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Pulitzer Prize Columnist: Does Elena Kagan Not Meet 'Ordinary-People Principle,' By Being Terrible?
Jim Newell
TheWashington Post's Kathleen Parker, recently named the best commentator in all of American journalism by the Pulitzer Prize committee, has written some crap today about, let's see, Elena Kagan, the arch-lesbian. Is Elena Kagan not ordinary enough to win confirmation to the nation's highest legal authority? Why is she from New York and not a shithole like Georgia, where most people in America are from? What is Elena Kagan's fucking problem and why did Barack Obama pick her, knowing that she wouldn't pass the "ordinary-people principle" that he apparently invented and lives by? She probably lost her virginity to something other than a horse! OR IS SHE STILL A LOSER VIRGIN? Kathleen Parker considers at least some of these important issues, today.
Parker first notes how Barack Obama says he likes to appoint people who are in touch with Ordinary Americans. Much like the more standardized Real Americans, Ordinary Americans do not live in either cities or the Yankee states. They certainly do not live in that Communist Catholic Jewnicipality, New York City, and they generally went to bad schools, which are in effect good schools, according to the principles of Ordinary America, as outlined by the condescending moron Kathleen Parker.
Certainly New York City dwellers would argue that they struggle with ordinary concerns, just in a more dense environment. But New York, like other urban areas, tends to be more liberal than the vast rest of the country.
To the Pulitzer board: this is called a non sequitur.
More than half the country also happens to be Protestant, yet with Kagan, the court will feature three Jews, six Catholics and nary a Protestant. Fewer than one-fourth of Americans are Catholic, and 1.7 percent are Jewish.
One does not have to be from a rural Georgia backwater (Clarence Thomas), or the child of recently arrived immigrants (Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito), to qualify as a justice, though it might help in claiming identity with ordinary people. One could even argue that it matters only that one regard the law with utter neutrality.
But the president adheres to the ordinary-people principle, and so the question must be asked: Does Kagan meet the standard? She may have other qualifications, including her willingness at Harvard to invite conservative scholars to her faculty. But a New York City girl who attended a prep school, Ivy League colleges and law school -- who once barred military recruiters from Harvard's recruitment office and was an adviser to Goldman Sachs -- can't be characterized as anything close to mainstream America.
Either Obama may want to tweak his operating narrative -- or geography may well be Kagan's wound.
Why can't the vast majority of Americans who live in cities with populations greater than 200,000 understand that they're not Ordinary Americans? They have no concerns, because they are Liberal. They should all take a trip down to Georgia and shit on the nearest patio. Could learn something.
[Washington Post via TAPPED]