RUSH: Michelle Obama has weighed in on Sonia Sotomayor. This is yesterday in Washington. At the Mathematics Science Technology High School, First Lady Michelle Obama gave the commencement address, this a part of what she said.
MICHELLE OBAMA: I read the story of Judge Sonia Sotomayor. She went to Princeton, and in the story she said that when she arrived at Princeton as a freshman — and this was nine years before I would even think about going — she said when she stepped on that campus, she said — and this is a quote — she said she ‘felt like a visitor landing in an alien country.’ Despite all her success at Princeton and then she went on to Yale Law School where she was at the top of her class in both schools, and despite all of her professional accomplishments, Judge Sotomayor says she still looks over her shoulder and wonders if she measures up. And when I read her story, I understood exactly how she feels.
RUSH: This is the first lady of the United States of America who admits that Sotomayor is still carrying around a chip on her shoulder, she still feels inferior because the evils of this culture and what it did to her — letting her into Princeton, finishing the top of the class — she got a chip on her shoulder, she still feels inferior, still has a guilt complex, and so does Michelle Obama. The first lady of the United States, I understand how mad she is, I understand the chip on her shoulder, I understand her story. I play this sound bite to illustrate to you, in their own words, my theory that the people running this country — Obama, his wife, Sotomayor — they’re mad. They’re angry. They’re not cool and calm and collected. I think it was the Hannity interview yesterday that I point this out that will be in the second installment tonight at 9PM ET on the Fox News Channel. They’re angry. They’re not cool, calm, and collected and there’s a lingering anger that they still feel the need for retribution. They gotta show somebody how mad they are, still gotta teach somebody a lesson, they gotta get even.
Victor Davis Hanson writing about this, National Review Online, The Corner today: ‘Michelle Obama is now weighing in on the Sotomayor nomination, and I think it will prove a serious political mistake, since she is reverting back to her ‘me too’ campaign mode, in that she emphasizes both race and the anonymous ‘they’ who are not nice or not sufficiently accommodating to the Other. So Michelle Obama describes the fear that Sotomayor felt at Princeton — and its lasting effects to this day.’ I’ve been fired seven times. I’ve been told ‘you can’t’ I can’t tell you how many times, ‘Forget it, if you go through the rest of your life trying to show those people that they were wrong, you’re never going to be happy because they’re never going to admit it and you’ll never know how they really feel.’ And that advice was some of the best advice I ever got. Don’t use as your motivation the ‘I’ll show them,’ in a personal sense, because it poisons you, it distracts you from the real reason you’re trying to succeed. Well, somebody needs to give this advice to Sonia Sotomayor and Michelle Obama. Get over it. You’ve overcome it.
You are the first lady of the United States of America. But if you want to run around and still act like you are the victim of a great injustice, because you grew up in America, a country you did say as recently as a year-and-a-half ago that you were never proud of, until a year-and-a-half ago, it really is time to get over it, because this kind of attitude results in the formulation of policy. This kind of attitude results in speeches that you make. This kind of attitude causes you to apologize for your country all over the world. This kind of attitude makes it possible for you to never be happy no matter what you achieve. (interruption) What makes me think they want to be happy? What makes me think they want to be happy is, okay, I want to be happy and I assume that most people aspire to be happy. I stand corrected. I realize that the left in this country is oriented toward being miserable. Misery is their happiness. Rage and anger is their happiness. It is what animates them. I can’t relate to it. I understand it, but I cannot relate to it.
Now, Victor Davis Hanson writes about this, and let me continue with what he says here. ‘So Michelle Obama describes the fear that Sotomayor felt at Princeton — and its lasting effects to this day — and then compares it, of course, to Michelle’s own ambiguous feelings toward the same Princeton campus –‘ In fact, Michelle’s thesis was all about that ‘– that one is willing to put up with for the education and prestige it gave, but does not really like for the presence of apparently so many stuck-up, rich, preppy kids and their ubiquitous exclusive campus culture.’ You went there, you wanted to go there, but you didn’t like it when you got there because of who was there. They didn’t treat you well and you’re still mad about it. So he makes some observations.
Number one: ‘Many Americans were terrified about our first year in college. Some left farms for sophisticated urban environments and were lost; others were the first in their families to go to colleges, and so on. The Ivy League is by definition snobbish to all outside its traditional insular orbit, whether white, black, brown, country folk, foreigners, etc. But by predicating such common discomfort on their own race and gender, Ms. Obama and Judge Sotomayor deprecate a universal human experience, and instead claim it as something unique to identity politics,’ when in fact everybody is scared to death and everybody shunned at some point, everybody is told they’re worthless. I take it back, I don’t think Obama’s been told he’s worthless. I don’t think he’s ever really been criticized. I don’t think he’s ever really been laughed at. He doesn’t deal with it well.
