Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
On the one hand, this unhinged rant of an obituary from The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin is vile, vicious and vacuous. It makes me slightly ashamed to be a subscriber.
On the other hand, it inspires me. It makes me want to live my life in such a way that I cause people to sputter with rage, distort my history and demean themselves with a destroy-by-any-means approach. The top:
Robert Bork, who died Wednesday, was an unrepentant reactionary who was on the wrong side of every major legal controversy of the twentieth century. The fifty-eight senators who voted against Bork for confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1987 honored themselves, and the Constitution. In the subsequent quarter-century, Bork devoted himself to proving that his critics were right about him all along.
Some of the folks involved with the proceedings, of course, have reflected with sadness on them. You might read Jeffrey Rosen's piece in The New Republic for more on that.
Toobin rewrites history as it relates to Bork's role in the Saturday Night Massacre. He claims:
Richard Nixon appointed Bork the Solicitor General of the United States, and in that post Bork showed that he lacked moral courage as well as legal judgment. In 1973, Nixon directed Elliot Richardson, the Attorney General, to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor. Richardson refused and resigned in protest, as did his deputy William Ruckelshaus. Bork, the third-ranking official in the Justice Department, had no such scruples and thus served as executioner in the Saturday Night Massacre, to his enduring shame.
For what it's worth, John Bolton says that the two who resigned did so specifically because they'd pledged in Senate confirmation hearings to do just that if the White House ever tried to interfere with Cox's investigation. Bork was confirmed before the Watergate affair became a big deal, so he had never made any such pledge. Still, he actually did want to resign:
[Richardson and Ruckelshaus] urged him not to, because then the entire top leadership of the department might have followed suit, and the country plunged into a constitutional crisis the likes of which we had never seen. Richardson and Ruckelshaus urged him to fire Cox to preserve the department’s legitimacy.
Toobin goes on to mock Bork's correct view that the Founders didn't write into the Constitution, for example, the right to kill your defenseless unborn child.
In what should be to his enduring shame, Toobin favorably quotes Ted Kennedy, who once left a woman to drown:
As Senator Edward Kennedy put it in a famous speech on the Senate floor, “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, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, [and] writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government.”
Was Kennedy too harsh? He was not—as Bork himself demonstrated in the series of intemperate books he wrote after losing the Supreme Court fight and quitting the bench, in 1987. The titles alone were revealing: ”The Tempting of America,” “Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline,” and “Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges.”
See what I'm saying? If you knew nothing else about Bork, just seeing Toobin lose his ever-living mind is high enough praise, no? What's so obvious about everything from the Bork hearings to this moment is that his critics hated him because he was brilliant and because he showed their weakness. He ran circles around them and they wanted to destroy him.
Oh that we should have such obituaries.
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Comments:
Oct '10
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
We are known by the enemies we make. Robert Bork offended the least worthy people in America. Sadly, their side have prevailed thus far.
In Teddy Kennedy's America, women are left to drown in cars while their lover works feverishly not to save them, but to save himself and line up his alibi.
Dec '12
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
Feared in death. Such is the liberal courage... Wait for when they cannot respond and pounce, yet again.
Decent folk get real tired of this real soon... NRA membership surging in wake of Newtown and voluminous liberal cries for gun control.
Bork's books set for a surge in renewed interest among the common folk.
Here I Stand!
Toobin... sit down and clamp your pie hole (an all American sentiment).
BT
Edited on December 20, 2012 at 3:57amJan '11
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
Over the past few weeks, for various reasons, we've been discussing civility.
We consider civility for its own sake; i.e., to respect others as a matter of course, or as a commitment to live well with others. Others believe that civility is simply a strategy for helping you achieve what you want.
One is a virtue. The other is a mask.
Toobin lashed out at Bork in the hour of his death. Toobin saw this as an opportunity to reinforce his agenda. Toobin, therefore, shows what civility means to him.
Oct '10
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
I would call Toobin a piece of garbage, but then garbage might sue me for defamation of character.
Oct '12
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
Toobin set out to diminish Judge Bork and failed. He succeeded in diminishing himself to the vanishing point.
