Diversely Sucky
Michael Walsh writes at the New York Post about the president's crop of unqualified -- but "diverse"! -- judicial appointees:

President Obama has said that one quality he prizes highly in his judicial appointments is empathy. "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom," he told a Planned Parenthood conference way back in 2007. "The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges."

Alas, according to the American Bar Association, empathy isn't good enough. Last week, news leaked that the ABA has secretly informed the White House that it rated 14 out of a potential 185 nominees for federal judgeships "unqualified" -- most of them women and minorities put forth in the name of "diversity."

Fourteen may not seem like many, but The New York Times (which broke the story) reports that it's more than the combined number of judges the ABA "flunked" during the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (who stopped submitting his nominations to the ABA).

After some huffing about racism and discrimination against women, the administration chose not to nominate any of the 14.

With Republicans continuing to block many of Obama's choices, it's no time for another losing fight.

But this won't stop Obama & Co.'s mad pursuit of "diversity" (narrowly defined in terms of race and sex) or from elevating politically correct "empathy" over what should be a judge's chief consideration, fidelity to the law.

As of August, the Senate had confirmed 97 of Obama's federal judicial nominees; nearly half of them have been women, a fifth African-American and 11 percent Hispanic.

"The president wants the federal courts to look like America," explained the White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler. "He wants people who are coming to court to feel like it's their court as well.

Wow. When I see a man or a black person in a judgeship, should I not feel it's my court as well? Does the judge have to look like me for it to be justice -- or just be just?

Further, "diversity" turns out to be pretty much meaningless. How "diverse" were Obama's Supreme Court appointments of Sonia Sotomayor (the Court's first "wise Latina") and Elena Kagan? True, they added two women to the court, but they also added two more Ivy League lawyers -- Yale (Sotomayor) and Harvard (Kagan).

In fact, every sitting justice studied law at either Harvard or Yale. There's nary a one from a state university or even from another Ivy League school. With six Catholics and three Jews, not a single member of the founding WASP establishment sits on the court. How's that for diversity?

For the record, I think it's amazing that we have a non-white president such a short time after we had Jim Crow laws. I just wish this particular guy weren't president.