Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh have gotten all worked up about Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination, calling her a racist and demanding that she be held accountable for it.

By now, most people have seen the controversial Sotomayor comment:

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.

Couple that with her claim that judicial decisions are tantamount to (have the material impact of) making policy, and you can see why some conservatives are agitated.

“Imagine a judicial nominee said ‘my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman,’” blogged ex-House Speaker Gingrich. “Wouldn’t they have to withdraw? New racism is no better than old racism. A white man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. A Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”

“Here you have a racist,” Limbaugh railed on his national radio show. “You might want to soften that, and you might want to say a reverse racist. And the Lib[eral]s, of course, say that a minority cannot be racist, because they don’t have the power to implement their racism. Well, those days are gone, because reverse racists certainly do have the power. Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist, and now he’s appointed one … to the Supreme Court.” (The FoxNews clip above contains video footage of his statement.)

Tucker Carlson also characterizes the aforementioned statement as racist and bemoans Obama’s attempt to play Identity Politics with his pick (especially, Carlson says, since Obama promised to help get us past such gestures). Ann Coulter agrees that Sotomayor’s comments are racist and recommends a Republican filibuster.

Democrats respond with requests that Sotomayor’s comments be properly “contextualized.” And they mostly dismiss the “racist” characterization out of hand.

But what should we make of her statement? What is she really saying?

A) Latina women are simply smarter/better than white men in some experiential sense.

B) The Court’s decisions have been negatively overdetermined by the historical preponderance of white male judges from elite social backgrounds.

C) She is chomping at the bit to use her identity to run roughshod over the Constitution.

D) All things being equal, she’d bet on a wise Latina woman over an unwise white man (with the discussion of wise white men not explicitly addressed at all).

E) None of the above

Of course, the answer for many readers is probably E. So, feel free to fill in your own blank.

Here’s a second question. This debate is fueled by which of the following?

A) The worst kind of partisan politics, plain and simple, almost regardless of how Sotomayor will behave as a judge

B) Differing assumptions about her potential take on affirmative action and the Second Amendment

C) A Republican attempt to gather the troops for Obama’s next Supreme Court nomination (especially if he’ll be replacing a more conservative judge)

D) A Democratic attempt to further estrange America’s growing Latino electorate from their Republican rivals

E) All of the above