http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/06/evidence-in-current-history.htmlHere is a fact I trust: if we had access to Princeton's records, they would confirm the text below (from the Daily Princetonian, February 28, 1976):
J. David Germany and Sonia M. Sotomayor are the joint winners of this year's M. Taylor Pyne Honor Prize, the highest honor the university confers on an undergraduate.
The prize, given to the senior or seniors who have "manifested in outstanding fashion...excellent scholarship and effective support of the best interests of Princeton University," carries with it an award equal to a year's tuition, $3,900 this year, which will be shared by the two recipients.
The Pyne Prize is not the first recognition of Germany's scholarship-he has won both the Freshman First Year Honor Prize for the highest grades during freshman year and the Class of 1939 Princeton Scholar Prize for the highest academic standing prior to senior year.
Two years ago, after winning the freshman award, Germany said, "There's a choke factor on every final exam, and I'm really due for a big one. But I'm going to enjoy this as long as I can." Today, his transcript shows 21 A+s and 9 A's.
[...]
Sotomayor, a history major, has maintained almost straight A's for the last two years, but is especially known for her extracurricular activities.
Her dedication to the life of minority students at Princeton has been illustrated by her service on the Governance Board of the Third World Center and in her efforts to form the Latino Students Organization.
(On a side note: I bet myself, when I read this text, that the "Third World Center" is no longer the "Third World Center." I won. Yes, dear Princeton: I know, you know, and God knows, that "Third World" was once a term of approbation to you. This too is on your tab - not yet summed.)
Again, I am confident that Sonia Sotomayor's transcript "for the last two years" would show "almost straight A's." Who assigned her these straight A's? And why?
At this point we leave the domain of verifiable facts, and enter that of proof by authority. Half Sigma does not know. Nor do I. Nor does anyone.
I am quite confident that David Germany is a smart cookie. Unless his name is pronounced "DavEED HermANee" or even if it is, I doubt he is of Puerto Rican descent. Which means he is just another white guy. Which is not a quality of any value at all. But does mean that to get his Pyne Prize, he had to beat a lot of other very smart white guys.
What did Sonia Sotomayor have to do? Whom did she have to beat? It is not at all clear.
My judgment is that when we look at the career of a progressive race activist of the late 20th century, institutional records and personal endorsements tell us just about nothing. Every rule can be, and is, bent for these people. What's clear is that at Princeton, David Germany was first and foremost a student, and Sonia Sotomayor was first and foremost an activist. Why on earth would anyone expect her grades to mean anything?
I will repeat the analogy I used when I questioned Barack Obama's Columbia record: the academic records of college athletes, who are regularly found to have graduated from reputable universities, while remaining almost literally illiterate. Trusting the academic records of a race activist - especially when not actually disclosed, but merely attested to - is credulous beyond belief. Behind any Sotomayor is an army of activist professors whose commitment to la lucha is, shall we say, slightly greater than their commitment to the academic integrity of Princeton. At least, in the athlete's case, his coaches and his professors are different people.
This is what is truly remarkable about Judge Sotomayor: at every stage in her career, her success is plausibly and parsimoniously explained by her mere ancestry. In every institution in which she has produced a record of excellence, her biology below the neck is a sufficient explanation of that record. As historians, we cannot even exclude the possibility that she got her Princeton A's because someone helped her with her papers. We have no evidence for this, but we also have no evidence against it - and we are writing history, not conducting a criminal trial.
Thus I feel the best public evidence as to Judge Sotomayor's actual talents consists of her speeches, such as this famous one (published as an essay in the La Raza Law Journal). Here is a speech by a white male colleague of Judge Sotomayor's - ie, one who owes his position on the Second Circuit to neurology, not dermatology. If you retain any doubts, please compare.
(Judge Sotomayor's judicial opinions, while also notoriously bad, are much less interesting, because they are produced with at least the assistance of law clerks. Perhaps Judge Sotomayor does not choose the best clerks, but she has the best talent pool to hire from. They know how to use a comma. It's not clear to me that she does.)
Similarly, Barack Obama, or someone writing under his name, produced one book which betrays nontrivial, if hardly world-shattering, literary ability. And nothing else. As Jack Cashill has observed, the author of Dreams From My Father, whoever it was, misspells Frantz Fanon in a rather distinctive way - and is also fascinated by tidal hydrology. Frankly, if someone can point me to a work in which Shakespeare mentions "Franz Fanon" and speaks of rivers flowing backward, I'll be prepared to at least consider the possibility that the real author of Hamlet was Billy Ayers. I know what a solid case for literary attribution looks like. This is it.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Ordinary claims require ordinary evidence. The claim that a politician's book was ghostwritten is an ordinary claim. Especially in the post-FDR era, when it is simply assumed that the task of a politician is to take other peoples' words and claim them as one's own, an act that previous generations of American would have regarded as unspeakably contemptible.
If you don't believe that John F. Kennedy wrote Profiles in Courage, why should you believe that Barack Obama wrote Dreams from My Father? Because everyone says he did? This is the evidentiary standard of a fishwife, not a historian. Why should you regard it as true, until proven false? Why not regard it as false, until proven true? What percentage of political memoirs are actually written by the purported author?
In fact we have almost no evidence of any historical validity that describes the early life of Barack Obama. Take the famous "birth certificate" controversy: I believe that Barack Obama was almost certainly born in Hawaii, but only because the converse seems labored and unlikely. The ordinary English meaning of birth certificate is an original physical document, produced at the actual date of birth, ie 1961. It is not a printout of a database record, which is what we have.
Again, I am confident that this document exists for Barack Obama. The refusal to disclose it is just as contemptuous and contemptible as everything else in the process that produced him. Stonewalling on all life records of this man - from birth certificates to college transcripts - is a classic Alinskyian maneuver, pure vicious hardball. It serves the exact purpose it achieves: to generate as many conspiracy theories as possible, most of which are false. Any actual dirt will disappear in this cloud of vain speculation. This is the regard for truth, decency and honor which Americans can expect from their rulers today. Were it actually discovered that Barack Obama was born in Papua New Guinea, I would find it far less damning.
Nor is this excessive respect for institutional authority an isolated glitch in the epistemology of current history, as most practice it today. It is actually a symptom of a much deeper syndrome: the tendency to analyze democracy in terms of its appearance, not its reality, even when that reality is known to everyone.
Here is a perfect example - courtesy of Powerline, which is by far the best neoconservative blog. The authors of Powerline are top-flight attorneys with excellent political connections, and the scholar they are quoting, Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books, whose mission is "to make war on the progressive administrative state," has a Ph.D in government from Harvard - an honor that does not appear to have been conferred on account of dermatology. In short, these individuals have the right talents, the right knowledge, and the right enemies.
And yet, by my standards of evidence, all this is a waste of time. The error is at step one:
Claremont Review of Books editor Charles Kesler sat down last summer to read the books and speeches of Barack Obama. Professor Kesler concluded that Obama is a serious and ambitious politician who has set about to engineer a transformative leftward shift in American politics and government.
We see that Professor Kesler starts his work with one completely unsubstantiated assumption. He assumes that "the books and speeches of Barack Obama" were written by Barack Obama.
Indeed, he knows for a fact that the "speeches of Barack Obama" were not written by Barack Obama. Fifteen seconds on Google will tell Professor Kesler that he is, at the very least, reading the books of Barack Obama and the speeches of Jon Favreau. As we've seen, he is more likely reading the books of Billy Ayers and the speeches of Jon Favreau (to name only two Obama ghosts). These certainly tell us something about Billy Ayers and Jon Favreau. Do we care? The former, at least, is certainly no longer employed in this capacity.
