Jay- this post compelled me to subscribe. I appreciate your writing and have been a long time fan from your national review days (why did you go??). I always look forward to your writings and count you as an important influence on my own conservative philosophy. I appreciate that you beat the drum for freedom world wide, whether Ukraine, Israel, Cuba, or other countries. And thank you for staying true to your roots, so to speak. Looking forward to what the future holds!
On the Village Idiwitt’s, I mean Anti Democrat Temper
I still remember where l was when I heard about this little, next big thing called twitter….on the Hugh Hewitt show, which I quit listening to the partisan hack, cold turkey, after the godforsaken Indiana primary in 2016…How dismaying it is to me that the anti social fora has gone off the speed rails and fittingly is now called XXX…where its most famous midnight tweeker gets his handle off from the literal Bada Bing, I mean Oval Office pictured above. God help U.S. We the Living in Idiocracy. (Forgive me Jesus, I pray for our sinners…but to the unrepentant that sold their immortal souls out to Heat Miser in the flesh…May there be a very, very special place in hell for Catholics in Claim Only [pronounced sicko] like Hewitt, Vance, Rubio…”collaborator behavior” [hat tip Matt Welch]). And there is absolutely, positively nothing wrong with your tweet Jay. Nothing wrong with shooting from the hip sometimes when it is coming straight from your frontal lobe, I mean heart….I can still remember the cancer survivor kid in my high school class plastering Bork’s Time magazine cover (remember when that was a really big thing, and really one of the only things to read….thanks internets) on our halls bulletin board, turning the B into a D. Clever, not wise, but funny all the same. I didn’t think care for it because it was about the same time I can remember that first class liar and certifiable schmuck Joe Biden started smearing his political opponents, only to make my blood boil for decades every time I saw his super polident smirk. And I do mean boil, for I have always despised phony, outwardly showy Catholics …but, to Witt
The New American Idol Barock Star Obama begot Trumpism
Trumpism begot Biden
Liar begot Liarer
Dumb begot Dumber
Bidumbnomics begot Idiocracy, Part Duh
Donald J Trump is simply the luckiest conman to be alive in our present Reality T.V. Show history gone wild. He had the cosmic fortune of facing Nurse Ratchet at the ballot box office in 2016….and then Selina Meyer in 2024. Thanks a lot loyal opposition party for nominating the best man….I mean a woman who did not know how to proverbially beat the living hell out of a preppy school yard bully. The fact that Kamala Harris did not chew The Don up and puke him out on the debate stage when he said the n*()’l! are eating peoples pets…and she did not look straight into the camera and declare Hilliary was right…”Any of you that believe this racist garbage man are ‘DEPLORABLES’ whose vote I not only do not want, I would like ‘you all’ not to just get out of my country, but get off my planet!!!” That is all, sorry for the digression. But I do not blame Republicans for Trumpism triumphing in November. And can you please stop calling the right trash republicans, they are “Rightists”, “Trumpers”, “ Trump Bible Thumpers” (contrarian populists who raise their collective right arms). God help U.S.
What about Garland…I remember when the the cunning Republican McConnell pulled something out of the political sayings vault, spoken words of one Joe Biden, as to why it is okay to shelve a SCOTUS nomination til after the election….and what about Ginsburg…what if she had not been so convinced the rest of the country where with Hilliary, and retired in 2016….i think shelving not one, but two polar opposite nominees would have been a problem for cocaine Mitch (begrudging hat tip Geraghty).
Speaking of no quarter (love the mighty Zepps live at Knebworth), a minority, majority of voters in Republican primaries got this monstrosity nominated. Smoke filled rooms (i am not thinking Jonah’s remnant ruminations will ever come true again), rank choice voting in all primaries, and a complete overall of the stupid system where Iowa and New Hampshire are bell tower states…Let’s have like five super Tuesday’s, where entire blocks of our nations electorate vote in primaries, over let’s say five weeks. Anyway, Trumpers not gonna do it anything to help fix our broken system, and not until we the people totally De Nazify, I mean De-Trumpify will there be any hope. But speaking of serious self reflection, I always thought the New American Idol Barock Star Obama’s calm, cool hand Luke reflection was just a pose he worked hard on in the mirror….like Addie with his one handed salute, the dumbmasses ate the phony shitte up like bread and circuses. God help U.S.
