Melba Toast Jokes Bringing Offense

Is this the worst that Roberts' said? Damn! Getting offended over this vanilla level comments is just putting a new level on being thin skinned.

In some memos, for example, he made jokes about Hispanics and women. For a 1983 Reagan interview in Spanish Today, he said, "I think this audience would be pleased that we are trying to grant legal status to their illegal amigos."

He also joked in 1982 about Kickapoo Indians, saying "a group of them made Newsweek by choosing to live in squalid conditions beneath the International Bridge in Eagle Pass, Texas, rather than their Mexican homeland."

In a 1984 memo advising on how to respond to an eccentric letter to his boss, Fred Fielding, asking if all property had been placed in a public trust, Roberts began, "One Ramon L. Rivera of Los Angeles (where else?) ... "

And in a 1985 memo about a corporate scholarship program for women, Roberts said, "Some might question whether encouraging homemakers to become lawyers contributes to the common good."

My thoughts (unspoken) nearly every hour run across much more acerbic comments. Maybe I'm not the mind to be using as a measuring stick though. Then again, I find it unlikely that the people that find offense with such comments are exactly equivalent to Mother Theresa either.

And my favorite topic of recent note pops up again:

In 1983 Roberts wrote that many proposals were "highly objectionable," including a Florida plan to charge lower tuition to women because they have less earning potential and "a staggeringly pernicious law codifying the anti-capitalist notion of 'comparable worth.'"

I won't get into the argument on comparable worth here. But knowing my beliefs on capitalism, I'm certain you know where I go on this specific bill that they are discussing.