Obama: From anti-war law professor to warmonger in 100 days

If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed, the US Supreme Court will consist of six Catholics, two Jews and precisely one white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the form of Justice John Paul Stevens, who is 88 years old and boasts of two important WASP insignia: inherited wealth and a bow tie.

The other WASP on the court, until he announced his impending retirement - thus paving the way for Sotomayor’s nomination - is David Souter. The two WASPS have been the most liberal members of the court.

There were desultory calls for President Obama to preserve the WASP quotient on the court by picking another white protestant, but Sotomayor fulfilled other, more pressing quota requirements, being a woman and of Puerto Rican ancestry - prospectively making her the first Hispanic member of the court, thus delighting America's fastest growing ethnic group.

Hispanics represent 14 per cent of the population and a quarter of live births

Hispanics are the great brown hope of the Democratic Party and the real estate industry (more or less coterminous), since they represent 14 per cent of the population but 25 per cent of the live births, thus responsible for the fact that the United States is the only Western industrialised nation with a fertility rate above the 2.2 per cent replacement rate.

Since WASPS are busy running America from their clubland bastions in Manhattan and Boston they haven't had time for procreative duties and scant opportunity either, since their leathery spouses spend their evenings going to charity balls and their weekends in the Hudson Valley or Virginia pruning their roses.

The WASP replacement rate is abysmal and their traditional claim to be America's ruling class is under relentless pressure from Jews, whom all WASPs, after a few martinis, invoke as running not just America but the entire world. So these days WASPS sit resignedly in their libraries reading histories of quintessential WASP clans like the Whitneys, the Rockfellers and the Harrimans, or watching reruns of CIA movies - the last genre dedicated to the thesis that ruthless white upper-class protestants run America.

Actually the WASPS fought their decisive battle for power early in the last century, when they realised that the streams of immigrants pouring into the New World from Czarist Russia or Catholic countries like Italy and Ireland would in the not so long term alter the nation's ethnic balance and challenge their supremacy.

WASPS fought back with the programme of population management known as the Eugenics Movement, eloquently defined by a great WASP hero, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who declared that: "It is better for all the world, if instead of