One day after President Obama nominated federal judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, former House speaker Newt Gingrich labeled her a racist.

“Imagine a judicial nominee said ‘my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman’ new racism is no better than old racism,” he wrote on Twitter, referring to Sotomayor’s now infamous statement that a Latina woman is likely to make a better judge than a white man. “White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.”

It was a wretched thing to say, and Gingrich wasn’t the only conservative Republican to say it. Rush Limbaugh called Sotomayor a “reverse racist” on his radio program; Fox News Channel’s Glenn Beck announced that “she sure sounds like a racist.” There were similar comments from controversialist Ann Coulter and former GOP congressman Tom Tancredo.

Sotomayor’s views on race and ethnicity are certainly deplorable. She is an unapologetic chauvinist who believes not only that a judge’s perspective is hard-wired to gender, race, and ethnicity but that the “Latina” perspective is especially to be celebrated. Those views are odious to anyone who believes that justice, to be just, must be colorblind. Unfortunately, that is not what contemporary liberals believe. Sotomayor deserves to be questioned closely about her embrace of such benighted identity politics. She did not deserve to be smeared as a racist.

The comments of Gingrich et al. quickly triggered a backlash. “What the hell is going on here?” demanded Chris Matthews on MSNBC after playing a clip of Limbaugh calling Sotomayor “a bigot … a racist.” In The New York Times, columnist Charles Blow denounced the “fringe Republican race-baiting.” Senator Dianne Feinstein of California lamented, “To call someone a racist … is just terrible” and only adds a “visceral and terrible heat” to public discourse.

To his credit, Gingrich retracted his slur after a few days. “The word ‘racist’ should not have been applied to Judge Sotomayor as a person,” he wrote on June 3.

The demonizing of Sotomayor as a racist was outrageous. Liberals and Democrats were justified in decrying it. And if they now agree that such political hate speech should have no place in public life, perhaps they will insist on apologies from those in their own ranks who have been guilty of comparable slanders.

Starting with Senator Ted Kennedy.

On July 1, 1987, just 45 minutes after Ronald Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, that Kennedy uncorked a poisonous assault on one of the nation’s most distinguished legal thinkers. “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids,” Kennedy charged.

They were despicable libels. “The Bork of Kennedy’s speech was a wild-eyed fascist and Bork the nominee was not,” writes Kennedy biographer Adam Clymer, a veteran Washington correspondent. Ethan Bronner, who covered the story for The Boston Globe, later described Kennedy as having “shamelessly twisted Bork’s world view” - with malice aforethought.

The same malice would be visited subsequently on other conservative judges nominated by Republican presidents. In 1991, Clarence Thomas was slimed as a traitor to his race for having married a white woman, and as a mouthpiece for white supremacists. “If you gave Clarence Thomas a little flour on his face,” declared Carl Rowan, “you’d think you had David Duke talking.” Judge Charles Pickering, a longtime advocate of racial reconciliation, was defamed by Senator John Kerry in 2002 as a “forceful advocate for a cross-burner” and by Senator Charles Schumer for his “glaring racial insensitivity.”

In some left-wing precincts, accusations of racism are flung about with astonishing recklessness. The recent “Tea Party” protests by fiscal conservatives around the country, seethed actress/activist Janeane Garofalo, were “about hating a black man in the White House … racism straight up.” The Fox News Channel, says Keith Olbermann, is “as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan.”

Few weapons of character-assassination are as abhorrent as the “racist” label falsely applied. Those angry when conservatives apply it to liberals should be equally scandalized when liberals apply it to conservatives. And, it should go without saying, vice versa.