For some reason, a lot of establishment journalists love counterfactuals. I blame Niall Ferguson. Most of the time, they make me think more of What if Napoleon Had a B-52 at Waterloo than of The Man in the High Castle.
Given establishment media’s obsession with the Borking of Bork and how it caused all the problems that currently exist in the country, it was not surprising that there’s been a lot of discussion about how the marriage equality decision would have gone down differently if Bork had been confirmed. I’m not sure how much sense that makes, since Bork died a few years ago. But that doesn’t bother me since at least in this parable, liberals got somewhere by fucking fighting, not by moderating their divisive hippie rhetoric to appeal to centrist middle Americans.
I had an exchange with an establishment journalist whom I like, John McQuaid, where I said over-the-top things about how Borking was the root of all evil. He couldn’t tell I was kidding, and I thought what an idiot, but looking back at some of stupidity that’s been written on the topic by serious people, I can see why he took it at face value. Even the liberal Joe Nocera wrote an article called “The Ugliness All Started With Bork” that ended:
The next time a liberal asks why Republicans are so intransigent, you might suggest that the answer lies in the mirror.
NonyNony
I mean, if the Democrats hadn’t Borked Bork it all would have been sunshine and lollipops in the USA. Forever!
You can’t deny it DougJ – sunshine and fucking lollipops.
(Bork would have written from the bench in a way that makes Scalia look sane and reasonable.)
Poopyman
Fortunately for him, liberals aren’t asking the question so much any more. It’s become apparent even to some Villagers that Republicanism is a mental illness.
Beyond that, writing such crap shows me that some people are just not going to get it.
Ridnik Chrome
The Saturday Night Massacre, all by itself, should have been enough to disqualify Robert Bork from sitting on the Supreme Court. Reagan nominated him as a deliberate challenge to the Senate, which had just switched to Democratic control in the 1986 elections.
And anyone who says Democrats started it should look up Abe Fortas.
Gin & Tonic
Holy shit, that’s still a thing? Bork went down 58-42, with 6 R’s in that count. It was 9-5 against in committee, at which point he should have withdrawn but was too stubborn. He got a vote, just like the Constitution says (no filibuster or fake filibuster), and was found wanting.
piratedan
yeah, because the Right has been incredibly reasonable to deal with since Watergate…. Just look at all of these stalwarts of moderation, Orrin Hatch, Jesse Helms, Dennis Hastert, Newt Gingrich, Jimmy Imhofe, Darrel Issa, Dick Cheney all reasonable people with nary an axe to grind.
After all, look at the mess that was the Clinton administration, we had to impeach a known horndog for getting a hummer from a willing intern.
These guys have had a hard on for payback since Nixon was caught with his political pants around his ankles and they’ve set out to control the media ever since (and Big Bill fucked up by taking the fairness doctrine to the woodshed, so that’s an own goal imho). The result, we have Rupert and his goons controlling one axis, RW AM hate radio 24/7 and a bunch of supposed journos demanding access to the GOP as if they had to fill out cotillion dance cards…
Stella B
@Ridnik Chrome: The “Impeach Earl Warren” crowd were Dixiecrats trying to impeach a Republican appointee for being too soft on civil rights.
White Trash Liberal
Republicans are so intransigent because fucking liberals stood up for their principles and denied a theocratic fuckstick a lifetime appointment to warp federal law.
If only we had just let Republicans have their way, just that one time, comity would prevail. Scaife would have held back on funding oppo research on Clinton, saving us from a keystone impeachment. Gore would have won even more legitimately than before and we’d have those flying cars sci fi writers PROMISED US.
Brachiator
So, what, it all comes down to Richard Nixon again, and the politics of getting even?
Bork revealed himself to be a quisling during the Watergate era:
In a sane world, Bork would have retired from public service, and never should have been considered for any job again.
Instead he got rehabilitated. Lots of stuff noting his brilliant legal mind. But he was an amoral little prig, and would have been a baby Scalia on the Court.
ranchandsyrup
*anguished white voice* My permanent conservative majority, it’s ruined!
Belafon
“It’s your fault I’m an asshole.” Not a defense.
JGabriel
Speaking of counterfactuals, Fox is now trying to convince their viewers that Dylann Roof was a left wing activist.
