Senator Embarrassment on gender and race

Dennis Prager nails it when he calls Senator Boxer "Senator Embarrassment". As he points out, even Californians who disagree with Senator Feinstein aren't embarrassed by her, as a general rule. But with Senator Boxer, jaw-dropping, embarrassing statements just keep coming, year after year.

Here, our junior senator, Barbara Boxer, gets arrogant about her title while questioning a general. Because she worked so hard to get that title. Her bristly feminist hostility seems so oddly out of date. Plus juvenile and rude, especially given the setting. And ignorant of the military tradition of referring to superior officers as "sir" or "ma'am". She was being honored, not disrespected.

I don't remember Senator Boxer's election as being a result of her hard work (especially compared to the work of becoming a Brigadier General). If the California Democratic Party machine had not been so dishonest and sleazy, we would have had the courteous, serious thinker Bruce Herschensohn as a senator, instead of "Senator Boxer, Ma'am". I don't think the party machine has reformed much since then. That's one reason that our state is in such sad financial shape.

And here she goes again, playing the race card against a black man. He takes offense at the suggestion that he should agree with the leaders of other black organizations just because he is black. Rightly so. The liberal hostility toward minorities who "leave the reservation" is a corrosive thing in American life. Senator Boxer was pretty clumsy in presenting her expectation that all blacks should think alike.

Interestingly, he got away with taking offense even though he was not expressing the official liberal "consensus". That's sort of rare. But remember, from Andrew Breitbart's heirarchy of political correctness:

Black trumps Woman.

From the comments: "Evidently, she was shaken but not stirred! . . why didn't she object when this guy called her ma'am?" She needs some shaking up from time to time or she'll get more and more condescending. "It was like being in Mississippi in 1945."

On the other hand, James Taranto makes a good point:

We watched the video, and we can see Alford's point. Boxer does come across as condescending, and, weirdly, she doesn't even seem to understand why a he would find it offensive for her to rebut his argument not on the merits but via a racially specific appeal to authority.

Yet Alford, by speaking on behalf the National Black Chamber of Commerce, is himself relying on just such a racially specific appeal to authority. We tend to agree with Alford and disagree with Boxer on the subject they were discussing, but the rule of etiquette he invoked--blacks may claim authority on account of their race, but whites may not seek to undermine that authority--put her at an unfair disadvantage, one that was particularly unwarranted given that the topic at hand had nothing to do with race.

On the third hand, she didn't think she had to prepare for her opponent.

More:

Boxer’s entire M.O. as senator is to wield liberal ethnic or gender groups as a bat to bludgeon any criticism to her agenda. That’s not debating, that’s bullying. That’s not respecting racial diversity. It’s using racial groups as a weapon.

Follow the second link for an interesting history of the phrase, "Truth to Power"and Boxer's dismissing of Secretary Condoleeza Rice's positions because Rice didn't have children. The last link concerns Dick Durbin's bigotry - some people are just genetically incapable of understanding others.

I'm looking forward to the time when legislators can get down to the business before them without diverting attention to unrelated race and gender sensitivities and assumptions. And when they actually pay attention to their constituents instead of their desire to increase their own power. Time for some new faces in Washington and some new political tactics in Sacramento.