R.I.P. Roger Scrutun, this here rebel punk nihilist (again, hat tip Welch) without an editor for the cause sure does miss you and your moral clarity…as I very much thank you Jay for still carrying his mantle. Gotta run on (“fuckin long, isn’t it [hat tip Joe Strummer]). Thanks for taking my rant Onward and Upward. Peace through superior mental firepower
I think you have a valid point regarding democrats and others who opposed Judge Bork. He was definately not unfit. I opposed his nomination because of a statement in his nominating hearings regarding the right to privacy not being referenced in the Constitution. I am only a citizen not a historian or constitutional scholar but it seems to me that rather than elucidate what rights citizens have, the constituion limits what powers government has. In fact it does specify that the powers and rights not referenced in the Constitution are reserved to the states or the people.
Wonderful article as always, Mr. Nordlinger. Only two small gripes :
Regarding Twitter, "In any event, the ceiling was raised to 280 and everything was fine."
It wasn't fine to begin with. Twitter has always been a plague on the earth.
Regarding Merrick Garland, I agree that at the time it would have been hard to argue that he was unfit. However, after his stint as AG I would completely disagree that he is worthy of the office. (This is definitely not an endorsement of Bondi).
Many appear to believe that Democrats deserve Trump because of what they said about Republicans. I disagree. No one deserves Trump. Least of all us conservative former-Republicans who are now politically homeless and a vanishing breed.
My good friend, I agree completely with your closing comment. At the same time I must observe that the GOP nominated that obviously unfit and unqualified individual in 2016 even as he campaigned on a racist platform. I am as conservative as yourself, sir - all the way back to Goldwater in 1964. Yet, as the years went by I began to understand that an ugly tone of racism and prejudice inhabits the Republican electorate. I remember well the "Communist" accusations used to taint the peaceful efforts of Doctor King, and the gleeful reports of hunting down and shooting black people in the hot summers of '66 and '67. Some of these were reported to with pride as late as the early 2000's. Based on my conversations with "respectable" people, Republicans were happy to overlook his lack of qualification simply on the basis of his racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric ... and his totally unfounded profession of opposition to abortion. Talk about the inability to distinguish truth from falsehood!
Would really be interested to see these “gleeful reports of hunting down and shooting black people”. I don’t think they exist other than in some fevered swamps, or, more likely, your fevered imagination. They certainly didn’t appear in any publication that I read.
I apologise for my lack of specificity and the conflation of published accounts with my personal experiences. I was a resident of Newark, New Jersey during the riots of the '60s, and watched the tracers flying to and fro from my Ivy Hill apartment on the west side of the city. One morning, a pair of neighbors, Newark Police officers, knocked on my door to display their new, spotlight-mounted long guns, which, they proudly assured me, would enable them to "target the whites of their eyes."
Forty years later, I had cause to relate this experience to a resident in the State of Michigan, and it was he who supplied the "gleeful report" of roaming the Black Neighborhoods of Detroit with his fellow National Guardsmen, firing randomly into the residences from the back of a pickup truck. I confess not to be a witness of the related incidents, but I can testify to the pride, satisfaction and good humour in the attitudes of my informants. As for "fevered imagination," I can think of none hotter than that of our current Vice President, who boasts of how he lies ("Creates stories") to incite fear about the behaviour of black immigrants.
I see the sins of the parties as somewhat different.
I am not familiar enough with Bork, but attended to Kavanaugh and Thomas who were attacked for alleged sexual improprieties, I see those as excesses of what came to be "me too", where unprovable allegations can be weaponized. The worst of the 'me too' ( and not all is bad, it is good the Weinstein got his comeuppance) is about, no sin or youthful indiscretion is ever redeemable and an allegation is a fact.
In the less partisan times of Bork it is notable that 6 Rs voted against him and 2 Dems voted for him, whereas with Kavanaugh only one senator, Joe Manchin went against party lines (Murkowski abstained).
Now the sins of the Rs with Garland was not that they besmirched his dignity, but that they channeled Machiavelli in an early iteration of what now is Trump's full on embrace of the advice of the Florentine philosopher - might makes right, the ends justify the means.
A difference is that the Dems did approve the following nominee Kennedy who was confirmed on a 97-0 vote. But the Rs on Garland were simply going to deny Obama any choice of justice simply because they could. We see something similar in Donald Trump exhorting Texas, Indiana, to redistrict in mid census restyle, a new form of power grab. That we have no norms about fairness and that we respect the wishes of the founders is what is at issue.