Kevin Johnson @ Fox, via TPM:
No, he was not. Roof was a conservative terrorist.
I used that phrase that somewhere else a few days ago, and a later commenter tried to correct it to reactionary terrorist.
Again, no. We need to tie the word conservative as tightly to terrorist as the right has spent the last few decades tying liberal to commie, pinko, gay, Islamofascist, atheist, et. al., et. al.
catclub
@Gin & Tonic: you answered just the question I was asking.
catclub
@Brachiator:
Elliot Abrams.
Ridnik Chrome
From the Nocera column, linked above:
Wingnuts and their apologists sure do love to quote that Kennedy speech, like it was some piece of McCarthyite slander. But did Kennedy say anything that wasn’t true? Bork was on the record as being against the Civil Rights Acts and against legal abortion. And if he had his way then yes, blacks would still be sitting at segregated lunch counters and women would still be dying of back-alley abortions.
khead
@Belafon:
Yeah, but you would be amazed how much I see it.
MomSense
It is either both sides do it or the Democraps are to blame. My guess is that Republicans must throw better cocktail parties and you won’t get invited if you tell the truth about how dysfunctional and radical the Republicans are.
Stella B
@JGabriel: A-fuckin’-men.
I just had it pointed out to me on Mother Jones that Robert E. Lee was a Democrat and therefore Democrats haven’t got a leg to stand on when it comes to civil rights. Sigh.
White Trash Liberal
@JGabriel:
Roof was influenced by and actively paraphrased ideas from the Council of CONSERVATIVE Citizens.
And the Foxbots will lap up this swill like it’s top shelf champagne.
Hurling Dervish
@Brachiator: Actually, to be fair here, both Cox and Richardson implored Birk not to follow them and resign, saying that there needed to be some kind of continuity or else the government couldn’t run.
JGabriel
piratedan:
Bill who? Clinton? Because Clinton supports the Fairness Doctrine
The Fairness Doctrine was revoked under Reagan.
Ridnik Chrome
@Stella B: Remember Eisenhower’s famous quote about how his two biggest mistakes as president were both sitting on the Supreme Court? Warren was one of the two he was referring to (and the other was William Brennan).
Walker
The proper term for this is “victim blaming”
LWA
This is why I get sick of the Broderistic appeals to civility. They inevitably load the dice in favor of the existing holders of power, and cloak their advantage.
Politics is intrinsically divisive and almost always loaded with deep moral intuitions, which can’t be sugar coated.
When people craft an image of a cerebral, calm, reasoned debate, I think of privileged people who have no stake in the matter, who have the luxury of coolly discussing abstractions.
There are people walking around today, who would be dead were it not for Obamacare. There are people being buried right now because of the Southern Strategy of fanning the flames of white resentment to gain electoral advantage.
To paraphrase, when I hear appeals to civility I reach for my gun.
MattF
What, exactly, is wrong with saying that Bork’s views on the law were unacceptable to the Senate? Because, y’know, they were. And because, y’know, that’s the precise constitutional test. I’ll allow that the political process that defeated his nomination was messy– but Bork on the Court would have been a disaster.
Origuy
@Stella B: Such people clearly think it’s 1865, not 2015. 150 years doesn’t mean a thing to them.
Matt McIrvin
Wait, I thought it was Roe v. Wade that forced, FORCED I say, the right to go insane for 40 years.
Chris
Short of confirming the crazy fuck..What would have convinced the VSPs of the Democrats goodwill?.. Lol (nothing I know)
Ruckus
@JGabriel:
Agreed. Conservative Terrorist.
Considering all the crazy that inhabits the conservative side of the aisle these days (and many, many days before now as well) it is very appropriate. The southern strategy existed to pull into the conservative club all the crazy. It’s worked very well, and they need to own it. Problem is of course that crazy rarely sees itself that way.
Stella B
@Origuy: Fifty years don’t mean a thing to them, because when they recite the sins of Civil War era Democrats, they ignore Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond.
