Some Quick Blogs

We haven't blogged much lately, so here's some brief items to get us going again:

• There's been a lot of blogging about Maureen Dowd's article on Clarence Thomas, but the main problem with it is a very basic one: whether or not Thomas benefited from affirmative action has nothing to do with whether or not affirmative action is constitutional. Thomas is under no obligation to deem something constitutional merely because it was of benefit to him.

• Marcus Cole, a Stanford Law professor, bluntly refers to Dowd as a racist. Good for him. The same should be said of Al Sharpton, according to whom Clarence Thomas is not the right kind of black. Why should Dowd and Sharpton be called racists? Because they believe that members of a particular race should endorse certain political views and only those views. There isn't anything different about this than a white supremacist accusing another white of being a race traitor.

• Richard Gephardt is an extremist, pure and simple:

  When I'm president, we'll do executive orders to overcome any wrong thing the Supreme Court does tomorrow or any other day.

  He doesn't belong in any political office. He either doesn't understand or doesn't care about the tripartite nature of our government. That alone makes him unfit for any office. I can't even begin to imagine the outrage had Bush let loose such a remark of unmitigated imperiousness.

• Then there's Howard Dean:

  "The president has divided us," former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean said. "He's divided us by race by using the word 'quotas.' There's no such thing as a quota at the University of Michigan, never has been."

  Of course there has never been a quota at UM. There's only been points awarded to minorities in order to reach a "critical mass" of certain minorities. Why, that's not a quota.

That's enough for now. My stomach's turning.