John Cornyn is not a stupid man, no matter how convincing he may act. He is a former Justice on the Texas Supreme Court and we’re just going to come out and say that one can’t get to those positions unless one is fairly brilliant. But we absolutely must add that intelligence doesn’t do anyone any good when one’s mind is so ideology-driven that it overcomes one’s higher functions. Partisanship can turn the entire mind into some sort of reptilian, fight-flight thing, which is about where we see Cornyn today.

Cornyn thought he had a wringer today. He had Kristen M. Clarke, a Biden nominee for Assistant Attorney General, stone-cold – and Cornyn was aiming to get his name in the paper tomorrow. He was going to be on Hannity tonight. 

As everyone knows, when one is nominated for an important position in the federal government, (especially the Justice Department), one will have their entire lives investigated for anything that might be fodder for those who oppose the nomination. One might think that an essay claiming that black people are genetically superior to white people would be the type of thing that would come up in one’s hearing, indeed – it would likely have precluded someone from ever being nominated.

At no point did Cornyn stop to think, “Is there something here that I am missing? It would be odd to nominate someone who said something so controversial, maybe I’m missing something?” Perhaps he should have. It might’ve prevented his humiliation. Cornyn began his questioning of Clarke

“Well, maybe there’s a misprint, dating back to your days in school when you seem to argue that African-Americans were genetically superior to Caucasians. Is that correct?”

How big of him! “Maybe it’s a misprint of one of the most charged issues in America.” Sure, they would allow that to happen.

Clarke seemed to relish her reply. “No, Senator, I believe you’re referring to an op-ed that I wrote at the age of 19 about the Bell Curve Theory, a racist book that equated DNA with genetics and race. As a Black student at Harvard at that time, we took grave offense to this book.”

“This op-ed opened with a satirical reference to the statement that you just noted. Contemporaneous reporting by the campus paper made very clear that this was not a view that I espoused.”

Clarke made her intentions clear, she was “seeking to hold up a mirror and put one racist theory alongside another to challenge people as to why we were unwilling to wholly reject the racist theory that defined The Bell Curve book.”

It sounds like Clarke’s answer was clear enough to get through Cornyn’s ideology and maybe he won’t get his name in the paper tomorrow: “So this was satire?”

“No f’ing shit, Senator,” Clarke said with a smile. *Actually, her specific quote was “Absolutely, Senator.”

Watch:

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Peace, y’all
Jason
[email protected] and on Twitter @JasonMiciak