First Principles

The very liberal Mother Jones magazine has a fascinating piece about the nominee’s lack of writing skills.  As a lawyer, I can’t stress how happy this makes me.  Bad writing will, I think,  ensure that her opinions are more likely to be overruled sometime in the future (I don’t have any data for that, but I think intuitively that once some memorable and quotable phraseology enters the legal culture, no future judge will want to be the one who made such prose moot).  And it will irritate law students and attorneys forced to muck through such turgid writing, sowing the seeds of disrespect for the legal theories and philosophies the opinions attempt to espouse.

The last thing we want as Conservatives is a smart, eloquent, and persuasive voice on the highest court in the land on behalf of Progressive legal theories.

And then, after President Obama declared that she had chosen her words poorly in that whole “wise Latina woman” speech, and we are told repeatedly by his sychophants in the media and elsewhere that you can’t judge a person by a single phrase in a single speech, we learn that she has used this kind of language often – sometimes the exact same phraseology.  Either the President must admit that he chose someone for a job which is all about choosing words carefully who often lets loose with language that even Barack Obama understands is offensive to people, or he has to retract what he said.  Either way, it just looks ridiculous for both of them.

Finally, someone dug up her senior thesis from Princeton.  I wouldn’t necessarily want to be judged by all the things I wrote when I was 21, but then, I wouldn’t have refused to call the U.S. Congress by its proper name in an academic paper, either.  She apparently declared her support for Puerto Rican independence, and referred to Congress as the “North American Congress” and the “mainland Congress.”

Now, ordinarily, I think this is a minor transgression, a mere youthful error, except for two things.  First, she doesn’t seem to have ever really grown out of those attitudes.  And secondly, I’m sure the same leftists who (falsely) claimed that Sarah Palin belonged to a secessionist political party 25 years ago will be up in arms about these new revelations, right?

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Everything we learn about this woman points to someone who will have little or no credibility with a majority of Americans, and will be merely a one-for-one swap out liberal vote, rather than the force multiplier for her ideas that a better judge might have been.  I don’t know that we dodged a bullet completely, but this is definitely more of a flesh wound than I was expecting.

Let’s keep our powder dry on a full on blocking attack on this one, and save it for a more dangerous judge.  In the meantime, she’s done us the favor of being honest about her liberalism over the years – something that rarely ends well for liberals politically at the national level.  Let’s not waste the opportunity to continue to shed light on the bankruptcy, injustice, and danger of those ideas.