The obvious problem is how does one measure diversity. Well the California bar suggests three ways, one of which is “Surveying diversity professionals at law schools on diversity reputation.”

Yes, they believe that each law school’s racial discrimination policies should be judged by racial discrimination professionals at other schools, and that the opinion of these professional race discriminaters should influence the decision of where prospective law students spend three years of their life and six digits of their dollars.

I say that any prospective student who actually considers that information when selecting a law school should be immediately made a lawyer – perhaps even as a judge - because plainly there is nothing law school could do to increase that person’s analytical ability.

His contention that modern black-on-white voter intimidation is fine because 1960s Mississippi was worse should, at least, raise an eyebrow. And as a lawyers, the quickness with which Holder blurs lines leads me to believe he’s much to quick to present a political, rather than legal, view. The quote that the congressman read dealt with someone describing the worst incident of voter intimidation he’d seen, and he’d seen some voter intimidation in the South in the late Jim Crow era. Holder attempts to refute this by getting huffy that the overall system of voter intimidation in the South was incomparably worse.

True dat, I guess. But systemic oppression is different from episodal oppression. Holder’s response didn’t address the quote, it just allowed Holder to make it awkward for everyone involved by making the situation about his own blackness. I reckon Shelby Steele would have some commentary regarding an immensely powerful black man raising his race as a shield to protect himself from a white questioner. And I reckon that everyone who thought that electing Obama would usher in a new era of race relations should have to wear a sign of some sort.

Once the verdict of History has come in, it’s always easy to tell Good from Evil. We look back at the Jim Crow era, and it’s obvious who the good guys were (those in the north who opposed segregation) and who the bad guys were (virtually all southerners, as well as the large number of northern segregationists).

At the time, though, things weren’t as, well, black and white. There was a strain of liberal segregationists who actually believed that segregation was positive for blacks. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of vile racists who used this excuse to back policies they might have otherwise backed. But there were some who seem to have legitimately believed in it.

Strom Thurmond fell into this category. His speeches from his days in state politics read as though he genuinely believed in the virtues of segregation for all South Carlolinians. While governor, he engaged in a large building project of schools and hospitals for black people, because he thought the existing facilities were inadequate. His words and actions – especially when seen in light of his later ability to come to terms with the civil rights movement, and the child he had with a black woman – seem to have been sincere.

Of course, all that subtlety has been lost in history, and all segregationists are, rightly, tossed together and categorized as Evil. It was an evil system to begin with, it was evil throughout its lifetime, and those facts are completely unmitigated by the fact that some thought it wasn’t evil.

I say that as an introduction to the following statement: I look forward every single day to the time when history finally casts its judgment on the neo-segregationists of our age, every college president who thinks the color of students matters more than the content of the classes, every race-hustling politician who tries to win set-asides for “his” people, every guilt-ridden white person who tries to apologize for his wealth by depriving others of the right to be judged as individuals, every condescending bureaucrat who thinks he’s doing black people a favor by unjustly elevating the mediocre among them, every HR hack who tries to arrange the demographics of the workplace to get the best publicity, and this Pennsylvania principle who thinks that “separate but equal” is still good policy if you mean well. Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.

If elected (or appointed-by-others-who-are-elected) local school boards run school systems into the ground through a combination of incompetence and giving the teachers’ unions the run of the place, whose fault is that? The voters’, that’s whose. “I voted for a bunch of nitwits” is not a statement of “a civil rights issue” and it does not make you oppressed. Quite the opposite, actually.

“I’ve read your brief, I’ve read the District Court opinion, I’ve heard your interchange with my two colleagues, and I don’t understand your argument,” Noonan told deputy solicitor general Edwin S. Kneedler. “We are dependent as a court on counsel being responsive. . . . You keep saying the problem is that a state officer is told to do something. That’s not a matter of preemption. . . . I would think the proper thing to do is to concede that this is a point where you don’t have an argument.”

So the Post then goes on to estimate the votes of the other two judges on the panel, and in doing so does something I regard as unconscionable:

Bea is also a Republican appointee and tends to vote with the court’s conservative wing, which could help Arizona’s chances. Paez is a Democratic appointee.

But Bea and Paez are Hispanic, and it is Hispanics who are most upset about the Arizona law. “Perhaps this is one area where Bea might not vote as a so-called conservative because he himself is an immigrant,” said Arthur Hellman, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and an expert on the 9th Circuit.

