Sotomayor Yearbook Post: Apathy or Calculation?

The question is not whether Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has socialist leanings.

The question is more interesting than that.

Does the White House not realize that posting her 1976 Princeton yearbook photo includes her tribute to Norman Thomas, the perennial candidate of the Socialist Party, or does the White House simply not care?

Or are they trying to create a firestorm over a 33-year-old yearbook entry in order to make the right look mean spirited?

Others weigh in on this HERE, and HERE and HERE.

If you'd like to read more about the late Norman Thomas, this is illuminative.

One of the quotes of Mr. Thomas:

“The difference between Democrats and Republicans is: Democrats have accepted some ideas of Socialism cheerfully, while Republicans have accepted them reluctantly."

Well, that's pretty much on the money.

Another quote, an echo of Nikita Khrushchev:

"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of 'liberalism' they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened."

Khrushchev told Eisenhower's Sec. of Agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, essentially the same thing, only he used the word "communism."

For all that, Norman Thomas, a magna cum laude grad of Princeton in 1905, was well-known and fairly mainstream, adopting a Christian socialism rather than the atheist model.

Of course, the end result is ever the same, and the Christianity gets lost along the way.