Republican DisSonyance

Huckabee called her Maria! Limbaugh thinks she's stupid! Gingrich says she's a racist! She's Sonia Sotomayor, Obama's first supreme court nominee, and she's warming the hearts of Hispanics and Democrats everywhere. Hispanics because they are justifiably proud of a girl from the projects who made good, and Democrats, because they think all that right wing bluster will alienate Hispanics from the Republican party.

So what does it all mean? Well, Ms. Sotomayor birth certificate says Sonya, not Maria, so Huckabee can stop worrying that his cleaning lady's about to quit. And while Rush Limbaugh calling anybody stupid is the ultimate example of the pot calling the kettle black, one does have to set the record straight. The lady was high school valedictorian, graduated magna cum laude and phi beta kappa from Princeton, winning their top academic prize, and went on to Yale law school, where she was editor of the law review. If that's stupid, then Rush Limbaugh must be a brainless invertebrate (no, wait, bad analogy... he IS a brainless invertebrate).

Still, it's fair to take a closer look at the quote, taken out of context from a 2001 Speech at (CONSERVATIVE RED FLAG!)...UC Berkeley. " I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Here's where the right wingers have a point. For a person whose job it is to weigh and measure and parse words, the quote is unfortunate. It lacks eloquence and clarity, and is too open to interpretation. Sotomayor does appear to claim that a Latina can make a better judgement than a white male, which is uncomfortably close to the notion that a white male can do a better job than a black one, or a Christian can be more effective than a Muslim, and yes, that is the kind of thinking affirmative action was established to debunk.

Now here's where Newt and friends are, depending on your tolerance for their world view, either misguided or full of shit. When Sotomayor talks about having "lived that life", she's not talking about race (and you can invoke la raza all you want, Hispanic is an ethnicity, not a race). She's referring to that great American taboo, class. We don't talk about class in America. It interferes with our mythology about upward mobility and pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps.

A judge who was a fourth generation legacy at Yale can't know what it's like living pay check to pay check, or getting evicted, or having a sick child and no health insurance. A judge from an underprivileged white or black background would share Sotomayor's perspective on how the law affects the working poor and the opportunities available to them. This is what Obama calls empathy.