Supreme Court nominees: Give the people what they want…

I have to chuckle about the rather incoherent response to Elena Kagan’s recent nomination to the Supreme Court. First off I will admit that I have some trepidation regarding such an unknown quantity replacing one of the few committed liberal voices in our judiciary. However the particular strain of criticism I am referring to seems to boarder on the fucking idiotic. For example I give you this labored talking point from a concerned citizen featured today in the Letters to the Editor section of my local newspaper, the Seattle Times:

“What could Supreme Court Nominee Elena Kagan possibly know about ordinary people? She was educated at an elite high school, an elite college, an elite law school and Oxford University, with two federal court clerkships and teaching posts at elite law schools.
The rest of her work life was spent in elite jobs in Washington, D.C. She has no reason to know anything about ordinary people — unless of course, when President Obama says ordinary, he means those with a career path like Kagan’s, which is far from ordinary.”

Now this statement might have some meaning if the other people on the court were just plain ordinary folks.
But since all the Supremes (except Stevens) come from a similar elite background, the word elite is rendered utterly meaningless. I would hope the letter writer isn’t just being mindlessly partisan here, hopefully they wrote similar letters back when Kagan’s fellow elitists Samuel Alito (Yale), and John Roberts (Harvard) were being nominated, but I’m guessing not…

Let’s face it America, you don’t get nominated to the high court if you spend your time doing average American things like getting sloppy drunk in the infield at Talladaga. My question is this, does the average American really want somebody just like them being on the nation’s highest court? If so I must say that is the kind of thinking that bad ideas are made of…

The writer seems to imply that only someone with an average education and background should be nominated. That the President should pick someone who understands firsthand the plight of *real* America. If that is the case, we would end up with someone just like me. I went to decidedly un-elite public schools, including a (gasp) public university. I have worked as a dishwasher, a pizza delivery boy, a picture framer, a retail manager, and I was a bartender for several years before finding work in the science field.

I’m not sure how much more mundane my career track could be, but I’m guessing it may fit this douche-bag’s person’s criteria for being non-elitist. I am not a lawyer, but since fancy law degrees tend to make you less-than-ordinary, that really shouldn’t be a consideration. More importantly, I do have actual real-world legal experience. Now I haven’t done anything impressive like argue before the Supreme Court, but as is common among the plain folk, I did defend myself (successfully I might add) in a disorderly conduct case a few years back. I believe that experience should suffice…

What exactly am I saying? I am saying that Doug Disney is the perfect ever-so-slightly-below-average candidate for the Supreme Court. I completely meet the letter writer’s implied criteria for serving on the nation’s highest court. A person who is commonplace, pedestrian, humdrum, average, mediocre, middling, unexceptional, unremarkable, undistinguished. I am that run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen, no-great-shakes candidate that the American people cry out for. After all we wouldn’t want someone who had distinguished themselves in any way, we want the ordinary…