Sotomayor nominated; would be first Hispanic on Supreme Court

Somehow this all reminds me of a hilarious Veronica Geng piece from 1986 where she riffs on a comment of Barry Goldwater’s that “There’s no reason we shouldn’t have an Italian President—we’ve had everything else.” She goes through a bunch of examples, including “President Thomas Noguchi (the only coroner ever to become Chief Executive)” and the time when “an obscure Pennsylvania coal miner named James Polki got elected President until the Electoral College found out a novice telegraph operator had made a mistake—if you want to call it a ‘mistake’ that American history includes a hardworking Polish immigrant who held the highest office in the land, temporarily,” and, of course, “the way a woman named Dora, or Doreen, occupied the Oval Office in 1920 as a poltergeist.” As Geng puts it, “It’s just an open secret—like the fact that George Washington was a full-blooded Chickahominy Indian, which everybody knows, even though it never appears in print anywhere.”

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