http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124777884829553723.html
The Sotomayor hearings were unsatisfying and relatively unilluminating. She was moderate in tone and manner, said little, will be confirmed, and over the years, decision by decision, we will find out who she is and how she thinks. They're all a mystery going in and then, paradoxically, cover themselves in a long black robe and reveal themselves. The Republicans questioning her never seemed to gain purchase, never quite succeeded in making the interesting (the Ricci case) interesting. Looking at things shallowly, and let's, Sonia Sotomayor seemed weirdly overrehearsed, speaking v e r y s l o w l y, gesturing with her hands in a way that was no doubt supposed to look natural and warm, like grandma in the kitchen, but instead came across as artificial and mildly animatronic.
Associated Press
Sonia Sotomayor
She took refuge (as did some of her questioners) in the impenetrable language of the law, and in what seemed (and this is becoming a regular strategy in politics) to be the deliberate jumbling of syntax, so people at home won't be able to follow what is being said. To be clear and succinct is to look for trouble. Better to produce a mist and miasma of jumbly words, and sentences that do not hold. You're talking, so you'll seem alive—in fact people using the syntax dodge are often quite animated—but as to meaning, you can leave that to the TV producers, who'll wrestle around trying to get something that makes sense and then settle for the Perry Mason soundbite. (Well, in truth the Perry Mason soundbite is pretty much what they want.)
I suspect the hearings added to a general sense of Washington's surface comity and essential sketchiness.
2 comments:
The pundits were all over this one, particularly Pat Buchanan who jumped in like a crazed pit bull crying "Affirmative action! Unqualified! Taking away white men's jobs!" and looking pretty much a fool all the while, and all of them, Noonan included, seemed to want a better show for television, a little fire and bite in what has become a perfunctory session of questioning. So what if she talked slowly? So what if she'd been coached? Everybody sitting at that table is coached. She didn't make any wrong moves, but she wasn't cute enough for television? Too bad for television--the job is supreme court justice. Television's talking heads looked for something to hate and came up with nuttin'.
ML, you're wrong. I'm sure that Pat Buchanan resembled not a crazed pit bull, but a crazed Christian conservative pit bull.
That being said, this is really nothing new. My main point of agreement with Noonan is that the hearings are all a lot of nothing, unless there's something there that the opposition can really get their teeth into. (That's when the pit bull goes to work.) The nominee gives carefully crafted, thoughtful and non-committal answers, essentially saying nothing. Remember Clarence Thomas? Remember the nastiness of Senator Arlen "Phil" Specter? Pardon my french, but same shit, different decade, different party.
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