Sotomayor snubbed by "plumber" G. Gordon Liddy for her plumbing; egad!

Sotomayor (AP Photo/White House)

Here’s some practical advice for all those supposedly Godless Democrats whom some readers of this column like to denigrate: Go out and do something illegal and immoral, not to mention unethical--did I mention illegal?--and be dumb enough to get caught. Spend a couple of months in a federal country club prison, or maybe get lucky and spend a few years eating and being cared for on the federal (read taxpayer) dime. Then perhaps you, too, can return to plague the nation like Republican radio host and global nitwit G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy spent 4.5 years locked up for his burglary skills in Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, which was apparently sufficient in the Republican universe to establish his credentials as a cogent, believable and popular commentator on United States politics. I’m thinking it might take a longer period of incarceration for those Godless Democrats to be granted pundit status, but I could be wrong. Still, if you’re a Democrat, plan on at least a decade in stir to earn your creds for speaking out on politics in America. If you’re an independent, it may well be you’ll have to commit a capital offense and get pardoned to achieve the media cred you are looking for.

But what if you object to willfully breaking the law? Perhaps you don’t want to embezzle, perjure yourself, or do bad things to good people. You even object to breaking and entering, burglary, and covering up your crimes by lying to police and prosecutors. Gosh. Well, maybe G. Gordon Liddy will have to retain his ranking as one of the top ten ex-criminal radio hosts of his generation.

Meanwhile, we can always hope that the population will find that living under the rule of law beats living under the threat of fear as we had done for eight long, miserable, soul-deadening years. And we can hope that the media will discover, due to lack of salivating audiences of ignoramuses, that they lose money when they employ slathering gasbags like Liddy and Limbaugh and their cohorts in juvenile antics meant to threaten, harm and destroy. (OK. That’s a stretch.)

Since we have not yet entered the golden age in which criminals lose, rather than gain, street cred in politics, those of us who decry imbecilic comments on the public airwaves must ask: Is it ethical for a radio station to permit any of its on-air voices to engage in discussions of a Supreme Court candidate’s intimate bodily functions?

In short, have they no shame, and do they really believe Liddy’s recent discussions of Sonia Sotomayor’s sexual plumbing is anything other than something a demented teenage Homer Simpson show wannabe might have uttered? Is it even marginally ethical to allow junior-high locker-room rank outs to pass for political commentary?

Perhaps they let it get by because plumbing is something Liddy’s mighty concerned with, having been one of the Watergate “plumbers,” granted that sobriquet because of their mission from Supreme Commandant R. Millhouse Nixon to stop leaks of information from his Oval Office. Or possibly because they dealt in effluvium (defined as “The odorous fumes given off by waste or decaying matter,” a perfect description for our government under Nixon.)

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has read this column before that I believe the current Republican Party’s platform is about as far from the Constitution and from humanitarian ideals as it is possible for an organization to be. However, Liddy has drawn even some highly visible Republicans back from the brink with his juvenile rantings. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said Liddy’s attacks were both “terrible” and “wrong,” And Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) rang in disagreeing with Liddy’s fellow traveler Newt Gingrich who said Sotomayor was a Latina woman racist.

Actually, all of it would be laughable, if it were not so sad. If anyone can prove that the white men running the nation under George W. Bush were not racist in the extreme, perhaps one might weigh the possibility that Sotomayor is in some way racist. However, that would seem an impossibility; check out the racist sentiments of the former Commander in Chief here. To check out Liddy or Limbaugh, just listen for twenty minutes, on any given day, to one of their execrable programs.

Sonia Sotomayor would have to stand on a corner soapbox denigrating every person of non-Anglo extraction for a couple of decades before she could hope to equal George’s record, never mind the conduct of his government at large. That government, among other things, ensured that students from minority cultures will be penalized as their already substandard schools are further penalized under his No (White Middle-Class) Child Left Behind program, a program that makes third-class schools out of second-class schools and rewards both teachers and students in the already high-performing schools for being good little parrots of mainstream Anglo culture and knowledge.

Poor G. Gordon. He is lamenting the likelihood that at last we will have some decent Hispanic and female representation on the Supreme Court. We have had both, but not both together. The prospect of that combination of gender and ethnic heritage is apparently as frightening to Liddy as any human being with a dark complexion and a Middle Eastern surname is to Dick Cheney.

Maybe Liddy would like it if we simply waterboarded all Hispanics to find out if they are now, ever were or might become illegal aliens. Liddy excuses his racism and gender terror by contending that “the Supreme Court is not designed to be and should not be a representative body.” By which he means what? That it is not meant to be elected, as are our elected representatives? True. Incontrovertibly true. Even an idiot would know that Supreme Court justices are not elected representatives. (Perhaps Liddy would like a refresher course on the three branches of the federal government: executive, legislative and judicial. Perhaps he could figure out which two have elected representatives, and which one does not.)

Assuming even Liddy understands the genesis and functions of the three branches of federal government, does he mean then that the Supreme Court should not fairly reflect the composition of American society, thereby bringing to its decisions a breadth of wisdom that will incorporate, insofar as possible, all the jurisprudence and all the societal factors that the very broadly written United States Constitution was meant to embrace, as time marched on? If so, he is even more ignorant than I give him credit for being. The Supreme Court is not a representative body in the lunatic equation Liddy is so simplistically trying to construct. But it is a representative body in that it is meant to draw the best judicial minds from the entire population of the United States, the better thereby to render wise decisions that uphold the intent of the law, and the intent of the aforementioned very broadly and inclusively conceived United States Constitution.