African American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people," Bush said at a White House Conference on Social Security in January. "That needs to be fixed."
Republicans also pulled out the card for Miguel Estrada:
To reject Estrada, said Sen. Charles Grassley, the normally mild-spoken Iowa Republican, "would be to shut the door on the American dream of Hispanic Americans everywhere."...Hatch neatly mixed the ideological and the ethnic. If Estrada were rejected, Hatch said, it would close the door to any nominee who was, "number one, Hispanic, number two, Republican, number three, possibly conservative and, number four, may have some ideas of his or her own."
Dionne says the practice dates back to the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas:
The new conservative political correctness actually goes back at least to the battle over Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's nomination. When Thomas was fighting charges that he had sexually harassed an employee, he declared his opponents guilty of a "high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves." Whatever you thought of the mess that surrounded Thomas's nomination, could he have chosen a more racially charged metaphor?
A few noticed the blatent hypocrisy regarding Estrada:
This was too much for House Democratic Caucus Chairman Bob Menendez. "Republicans and Senator Hatch in particular can't have it both ways," Menendez said at the time. "They can't blatantly call for the end of affirmative action by characterizing it as a quota system while, at the same time, demanding that we support all Hispanic nominees simply because they are Hispanic."
What's good for the goose should be good for the gander, no? Dionne asks:
Why is it wrong for liberals to invoke the injustices of race (or class) when they talk about heath care, child care and taxes, but just ducky for Bush to make similar arguments on behalf of Social Security privatization?