Rick Warren quizzed both Barack Obama and John McCain on Saturday at his Saddleback Church. I’ve read the transcripts, and they seem thoughtful on the Obama side, and his supporters like that thoughtfulness. McCain responded with such straightforward and sure answers that he also satisfied his followers, who want a man who does not waver. But, but, McCain flip flopped when Warren asked about Supreme Court nominations. Naturally, the wing nuts focussed on Barack Obama’s answer where he said he would not have nominated Clarence Thomas, a man who, like McCain, is predictable and sure, if often a follower and wrong.

Here’s what Obama had to say about Thomas, from the FoxNews article featuring Thomas’ supporters:

During the symposium, Obama said he would not have nominated Thomas to the bench because “I don’t think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation. Setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his interpretation of a lot of the Constitution.”

Seems strightforward. The facts are in Thomas’ biography. He wasn’t a jurist at all when he was nominated. Legal thinker? Thomas had represented the United States during the Reagan and Bush Administrations, but we’re not talking about a body of legal opinion or anything. I suspect Barack Obama, himself a former law professor, ought to be given a little credit in judging such skill, eh? That doesn’t stop the whiners, though. How do they respond? Well, they don’t respond to Barack Obama’s statements at all. Not one little bit. They try to link Obama to others who have critiqued Thomas, and don’t challenge Obama’s words one little bit. In short, they evidently aren’t good readers or listeners.

Here’s Clarence Thomas’ former law clerk Helgi Walker, herself not exactly an unbiased observer:

“Reasonable Supreme Court observers of all political stripes, who do not necessarily agree with Justice Thomas’ jurisprudence, consider his work to be scholarly and of top quality. And yet Senator Obama is, sadly, unable to acknowledge even that much about an intelligent, wonderful and kind man who broke racial barriers to rise to the very top of the legal profession,” said Helgi Walker, a former associate counsel to President Bush and former law clerk for Thomas.

Long and others said Thomas has repeatedly proven critics wrong about his intellectual capacity and repeated previous defenses that much of the criticism of Thomas is because he is a black conservative.

“Apparently, Obama can do no better than to recycle discredited statements of Harry Reid when it comes to Justice Thomas. Like other liberal elites, Obama cannot stand it when a black man strays from the ideological plantation and refuses to implement liberal policies through the courts. But Obama will never point out any intellectual deficiencies in Justice Thomas’s work, because he can’t. Justice Thomas’s opinions consistently reveal faithfulness to the Constitution, judicial modesty and deference to the will of the people in our representative democracy. That is opposed to everything that Obama and the liberals are trying to do in grabbing power from the people and giving it to the courts,” she said.

Nope, that wasn’t what Barack Obama was basing his opinion on. And these folks in the FoxNews article are adult enough to address Obama’s opinion if they wanted to. They are dishonest and whiney in not doing so. They are also dishonest in failing to note John McCain’s answer to the same question.

In answer to Rick Warren’s question, McCain said he would not have nominated Souter, Ginzberg or Breyer. Well, he’s entitled to argue after the fact that he doesn’t agree with the judicial philosophies of Souter, Ginzberg and Breyer, but this is a flip flop without a doubt on the part of McCain. You see, McCain VOTED for Souter, Ginzberg and Breyer, the very jurists he complains about now. He already approved of them with his Senate vote. Nope, you won’t see the wingersw excoriating John McCain for voting for Supreme Court Justices they don’t like. They’ve got all the opportunity in the world to take McCain to task for filling the Supreme Court with those liberals. They will not do so, however, because their whininess is confined to protecting larence Thomas, even though he wasn’t attacked by Barack Obama on anything other than the factual issue that he had no experience as a jurist.

The whiney Clarence Thomas defenders ignore altogether that, as Politico notes, John McCain was for Souter, Ginzberg and Breyer before he was against them. This calls into question, of course, McCain’s straightforward and sure answers to Rick Warren, designed as they were to let Republicans know that John McCain has values that are sure and steadfast. No, they wobble like a bobblehead.