FREAK OF THE WEEK: Conservative commentator Mark Krikorian

This week, the FredBlog shines its freaklight on Mark Krikorian, head of the Center of Immigration Studies and the man who argues that Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee isn’t qualified because she pronounces her name in an un-American way.

Ever since Obama chose Judge Sonia Sotomayor to be the next justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, the fringe of the Republican Party has gone nuts.

Talk-show blowhard Rush Limbaugh called her a racist and compared her to a former head of the Ku Klux Klan.

Former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo – who once famously called Miami a third-world country because of the number of Latinos in the city – called her a radical.

And former House Speaker Newt Gingrich wrote on Twitter: “Imagine a judicial nominee said 'my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman' new racism is no better than old racism. White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”

But perhaps the strangest and most offensive attack came from Mark Krikorian, whose anti-immigration views are often showcased in the National Review and the magazine’s online feature, “The Corner.”

This past week, Krikorian wrote that Sotomayor was not qualified to sit on the highest court in the nation because of how she pronounces her last name.

You see, she pronounces it the way it is in her native Puerto Rico – with the accent on the last syllable (so-toe-my-OR), instead of the first syllable (SO-toe-my-er). In fact, Krikorian calls hers the “unnatural pronunciation,” because that’s not how he would say it in English.

“This may seem like carping, but it's not,” wrote Krikorian. “… Conformity is appropriate [in] how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options – the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.” (http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MzkwYzY3ZTc4NTkwZjRiMjM3OGVlMzlmNTZjYmY2ZDI=)

So there ya go. In Krikorian’s us vs. them world, Sotomayor shouldn’t be confirmed because the way she pronounces her name doesn’t conform to his language standards.

But really, this has nothing to do with the Supreme Court, and everything to do with xenophobic fearmongering. He even makes a point to say that English is superior to Spanish because “English dropped gender in nouns, what, 1,000 years ago?”

The most ironic part of Krikorian’s blather is that he’s trying to make a subliminal link between Sotomayor and the whole issue of illegal immigration. But Sotomayor is from Puerto Rico – which has been part of the U.S. since 1898.

Sotomayor is NOT a foreigner. And Puerto Rican culture has been part of American culture for 100 years!

If Krikorian’s attack is really among the best that conservatives can come up with, then the Republican Party is even worse off than we thought.