Historical Ignorance

Does anyone in the media even know how to do research at all?

• President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, selecting a woman who would be the court's first Hispanic justice and a liberal who is unlikely to change its ideological balance.

Without a single deviation from the party line, every news outlet we followed today ran with this storyline. Obama had to have some sort of first...even if it's wrong:

• Benjamin Cardozo (1870-1938), Supreme Court Justice 1932-1938, was of Portuguese descent. He holds the distinction of being nominated by a Republican president even though he was a lifelong Democrat. Hoover actually took the advice of both parties and nominated a man named the most qualified jurist in the nation.
  

The wikipedia entry has been altered extensively all day today, casting all sorts of aspersions on his ancestry, concentrating on the fact that his relatives fled Portugal for Holland during the Inquisitions due to Jewish heritage in an effort to make Sotomayor the first true "Hispanic" nominee. We guess if you aren't from this side of the Atlantic, your historical contributions to the American experience don't count for spit.

It'd be amusing if it wasn't so "1984" in terms of altering past events to fit the present narrative.