Tom Q
As Michael Kinsley said when this “all was fair till Bork” fantasy was first floated, 7 years prior to the Bork nomination, the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) ran campaigns against incumbent Democratic Senators in the 1980 election that were scurrilously personal and false. This campaign led to a wholly unexpected GOP takeover of the Senate, which enabled much of the Reagan Revolution (in the days leading up to the election, most Dem pundits accepted Reagan would likely win, but thought the Dem Congress would be a check on him). The idea that slash and burn tactics began with Bork is patently false.
And, as was noted above, Kennedy’s speech was alarmist, but everything he said about Bork had basis in reality.
Ruckus
@Origuy:
People looking for support of an illogical political thesis never seem to mind
lookingbeing illogical.I wonder why that is?
Bobby Thomson
@Ridnik Chrome: in fairness, Fortas was a hack.
Mike in NC
After all these years the Village is still butthurt over Bork.
Christie about to squeeze into the Klown Kar tomorrow.
Peale
@Ridnik Chrome: Yes. That covenant he signed with his neighbors – it wasn’t like that was something that was dredged up from before time began.
Citizen Alan
If Bork had been on the Supreme Court all these years instead of Kennedy, we would not now be celebrating the legalization of gay marriage. We would, at best, be celebrating the fact that being gay was no longer a criminal offense. Or have we all forgotten that Lawrence v. Texas (striking down sodomy laws) was a 5-4 opinion written by Kennedy.
mai naem mobile
The person at the root of the incivility is the Newstster. He just took a bunch of House customs and threw them out of the window. Nothing to do with.Bork.
CONGRATULATIONS!
I remember the whole Bork thing. I was still in high school. I thought Reagan was the presidential equivalent of a mass murderer out on parole, and knew any thing or person he suggested for any reason would be bad for this nation.
But Bork was a surprise nonetheless. I did not think Ronnie had that much “fuck you” in him, and was a bit surprised that a publicly-proven craven shitbag coward like Bork really thought that the American people would allow him to have any post in government whatsoever, much less a Supreme Court seat. But it seems, from subsequent interviews, he really thought he was the guy for the job.
Of course, we got Thomas instead, in what may have been the most cynical nomination for the Court ever made (Reagan thought, correctly, that Dems wouldn’t touch the first black Supreme Court nominee no matter what his views, and he was right).
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
“Journalists” love counterfactuals because (a) they’re easy and (b) they don’t require any actual knowledge, because you can make it all up. For all we know, Bork could have suffered a severe head injury while walking up the steps for his first day, had a complete personality reversal, and became more liberal than Thurgood Marshall. You can’t say it couldn’t have happened, because we’ll never know!
Peale
@MattF: Well, it is a world where there is supposed to be comity and therefore ideas aren’t supposed to matter.
Peale
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Thomas replaced Marshall, who was the first AA justice. I think the justice who we got post Bork was Souter.
Cacti
I’ve yet to see any member of the courtier press point out a single untruth in Ted Kennedy’s floor speech about Bork.
Bork was a far right loon, and wholly lacking in ethics as shown by his willingness to fire Archibald Cox for Richard Nixon.
The country dodged a huge bullet when he was kept off SCOTUS.
The Thin Black Duke
Speaking as an African-American grumpy old man: fuck ’em. Life is short, time is precious, and I ain’t got the patience anymore to engage in useless arguments with bigoted fools who have already made up their minds.
Bobby Thomson
@Tom Q: “alarmist” implies overstatement. It was just the truth. But conservatives always holler blood libel when their words are quoted accurately.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Reagan’s nomination of Bork was a deliberate provocation, much like Bush II and Ashcroft, and John Bolton, and….
From Nina Totenberg’s NPR obit:
She gives a lot of space to Tom Goldstein of SCOTUS blog, who seems to be singing from the same hymnal as Nocera
and this from Tom Shales
reminds me the Simpsons’ judge has Bork’s facial hair.
@Peale: Kennedy, no? And in between Bork and Kennedy was a young Stanford prof who withdrew his nomination because he had smoked the marijuana in college, or law school?
piratedan
@JGabriel: if so my bad, my understanding was that Clinton removed the last vestiges of said regulation.
Hurling Dervish
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Douglas Ginsberg tearfully confessed to smoking the deadly herb and his nomination was canned. Imagine that happening today.
Comrade Luke
How can anyone use Bork as an example, without mentioning the complete free pass the Dems – led by Kerry – gave to Alito?
