When Words Don't Mean Anything
Victor Davis Hanson

Rather than an attempt to defend empirically Sotomayor's suggestion that Latinas are superior, in the judicial sense, to white men, we have been given a variety of postmodern contexts, constructing what she "really" meant: She was merely talking about the advantages of poverty that she thinks she has experienced that are not true of white men; she was only "joking"; she was making an intricate case for diversity, etc. — any explanation other than the natural one that was elaborated on later in her diatribe, namely that she believes the color and gender of a person impart wisdom or less than wisdom.

With the advent of Obamaworld, the centrist veneer sometimes rubs off the race/class/gender/religion talk and we see the fundamentalism in its essence — in the impromptu moments of the campaign it was Michelle's "mean country" and first-time pride in the U.S., Obama's "typical white person," Pennsylvania clingers, and original contorted defense of Reverend Wright, then there was Eric Holder's "cowards" outburst, and now Sotomayor's Latina tribalism.

In each case, once the race/class/gender animosity is revealed, there is a brief hesititation to see how well the media will come to the rescue and "contextualize" the remark, and when that fails there is the obligatory qualifier "maybe not the best way of putting it," "wrong word," "if I had to say it over, I'd . . ." The point being that, in the D.C. gotcha culture, these are never gotchas due to the race, gender, or class of the perpetrator.

I think the unifying explanation is that such wonderful people either simply are incapable of racialist remarks, or that the good that they otherwise stand for so overshadows the embarrassments as to make them not embarrassments at all.

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