Media Matters' Boehlert goes head-to-head with Tancredo over Sotomayor on CNN

Tom Tancredo has as much cred as a dead fish.

Yeah, of course it's AOK for Alito to say the same thing because... oh, he's white! Whites are, by default, supposed to be the 'superior' people in this country so they get a pass when they say this stuff.

Conservatism in action, folks.

Great job! You beat Tancredo with just a 1/3 of the time.

Boehlert did a better job than Frisch, but he still should've come at Tancredo with some harder facts. For instance, if the context is, as Sanchez said, 10 minutes worth, then come at Tancredo with some more highlights.

The right wing has a standard MO when it comes to these interviews and opponents of it, centrist, left, or otherwise, should be ready for it. That being said, Sanchez didn't leave Boehlert enough time to do much with the interview.

Thank you Eric for letting him go on and on and on. That is how you let your opponent bury himself. You came off a cool and in control and Tancredo came off, well, like Tancredo. Victory for EB!!

Tancredo is a jackass.

Not 60 seconds after he says judges should ONLY be concerned with the LAW, he says it's OK for Alito to bring his life experience and family experience to the bench.

And Boehlert is exactly right in saying that Sotomayor's comment is actually LESS controversial than Alito's.

I agree that Boehlert should have made more of an effort to point out Tancredo's absurd, self-defeating argument. But whaddyagonnado when the discussion is so clearly slanted in favor of the conservative, especially when it comes to time given to make one's case...

You were great, Eric, but god, I wanted to pull my hair out because that freakin' idiot -- i.e. Tancredo -- wouldn't let you get a word in edge wise! I love his reaction when Sanchez quoted Alito saying the same thing. Tancredo tried to dance around that because he knew his argument was pretty much dismantled from that moment on.

At least he didn't use Hannity's debate tactic when confronted like that: "We're not talking about Alito here, we're talking about Sotomayor's reverse-racism!" Y'know, I always felt the Repiglicans were intellectually bankrupt, but when Joe Scarborough and Bill O'Reilly are the voice of reason regarding their slime tactics nowadays, you know that their ideas are in the gutter.

This Sanchez clown is such a puppet. Why doesn't he just work for Al Jazeera.

most of the segment was sanchez and tancredo yelling, and eric just sitting there watching. how was that fairly arguing both sides?

Eric succintly demonstrated Tancredo was factually incorrect, ignoring all context, grasping at straws, and being purposefully obtuse by ignoring prior examples.

Tancredo's headlong rush to the gutter was blatently obvious. Eric interjected just enough and with an even "temperment" that framed Tancredo as a borderline hysteric with a pathetic argument.

This piece is quite interesting. It's about a situation Sotomayor had to deal with right out of college - seems she was subjected to some very inappropriate racist sounding questions that could have damaged her career. Any of the rightwing apologists here care to comment on this?

While I think Boehlert did a better job of defending and explaining Sotomayor's statements than many others in the media have, he actually fell short on landing the knockout punch in that debate. And all he had to do in order to land that punch, was carry it a little further and rely on the actual "Full" quote that Sanchez put up on the screen earlier in the interview after he'd made his point about the context of the whole thing being within the scope of dealing with race and gender discrimination cases. Here's how he should have handled it:

"Listen, Rick, here it is in a nutshell. Sonia Sotomayor made the statement she made in the context of speaking about race and sex discrimination cases. And in light of that, let's take a good hard look at what she said. She said, as you just showed, and I quote, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

So, she's saying in effect, that in any case involving race or sex discrimination she would HOPE that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would MORE OFTEN THAN NOT reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

She is not advocating that white males are incapable of reaching a better conclusion than Latina women. She's not stating that a Latina women would AUTOMATICALLY reach a better conclusion than a white male. In fact, she's not even stating anything at all about what WOULD happen. She's stating a HOPE. A hope that the richness of the Latina women's experiences would better inform her judgment in regard to race and sex discrimination cases than a white male's who has never been in those shoes.

In fact, she goes on to recognize that there are many cases in which white males, specifically the 9 white males on the Supreme Courts decades ago, reached great conclusions when it comes to race and sexual discrimination cases. However, she also points out that there have been, at times, "wise" justices such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose conclusions on such cases were, and I believe this is the prevailing thought nowadays, completely wrong. Her point being then, that she would HOPE that someone who's lived the life of a minority woman would be able to better make a judgment than say...Oliver Wendell Holmes had in those cases.

There is nothing racist with that, and anyone who purports to make it so is grasping at straws out of desperation."

That's what Boehlert should have said. I know he was working under certain time constraints, but if he'd prepared, he probably could have said something like that, had his assistants pare it down a bit, and gotten it all out under thirty seconds to a minute. If he had, the entire case against Sotomayor would have been destroyed, right there. The emphasis should have been placed on talking about the fact she said "I HOPE" and "MORE OFTEN THAN NOT". That is the knockout punch, and he didn't deliver it.

nuance, indeed... while alito did say his experiences shape his decisions, if he had said that he hoped his experiences as a white man would more often than not make him a better judge than a latina woman, he'd rightly be branded a racist...

Okay, say the President has the opportunity to choose another candidate. Let's move on. Any way, mitigating circumstances is the same as empathy. GO Eric! Let me know if i can put something in your cup to work with. Sincerely

This is priceless hipocracy. This whining on-and-on about "let's consider the conext" from Boehlert is coming from the head of an organization that makes its living on taking one or 2 sentences from Limbaugh's 3-hour show and raping him over it......Oh yea, and without considering the context! Hipocrits.

Sotomayor should be finding the best civil rights attorney she can! She will have more that 15,000 on her checking or savings account then. She'll really hit a jackpot if she pays these libelist remarks some attention. These statements are not made as a matter of opinion, they are made as if they are facts! When in all truthfulness, they are just opinions that have not been substantiated.