“Back in Washington, his opponents have depicted Judge Charles W. Pickering as the personification of white Mississippi’s oppressive past, a man so hostile to civil rights and black progress that he is unfit for promotion to a federal appeals court.

“But here on the streets of his small and largely black hometown, far from the bitterness of partisan agendas and position papers, Charles Pickering is a widely admired figure of a very different present,” The New York Times reports.

In funeral parlors and pharmacies, used-car lots and the City Council chambers, the city’s black establishment overwhelmingly supports his nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which is heading toward a contentious vote in the Senate in the first major judicial battle of the Bush administration.

[…] The judge’s widespread popularity in his hometown has been frustrating to the many civil rights and abortion rights groups that have worked to portray him as an ideological relic of the Old South.

Several opponents of his nomination have tried unsuccessfully to get his supporters to change their minds, and their inability to do so reflects the distance between national liberal groups and many Southern blacks in small towns. In a city like Laurel, with a population of 18,393, one’s personality and faith are often more important than a judicial paper trail or an adherence to an agenda [my emphasis].

…Too bad none of Pickering’s “widespread popularity” will convince these know-it-all “national liberal groups” — e.g., the N.A.A.C.P, the Congressional Black Caucus, or People for the American Way [aka, “People for Our Idea of the American Way, and if you don’t like it, too freakin’ bad] — that perhaps it’s time to stop fighting the nomination on behalf (ironically!) of the judge’s very supporters. Because to do so would be to admit that certain peoples can make their own informed choices — which evidently these “national liberal groups” believe is not the case with ig’nant, religious, countrified Mississippi blacks.

No worries. Omniscient advocacy groups comprised of liberal intellectuals will set these poor, benighted souls straight. After all, if the Congressional Black Caucus can’t protect rural blacks from themselves, who can?

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