What’s Good For The White Goose

Read this over at Suspect Device and reproducing it in its resplendent, must-read entirety.  If rich/white Americans do something to get ahead, a-ok, wow, resourceful!  If unfortunate people of color do similarly, the level playing field has been irrecoverably damaged.  And there you have it.

Commenter Harry Hopkins at CAMPOS: To the manner born

I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle“s chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon“s domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. ˜I oppose it,“ Irving replied. ˜It subverts meritocracy.“

Remember this when you judge Sonia Sotomayor’s words that were picked for scrutiny.  Think about it.

And Russ Feingold is my hero. I suggest we be wary of the phrase ˜judicial activism,“ he said. So many of the rulings of the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court can be described as activist.