Speaking of the Sotomayor confirmation, a good question on which to reflect is how we got so divided on this judicial appointment thing. One starts, or should, by looking at Ted Kennedy's bombastic lies -- I said lies, senator -- about Robert Bork: "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters … "

Kennedy's ravings more than ruined the Bork appointment: They ginned up the wars we still fight over the awful things imputed to this nominee or that one, depending on what president happened to nominate him.

Americans, who slaughtered each other on the battlefield less than eight decades after independence, are no society of pious saints and cheek-turners. Americans get mad and mean with the best of them. What the best of Americans have to hope is that their leaders won't crank up the meanness machine save for the most urgent of causes.

The Sotomayor nomination isn't one of those causes. Certainly the Bush White House's post-9/11 strategy for preventing additional murders of innocent Americans qualifies as the oddest of all provocations for a political war of victors against vanquished. If the attorney general indeed goes to war with the Bush White House, the most generous and reasonable response one could make is, "General Holder --- you must have lost your mind."