WSJ compares Obama and Thomas

| August 18, 2008

The other night at the Saddleback non-debate, both candidate was asked which Supreme Court justices each would not have nomimated. McCain, of course, said that he wouldn’t have nominated the most liberal of the justices, but Barack Obama took the standard leftist position of singling out Clarence Thomas. So the Wall Street Journal decided to compare Barack Obama to Justice Thomas;

By the time he was nominated, Clarence Thomas had worked in the Missouri Attorney General’s office, served as an Assistant Secretary of Education, run the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and sat for a year on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s second most prominent court. Since his “elevation” to the High Court in 1991, he has also shown himself to be a principled and scholarly jurist.

Meanwhile, as he bids to be America’s Commander in Chief, Mr. Obama isn’t yet four years out of the Illinois state Senate, has never held a hearing of note of his U.S. Senate subcommittee, and had an unremarkable record as both a “community organizer” and law school lecturer. Justice Thomas’s judicial credentials compare favorably to Mr. Obama’s Presidential résumé by any measure. And when it comes to rising from difficult circumstances, Justice Thomas’s rural Georgian upbringing makes Mr. Obama’s story look like easy street.

But the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wasn’t done. They point out that this answer uncovers Obama’s real leftist roots and highlights his habit of mouthing the platitudes of the Left when unprepared;

Even more troubling is what the Illinois Democrat’s answer betrays about his political habits of mind. Asked a question he didn’t expect at a rare unscripted event, the rookie candidate didn’t merely say he disagreed with Justice Thomas. Instead, he instinctively reverted to the leftwing cliché that the Court’s black conservative isn’t up to the job while his white conservative colleagues are.

I guess it’s just a reflex action to bad mouth the minorities who’ve left the Democrats’ plantation. But it may have been the wrong course. I have Black friends who are Democrats, who’ve also read Thomas’ autobiography and now admire him. I wonder what they think of Obama this morning.

Michael Gerson of the Washington Post, unsurprisingly, admired Obama for his honesty in the response;

He attacked Justice Clarence Thomas as unqualified and defended his vote against the confirmation of the widely admired Chief Justice John Roberts. Obama deserves points for honesty on all these issues, but it is possible to be honestly off-putting.

I guess Gerson mistook honesty for blatant stupidity and failed to see the irony as pointed out by the WSJ.

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Liberals suck, Politics

1 Comment
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
rochester_veteran

It’s pretty common for black conservatives to be labeled as “Uncle Tom’s” by black people who’ve bought into the entitlement attitude and who are forever playing the victim. I’ve run into this on local community blogs in Rochester, NY. I have a friend and fellow conservative blogger, Rev. Dr. Tommy Davis, and he was called an “Uncle Tom” and a race turncoat for being a black man who’s a Conservative Republican in a discussion. Heck, the lefties, including Obama, look upon conservatives as racist rednecks… which is ironic because the political party that supported freeing the slaves is the Republican party! Here’s a link to and article that Rev. Dr. Davis wrote for RochesterConservative.com on the subject of black Republicans:

Black Republicans’ Legacy (the essay the D&C wouldn’t print!)

Instead, he instinctively reverted to the leftwing cliché that the Court’s black conservative isn’t up to the job while his white conservative colleagues are.

This statement from the WSJ commentary is so true! The lefties are the true racists as they believe that black people can’t stand on their own two feet and need to be treated as a special class of citizen, one that is bound by the chains of entitlement and victimhood.