Ward on Words

Against what (at times) seemed to be insurmountable odds, Americans have re-elected a black man presiding over a bitterly divided America still wallowing in a sludge-filled economic trough. How did this happen? A miracle? God's will? What happens when white men became minorities in America?   Perhaps.

It seems we have come a long way since the conversation about the "pube on the coke can" that we all heard about during the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. And there seems to be (at least for now) less outrage expressed about Sonia Sotomayor than that which erupted over the Bork nomination for SCOTUS way back in the Reagan era. And though I confess I haven't read obsessively about Obama's pick for the US Supreme Court, I haven't heard the word "abortion" bandied about much over the nominee. No, the buzz that's racing through the blogosphere about Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's first nominee for the Supreme Court, is focused on a single word. Empathy. Though the Republicans have not yet made it known if they're going to "bork" Sotomayer's nomination, we should be heartened, I guess, that much of the chatter swirling about the nomination of Sonia Sotomayer concerns the quality of her "empa...

Karl Rove says one of the most astonishing things in today's Wall Street Journal. You can read the entire story here . But check out what he says about Obama's stimulus plan: "The bill he signs will create a raft of new programs and be the biggest peacetime spending increase in American history, which will give us larger deficits and create pressure to raise taxes." (italics mine) "The biggest peacetime spending increase...." Has Karl Rove forgotten we're at war? On two fronts? Because we needed to stop Hussein from blowing us up with all those nukes he had - but when we found out the nukes were figments of the CIA's overactive imagination, we then shifted the purpose of the war to building democracy in a region not known for the love of personal freedoms? And we're still searching for Bin Laden? I knew the Bushies were going to offer up some revisionist history for us to digest, but this - wow! Rove's calling us a nation at pea...