Kryptik
@Stella B:
And yet they use Byrd as a bludgeon to somehow prove that Dems are the real super racists and all KKK lovers and everything, despite, you know, Byrd renouncing (rather than denying) his racist past and making amends for it in his later career to his dying day. But nope, Byrd was in the KKK once in the past, that means all Dems are super-mega racists who own the KKK and only Dems get to own them, GOP are pristine flowers who love everyone except those evil evil fucking murderous racist Dems.
LanceThruster
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4jpejfk341rpn7e8o1_500.jpg
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Checked my memory: Kerry was part of the attempt to filibuster Alito. You mean Roberts?
Looking over that page… Oy. Alito’s nomination gave us the “gang of fourteen”, the bipartisan (hallelujah, praise unto St Broder!) group working to get him passed, I think the first of the Senate “gangs” of the last few years. Lincoln Chaffee, now running to Hillary Clinton’s left (at least he was a few weeks ago) was part of it.
My most vivid memory is Byrd himself, bellowing on the Senate floor in full Foghorn Leghorn mode about “Mrs A-Lee-Toze Tee-YAHS!”
ETA: Checked the vote on Roberts, Kerry was a yea in committee and in the floor vote
Roger Moore
@Ridnik Chrome:
It doesn’t matter. To a Conservative, pointing out that somebody is a dangerous asshole is much worse than actually being a dangerous asshole.
Botsplainer
OT, from the “You’ve Got to be Fucking Kidding Me” files:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-33311240
Because nothing says social fairness to a population with a 25% unemployment rate like austerity.
EthylEster
DougJ wrote:
I’m sure it’s the first time that has EVER happened.
Comrade Luke
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Yea, Roberts.
I distinctly remember Kerry up there saying something to the effect of “Look, you’re going to get affirmed, but let me ask you some questions anyway”. It was infuriating.
Culture of Truth
The only thing they love more than counter factuals is stories where liberals and mean and conservatives are all heroic intellectual principled victims.
Belafon
@Comrade Luke: At the same time, while you can point at Bork and say “nutcase”, blocking a presidential nominee because he’s not someone you would appoint is problematic. We’ve gotten onto Republicans for blocking Obama’s nominees because they are not conservative.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: D’oh! Got that wrong, looks like Kerry was a no vote on Roberts confirmation. I had a weirdly hard time finding the actual vote. Usually it’s a pretty simple google search.
Tokyokie
I’m still not sure what the big deal with the Bork nomination was. Senators asked him questions, he answered them willingly and revealed what a horrible man he was, and, by a significant majority, the Senate rejected his nomination. The main fallout from that has been now Supreme Court nominees obsfucate and run out the clock during testimony and no longer reveal their actual judicial temperament. Frankly, I think the weasley bastards should be threatened with contempt and have the hypothetical questions asked again. I thought Roberts’ testimony was especially mendacious, but if Republicans are going to continue to cry foul over Bork’s treatment, Democrats, for the rest of time, can play the Clarabelle Thomas trump card and always take the trick.
Kropadope
@JGabriel:
No, to do that, we would have to accept that these violent extremist assholes are conservative. Extremist and conservative don’t really match, unless we accept Rush Limbaugh’s redefinitions of liberal and conservative. Let’s not though, let’s take the English language back.
Democrats are social liberals and conservative economic liberals.
Republicans are a mix of social reactionaries and social apathetics and they are radical economic liberals.
Sherparick
And the answer always is: “Both Sides (but hippies mostly).
Poopyman
@Belafon:
FTFY
Poopyman
@Tokyokie: The big deal about Bork’s nomination was that Democrats had the temerity to block a nominee of The Sainted One.
Sherparick
@JGabriel: I hadn’t realized that Communists had taken over the local South Carolina schools. I did not get that memo. John Stewart was wrong. Faux News is not “BS Mountain,” it’s a freaking Mount Everest of BS.
Matt McIrvin
@CONGRATULATIONS!: George Bush the elder nominated Clarence Thomas, not Reagan. Replacing Thurgood Marshall, the first black SCOTUS justice (who was a genuine hero of civil rights and 20th century law) with that guy was a neat trick.
