A white Irishman is about as far away as you can get from a wise Latina woman.  Indeed, this white Irishman once remarked “I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.”  But the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was regarded as one of the wisest men ever to serve in Congress.  He received praise from both sides of the aisle for his brilliance, empathy, and political acumen.  His experiences weren’t nothin’ to sneeze at either.  Born into poverty he attended high school in Harlem and worked as a longshoreman before entering college.  He joined the Navy to pay for his education and served on active duty during World War II.   After the Navy, he continued a lifetime of government service.   In the Johnson administration he helped formulate policy for LBJ’s War on Poverty.  No partisan, he would also continue the fight against urban poverty in the Nixon White House.  He served as American ambassador to India and as ambassador to the U.N. before entering the Senate.   Through this time he managed to maintain a lifetime of scholarship and wrote 19 books.  George Will reportedly once quipped of Moynihan: “he wrote more books than most senators have read.”