Rampant Dishonesty

The Sotomayor hearings are proving to be far more interesting than I’d expected. I have assumed that Sotomayor is smart, a quick study, and that she would be well prepped to deflect and defuse the many embarrassing questions provided by her long record of highly controversial assertions. But when one of her most prominent academic supporters, Prof. Louis Michael Seidman of Georgetown University Law School (one of the founders and intellectual lights of the radical Critical Legal Studies movement of the 1980s and current defender of “empathetic judging”) writes (scroll down), after listening to some of her testimony today, that

I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified[,]

it’s pretty clear that one or several of my assumptions are wrong.

John Hinderaker has documented carefully and beyond cavil on Power Line that Sotomayor did not respond truthfully about her “Wise Latina” remarks. But Sotomayor’s misrepresentations of what she meant look like George Washington’s confessing his attack on the cherry tree compared to Sen. Patrick Leahy’s creative misquoting. From the Associated Press account:

Trying to head off criticism of a controversial comment, Leahy misquoted Sotomayor’s own words in kicking off the second day of her confirmation hearings….

LEAHY SAID: “You said that, quote, you ‘would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would reach wise decisions.’”

THE FACTS: If that’s all Sotomayor said, the quote would barely have mattered to opponents of her nomination. The actual quote, delivered in a 2001 speech to law students at the University of California at Berkeley, was: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Leahy’s revision dropped the controversial part of the phrase, the part that has attracted charges of reverse racism.

If Sen Leahy believes he quoted Sotomayor accurately, he doesn’t deserve to be a Senator, much less chairman of the Judiciary Committee. If he purposefully misquoted her to make her sound better, he doesn’t deserve to be a Senator, much less chairman of the Judiciary Committee. If he misquoted her accidentally, he should apologize to the Senate and the public; if he doesn’t apologize, he doesn’t deserve to be a Senator, much less chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

Egregious as it was, Sen. Leahy’s misrepresentation (whether intentional or incompetent) was no worse than that pedaled by Sotomayor’s defenders in the preferentialist press every day. Take, for example, the Washington Post’s and MSNBC’s (where else) Eugene Robinson (please, take him). Today, Robinson, sounding like the Leahy of the ink-stained wretches that he is, wrote:

The whole point of Sotomayor’s much-maligned “wise Latina” speech was that everyone has a unique personal history — and that this history has to be acknowledged before it can be overcome.

Really? If that was the “whole point,” then why does that bear no resemblance to what she actually said (emphasis added, since Robinson somehow missed it in the several zillion times it has already been quoted):

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Robinson goes on to say that “[d]enying the fact of identity makes us vulnerable to its most pernicious effects.” Denying facts is never good, something Robinson would do well to recall before he continues throwing stones through the glass walls that surround him.

UPDATE [15 July]

Leahy’s explanation to Byron York of his striking misquote is about as impressive as, well, his ability or willingness to quote accurately.

“I was doing it from memory,” Leahy explained.  “But I knew that she would — she stated exactly what she said, and the statement is in the record.” Leahy added that he did not consider Sotomayor’s precise words very important; her response, he said, was much more critical.

If he didn’t consider her “precise words” important, why did he purport to quote them? If he was quoting “from memory,” why was he reading the quote from a text?