JGabriel
@piratedan:
There were a couple of court-ordered rule changes by the FCC, under Clinton, to bring FCC rules in compliance with Reagan revoking the Fairness Doctrine, so you’re right as far as that goes – but that wasn’t Clinton policy, that was just belated consequences from Reagan’s revocation.
Benw
@Sherparick: both sides (but when hippies do it, they’re really mean and hurt our feelings)
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Botsplainer: On the one hand, I wish we had the “no transfer payments” system here, so the Southern states would have to come begging, hat in hand, for money from DC every year to pay their bills, as the way we do it now avoids the humiliation and allows their state governments to continue the fiction that conservatism works for anything.
On the other hand, there’s nothing to stop Greece from telling the EU to go fuck themselves and watching the entire house of cards fall into a heap of worthless paper. Yeah, it would put Greece back to the Stone Ages. But it would probably hurt their German creditors even more.
Lesson: never take a dime from the IMF.
jl
Maybe the hypotheticals are really the true hidden truly true truth. Which always coincidentally supports whatever at all you need to get what you want right now, never mind what you said yesterday or tomorrow.
Niall Ferguson came up, so to illustrate. Even though there is a load of historical evidence that John Maynard Keynes was truly and enthusiastically biexsual, rather than gay, and even though he married and tried to have kids, that hides the real truth, that Keynes was really 100 percent gay.
Why, because we need to slam gays today to try to get what we want by saying that they just don’t give a shit about the future. And we need to discredit Keynes on macroecnomics by slamming gays, therefore Keynes had to be gay and must not have wanted kids. Even tough Keynes was making an empirical argument about macroeconomics, that in the fake misleading nonhypothetical history and reality, has not one once of relevance to what he was sexually.
Now, Ferguson has claimed and will claim tomorrow that he is a historian that worries about the historical record and evidence, but that is not relevant today.
Nice work if you can get it.
Frankensteinbeck
@Benw:
For the media, it’s ‘Both sides do it, which proves that liberal ideals are childish and conservatives are mature adults.’
James E Powell
@Hurling Dervish:
Actually, to be fair here, both Cox and Richardson implored Bork not to follow them and resign, saying that there needed to be some kind of continuity or else the government couldn’t run.
Cox spoke at my law school and said exactly this. Cox told us that Richardson & Ruckelshaus believed that their resignations would make the point.
It was the early 80s, a few years before Bork was nominated. But it was generally believed that Reagan intended to put him on the supreme court.
Tommy
@CONGRATULATIONS!: How about it. I live in a state where we pay $1.27 for every dollar we get back from the Federal government. My state is having some financial issues. Heck our Controller was on 60 Minutes two years ago and he called our state a “deadbeat state.” There are a lot of bills, many for schools and hospitals, we just are not paying.
Then I see all these deep red states, often in the south, that get far more in Federal funds than they pay. Yet they rail against the government 24/7. Pisses me off to no end!
gene108
I think the ugliness in modern politics did start with Bork. To say it did not ignores history.
For whatever reason, the Right seemed to invest a heavy amount of emotional capital in getting Bork confirmed. Why? I do not know.
But when his nomination failed, they began to try and find ways to weaponize their anger and hatred and channel it into the broader political system.
I think blaming Democrats / liberals for the Right’s 25+ year temper-tantrum is like blaming a rape victim for getting raped; the Republicans could have looked at the criticism leveled at Bork as valid and realized he and his supporters were out of step with contemporary America.
Rather they decided those, who did not adhere to their world view must be knocked down a peg, by whatever means necessary.
jl
And, this is just my impression, but seems like conservative and reactionaries are more attracted by the ‘but for the tragic twist of fate’ argument about why everything is effed up and bullshit. I have seen lefties indulge in this self-pitying speculation, but I don’t think as much as conservatives and reactionaries.
Maybe because I see a lot of it in reactionary economic history. Oh, if only Adam Smith and Ricardo had not dabbled din the labor theory of value. They were one hundred percent right on my selection of their thought that supports my policy preferences today, and that obviously gave an misleading merit to the EVIL labor theory of value.
Why, because Marx, that’s why! Marx is evil! Oh, the humanity! If only an Austrian economist could have been there on the nights that Smith and Ricardo sat down to right about labor, and had taken them out drinking, or thrown them in the river!
