And speaking of ignorance…
…Joe Klein shows quite a bit of it himself in his hit piece on ignorant commoners like Christine O’Donnell:
[O’Donnell] is attractive, to some, because she doesn’t know anything. She couldn’t name a Supreme Court decision she disagreed with, not even Roe v. Wade. There is no way she could ever be confused with a member of the elites; there is no way she could be confused with an above average high school student.
Only problem with what he’s written (well actually, it’s hardly the only problem, but it’s the one that initially leapt out at me) is that he is misstating the question O’Donnell was answering. She was asked to name a SCOTUS decision “of late” with which she disagreed. When she couldn’t think of one, Wolf Blitzer “helpfully” suggested Roe v. Wade, but O’Donnell corrected him by saying that Roe is not a recent SCOTUS decision (the date was 1973, in case you’re interested).
Perhaps O’Donnell’s difficulty in naming a recent case with which she disagreed might be due to the fact that—as Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson noted:
The question of dissatisfaction with Supreme Court decisions “of late” was particularly bad. For conservatives, decisions by the Roberts Court “of late” have been, for the most part, acceptable. The Kelo case, from 2005 (pre-Roberts), is being cited as something O’Donnell should have known, but that really is inside the law stuff. Coons didn’t exactly exhibit legal scholarship by citing the Citizens United case, considering that for the last several months the case has been the rallying cry of the left.
Klein doesn’t appear to understand the irony of his calling O’Donnell ignorant as he simultaneously displays his own ignorance.
I think Roe v. Wade was the whole point of that question. It was an attempted “gotcha”, but she wriggled out of the trap.
One can believe that Roe v. Wade was a bad decision without necessarily wanting to make all abortions illegal, but that’s too subtle a position for some ideologues on the left.
They did the same thing to Palin: “name the newspapers you read,” as if this has anything to do with public and foreign policy.
I’d venture to say that Obama could easy list the rags he reads, but his tenure as president is nothing short of disastrous.
These elites gave us Obama; you had your chance, now we’d like ours.
Christine O’Donnell is exceeding expectations. She is nearing a single digit deficit in the polls despite an all out media smear campaign and desertion by her own party.
She also has the character and the strength to take on bullies and fools like Klein. Just like Sarah Palin and Sharron Angle, she is quickly acquiring the requisite skills for surviving and winning the media game.
I can’t help but wonder how this race might have been if Rove, Krauthammer, the NRSCC et al had spent the first week actually supporting O’Donnell rather than declaring her unelectable.
Rove, Kraut, et al. are Snobs. That’s the bottom line for them. Christine put a foot wrong on a couple of occasions, and I’ll grant you she didn’t come across as a heavyweight, but the guy she’s running against has BAD PRINCIPLES.
She has, on the main, Good Principles. And every senator has staff out the wazoo who keep them informed on all the issues (should they wish to be). Good principles, for me, trump being able to answer the Jeopardy-style questions with debate school nimbleness.
I was stumped for a moment myself about recent cases. I thought of Kelo, of course. But the ones that really have hurt have been the War on Terror decisions that get judges into the warfighting business, e.g.Hamdan, Boumediene, and Hamdi.
Beverly Says:
October 16th, 2010 at 9:04 pm
Bingo. That’s what I’ve always said about Sarah Palin. Good principles are more important than encyclopedic knowledge, particularly when one has good staff and advisers.
God, how I detest this liberal “gotcha” crap, where they generate some (typically) off the wall question and spring it on an unsuspecting American. The classic example was asking Bush the name of the Prime Minister of Pakistan.
Ask the Nubian Nullity what country, say, Treblinka was in. Ask him to find Yalta on a map. I could go on for hours.
Ask Joe Klein what Senate resolutions of the past five years hedisagreed with. Ask him which recent Pulitzer Prize he most disputed. Ask him which recent Executive Orders he most disagreed with. Once again, the list of “gotcha” questions can go on and on.
When will this puerile gotcha crap end? At a minimum, he should (publicly) ask the Messiah the same question that he asked the American.
I consider myself well informed. I have an M.D. and read widely. I couldn’t think of a recent SCOTUS decision with which I disagreed without looking at a list I found on wikipedia. Constitutional lawyers carry that kind of thing around in their heads. The nice (I believe) thing about many of the upstart candidates (including O’Donnell and Palin) is that they have broken the mold of the coastal liberal establishment when it comes to running for office. After all, it isn’t the job of governors, presidents and even legislators to live and die over SCOTUS decisions. Their job is to determine the sense of the people and pass laws and enforce them within the bounds of the constitution. I would expect that a Senator listening to Supreme Court nominees would bone up on recent and older decisions. And of course, they all do. The traps laid by Journolist types may amuse HuffPo addicts but in the end they alienate the people who get to decide on candidates: the voters.
We detest them because they are detestable.
I read somewhere that relationships could withstand a lot of conflict, but contempt is fatal. We have reached a point in the political dialogue where only contempt remains. We know the Left will never give up or back down. Now the patriots won’t back down, either.
This is going to get uglier.
Actually, what I find more interesting is that the “recent” case that the interviewer comes up with is the Leftist favorite, Roe vs. Wade. It ALWAYS seems to come up with them, even though Kelo is a much more important and significant piece of case law that affects many more people.
Kelo would have been my choice too, both for its current impact but even more for its long-term implications.
Having said that, I was choosing from a …uh…rather, shall we say, “select” group of cases?
The consistent theme of liberal “gotcha” questions is an attempt to establish their opponents as stupid and uninformed. The flaw in that reasoning (if you’ll pardon the exaggeration) is that the interrogatory shibboleth must request information that is common knowledge to intelligent and informed people.
Then those who cannot respond have placed themselves in the stupid and/or uninformed group, alongside those who don’t know where Auschwitz is, what language is spoken in Austria, how “corpsman” is pronounced, or how many states there are in the U.S. You know, that benighted group.
There is also a problem with what is meant by “disagree with.” For example, While I do not like that states’ abuse eminent domain in the way that many of them do – and could therefore be consider as one who “disagrees” with Kelo vs. New London – I don’t actually disagree with the Kelo decision in that I think the Supreme Court ruled on the law. That’s their job.
They did not decide on what should be right; they decide on what the law actually said. In essence, the Supreme Court said that the state should rewrite the law (if the states so chooses) to make it harder for local governments to take individual property. This is what the Supreme Court should be doing – ruling on what the law actually says, not what they wished it said.
Further, what does one make of a candidate (on the left or right) who says they disagree with a Supreme Court decision? Does this mean they want to change a law or does it mean that they want judges who will “interpret” the law to fit their political agenda?
The question was nothing more than a gotcha trap which O’Donnell didn’t fall for.
There was a European writer in the 1950s- can’t recall who- with an essay on the power of the questioner, which includes the power to forgive (poor answers, and more). But the key is in the POWER of the questioner, which we see so well displayed in this matter: Flay them (her) because (their) her answer was bad (poor, whatever).