The Obama media conspiracy to silent dissent about Sotomayor

Chris Stirewalt:

President Barack Obama may not have spent many years in the political game, but he still has plenty of silky moves. Consider the trap he set for Republicans with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court.

First, he hails the choice as historic, maintains that she brings a fresh perspective because she’s a Hispanic, and depicts her as a benign liberal in the David Souter mold.

Then his henchmen put out the word, swallowed whole by the establishment press, that only right-wing troglodytes could oppose a woman of Sotomayor’s unquestioned virtues.

At the heart of the strategy is a false choice: Republicans could be progressives like Colin Powell or retros like Rush Limbaugh. In other words, could Republicans get over their inner Klansmen and refrain from destroying a Hispanic woman?

“Despite her remarkable personal odyssey, Judge Sotomayor is already being called a liberal activist by some conservative groups,” said Pete Williams on the “NBC Nightly News.” Even though she grew up the daughter of Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, the radical

Right is already on the attack!

I don’t recall that because Justice Samuel Alito grew up the son of Italians in Trenton that any reporters worried about branding him a conservative. I do recall that reporters even futilely scoured citizenship records to test if Alito’s father had been born in Italy as he claimed.

But NBC isn’t exactly credible anymore. It’s hard to shoot straight with a parent company looking to milk the administration through favorable regulations and a news department that has gone hard Left to try to shore up poor ratings.

But across the television spectrum (except FOX News) and in the rivers of newsprint gushing forth from the old-guard papers, the same White House-approved story took shape.

It wasn’t that Republicans would struggle to deal with some of Sotomayor’s flakier positions because of the Obama administration’s calculating use of identity politics. It was that Sotomayor’s background actually gave some Republicans pause, but that they didn’t know how to say so without appearing to have a racist, sexist bias.

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The irony of this approach is that the most racist and sexist statement to emerge so far is Sotomayor's own statement about being better able to make decisions than a white male. That is why some Democrat consultants are already urging her to retract the statement and apologize. If she does not the grand plan may falter. They can probably still get her nominated, but the Democrats will be wounded and that will probably help Republicans during the next two election cycles.