensus".

Blankley:

I can think of four possible explanations for this almost unprecedented presidential detachment from the decision making of policies the president publicly declared to be vital to the country and his presidency:
1) He is a very, very big-picture man, and he delegates decisions even on the central points of vital issues.
2) For tactical reasons, he decided these matters were not worth using up political chits.
3) He is either hesitant or unskilled at management, and he let matters drift until it seemed too late to intervene personally.
4) Or his personality type leaves him surprisingly uninterested in things that aren't personally about him.

I'll eliminate #2. Tactically this was the perfect time both to make it clear to congressional Democrats that he would be doing the producing and directing on matters important to him, and to make cooperation with him as attractive as possible to Republicans .
There's no doubt truth in #1, but it doesn't explain Obama's non-decisions on the stimulus package. The necessity of insisting on absolute unity of purpose in items in a bipartisan emergency stimulus package is big-picture enough for the most visionary leader to isolate and insist on.
#4 can't be discounted wholly. A man who writes two memoirs and compares himself favourably to Lincoln has an very healthy sense of self-esteem even for a politician. It is this type of personality also which sees itself as rising above the pettiness and self-interest that afflict everyone else.
But I say #3 is the winner. Obama was quite skilful or lucky in selecting a campaign team and setting a campaign tone, but the quantity, urgency and importance of the policy and personnel decisions to be made now overwhelm him.
This should ensure for Americans a very entertaining if perhaps somewhat painful presidency. The President's stated goals of civility, practicality and bipartisanship will be subverted and sabotaged at every stage not only by congressional Democrats but by his own appointees. Obama's rhetoric and style will ensure that his approval rating remains high despite an unending series of unpopular and disastrous policy ventures. Public anger will be continually directed not at the king, but at his counsellors, whose heads will roll regularly in response to repeated failures of judgment, achievement and ethics.