SotoSkirmish: Tancredo Says Sotomayor 'Appears To Be Racist'

Former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) says Sonia Sotomayor "appears to be a racist." At issue is Sotomayor's 2001 comment that she "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 live."

Critics have hit her on this point, but the word "racist" hasn't been thrown around quite so openly as the outspoken Tancredo invokes it here, distilling quite plainly the essence of the criticism:

It is incredible to me. There is no one else I can think of who could have possibly said the kind of things she said, if they were reported accurately, about the benefits of being a brown woman as opposed to being a white man in interpreting the law, and nobody could look at that and say that that was not a racist, sexist statement that would disqualify anybody else...[s]he is a Hispanic woman, and therefore we can't say things like this...I'm telling you, she appears to be a racist. She said things that are racist--in any other context, that's exactly how we would portray it, and there's no one that would get on the Supreme Court saying a thing like that except for a Hispanic woman.

Whether or not this line of criticism is politically wise is another question.