It seems reasonable that if the opposition holds the majority in the Senate they could veto the occasional choice on ideological grounds, which might fit Bork more than Thomas or Kavanaugh. If the Dems nominated a far left justice I wouldn't deny the Rs in power a rejection. My problem is using the approval process to just obliterate the founder's intention that a president gets to choose a justice, essentially rewriting how our system has worked.
There is an older conservative value about how men are to act, not in the service of raw power but with some deference and magnanimity and I see it clearly in Trump's instigation of the redistricting, where the already questionable edge the party had on gaming the system is pushed to an extreme and partisanship becomes more and more the coin of the realm. I see Garland as an earlier iteration of that.
Unprovable accusations aren't all that was weaponized, though.
I remember conversations at the time of the Kavanaugh kerfuffle with someone who I judged should not have regarded me as "on the other side". We both agreed that publicly bruiting an allegation of such youthful behavior without evidence that similar behavior persisted through adulthood was inappropriate (and when behavior persisting into adulthood is the problem, focus on the adult behavior, anyhow).
Where we differed was in whether we felt a need to defend Kavanaugh's youth. I did not. I said I could find the current hullabaloo inappropriate while also having judged the adolescent Kavanaugh risky enough to avoid in situations where his sobriety wasn't assured. (Among the truest things I can recall Trump saying is that Kavanaugh apparently had "difficulty as a young man with drink".)
Burdens of proof *should* differ according to occasion. Criminal burden of proof is appropriately quite high, civil burden of proof is lower, and the informal burdens of proof we use to decide the risks and hassles of associating with certain people, even lower. Competition for the most prestigious positions is fierce, and candidates are sometimes knocked out for trivial reasons – that's life. I disliked the spectacle, but if Kavanaugh had been quietly passed over for other candidates, no great harm to Federalist-Society-style jurisprudence would have been done: the bench was deep. I eventually drug out a probability calculator so that my interlocutor and I could compare numerical estimates of "Did the Kav do it?"
Our estimates were both under 50%, and mine exceeded his by only 5%. Yet that difference was enough for my interlocutor to sense I was "really on the other side" – the "woke" side. My interlocutor wasn't nuts – he was a reasonable man. But the situation was rather nuts. All I had to do to "betray my side", apparently, was rally to it insufficiently.
Exaggerated airs of injured innocence can be weaponized, too.
Midge, to Witt, Anita Hill and “Dr” [I forgot that part, but not the two last names, which is almost always a huge predictor of a woman’s politics, like a woman of liberal arts and phony sciences calling herself “Doctor”) Ford have something in common: The Eleventh Amendment Bill of Right to an Abortion is sacred and shall be defended by any means necessary, including, and definitely not excluding, making the worst possible allegations up…because the me too movement has always had something really big going for it, that no meteorology need be used for proving: Believe all women is a really sick thing that both shameless liars Hill and Ford had going for them, especially with Roe vs Wade in the imbalance of justice going for the fing despicable liars. Thomas and Kavanaugh are not the pigs they were betrayed to be. Don’t believe me, removed the whole cloth allegations from history, and unlike the pig President, there is not one iota of evidence to suggest that both sitting SCOTUS Justice’s are anything but eminently decent men…always and everywhere. And, of course, if I am wrong about the accusers, well that makes me a “r” in spirit. I am not, regardless of my venomous tongue, and neither are the black labeled Justices. Before Trumpism there has always been an anarchic, godless leftism. Like I have been saying for years: Truth is not a progressives value. Being progressive means never having to say you are sorry. All progressives have is smear itself. Gotta run on. Thanks for taking my rant. Peace through superior mental firepower
Midge. I like your meter, and my first estimate would be 50%, but there is a caveat in that both people could have seen what was done from totally different perspective and a perspective that changes over time. For me, I just dont see the point of judging a jurist on whatever teenage misdeeds occurred. In the current political climate it is almost inevitable that allegations will come out of the woodwork. There were all kinds of allegations about Biden, who strikes me as a fairly straight arrow. I am not that concerned about personal misbehavior unless it reflects on the job being done. There is a partisan tinge inevitably to judging the sins of our friends and enemies, because I as a conservative Dem, tend to forgive Bill Clinton's womanizing more than Trump's, but ultimately even with Trump it is the least of my concerns. Imo the anti Trumpists, and I am one, spend all their time looking for a smoking gun that is somehow going to nail him to the wall, where his transgressions are so obvious and in the open, certainly from the Obama not born here libel to whatever string of lies he has spun in the preceding week, that why even bother looking through the garbage. Going afield there, in these days hard to get Trump out of my head, like an ear worm song.