May '11
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
Oh, Molly... that you only now feel slightly ashamed of that New Yorker subscription. ;)
The passing of Bork, however, is far sadder a day (and will be remembered by far more) than will be the passing of Toobin, I'm afraid. I should also point out that while far worse things could have been said about Ted Kennedy, who deserved no fanfare or mourning, but only contempt - conservatives, for the most part, respectfully refrained.
Apr '11
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
I stopped reading The New Yorker twenty years ago after Pauline Kael retired. Looks like I haven't missed anything.
Edited on December 20, 2012 at 6:18amMay '10
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
Shameful. Just shameful.
Mar '11
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
Reading such all that one can take away is pain. Seeing that any one of the brood of Kennedys which have plagued our nation are held in anything less than contempt, it is the failure of our times that line of men can be quoted without shame. This is no remembrance of Bork, but recitation of past sins enacted by the media and the mendacious in government.
Edited on December 20, 2012 at 5:18amSep '12
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
A hit piece on a guy who changed the course of American law disguised as an obit? I suppose death was a good time Toobin could write this about Bork. In life Bork stood too tall for someone like Toobin to bite at his ankles. What an unbelievable jerk.
Nov '12
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
New Yorker - Pravda on the Hudson. No .... Pravda had more class.
Edited on December 20, 2012 at 2:22pmDec '11
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
Toobin or not Toobin that is the question. I feel the same way about him as I feel about Sally Quinn on faith. The best way I can describe it is surreal in need of a shower.
Sep '10
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
I admire you greatly, Mollie, but I am astonished that you continue to send money to The New Yorker. I subscribed for decades, but cancelled my subscription during the Sid Blumenthal era there, when it dawned on me I was paying my enemies to help destroy everything I held dear. I still read the magazine once in a while, when back issues appear on my library's "Free! Help Yourself!" table, but not one red sou will they get from my purse. I won't even accept it at (almost) no cost, as they continue to offer to me, because then they would count me as a subscriber to attract advertising dollars.
Yes, I know. That's not your topic, which is the brilliant and esteemed Robert Bork, a great man who can't be diminished by the squeaks of Jeffey Toobin or any other pantywaist New Yorker opinion writer. It's their shame and let them live with it. Mediocrity sees nothing higher than itself.
Nov '12
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
Toobin wears a toupe.* But then again so do some conservatives so I guess that takes the sting out of my ad homi...say, why don't we do a study: who wears more toupes: liberals or conservatives...?
* This is the level of intellectual discussion J. Toobin deserves...
Aug '12
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
Not even Anthony Lane can get me back to The New Yorker. I think it was a casual slander of George W. Bush in a David Denby movie review that cut it for me. From what I can see it's gotten worse since my subscription lapsed; but it's good to be alerted when they disgrace themselves again. Thanks for that Mollie.
The access to their archives a subscription provides I confess I still find tempting.
Jun '12
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
You're right, Mollie. Bork must have done something really right to have engendered such hatred. What greater tribute on this earth could one receive?
Apr '11
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
One more "why I no longer read The New Yorker" story? I grew up with the magazine in the house, graduating from the cartoons to the movie, book and theater reviews. Subscribed myself off and on. I thought the magazine was sophisticated and funny. It published Capote, Salinger. As I grew older, though, it seemed pretentious and smug. The covers became political and ham-handed.
Then, in 2006, Dick Cheney hit a hunting buddy, Harry Whittington, with birdshot. The New Yorker cover presented a parody of the "Brokeback Mountain" poster, with Bush and Cheney in the Ledger and Gyllenhaal roles, Cheney with shotgun. What did that mean? They were secretly gay? Cheney wanted to shoot Bush? It meant nothing, but it was certainly meant as an insult.
I have not picked up The New Yorker since.
Edited on December 20, 2012 at 4:19pmSep '12
Re: Borked To Death, To Their Enduring Shame
This post works as a partial Fisking, of the vile and vacuous and vituperative Toobin. Why doesn't someone execute a full and proper Fisking? That's what gets noticed in a broader sense.
Wish Ricochet had an in-house Fisker, adept in rapid-response takedowns. Like how Breitbart uses its Retracto, the correction alpaca. Ricochet could have Refuto, the fisking Marmot. Or something.
Edited on December 20, 2012 at 11:31pm