‘Compelling life stories of minorities’ are apparently only compelling to Democrats if you end up bowing to the mindless twaddle of expansionist, racist, divisive rhetoric of the Left. While the Democrats are running around calling anybody ‘racist’ who oppose Judge Sonia Sotomayor, let us remember these names – Clarence Thomas and Miguel Estrada.
Both of them had compelling life stories that make Sotomayor look like a rich young brat raised in the English manor, with servants at her beck and call. Both of them worked extremely hard to achieve heights seemingly unattainable from their humble beginnings.
Both are brilliant. Both are minorities. Yet both are to this day treated to the most vile and inhuman treatment that the Left can levy, called horrible things in public and in print. Why?
Oh wait. I’m racist. I can’t ask that question.
But hey, since I actually “can” ask the question – at least until Democrats make it illegal to be conservative – I shall.
Thomas was born in 1948 in coastal Georgia. He experienced real racist oppression, not the kind peddled by the race-hustling professionally offended crowd. He spent his earliest years in a one-room shack with a dirt floor and no plumbing.
At age two, his father walked out on the family, and, starting at age seven, he was raised by his grandfather. At age 16, his grandfather sent him to an all-white Catholic school in Savannah, where he also was confronted by racism, yet excelled in academics and played football.
Due to excellent college performance, he received law-school offers by Yale, Harvard, and Penn (not the Sears, Penneys, and Levines of law schools). He chose Yale, where he also excelled. The rest is history, and he was nominated for the Supreme Court in 1991, then confirmed 52-48 after a bloody, dirty, vicious fight led by Democrats.
Estrada was born in 1961 in Honduras, the poorest country in Central America. In 1978, he came to the U. S. to live with his mother, having limited English-speaking skills. He was clearly brilliant and driven, because he graduated Magna Cum Laude at Columbia College five years later, followed by his Law degree at Harvard Law School in 1987, also Magna Cum Laude.
Soon he was clerking for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy before embarking on his career as a U.S. Attorney. He was nominated to the D.C. Court of Appeals by President George W. Bush in 2001.
Both of these men rose from humble beginnings with many obstacles. Both excelled at top law schools and beyond. Their stories are actually a good bit more compelling than that of Sotomayor, whose own colleagues say she seems unable to handle the technical aspects of the law, and whose rulings have been overturned by the Supreme Court at rates rivaled only by Nolan Ryan’s fastballs.
Why was Thomas dragged through hell in his confirmation process? Why was he called an Uncle Tom? Why was Miguel Estrada left to rot for over two years in a confirmation process, and held up ultimately by filibuster?
Oh, simple, really.
Thomas and Estrada do not believe they have some amazing wisdom that exceeds that of James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
They see justice as equal, under the law, and colorblind. They see the role of a judge as impartial, bound by the Constitution and duly enacted laws. They see their role as a humble one. They look at people who are white, black, Latino, or Oriental, and they see people.
People on the Left sees themselves as brilliant, the Constitution as an annoyance, the law a tool to secure power and control people. They look at people and see classes, races, and divisions. Therefore, they love Sotomayor, and hate Thomas and Estrada.
Paul Fuller is an enterprise software architect from Dallas, TX, and an editor at RedState.com, under the nom de plume E Pluribus Unum.
