Racist?  That’s what Limbaugh the Entertainer and Nuke ‘em Newt would have us believe.  The line they find particularly offending is one from a speech given by Judge Sonia Sotomayor in  2001 to an Hispanic group in Berkeley, California.

Among her words from that speech:  “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life,” in describing how one’s life experiences can inform judicial opinions.

Let’s get the preliminaries out of the way early . . . I’m a white male, and I’ve not walked in the shoes of a Latina woman.

That said, I am of Irish descent, and was raised in and educated by the Catholic Church.  I recall from my youth learning that there were people in my town who would not do business with my father because we were Irish Catholic.  I remember, also, that some families would not permit their kids to play with me for the same reason.  I can recall, also, being made fun of and threatened when, as a ten year old,  I wore a Kennedy button on my coat during the presidential election in 1960.

None of these were watershed events in my life, and I can’t blame them for the way I’ve turned out, such as that is.  But, they are a part of my life, contributed in some small part to my personal fabric, and at nearly age 60, I can recall them quite clearly.

I do not mean to suggest they are comparable to the more ominous side of discrimination, the plight of inner city youth (I grew up well outside city life) and people of color.  Also, I am not a woman.  But, that is not the point, either.

Of course it’s true the circumstances of our youth contribute to the person we are in adulthood.  So do our education and training, our families and family traditions, all of our life experiences,  just as has been the case for those now calling Judge Sotomayor a racist.

There may be a way to get around this, though, if it is a legitimate concern and not simply manufactured drivel.  The answer, actually, is quite topical and current in this age of technology.

Google has been working for a time on a form of artificial intelligence that would be able to “understand” copy on a web site and not just recognize the words it finds.  It’s truly an amazing concept, and if anyone can write that software and form those algorithms, it’s the guys and gals at Google.  Years away, true, but still . . . .

Let’s task Google with developing an AI judgeship algorithm.  When you think about it, the concept really isn’t so out there.  The Constitution is a fixed document, and so are all of the past Supreme Court decisions.  They’ve been codified, and are sitting in data bases already.

So, hard code the law – - in a series of if/then scenarios. Google has already indexed the web’s 241M+ web sites, and hard coding the Constitution should be a pretty simple task after that, don’t you think?

Each case in controversy, then, is entered into the appropriate fields on the data entry forms, and the algorithms go to work determining the outcomes of the if/then scenarios.  If “these are the facts,” then “this is the result.”

Easy peasy.  The end of the process in any case is a single result, no rank position to worry about. Google could sell its sponsored results for  “decision” pages and make another fortune.  Wow.

If Limbaugh the Entertainer’s and Nuke ‘em Newt’s objection to Judge Sotomayor’s nomination is racism, and they fear her life experiences might taint her votes on Supreme Court cases, then take that out of the equation.  And if that’s the basis of her disqualification, it’s the basis for ousting the other eight,  too.

Replace them all with a Google algorithm.  No worries about empathy, or judicial activism, or that whole “the law is a living thing” notion.  All removed from the equation.  Justice would be truly blind.

Yeah, that’s the ticket, you knuckleheads.