MoDo and Friedman

MoDo, in “White Man’s Last Stand,” says a gaggle of Republican men afraid of extinction couldn’t root out any sign that Sonia Sotomayor has emotions that color her views on the law.  The Moustache of Wisdom is in Kirkuk.  In “Goodbye Iraq, and Good Luck” he says Iraqis know who they were, and they don’t always like it, but they still have not figured out whom they want to be as a country.  Here’s MoDo:

You can’t judge a judge by her cover.

Despite the best efforts of Republicans to root out any sign that Sonia Sotomayor has emotions that color her views on the law, the Bronx Bomber kept a robotic mask in place.

A wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not know that a gaggle of white Republican men afraid of extinction are out to trip her up.

After all, these guys have never needed to speak inspirational words to others like them, as Sotomayor has done. They’ve had codes, handshakes and clubs to do that.

So when Republican Senator Jon Kyl, without so much as a howdy-do, went at Sotomayor, and soon was asking her if she agreed with Barack Obama’s contention, when he voted against John Roberts, that a judge’s heart is important, the would-be justice was as adroit as her idol Nancy Drew.

“No, sir,” she said, indicating that the only bleeding-heart thing about her was the color of her jacket. She added that “it’s not the heart that compels conclusions in cases. It’s the law.”

President Obama wants Sotomayor, naturally, to bring a fresh perspective to the court. It was a disgrace that W. appointed two white men to a court stocked with white men. And Sotomayor made it clear that she provides some spicy seasoning to a bench when she said in a speech: “I simply do not know exactly what the difference will be in my judging, but I accept there will be some based on gender and my Latina heritage.”

The judge’s full retreat from the notion that a different life experience is valuable was more than necessary and somewhat disappointing. But, as any clever job applicant knows, you must obscure as well as reveal, so she sidestepped the dreaded empathy questions — even though that’s why the president wants her.

“We apply law to facts,” she told Kyl. “We don’t apply feelings to facts.”

She even used a flat tone when talking about the “horrific tragedy” of 9/11, when she was living near the World Trade Center. And she was mechanical in explaining to a grumpy Senator Orrin Hatch that banning nunchaku sticks did not dent the Second Amendment because the martial-arts weapons’ swing “can bust someone’s skull.”

Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer gamely tried to make the judge seem even more coldhearted. Recalling the sad plight of poor families from the Bronx who sued T.W.A. after a jet crashed off Long Island in 1996, he quoted the Bronx jurist’s dispassionate dissent: “The appropriate remedial scheme for deaths occurring off the United States coast is clearly a legislative policy choice, which should not be made by the courts.”

Schumer also cited the case of an African-American woman who filed suit after being denied a home-equity loan, even after the loan application was conditionally approved based on her credit report.

Sonia Legree ruled that the woman’s claim was filed too late, the same argument that the Supremes used on Lilly Ledbetter when she belatedly learned that her male coworkers were much better paid. President Obama has cited the Ledbetter decision as a reason the court needs a more “common touch.”

“The law requires some finality,” Sotomayor explained about her case, with an iciness that must have sent a chill up the conservative leg of Alabama’s Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, even as it left Obama hanging out on an empathy limb.

Republican Lindsey Graham read Sotomayor some anonymous comments made by lawyers about her, complaining that she was “temperamental,” “nasty,” “a bit of a bully.” Then he patronizingly lectured her about how this was the moment for “self-reflection.” Maybe Graham thinks Nino Scalia has those traits covered.

But the barbed adjectives didn’t match the muted performance on display before the Judiciary Committee. Like the president who picked her, Sotomayor has been a model of professorial rationality. Besides, it’s delicious watching Republicans go after Democrats for being too emotional and irrational given the G.O.P. shame spiral.

W. and Dick Cheney made all their bad decisions about Iraq, W.M.D.’s, domestic surveillance, torture, rendition and secret hit squads from the gut, based on false intuitions, fear, paranoia and revenge.

Sarah Palin is the definition of irrational, a volatile and scattered country-music queen without the music. Her Republican fans defend her lack of application and intellect, happy to settle for her emotional electricity.

Senator Graham said Sotomayor would be confirmed unless she had “a meltdown” — a word applied mostly to women and toddlers until Mark Sanford proudly took ownership of it when he was judged about the wisdom of his Latina woman.

