Senator Kennedy and the Other N-Word

When Senator Kennedy used that other N-Word last week, he did not specify to whom he was referring. He didn’t have to. The targets of his pejorative are those nominees for the federal bench whose confirmations are being and will be blocked by Senator Kennedy and others at the behest of the organized left.

For the record, that would include a sitting Justice of the California Supreme Court. A sitting Justice of the Texas Supreme Court. The current Attorney General of Alabama. A Federal District Court Judge (who is also the father of a U.S. Congressman) who testified against the Imperial Wizard of the KKK, incurring death threats as a result. A veteran California Superior Court Judge with degrees from Princeton and Duke. The brilliant attorney, nomination now withdrawn, who Senator Kennedy’s handlers on the left have also labeled as "especially dangerous, because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment."

If these people of formidable personal and legal accomplishments are "Neanderthals," we should all be so regressed. To be every bit as churlish and indelicate as the distinguished gentleman from Massachusetts, none ever abandoned another human being to drown. None is known to be besotted by alcohol, bloated by the overindulgence of privilege or even exhibiting the diminished capacity of age to which we all fall victim, some with greater dignity than others. There is no record that any have ever or would ever hold personal ideology above the law, and each has chosen the law by which to live.

Parsing the Senator’s remark for subtle meaning is of no illuminative value. It was meant to insult and demean, to cast human chum upon the roiling waters of an angry ideological sea. Having already tested those waters with extreme hyperbolic remarks about the President, the Senator continues to conjure the fish with which to feed his masters of the left.

Beyond his vituperative verbal assault, the fundamental premise of Kennedy’s statement is demonstrably false. If allowed to vote, "the members of the U.S. Senate" would confirm each and every one of the president’s nominees by bipartisan vote. The resistance is that of a minority, many willing, some for gain, others in fear of reprisal, but all linking their now-tainted hands in that petulant refuge of filibuster. Few of those, it now appears, are even making their own decisions.

When Zell Miller, who may be retiring from the Senate only to assume the more influential mantle of a contemporary Will Rogers, began poking his sharp stick a while back at "the groups," and their power over Washington, no one paid much attention.

No one is paying much attention now to actual documentation of Senator Miller’s alarm.

A series of memos leaked to The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, subsequently provided to the Center for Individual Freedom and others, reveal a disquieting view of the conspiratorial process being used to subvert judicial confirmations.

The memos, written to Senator Kennedy and Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL), apparently by staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee, document in excruciating detail the power and control wielded by prominent liberal groups over their ideological handmaidens and fellow travelers in the Senate.

The memos reveal a cynicism of raw political scheming that is well understood but rarely exposed, in writing, for public view. To read them in their entirety, click here.

We would normally question the authenticity of such documents, but since the reaction of Senator Durbin and others is only to yelp they were stolen, that would not seem to be an issue. We do not know who made the handwritten notations or underlined some passages. We reprint them in the form we got them, without alteration.

Even Neanderthals can grasp the import of the memos. Left wing outside groups, clearly identified, are the puppet masters of obstruction. For a list of their captive senators, readers need only scan our Judicial Scorecard. (To download a copy of the Judicial Scorecard, click here.) Those with zero ratings would be logical suspects.

Anyone who doubts the ultimate importance of judicial confirmations need only read the memo dated April 17, 2002. It is not about "especially dangerous" Latinos or black conservatives who are "out of the mainstream." It is about covert tampering with the University of Michigan affirmative action case, at that time actively before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Bribing judges and tampering with juries to affect the outcome of cases are punishable crimes. It should come as no surprise, then, that there are those who have contrived another way to obtain the same result, with the knowing collusion of U.S. Senators.

We have seen anthropological renderings of Neanderthals. Some carried clubs. Along with acceptable behavior and responsible discourse, perhaps Senator Kennedy, the recipient of the April 17 memo, has forgotten that.

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