CHEAP, EVEN FOR PAT BUCHANAN…. The New York Times had a report over the weekend on Sonia Sotomayor’s background, which noted that the judge, as a young woman at Princeton, “spent summers reading children’s classics she had missed in a Spanish-speaking home and ‘re-teaching’ herself to write ‘proper English’ by reading elementary grammar books.”
Pat Buchanan, at his most Pat Buchanan-esque, is not only using this anecdote to mock the judge, but he continues to push a baseless, insulting far-right line about Sotomayor’s intelligence.
“Well, I, again in that Saturday piece, she went to Princeton. She graduated first in her class it said. But she herself said she read, basically classic children’s books to read and learn the language and she read basic English grammars and she got help from tutors. I think that, I mean if you’re, frankly, if you’re in college and you’re working on Pinocchio or on the troll under the bridge, I don’t think that’s college work.”
Jason Linkins responded that Buchanan “is just knowingly being a jackass.” That’s clearly true.
Amanda Terkel drives the point home nicely: “Buchanan has long claimed that Hispanic immigrants are resistant to learning English and has said that it would be easier for them to ‘assimilate’ if they did so…. So basically, Buchanan yells when Hispanics are allegedly unwilling to learn English. However, when they make an attempt to do so, he mocks them as being dumb.”
