Even by Republican standards, the Sotomayor meltdown is pretty impressive. Tom Tancredo calls La Raza, which is a pretty ordinary advocacy group, "a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses." Newt Gingrich writes that we cannot accept Sotomayor's rather anodyne remarks about experience being helpful in judging "if Civil War, suffrage, and Civil Rights are to mean anything", which would surely be news to all the African-Americans who are not presently enslaved.

The thing that gets me is that all of the people who are doing so much asinine talking for the Republican Party - Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich, G. Gordon Liddy, and Tom Tancredo are professionally unemployed. They're all an ex-something. And they all became an ex- in disgrace:

• Dick Cheney, one of most hated politicians in U.S. history and big-time torture advocate
• Newt Gingrich, former Speaker who resigned in disgrace after using tax-exempt foundations for political purposes
• Tom Tancredo, who didn't bother seeking re-election to the House this year
• G. Gordon Liddy, ex-convict who conspired to murder on behalf of Nixon, as well as orchestrated Watergate.
  

They're surrounded by all manner of talking heads and pundits, who benefit personally from being as loud and controversial as they can. They're killing off what ought to be conservatism.

Once again, Hilzoy saying what I think:

He has chosen a judge who is by any standard exceptionally qualified, and who has, in addition, a fairly conservative judicial temperament [...] But she is also a Puerto Rican woman. If the Republican Party were led by sane and decent people, this would not matter. But they aren't. As a result, they seem to be unable
to see anything about her besides her ethnicity and her gender. The idea that she must be a practitioner of identity politics, a person whose every success is due to preferential treatment, etc., is apparently one they absolutely cannot resist. [...]

I hate it. I want to have a reasonable opposition party. I also don't want people of color, and especially kids, to have to listen to all this bigotry. We should be better than this.