Number two: ‘Once more we see the schizophrenia of affirmative action, diversity, and identify politics — the university is both obliged to select students on the basis, at least in part, of race, class, and gender, but then almost immediately faulted for a climate that, in the eye of the recipient, stigmatizes those to whom it gives unusual consideration.’ Okay, the university has to get people in here, gotta get affirmative action, gotta get race, gotta get gender, gotta have all this. Then those people that get in, get mad that they got in on that basis and blame the country for it, proving a point that many have made over the years that affirmative action doesn’t do one thing other than stigmatize the recipient. Sotomayor and Michelle Obama are illustrating that.
Third observation: ‘The remedy for feeling separate at elite colleges is apparently to reemphasize separatism based on identification with the tribe (e.g., Justice Sotomayor’s senior thesis, like that once written by Ms. Obama, is predicated on ethnic and racial grievance).’ She harps on and to this day harps on that she is Hispanic, that she’s a Latina, that she’s a Puerto Rican. She referred in of the things — maybe it was a thesis or something she wrote — she refers to the mainland Congress which is how they refer to the US Congress in Puerto Rico. I wonder does she think she’s been nominated to the mainland Supreme Court? And she’s from the mainland Bronx, by the way, she’s not from Puerto Rico. Her parents were.
‘All of this should disturb Democrats,’ Victor Davis Hanson writes, ‘because it fuels a general and growing perception (cf. Sotomayor’s white-male references, Eric Holder’s ‘cowards’ remark, the serial Obama apologies abroad, the confusion about America being an important Muslim nation, etc.) among the public that something very strange is going on — a sort of generic anger being expressed at the highest levels of government that seems fueled by long past resentments against a perceived establishment that at times apparently is to roughly characterized as white, or white male, or rich, or Christian, or something other than poor, of color, or of female?’ Bingo! Bingo! He’s exactly right. Anger. It fuels, it propels these people.
I gotta take a break. I’m a little long here. There’s some updated stories here on the Sotomayor nomination. Turns out, ladies and gentlemen, she made close to an identical ‘wise Latina’ comment in 1994, so it could not be a misspeak.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Sonia Sotomayor, 1994 speech: ‘Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that ‘a wise old man and a wise old woman reach the same conclusion in dueling cases.’ I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes the line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, if Professor Martha Minow is correct, there can never be a universal definition of ‘wise.’ Second, I would hope that a wise woman with the richness of her experience would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion.’
So here’s two times that she has said it, despite the fact that Obama said, nah, she needs a do-over, she wouldn’t phrase it that way. So she said it in 1994, she said essentially the same thing in 2001, seven years later. This is racist. It is bigoted. There is no question about this. There’s a lot of stuff in the Sotomayor stack here, there’s a little funny story, ‘Democrats Pivot on Sotomayor.’ This is in The Politico: ‘In defusing the controversy over the ‘wise Latina’ comment, Democrats sought to put the spotlight back on Sotomayor’s extensive legal career, assure the public she was committed to following the law and is not an activist judge. Typically senators are largely mum about their private conversations with high-profile nominees. But Democratic senators, after watching Sotomayor get ripped for the past week by conservative commentators, chose to reveal much more of their conversations from Tuesday’s closed door meetings.’ And Patrick Leahy said, ‘What she said was of course one’s life experience shapes who you are. But ultimately and completely … as a judge you follow the law.’ No, Senator Leahy, twice she has said that a wise woman, with the richness of her experience, would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion than a white male.
And New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez has done a Chuck Schumer. ‘Democratic Senate campaign chief Robert Menendez (D-NJ) today issued a stern warning to Republicans up for reelection in 2010: Vote against Sonia Sotomayor at your own peril. His blast at vulnerable GOP senators was the most purely political statement from a Democrat yet in a week of Sotomayor visits to Senate offices.’ That follows on the heels of Chuck Schumer saying basically the same thing. ‘I think that when all the senators have to cast a vote on Judge Sotomayor, if they select a negative vote, they will have to explain how it is you cast a no vote on someone who has great intellect, on someone who has been committed to the rule of law, who has been committed to precedent, and who has many times decided in ways that are adverse to what her personal experiences would be.’
