Tag: elena kagan

#rsrh Losing Dowd on Kagan.

The way this administration is handling Supreme Court pick (and current Solicitor General) Elena Kagan may just have more Left-pushback than I assumed: it’s making Maureen Dowd wax most sarcastic.

[‘Voice’ of Joe Biden]: This week, when the president first told me he’d chosen Elena Kagan to serve on the Supreme Court, I couldn’t help but smile. I met her 20 years ago, when she took a break from teaching school and chasing guys to join my staff in the Senate, and even back then, it was easy to picture her in a black robe.

Of course, Elena prefers to see herself in something frillier, because she’s a girl’s girl. Just try dragging her out of La Perla! And I’m sure, under those robes, she’ll be rocking some Juicy Couture jeans and Christian Louboutin suede boudoir slides. Uh-oh. Did I sound gay there for a minute? Well, I’m not. And neither is Elena Kagan.

[snip]

Elena is anything but a history-making, barrier-breaking, proud, strong, happy gay woman. She’s a garden-variety, sad, scary, single, childless career woman who can’t get a man because she’s too smart, works too much and refuses to settle.

I’d like to repeat for the record – once again – that wide swathes of the Right are largely indifferent to whether or not SG Kagan is gay. Although if it turns out that she is we’d quite like to know why this administration felt the need to lie about it.

News media starting to get ornery over Kagan thing.

Not that the White House cares.  Or do most of the people reading this, except in a theoretical, pass-the-popcorn sense, I suppose:

The White House today posted on its website a video allowing Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan to speak “in her own words” about her personal history and perspective.

In the interview, conducted by a White House staffer who produces videos for the administration, Kagan discusses her childhood, parents and professional career. At one point she jokes that people get confused between her job as solicitor general arguing cases before the Supreme Court and the attorney general, who puts “the labels on the cigarette packages.”

While the White House seems to believe the American people deserve to hear from Kagan, it has not made her available to reporters. That prompted some consternation at today’s White House briefing.

As most folks involved with the VRWC will happily tell you, this is a totally-expected and unsurprising gambit in the administration’s ongoing move to turn the media’s 2008 infatuation with the President into whole-scale neutering. The White House’s logic is compelling, in its way: they know what they want Kagan to say, they have no intention of letting her say anything to the media that is off-message, so why even bother with the formality of an outside interview? There are plenty of people in the Executive branch of government who know how to operate a video camera, so get one of those, do the interview, hand it to the media, and tell them to get it on the nightly news. That’s how it worked in the campaign, right? Doing it this nakedly is just more… efficient.

It will be fascinating to see whether this ends up being the Obama administration’s War of Jenkins’ Ear moment. Particularly if the White House ends up playing the part of the Spanish…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Kagan assaulted by Left for racism! #rsrh

For the record: I’m officially uninterested in defending Elena Kagan as a possible USSC pick.  She’s not of my party, and neither is the President who would be nominating her: and as Ed Morrissey notes here I share the plurality position that what we need now is a more conservative court.  So if the President wants my help on this, give me somebody I’m interested in helping.  Alternatively, he can take Ann Althouse’s (deviously) poisoned advice, nominate an open, proud liberal, and settle this nonsense once and for all.  Either way, William Jacobson’s examination of the Left’s preliminary character assassination of Kagan (H/T Instapundit) is merely of academic* interest to me…

…except for this bit. Continue reading Kagan assaulted by Left for racism! #rsrh

#rsrh Ben Domenech freaks out the White House.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Hot Air readers.

Having reviewed the completely voluntary decision of the White House to freak out over Ben Domenech’s mention in passing of now-probable USSC nominee Elena Kagan’s rumored sexuality – and before anybody freaks out in their turn, note this passage, please:

…as the reaction from Julian Sanchez and Matt Yglesias shows, I was not alone in that apparently inaccurate belief.

…one wonders what all the fuss was about.  After all, Ben, Sanchez, Yglesias, Glenn freaking Greenwald – and for that matter, myself – are all more or less in agreement that a strong reaction to this is at least a bit odd.  In a world where Senators Cornyn & Sessions can both readily and for the record state that sexual orientation is not a barrier for a Supreme Court spot, why would the White House jump on this issue with both feet?  And why did they, by the way, do so in a manner that explicitly and authoritatively denies that Ms. Kagan is gay?  It’s a mystery… Continue reading #rsrh Ben Domenech freaks out the White House.