Washington politics may not be good at producing health-care reform, but it’s great at creating catchy new lingo. Getting “Borked.” “Hanging chads.” “Lipsticks on pit bulls.” The latest is “wise Latina,” two words that have been repeated ad nauseam since the middle of May, when conservatives started flogging the text of a 2001 speech given by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor at the University of California, Berkeley. In that talk — on the subject of a Latino presence in the American judiciary — Sotomayor now famously said, “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.” Since May 14, when the New York Times posted the full text of the speech online, a vaudevillian assortment of right-wing politicians and commentators have taken this remark as evidence that Sotomayor is a racist who will pursue an unknown agenda once ensconced in that great neoclassical retirement home known as the U.S
