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David Letterman’s confession last night that he has slept with women he works with was a perfect window into the twisted psyche of the comic. (Read Troy Patterson’s excellent close reading here.) This is why women don’t want to stay married to comedians (the subject of Judd Apatow’s Funny People). They can’t break form, even in what should be the most shattering and intimate of moments. Even as Letterman is changing our view of him forever he is exactly himself, with his deadpan delivery and self-mockery. There is hardly a moment when you’re totally sure whether he’s joking or not ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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Rebecca Traister has already expertly parsed Jeff
Rosen's hasty, uncareful slamming of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for what it
shows about how we—actually, white male legal pundits—talk about
women who are up for huge jobs like the Supreme Court. Dahlia and Hanna
dissect the put-down and the code words, too. At the National Journal,
Stuart Taylor Jr., who also jumped on the anti-Sotomayor bandwagon, has
had the grace to jump off, writing in an editor's note that he regrets
being "unfair" to the Second Circuit judge, in particular by "citing anonymous claims that she has been 'masquerading as a moderate,' which I do not know to be true."
But it's too late to sheathe the claws. They've already produced this dreadful, not funny David Letterman parody of Sotomayor as a screechy gavel-banger. Is that Spanish she's speaking? But of course. The Washington Post Wednesday quoted "a lawyer who has been consulted on the Obama selection process" saying that Sotomayor may
have to overcome a perception that she "doesn't play well with others." Today, a news story in the paper makes nice.
Let's just hope that anonymous supposedly-consulted lawyer is wrong and
the Obama administration doesn't care about the swirl of perceptions
and is doing it's own reporting. There is an abundance of excellent
women candidates, as Dahlia and Chris Wilson and I have been discovering as
we begin to read up and write about them. Picking one of them isn't
affirmative action, no matter what the white guys writing the columns
say. (And no, Ben Wittes, I'm not crying for
the excellent white men who aren't at the top of the list this time,
and it's not just Democrats who take identity politics into account
when they make Supreme Court selections—hello, Clarence Thomas, not to mention Harriet Miers.)
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