Edit: Jefferson indulged in it too, when he lamented the single politician who cast that single vote that he claims would have ended slavery in the US if that one vote had gone the other way.
Arclite
OT, but Huckabee is the worst. He can forgive fucking murderers, but not two people who love each other and want to get married. Asshole.
Botsplainer
Shorter Ron Fournier: “I’ll show you on this doll where Hillary touched me. Will somebody give me a cookie after?”
http://freebeacon.com/politics/fournier-hillary-clinton-undermining-public-trust-in-her-and-politics-in-general/
Tommy
@Botsplainer: I am the first to admit I am not a huge fan of Hillary. But I am also old enough to vividly recall the 80s and the endless attacks against Bill and Hillary. The rights hatred of her is off the charts. No matter what she does they will attack, attack, and attack some more.
I have no idea what is going on with these emails. What the White House might or might not think. But I tend to think there is a lot less here than the Republicans would like us to think.
Jparente
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Or from FEMA
Eric U.
apparently, the current republican party hate goes back to them losing the Civil War.
OzarkHillbilly
@gene108:
I remember a certain S.Carolina Representative beating another Rep about the head with a cane. That was over a hundred years before Bork IIRC.
Politics has always been ugly. That’s how we got Jim Crow.
Botsplainer
@gene108:
Bork was the movement conservative’s movement conservative. His view of the power of the executive and its relation to the state was one which was akin to that of Franco. Rejection of his nomination was tantamount to denying American exceptionalism.
lgerard
The selective memory here is astonishing.
Bork’s downfall was his appearance before the Judicial Committee where he displayed both his arrogance and his utter contempt for the democratic process. I have never seen anything that remotely approaches it since then. Think Scalia squared.
The truth is, no no one Borked Bork but Bork.
Tommy
@Botsplainer: I was 17 when the whole Bork thing happened. I wasn’t very political at the time, but I recall watching the hearings and thinking to myself, “my gosh this person isn’t qualified.” I didn’t know that much about the world. I had yet to take a few law classes in grad school and it was still clear this person didn’t need to be anywhere close to the SCOTUS.
peterboy
the real problem is that the Democrats didnt Bork Thomas.
gene108
@Tom Q:
From what I’ve read, the difference pre-and-post Bork was the grand unification of the Right Wing / Conservative Movement.
You may have a NCPAC running negative ads one election cycle or Gingrich pushing for this with his PAC, in House races.
But you did not have what we have today, where ever bit of right-wing machinery gets on and stays on the same page, with the exact same talking points.
Bork’s failure to be confirmed caused the beginnings of the fusion between right-wing media, think tanks and politicians, in a way we know today; whereas in the past they had worked together but had some degree of independence of thought and opinions on different subjects.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@gene108:
I suspect it was the beginning of the right’s attempt to rehabilitate Nixon and “it’s not illegal if the [Republican] president does it.” If Bork had been put on the Supreme Court, it would have retroactively justified Bork’s actions on Nixon’s behalf.
gene108
@OzarkHillbilly:
You forgot the other represtantive, who held the subject of the beating down. It was a literal 2-on-1 hit job.
OzarkHillbilly
@gene108: I blame it all on Al Zheimers.
Benw
My favorite counter factual I like to call “the David Brooks”: our conservative intellectual betters were leading us to a great American future with wisdom and probity on issue X, until the damn hippies came along and f’ed everything up.
catclub
@lgerard:
Swedish chef episode?
jl
I was too young to remember the Bork affair. I am not too young to remember what the reactionary response was to the failure of his nomination.
IIRC from the reading, Bork scored 100 percent on the reactionaries scale of fantasy judge perfection. The hurt of losing him was immense, so they started a campaign to work the refs on bizarre and ornate rules for what were acceptable and unacceptable reasons to confirm or not confirm a nominee to the SCOTUS. As far as I can tell it boils down to:
Any criticism of our favored nominees is unfair and imposing an unethical litmus test on how the nominee with decide cases and also are unconstitutional attempts to inject partisan ideology into the pure realm of pure legal judgment, to interfere with the ethereal and eternally unchanging role of judges in as umpires calling balls and strikes.
