The wankery from the right is unabated AND apparently this s a dress rehearsal for what we may be in for over the next four years should Obama win.
Now that we’ve put away the black man attacking white female supporter of McCain, we’ve moved on to the new subject of the Looking Glass. Today that subject is a seven-year old panel discussion of which Obama was a member where our right rabbits are beckoning us to follow them in their assertion that Obama has claimed it a “tragedy that the Supreme Court did not pursue a redistribution of wealth”. This is headlined over at Drudge so we have strike one and two right there.
Jake Tapper at ABC has a link to the entire radio program (there is a opportunistically edited version floating around out there that is, of course, more crazyness) plus some germane excerpts from the discussion. The take away is that Obama isn’t complaining about the Supreme Court — he is complaining about the strategies and tactics of the civil rights movement:
one of the, I think, the tragedies of the civil rights movement, was because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change, and in some ways, we still stuffer from that.”
This new bit of wanking has earned itself a calling out (and some admiration of his constitutional thinking) by two conservative lawyers at the Volokh Conspiracy — both David Bernstein and Orin Kerr.
One more piece from the interview:
A caller, “Karen,” asked if it’s “too late for that kind of reparative work economically?” And she asked if that work should be done through the courts or through legislation.
“Maybe I’m showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor,” Obama said. “I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. The institution just isn’t structured that way.”
How can it possibly be a tragedy for someone to articulate a view of the courts that (rightly, I think) actually recognizes the limitations of judicial actions versus doing the work of influencing public opinion and passing legislation?
But I guess that since the GOP has gone almost completely atavistic at this point, working the socialist angle is among all of the arguments they have left.