October 15, 2007
By Wendy E. Long
Whoopi: Ask Senators to Apologize to Judge Southwick
By Wendy E. Long
Just when you thought "white male in the South" didn't equal "presumptive racist," a disgusting spectacle with that familiar theme is unfolding in the United States Senate.
Call it "Nifong Justice" -- after the Durham, North Carolina district attorney who contrived to charge three white Duke lacrosse players with rape of a black woman, charging them with a "deep racial motivation." Nifong lost his prosecutor's job, was disbarred, and even went to jail for his racist character assassination of the lacrosse players.
And earlier this week on "The View," Whoopi Goldberg called upon Al Sharpton to apologize to the lacrosse team. Sharpton jumped on the bandwagon with Nifong and publicly accused the white young men, judging them not on their merits or on due process of law, but on the basis of some politically correct agenda having nothing to do with them. In Whoopi's words, that process put the players "through hell."
Let's hope Whoopi or someone else demands an apology from the United States Senators who are now putting someone else "through hell." This time the target is not college lacrosse players, but an honorable judge who has served our country in Iraq. A white male Southerner, of course.
Next week, the Senate is likely to vote whether to support a liberal filibuster of Judge Leslie Southwick, President Bush's latest nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the federal appellate court for the deep South states of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.
Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), and a cadre of hard-core liberals are waging a war of character assassination against Judge Southwick, charging that in his tenure as a Mississippi state appellate court judge, Southwick did not "side with" the politically correct litigants, such as civil rights plaintiffs, frequently enough.
Durbin is playing the race card against Judge Southwick over a case where a state employee made a racial slur, using the "N" word, against a black fellow employee. A state administrative board found that the employee who uttered the slur should not be fired because it was a single instance of misconduct, not a repeat offense or a pattern.
Judge Southwick and the Mississippi state appellate court on which he sat at the time ruled, as the law required them to, that because there was sufficient evidence for the administrative board's decision, the court as a matter of law could not overturn it.
In other words, Judge Southwick followed the law, as his job required him to do. But Durbin is attacking him, saying Southwick can't be fair in civil rights cases.
Durbin is doing essentially what Nifong and Sharpton did: attacking someone else as a racist in order to advance his own political agenda. Never mind the facts, never mind the law, just play the race card against a white man in the south and you know you have a good chance to bring him down.
The Judiciary Committee voted 10 to 9, in favor of Judge Southwick. That was in August. Since then, Harry Reid has been blocking a full Senate vote on Judge Southwick at the behest of outside liberal groups, and Senators like Dick Durbin continue to do their bidding in launching unfounded and race-based attacks. But the single Democrat on the Judiciary Committee who voted for Judge Southwick, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal.), rejected Durbin's race-baiting. Feinstein said of Judge Southwick: "I don't believe he's a racist. I don't believe I'm a racist."
Good for her. The likely first vote on Southwick next week will be on "cloture" whether to bring the nomination to a yes-or-no vote by the full Senate. The Nifong-Sharpton Senators, like Durbin, are so determined to bring down Judge Southwick that they are pressing for a Democratic filibuster: to prevent his man who has served his nation in war from even having a fair vote on the Senate floor.
Reid is caught between them, and the Democrats who won't make the Nifong-Sharpton play, like Senator Feinstein. We'll see which Senators will evaluate an honorable judge and war veteran on his merits, and which ones will play the race card to drag him, as Whoopi said, "through hell" and make him a pawn in some other political battle.
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