Dick Durbin: Expert in Forensic Bigotry

The happily named Dick Durbin, senator from Illinois, had this to say during the Sotomayor hearing yesterday:

"When we asked questions of the white male nominees of a Republican president, we were basically trying to ... make sure that they would go far enough in understanding the plight of minorities, because clearly that was not in their DNA," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said.

How do I scorn thee? Let me count the ways.

If you are saying that a white male is congenitally incapable of understanding the plight of minorities – that, in effect, people are hotwired to hold certain opinions based on their pigmentation or ethnicity or gender – then doesn’t it follow that, say, a Latina woman, even a wise one, would be governed by the same tribal instincts? Is the Supreme Court, then, nothing but a committee composed of people each one of whom simply represents the identity politics of his or her clan? Isn’t this inconsistent with traditional concepts of law and jurisprudence – as even Judge Sotomayor now claims (however disingenuously)? By the way, how did you manage to escape the iron grip of your own rather obvious Caucasian-male DNA? Are you, in fact, an African-American, a Mexican-American, or some other hyphenated type of American, who is shamefully and dishonestly trying to “pass”?

And what bearing does the “plight of minorities” have on the application of the law, aside from civil rights violations in which racial or ethnic prejudice can be clearly shown to have been the cause of a crime?

Do you, Dick – may I call you Dick? – have any idea, yourself, what you’re talking about? Or are you just trying to polish the turd of liberal orthodoxy?