And then there’s the Supreme Court, of course, which gave up its claim to rational neutrality when the justices appointed by Republican presidents — including Bush Sr. — ignored what was fair to make a sentimental choice and throw the 2000 election to W.

Faced with that warped case of supreme empathy, no wonder Sotomayor is so eager to follow the law.

Here’s the Moustache of Wisdom:

I’m in the provincial headquarters building in downtown Kirkuk — the oil-rich district of northern Iraq that is the most disputed corner of this country. The provincial leaders — Sunnis, Kurds, Turkmen and Christians — have come to meet America’s top military officer, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with whom I am tagging along. All 11 Iraqi leaders are seated on one side of a conference table and local U.S. officials have provided me a color-coded guide, identifying each Iraqi politician, their political tendencies and religious affiliation. Each Iraqi leader tells the admiral, through an Arabic translator, why his or her community deserves to have this or that slice of Kirkuk, until it comes to a Kurdish representative, who announces in English: “I want to tell a joke.”

It’s my lucky day.

“After Saddam was ousted in 2003,” said Deputy Provincial Council Chairman Rebwar Talabani, “there was an elderly citizen who wanted to write a letter to the new government to explain all his sufferings from the Saddam era to get compensation. But he was illiterate. As you may know, outside our government offices we have professional letter-writers for illiterate people. So the man told the letter-writer all of his problems. ‘In the ’50s, they destroyed my house,’ he said. ‘In the ’60s, they killed two of my sons. In the ’70s, they confiscated my properties,’ and so on, right up to today. The letter-writer wrote it all down. When he was done, the man asked the letter-writer to read it back to him before he handed it to the governor. So the letter-writer read it aloud. When he got done, the man hit himself on the head and said, ‘That is so beautifully done. I had no idea all this happened to me.’ ”

Talabani’s joke seemed to have been directed as much to his fellow Iraqis as to Admiral Mullen. My translation: “Everyone here has a history, and it’s mostly painful. We Iraqis love to tell our histories. And the more we do, the better they get. But with you Americans leaving, we need to decide: Do we keep telling our stories, or do we figure out how to settle our differences?”

And that is my take-away from this visit: Iraqis know who they were, and they don’t always like it, but they still have not figured out whom they want to be as a country. They are exhausted from years of civil strife and really don’t want to go there again. Yet on the big unresolved issues — how will power be shared in Kirkuk, how will the Sunnis who joined the “awakening” be absorbed into the government, how will oil wealth and power be shared between provinces and the central government — the different ethnic communities still don’t want to compromise much either.

I am amazed in talking to U.S. Army officers here as to how much they’ve learned from and about Iraqis. It has taken way too long, but our soldiers understand this place. But what about Iraqis? There are now many Iraqis embedded with U.S. forces in Kirkuk. In the dining hall on the main base, I like to watch the Iraqi officers watching the melting pot of U.S. soldiers around them — men, women, blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics — and wonder: What have they learned from us? We left some shameful legacies here of torture and Abu Ghraib, but we also left a million acts of kindness and a profound example of how much people of different backgrounds can accomplish when they work together.

We are going to find out just what Iraqis have learned soon. As Admiral Mullen told the Iraqi leaders around that table: “The U.S. is not going to solve” Iraq’s problems. That is the job “of a sovereign nation.” So Iraqis better get to work, because “on the current withdrawal plan, coalition forces will not be here in 18 months.”

That’s an important message — otherwise Iraqis will delay forever resolving their big, nation-shaping disputes. We can’t do it for them — but our diplomats could do more to help them forge those compromises. We have special envoys for Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Arab-Israeli affairs, but for Iraq — a country key to the Middle East in which we have lost so many lives and are spending a trillion dollars — there is no special envoy, or secretary of state, totally focused on securing a decent outcome here. Vice President Joe Biden is overseeing Iraq policy, but he has too many other things to do. Iraq needs a big, tough, full-time mediator.

Senior Iraqi officials are too proud to ask for our help and would probably publicly resist it, but privately Iraqis will tell you that they want it and need it. We are the only trusted player here — even by those who hate us. They need a U.S. mediator so they can each go back to their respective communities and say: “I never would have made these concessions, but those terrible Americans made me do it.”

After we invaded and stabilized Bosnia, we didn’t just toss their competing factions the keys. President Bill Clinton organized the Dayton peace talks and Richard Holbrooke brokered a deal that has lasted to this day. Why are we not doing in Iraq what we did in Bosnia — when the outcome here is 100 times more important?