I hate it when Maureen Dowd makes me link to her

Until Sarah Palin came along, MoDo was the archetype of the aging high school prom queen who can't deal with the fact that she's not the prettiest, cutest girl in school anymore. She's dealt with this by becoming a tiresome, snippy woman, snarking about trivia as if Biff and Bobby and Butch are still trying to get her up to Lover's Lane after the Big Dance. But as I worked from home the other day after my all-night marathon of trying to make up a week's worth of slippage in my project's schedule (little of which can be attributable to me), I nearly fell off my chair listening to Sen. Tom Coburn's carefully-worded opening statement in which he essentially said that he wants a Justice who will uphold the Noble Tradition of White Guy Privilege and Superiority that his constituents in Oklahoma hold dear.

The Republicans' repulsive display of "Some of my best friends are Hispanic" (sic) and their pathetic attempt to make it Miguel Estrada instead of Sonia Sotomayor sitting in front of them demonstrated that the issue is neither that Sotomayor is Latina or a woman, it's that she is a tough tomato from the Bronx -- part of New York City, the capital of the Godless Heathen Liberal Homosexual Communist Jewy Jew Northeast. If she were Sonia Sotomayor from Texas with a record akin to that of, say, Edith Jones no one would be concerned. But she is a Noo Yawkuh, and the Revenge of Estrada must be exacted. Because while Miguel Estrada, like Clarence Thomas before him, could have been relied on to issue rulings that would reinforce White Guy Privilege in perpetuity, someone like Sonia Sotomayor may not be as reliable in guarding good Christian Caucasians like, oh, say, John Ensign and Mark Sanford and Sarah Palin from the Marauding Hordes from the South.

Enter MoDo, who cuts through all the talk about the Constitution not being malleable and allusions to the Geneva Conventions being some kind of One World Government plot and gets to what Tom Coburn and Lindsey Graham and Jeff Sessions are REALLY worried about:

You can’t judge a judge by her cover.

Despite the best efforts of Republicans to root out any sign that Sonia Sotomayor has emotions that color her views on the law, the Bronx Bomber kept a robotic mask in place.

A wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not know that a gaggle of white Republican men afraid of extinction are out to trip her up.

After all, these guys have never needed to speak inspirational words to others like them, as Sotomayor has done. They’ve had codes, handshakes and clubs to do that.

So when Republican Senator Jon Kyl, without so much as a howdy-do, went at Sotomayor, and soon was asking her if she agreed with Barack Obama’s contention, when he voted against John Roberts, that a judge’s heart is important, the would-be justice was as adroit as her idol Nancy Drew.

I suppose it's to Sotomayor's credit that she's able to sit through all the manure being thrown around the Judiciary Committee without telling these gasbags just how full of shit they are. But meanwhile I sit here hoping beyond hope that in her effort to just get this over with, she doesn't agree to sign a pledge that White Male Privilege must be preserved at all cost, and anything else is "empathy."