The NY Times editorializes that Justice Janice Rogers Brown is "out of the mainstream." This is getting repetative. So many Republican appointees are "out of the mainstream" that one wonders where this "mainstream" can be found. Certainly not in the NY Times newsroom, which probably has more parapalegic gay Hispanics than Republicans. In particlular:
As an archconservative justice on the California Supreme Court, she has declared war on the mainstream legal values that most Americans hold dear.Such as affirmative action, municipal takings, gerrymanders and general governmental repressions of liberty. Ann Coulter suggests that
...if your "mainstream" includes Roman Polanski, Michael Moore, Howard Dean and Jacques Chirac, then Brown really is "out of the mainstream." This proverbial "stream" they're constantly referring to is evidently located somewhere in France.This may be unfair to the Times, coming from Coulter who is arguably not in the Times' official mainstream guidebook. Let's see what a more moderate center-right publication -- the Wall Street Journal -- says:
As Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Justice Thomas and others can attest, liberals reserve their harshest and most personal attacks for minorities with the audacity to wander off the ideological plantation.Well, there's one possible answer -- the NY Times is simply using racist code-words for "all mainstream minorities are liberals." Her opposition to racial quotas (in a decision supported by a unanimous CA Supreme Court) in the case of Prop 209 (passed by the citizens of California) was of particular affront to the Times. I guess this means that the citizens of California are also out of the mainstream (and/or racist). It seems that Justice Brown, born to an Alabama sharecropper's family in 1949, does not have the Time's refined sensitivity to discrimination and poverty that would be necessary to be considered "part of the mainstream."