If the headline read “Pat Buchanan: Not Enough Muslims on the Supreme Court,” that’d be something. Instead, what we get is the utterly predictable: “Pat Buchanan: Too Many Jews on the Supreme Court.”
Surprise surprise, Pat’s been Jew-counting. Those damn Jews are taking over our most sacred institutions. When all else fails — and the lesbian “smear” campaign against Elena Kagan is clearly faltering (amazing that it’s 2010 and we still talk of “accusations” of lesbianism) — there’s always good old antisemitism to fall back on. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it: “If Jews didn’t exist, antisemites would have had to invent them.”
Count ’em, says Buchanan from his current perch as a commentator on MSNBC. Three of ’em if Kagan gets the nod! Out of nine. It’s a calamity for Christian America — a separate little cabal there on the bench, out to corrupt the purity of Christian values. What do you mean, Judeo-Christian? Nobody pays any attention to that Judeo bit. That’s just another sop to the Jews, adulterating Christianity. We have to put a stop to them. We have to stand up to this canker in our society. Who the hell do they think they are?
None of the three are religious? Ha, you don’t believe that, do you? It’s in their blood — the stain, as Philip Roth put it, the fatal flaw, as bad as being black. And hey, if they’re not religious, that makes it even worse. What do they believe in? Abortion? Gay marriage? Civil rights? The Antichrist?
Thank God (as it were) we have no less an authority than Richard Nixon’s assurance that Buchanan is neither an antisemite nor a Jew-hater (the precise distinction clear only to Nixon), but “a good patriotic American.” The Nixon seal of approval is always reassuring.
Is it worth pointing out that only four Jews have sat on the Supreme Court before? That a third of all justices have been Episcopalians, who are 1.7% of all Americans? That the Constitution upheld by the court forbids discrimination on the basis of religion? No — that’s only stooping to the level of Buchanan demagogery.
Come on, Obama: rock Buchanan’s world and nominate a Muslim next time.
Or even — gasp! — an atheist.
Wasn’t someone counting Catholics on the Court recently? Some astronomical number, like four or five, I forget.
I think it’s six. Feeling Waspish, anyone?
Gasp, indeed! They’ve had to really scrape the dregs to find this hook! Gasp and grrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Little is more feared or reviled in this country than those of us who either don’t believe in god or are unable to accept organized religions’ versions of a “higher being.” And, yes, the other justices are Catholic (I wish more of them were catholic LC).
It points to the fact that maybe status as a robust democracy should not keep out people whose views it found offensive.
In particular reguard to Israel barring Mr. Chomsky today he said: “There were two basic points,” he told the interviewer. “One was that the government of Israel does not like the kinds of things I say — which puts them into the category of I suppose every other government in the world.”