So now we got Democrats out there threatening Republicans. That’s okay. Oh, that’s fine. In fact, that’s worth reporting, that’s good stuff. The state-run media cheers Menendez and cheers Schumer. But you let me categorize her statements as racist, all hell breaks loose, oh, my God, we can’t have this, you gotta take that back, you gotta retract it. No. Don’t retract it in any way, shape, manner, or form. Let me again share this little statement of Sotomayor’s that she made in 1994 and again in 2001. ‘I would hope that a wise woman, with the richness of her experience would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion than a white male.’
I want to read to you an excerpt of a speech by Justice Clarence Thomas in 1996. ‘In my mind, impartiality is the very essence of judging and of being a judge. A judge does not look to his or her sex or racial, social, or religious background when deciding a case. It is exactly these factors that a judge must push to one side in order to render a fair, reasoned judgment on the meaning of the law. In order to be a judge, a person must attempt to exorcise himself or herself of the passions, thoughts, and emotions that fill any frail human being. He must become almost pure, in the way that fire purifies metal, before he can decide a case. Otherwise, he is not a judge, but a legislator.’ Clarence Thomas describing his job, 1996. Compare that to Sotomayor. Well, I would hope a wise woman, with the richness of her experience, would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion. And the Democrats want to tell us that she’s devoted to the rule of law? And that if we vote against her, what, what will happen? These Republicans are now going to have no chance to get the Hispanic vote? Really? Are they getting it now?
I’m going to ask this question ’til I’m blue in the face. How can you sponsor, advocate and demand amnesty for 20 million illegal Hispanics and not get their vote? President Bush didn’t get their vote. John McCain didn’t get their vote. They pushed for illegal alien amnesty. For crying out loud, if that’s not going to get you the Hispanic vote, what will? And by the same token, the Democrats destroyed Miguel Estrada, Alberto Gonzales, Janice Rogers Brown, and Clarence Thomas. Did they lose the Hispanic vote when they did? Did they lose the black vote when they did? No. So there must be other explanations for why Hispanics vote the way they do and why African-Americans vote the way they do. But these idiotic Republicans buy into the premise that one negative comment about any Hispanic or black will forever ruin the chance to get votes from Hispanics or blacks. It’s as absurd as believing the silly notion that moderates are the great purists of our culture and they don’t like acrimony, and those moderates don’t like partisanship, they don’t like it. One word of mean-spirited criticism from a Republican candidate and those moderates are going to go where? To the Democrat Party, which is the home of the most extremist, mean-spirited, anger, and rage-filled partisanship in our country.
Now, somebody smarter than I am is going to have to explain to me how a normal campaign of criticizing your opponent’s policies sends these innocent, waif moderates who can’t stand negativity running into the arms of the authors of negativity. It doesn’t. It’s a total fraud. It’s a position that has been put forth, the Republicans buy into it, it’s a premise that’s deeply flawed, and all of these premises — Menendez, Schumer, you vote against her at your peril — this is a threat, and it’s a demand that Republicans shut up and don’t do one thing that they believe in, don’t stand for anything because you’re going to pay for it, and you’re going to lose. The sad thing is that so many Republicans, ‘Okay, okay, you’re right, you’re right, you’re right, I won’t vote against her, I won’t even say anything, you’re right, if I say something negative about her, oh, yeah, you’re right, okay, okay, okay, okay, by the way, we loved Obama’s speech in the Middle East. That was a great speech. We love Obama.’
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Ellen in Essex, Connecticut, welcome to the Rush Limbaugh program. How are you?
CALLER: I’m doing fine, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: Well, I’m a first-time caller, and haven’t been listening to you long, but I’ve been listening to you these last couple of days talking about why are Michelle and Judge Sotomayor so mad.
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: And I believe part of their problem is they were trained to be that way. Let me tell you why I say that. I grew up around the same time as them, I actually spent some time in the projects with my family. When push came to shove, they were told that you need an edge, and you sit down and you profess your minority status.You push that. So all things being equal, they were trained to be angry about being a minority rather than…
RUSH: Makes total sense. I think that jibes with a theory of mine that Sotomayor and the things that she’s written is what she’s been taught.
CALLER: Oh, not only taught. They were encouraged. They were counseled to do this.
RUSH: Right. They were at fault the multicultural curriculum. Obama himself, too, I believe, along with Michelle.
CALLER: Right. And so if you believe that, if you — and I do; I watched it. I grew up and I watched it with my friends. I watched it in the projects I lived in, and so if you’re successful — you know all things being equal — you got into the best schools, you got the scholarships and you built on that success that way, then when you got your first job, you know, ‘Remind them that you’re a Hispanic, remind them that are an oppressed minority.’
RUSH: Right, right. Exactly. I hate to cut you short, but I have no flexibility on time here. Ellen, thanks much.