This guy is openly speculating that judges will base their decisions not on the law or the arguments, but on their race. What sort of third world crapistan does this Hellman chump think we live in? [The sort where the president calls on his preferred ethnic groups to show racial solidarity against his enemies? --Ed. Yes, I guess that would be the sort.] If I thought that any judge would base a decision on his personal identity rather than the law, I’d call for his immediate impeachment, not make glib comments to newspapers where I used the trademark phrase of the Liberal Douche, “so-called conservative.”

As an old pro, though, I know that you don’t fire someone without at least hearing their side of the story unless you want them gone in the first place.

This woman has been a thorn in the side of the Agriculture Department for years. She was part of a class-action lawsuit against the department on behalf of black farmers in the South. For years, she has been operating a community activist organization not unlike ACORN.

I think there were those in the Agriculture Department who objected to her being hired in the first place.

Plus there was the politics. If you are running for election in south Georgia, you don’t want to have to explain someone like Sherrod.

But I have to add that the overreaction of the White House once again underscores Obama’s own problem with race.

This president has carefully crafted his image, and it hinges on his not being seen as a Jesse Jackson or an Al Sharpton, as a flack for the NAACP or the Urban League.

In other words, he does not want to be seen as a “black” president. He wants to be seen as a president who happens to be black.

That mind-set permeates his administration. Anytime there’s an issue that is clearly “black,” the Obama people do not want to be associated with it in any fashion.

We saw it first in his distancing himself from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and to a lesser extent in the dust-up between police and Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates. And now this.

Obama has come in for considerable criticism from a number of respectable and important black people. He has a Latino issues adviser. He has an adviser on gay rights. He has an adviser on senior issues, on labor – but there is no African American issues adviser. There has been no big black cultural celebration at the White House.

There’s only one black in his cabinet. Even George W. Bush had more blacks in positions of power than Obama.

She may not have deserved what happened as a specific result of her NAACP speech, but she seems to be the type who had it coming. This woman was a dirt-bag race-monger from the beginning, and it didn’t take much provocation for her to let loose.

It’s like charging a criminal with one crime for which he’s innocent and having him admit to a different crime while on the stand. Breitbart’s off the hook, so far as I’m concerned, and this woman needs to be put back on it.

Edit: I’ll add this, from a comment I made earlier in the day, regarding the strategy that those of us who favor a color-blind society should use when facing bigots like Sherrod:

We need to show that if everyone were held to the standards of speech that conservatives are held to, most people can quite easily be called racists. We need to illustrate that there is a fairly widespread us-vs-them mentality in the black community that is lethal poison to a color-blind society, and that we will no more tolerate racism and racial discord from non-whites than we tolerate it from whites. And we need to show that we care enough about ending racial discord that we’re willing to call people to the mat over it.

Erick Erickson (whose name always makes me snicker) has some thoughts on this:

. . . Andrew Breitbart promised he would do to the left what the left has been doing to the right for years. He is gathering quite the collection of leftwing scalps and will forever warm the hearts of the right for the ACORN takedown alone. I’m glad he is on our side.

That said, I think Shirley Sherrod has been unfairly characterized as a racist. . . .

The left has used race as a weapon for a very long time. They have devalued what racism means – which is a terrible shame if you actually care about stopping real racism or remembering it in our history. The word now connotes disagreeing with the left instead of what it actually means.

Had Ms. Sherrod been white, she’d be vilified in the press, fired, and probably have trouble thereafter seeking work. The NAACP would be passing a resolution condemning the Department of Agriculture as racist. This is what we have become in politics because of the unrepentant race-baiting on the left. It has become a tit for tat war of retribution.

We see that on the Journolist as reported by the Daily Caller today. When Jeremiah Wright was in the news, the leftwing reporters on Journolist plotted to change the subject by declaring various figures in and around the Bush White House, including Karl Rove on the inside and Fred Barnes on the outside, “racist.” They wanted to scream racism not because the people to be attacked were in fact racist, but because it would be a useful way to change the subject.

That war has casualties on both sides. Ms. Sherrod is the latest. It is not fair. But that’s how the left plays and the right must fight on offense or not fight at all. It disgusts me to have to say it, but that is so very sadly where we are. As long as the left gets a pass on this all too easy game, the right has to fight back.

Ultimately, I’m with Erickson. Too many people I respect have been unjustifiably labeled racist for me to shed more than a couple of tears for Ms. Sherrod. The aim at this point is to make the Racist War so mutually damaging that we all agree to ignore it. This can’t end until the race hucksters and shamsters pack up and go home.