If at first you don't succeed... chuck the results.

Now I don't know about the rest of you, but when there's say, a raging fire at my place in the middle of the night, I sure hope the firefighter who has worked hardest to compete and lead his crew is on duty that night.

Because you know what they say, in the smoky darkness of the night, you're not looking for black skin or white skin in the person there to save your life ... you just want those proven best. With no special "help" or throwing out performance results to skew the credentials. Let the liberals have the color-choice preferences in their neighborhoods, and pity the poor conservatives in New Haven who may lose crucial seconds when it matters, to politically correct employment practices.

It seems what has infected higher education in recent decades, in churning out well-credentialed professional candidates that somehow don't seem to measure up very well in the real world (see the financial sector, for one) will now consume our judiciary.

In our desire to pursue style over substance... , preferred candidates over neutral performance results that maybe we don't like... , we're changing the game forever, folks. And if you honestly don't think that lowers the caliber of the performances for all players on the field, it's probably good if you don't know just how far, quality- and substance-wise, we've already fallen.

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*Thinking out loud:
Now, everything I know about Spanish relations I learned from a friend, but ... she seems to think your average Mexican doesn't identify much with the Borincano, being as one is a U.S. citizen at birth, and the other is not. And don't get me started on her differences with her Dominican sister-in-law...

Point is: those outside politically involved community coalitions probably don't identify as Hispanic, and won't see strong questioning against a Supreme Court candidate as "picking on" a woman of their own. I hope well-meaning, politically calculating senators will not shy away from asking Judge Sotomayor about the results of her record. She least of all would want deference based on her poor background, gender or ethnicity, I would think.

Unless of course, that bland liberalism has set in over the years, that seems to affect equally so many from all different backgrounds, where they're so busy looking at the style characteristics of the candidates for the job, that they discount the results if they don't prove the pre-ordained conclusion.