Twisting Himself Into a Human PretzelIs MyDD's incredible 12-year-old blogger Matt Stoller.
Matt is upset that people are portraying Nancy Pelousy as motivated by vindictiveness in committee assignments. At first, he admits that Alcee Hastings is inappropriate for the Intelligence Committee chair, but not because he was impeached:
I don't mean the rejection of Hastings, because substantively he's a cipher on Intelligence matters and that's reason enough to find someone more suitable to hold this critical post. I mean the way he's being insulted by the punditocracy. It's not an unusual situation to have a black man wrongfully accused of a crime in this country, and to so callously throw Hastings aside as tainted, even though he was acquitted of the charges and chosen repeatedly by voters to hold public office, looks insensitive at first, but when you combine this with the needless dig at Menendez, it looks a lot to me like a whole lot of brown people are considered tainted with no evidence whatsoever.Yeah, it's because they're brown. Not because Hastings was impeached (and Pelousy voted in favor of impeachment), but because he was brown. And Menendez isn't a crook who rented space to a 501(c)(3) in his building that he arranged funding for, he's guilty of being in the Senate while brown.