Any candidate we don’t like? Well, hell, he might over rule our favored litmus test precedents, and hell, look at this nut, total radical loon way out of our assertions about the ideological mainstream of US jurisprudence!
Complete bad faith patently incoherent and self-contradictory absurd argument, with no substance behind at all. But they yell loud, and playing along with the posturing and theatrics is easy. And no substance, so don’t have to actually know anything to play along. So the corporate media hack media love it, just love it.
Culture of Truth
Also, Bork left a paper trail, which ambitious judges are careful to avoid.
Also, NBC just fired Donald Trump.
someofparts
Please. The Bork hearings launched the decline in civility?
How about the onslaught of shock jocks after Reagan eliminated the Fairness Rule.
Matt McIrvin
@jl: I just learned that Ferguson spent some time arguing with Krugman and Brad Delong about the imminent danger of hyperinflation, on the basis of a ridiculous conspiracy website that spent its time arbitrarily unskewing government economic statistics to show that true inflation was double-digit and the economy has been shrinking since the 1980s. (To his credit, he did retract the claims when presented with extensive debunking of his source.)
Samuel Knight
One of the few successes that thinking progressives have had in the last 30 years, was keeping a right wing nut named Robert Bork off the Supreme Court. Something they should have done to Clarence Thomas as well.
Thus is it any wonder that the openly right and the closeted right (centrists) hate that achievement?
Second note is that the step 1 in any conservative playbook is to blame some else. Not a big deal if doesn’t make sense, just blame that someone else fast.
SFAW
@catclub:
Icelandic. It was the one where he wore the “swan” tutu/dress to one of the awards shows. (Oscars? Grammys? Too old to remember or care.)
Brachiator
If the Senate would just STFU and confirm all of Obama’s judicial nominees without a fight or unfair blocking of the nominee, then I might listen to some historical BS about Bork. Otherwise, I got no fucks to give.
Artemesia
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Thomas was of course not the first black nominee; why has Marshall been so completely forgotten?
SFAW
@someofparts:
Abso-fucking-lutely. Because not getting their way on ANYTHING — no matter how beneficial or innocuous — gives the Rethugs license (in their own “minds”) to scorched-earth anything and everything that they don’t like, or mostly-don’t-like, or which could fall under Cleek’s Law.
Tree With Water
Bork’s defeat was a high tide of sorts, an example of democratic party power being wielded wisely and effectively in the U.S. senate. That’s one reason the GOP seized upon it to rally their faithful, much as the nazis once commemorated the Beer Hall putsch.
JGabriel
@Kropadope:
I do.
The conservative Republican Party has spent the past five decades pursuing a Southern Strategy of appeals to racists, sexists, homophobes, fundamentalists, and, perhaps most importantly, gun nuts.
And they have done this with repeated references to violence, references to “the tree of liberty being refreshed by blood”, and “if we can’t win at the ballot box, we’ll win with the bullet box”, and “people will start to resort to those Second Amendment remedies”, and so on. All of those quotes are from people in the Republican mainstream who call themselves conservatives.
Starting with the Birchers and Barry Goldwater’s cry that “Extremism in the name of liberty is no vice!” the Republicans and conservatives embarked on a rightward path to, well, extremism – from Nixon’s It’s okay when the president does it to Reagan’s Government is the problem to Gingrich’s I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty and Norquist’s drown the government in a bathtub to Bush advocating torture, to today’s conservatives who call for Second Amendment remedies and ballot by bulletbox.
Conservative no longer means what people think it used to, if it ever did. Hell, Eisenhower and Teddy Roosevelt – the usual exemplars of conservativism people cite when they want conservative to mean something different than how it’s usually used today – were liberals by both today’s definition and by the 18th C. definition: pro-market, pro-representative-democracy, pro-equality, pro-liberty. In the 18th C. “conservative” meant “royalist”; today, and for the past 50 years, it means the Southern Strategy.
The people calling themselves conservatives who disagree with that strategy should start calling themselves liberals.
I’m not saying all conservatives are terrorists. But I’m no longer willing to pussyfoot around giving conservatives cover by insisting these terrorists who were inspired by conservatives have a different label like right-wing or reactionary – they are conservative terrorists.
