Affirmative Action for Republicans

Conservatives bemoan affirmative action as “reverse racism” as if racism were something that could just be spun in the opposite direction from whence it came. Their charge, however erroneous, is that certain people are just given a job based on their appearance and not because of their qualifications. From that point of view, Harriet Miers is the perfect emblem of affirmative action. She is a candidate for a job that doesn’t have the qualifications, but does look the right way.

The problem, of course, is that affirmative action doesn’t do anything of the sort. No one gets hired or goes to college or becomes a doctor based solely on the color of their skin of the kind of genitals that they possess. People who claim otherwise are forgetting that affirmative action only helps to keep the door open to otherwise qualified candidates. People who receive assistance from affirmative action programs are still qualified to take on whatever position they are being offered.

But the bogeyman persists, which is strangely appropriate given that the Bush administration despises the doctrine so and yet tries to emulate it as much as possible. This nomination is the best evidence we have that opponents of affirmative action just don’t get it.

And that’s not even touching the audacity of the Right on this whole issue. Imagine a group so powerful, so spoiled, and so convinced of their own infallibility that they deride their own man the moment he steps away from them in any respect. This should teach Mr Bush the meaning of the old political adage “you gotta dance with them what brung you” and what happens when you stop moving to the music.