Rush Limbaugh advises Republicans to "take it to the mat" and fight Sonia Sotomayor as strongly as possible.

Not because she can be defeated, but because "the people need to know what Obama really believes in, and this is how it can happen." This is a "golden opportunity," he said on the radio just now. "Will Republicans do it? That's another question."

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian writes:

And why not? Those of us who believe that philosophy and ideology trumps race and sex as proper measures of a person's competence to hold high office will get branded racists sooner or later, so why not get it over with?

Obama got into office partially because of the success of this foul sort of racial extortion, so of course he's going to continue to use it as a political tool.

It's time for the Republicans to show that they can be as vindictive and nasty as the Democrats have been during every Republican Supreme Court hearing in the last 20 years or so. What have they got to lose?

That reminds me. Rush called Sotomayor a racist. He quotes something she once 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" — and declaims "So here you have a racist. You might want to soften that. You might want to say 'a reverse racist.'" He adds that Obama is "the greatest living example of a reverse racist and now he's appointed one."

ADDED: Here's the transcript of the show. Let me extract another tidbit:

[T]he odds that she could be stopped are long. Perhaps the biggest pitfall she faces is her own confirmation hearings. She might slip up there and might say something that would give the opposition a home run. But even then they're going to have to be willing to take advantage of it. By the way, do you know that Obama opposed both Roberts and Alito? Barack Obama opposed them both, and in both cases -- of John Roberts, the current chief justice, and Samuel Alito -- he said, "Oh, they're perfectly qualified and they've both got perfect judicial temperament. But I'm going to vote against them," because to him it's about ideology. It's about liberalism. He thought these two guys were conservatives, and it didn't matter to him what their judicial temperament or qualifications were. He voted against both of those.

I thought Obama was wrong to vote like that, and I can see how he deserves to have it come back to bite him. If confirmation is about agreeing with the ideology, then Republicans might want to vote against Sotomayor. But confirmation should not be about ideology, and conservatives ought to want to prove that principle by their votes. Use the confirmation hearings to delineate what liberal judicial ideology is and why people ought to reject it. Then get a good presidential candidate for 2012 and make Supreme Court nominations an issue. Is that too hard? Does that take too long? Too bad! You say you want a Justice who will tell the truth about what the Constitution means. But here's something about what the Constitution means: The President has the appointment power.