JGabriel
He’p me! I been modererated!
hoodie
Got into this with an editor friend the other day. A lot has to do with a tendency to find meaning in expression more than in substance, and interpret without context with a bias towards neutrality, which they often conflate with objectivity. Thus, for example, Kennedy’s words about Bork seem as literally hyperbolic as some eruption from Sarah Palin about Obama palin’ with terrorists, but in context are much more tied to truth in light of Bork’s writings. I imagine it comes from a headline mentality and the understandable desire to not bring one’s political biases into one’s reporting, but it gets mangled in the execution. There’s also a knee jerk defensiveness when otherwise liberal minded reporters get attacked by liberals for broderism. It is taken as an affront to journalistic integrity, when it’s really just a critique of bad journalism.
bartkid
The only counterfactual that matters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suv1hcBA3PY
Jim, Foolish Literalist
That’s interesting. So they are aware of it? the concept of Broderism.
I think the case with Kennedy is also that he brought up abortion. My sense is that most journalists are tote-baggers, nominally pro-choice, but one doesn’t like to talk about such things.
Howlin Wolfe
@Bobby Thomson: Based on what, on whose opinion?
Howlin Wolfe
@mai naem mobile: That comports with my recollection. I don’t remember Republicans crying, “Remember the Bork!”
Howlin Wolfe
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Thomas wasn’t the first black nominee. Thurgood Marshall is glowering at you from the beyond.
martinmc
@piratedan: : She wasn’t an intern at the time.
Tree With Water
@hoodie: I have no recollection of Kennedy’s intemperate language (although I would likely endorse every word, or consider it too temperate). What I remember above all is that Kennedy of Massachusetts managed to convey the danger that Bork represented to his party’s rank and file, and in so doing shored up the votes needed to torpedo the crazy bastard. And while it was the end of Bork, it was also the birth of Robert Bork as the GOP’s own walking, talking, Horst Wessel-caliber martyr. It was a win-win for each: republican shot callers created a major political martyr (to better rally the loons), and Bork dined out on the country’s close call for the rest of his miserable life.
Omnes Omnibus
@Howlin Wolfe: Marshall was also 1000x the person that Thomas is.
hyperpolarizer
Nocera is a tool and hardly liberal. He is pretty much beneath notice, and if he thinks Borking is the root of all evil, it’s just in character.
I remember the hearings well, and in particular Senator Hewell Heflin saying (after Gerald Ford’s former transportation secretary had testified against Bork) “In Alabama we have a saying that the only acceptable form of cannibalism is Republican eatin’ Republican.”
PurpleGirl
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
that Dems wouldn’t touch the first black Supreme Court nominee no matter what his views,
The first African-American on the Court was Thurgood Marshall. Thomas Clarence was nominated to take the seat of Justice Marshall. It was shameful that Thomas was to get Marshall’s seat.
Provider_UNE_AndPlayersToBeHatedLater™
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Bush pere gave us thomas.
I hope this has been previouly noted.
I remeber praying that thurgood would live out his term, as i figured a dem would win in 92.
I was wrong, and as a black person very angry when clarence was given a pass.
…
Provider_UNE_AndPlayersToBeHatedLater™
@Provider_UNE_AndPlayersToBeHatedLater™:
Neglected to catch thomas as the first black supreme court justice error.
Blame it on my rush to clarify the the identity of the man who made the most cynical appointment in judicial history, with a close second being janice roberts brown, and of course Harriet Miers…
Gotta love the bush fam.
Though more seemed to have remembered thurgood, than who appointed thomas, which is actually a positive in my book.
Well done.
Avedon
@piratedan: Since Nixon? No, they were always like that. But taking over the media isn’t just about Nixon’s impeachment (despite such claims), but about the Powell Memo. Those long-haired boys and demands for a basic income guarantee just scared the pants off the big Tories.
Avedon
@Ridnik Chrome: Don’t forget his maybe-sometimes on certain days of the week when I feel like it view of the 1st Amendment, which basically meant, “Free speech is only for people who agree with me.”
Paul in KY
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Mr. Marshall was the 1st black supreme court nominee.
Nathanael
It would have been correct to refuse every single nomination Reagan made to the Supreme Court. Every single one of them has committed impeachable offenses. But I suppose Democrats didn’t quite have the spine to blockade the nominations until Bush the Elder got into office.