Pat Buchanan on Sotomayor: waving the dagger and sprinkling poison

Pat Buchanan, Jesuit educated in Washington, D.C. at Gonzaga College High School under the old rule, got his basic training in rhetoric the way I got mine: reading Cicero’s orations against the anti-Republican conspiracy of L. Sergius Catilina.

Cicero employed every rhetorical device: wit, learning, the curt and quick reply, appeal to reason, and to the divinity. But Cicero also used hyperbole, ad hominem attack, and a device he deplored in the followers of his adversaries: “how to wave daggers about and sprinkle poisons”. (2d Oration, M. Grant, tr.) Buchanan has developed the last two skills with particular relish.

In his recent screed in Human Events “Miss Affirmative Action 2009" Buchanan says of 2d Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor “her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.”

As Buchanan notes, Sotomayor said in the early 1990's at a PLI panel discussion on women in the judiciary "If we had gone through the traditional numbers route of those institutions," says Sotomayor, "it would have been highly questionable if I would have been accepted. ... My test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates." (See video here)

Buchanan ignores Sotomayor's elaboration that because she had graduated first in her class from Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx, she “was readily accepted” at Princeton; and that her SAT scores, while below the norm for Princeton, were “not so far off the mark that I could not succeed there.” Her election to Phi Beta Kappa shows at least that. Her admission at Yale Law School was similarly driven by her summa cum laude performance as an undergraduate.

Such nuance is lost in Buchanan’s account which quickly escalates to the hyperbolic language of resentment, a Buchanan trademark - as Lance Morrow observed in Time magazine a dozen years ago. Buchanan declares there is “no need for name-calling” and then immediately begins to wave the dagger and sprinkle the poison of white-backlash:

“Thus, Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review -- all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.”

Sotomayor was “whisked”, “all because”, the Ivy League “cheated more deserving students” [who also graduated first in their class?] of a “lifetime” of effort. How quickly the Buchanan rhetoric escalates, how sparse evidence suffices for Buchanan to concoct a vast conspiracy by which a woman is vaulted to the top of her class at Princeton, one of 20 Hispanics among 2,000 students, arbitrarily anointed for greatness, all to serve the cause of an unjust racial order, to embed a “race-based bigotry against white males so that persons of color can receive the rewards of society that they could not win in free and fair competition.”

The Times describes Sotomayor’s efforts: “She spent summers reading children’s classics she had missed in a Spanish-speaking home and “re-teaching” herself to write “proper English” by reading elementary grammar books.” Despite his opening abjuration of name-calling Buchanan descends quickly to ad hominem mockery: “How do you graduate first in your class at Princeton if your summer reading consists of "Chicken Little" and "The Troll Under the Bridge"?”

I point out to Mr. Buchanan that at my all-boys Jesuit high school Brooklyn Prep (whose admission test Justice Scalia personally told me he had failed) we were drilled two hours a week by Mr. O’Connell to purge the Brooklynese "dese dems and doe's". We recited “trippingly off the tongue”, in unison, “mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy”, and “John Styu-art Mill, by a mighty effort of the will, wrote Principles of Political Economy”.

We read E.B. White’s explanation of why “These are the times that try men’s souls” soars over “these are trying times for men’s souls”. We diagramed sentences in Latin, Greek, French, and English. Such work apparently constitutes part of a meritorious “lifetime” of effort only when made by white males engaged in “free and fair competition”. When made by a Puerto Rican woman from a Spanish-speaking home in the “Projects” it becomes flesh for Buchanan’s dagger.

Buchanan claims (without the slightest evidence) that “no one has brought forth the slightest evidence [Sotomayor] has the intellectual candlepower to sit on the Roberts court”. As but a beginning effort to judge the evidence (beyond her years on the bench since her nomination by George H.W. Bush), I suggest the PLI video above (Sotomayor’s remarks are at 9:04, 35:39, 42:25); and her remarks on the role of experience in judicial work here.

For the final proof I look forward to her (third) Senate confirmation hearings. In particular I will relish the moment when she tells the nation that she is proud to be a Puerto Rican from the Bronx. There will be many moist eyes watching her on television. And few will hear Pat Buchanan grinding his teeth as his forces lose another round. Change has come to America.