“For me, I just don't see the point of judging a jurist on whatever teenage misdeeds occurred.”
I doubt you literally mean that. Maybe you mean, “Within a realm of whatever’s considered ‘normal’ teenage misdeeds (or, for adults, ‘normal messing around’), I don’t see the point.” But once a teen has committed first-degree murder, for example, rehabilitation to the point of becoming qualified for SCOTUS, much less making it through a contentious nomination process, seems unrealistic, no?
Pressing Kavanaugh’s nomination, instead of someone like Barrett’s, during the #MeToo moment was a *choice* to escalate the culture wars by championing perceived male boorishness. It was part of the choice the US right has been making to champion a predatory “conservative” sexual ethic, rather than one expecting sexual restraint from both the sexes.
Kavanaugh the individual may not have deserved the spectacle over his youthful past, but, considering some of his own dubious testimony during the matter (adolescents who drink that much cannot be so cocksure they never got blackout drunk), he himself was willing to join in the escalation, if only to serve his ambition. I’m sympathetic to serving ambition with dishonesty under social expectations that make honesty effectively impossible, but my sympathy doesn’t extend to considering it right. It remains wrong, if the kind of wrong that takes uncommon virtue to resist in moments of barmy social ferment.
Very fair and well written. There is no shame in arguing Dems are to blame for Trump. Don't let the commentariat make you feel bad about doing that. Just as one example, no one sees reviewing Smithsonian history as anything but fascist but for the woke approved scripts there now. Those make a review necessary, even inevitable.
Jonathan V Last had a response over at The Bulwark.
I understand Jay’s frustration—it’s true that many liberals spent years arguing that mainstream conservatives like Mitt Romney were evil. (Remember “Chimpy McHitler”?) But in response I’d observe:
(1) This lack of perspective is an American problem, not a liberal or conservative problem. Liberals claimed that Bork bore the mark of the beast. Conservatives swore that Bill Clinton was a socialist who was running a drug ring out of a secret airstrip in Mena. This is what we do in America. We pretend that George H.W. Bush is the worst fascist ever while he’s in politics—and then we revere him when he’s gone. Just like people accused FDR of being a commie and said the New Deal was socialism.
(2) I’m skeptical that this crying-wolf effect has much influence on people’s actual behaviors. Why? A couple reasons.
First, voter coalitions are constantly shifting, both in demographic makeup and in the actual humans, who age in and die off. How many presidential elections does the average American vote in over a lifetime? Ten? Twelve? This is not nice to say but the conservatives who were most outraged by the Bork fight died years ago. A large percentage of them weren’t around to vote for Trump the first time, let alone the second and third times.
Instead, Trump was powered by a huge cohort of new voters—many of whom never (or only rarely) voted before Trump entered politics. It’s not merely the case that Trump’s base has no idea who Bob Bork was today—it’s that these low-info mouthbreathers wouldn’t have known who Bork was if they had been of voting age in 1988.
So, if Bork had been confirmed to be a Justice of the Supreme Court, then might we have avoided having Trump as President? Or might we be just as likely, if not more likely, to have Trump as President? I think I understand your concern about Bork, particularly given how well you knew him, but I do not think that the one thing had anything to do with the other thing. I do think people on both sides should put aside their differences for now and unite against Trump, but that does not change what was done in the past and why it was done. And, FWIW, I don’t think “unfit” in the case of Bork was really based on his credentials, but instead more on his views regarding civil rights and the results of the Saturday Night Massacre. If Senators (including the six Republicans who voted against Bork) had said that, would you really feel any different about Bork’s rejection?
I guess I would question how much “won more” would have been required to keep the right from moving to Trump. Maybe Mitt Romney beating Barack Obama would have been enough? I do tend to think that Robert Bork on the U.S. Supreme Court would have led to a more aggressive right, not a less aggressive right. As you say, there is no way of knowing, but I respect your view and your willingness to express it.
If Romney had won, you wouldn’t have had Trump. At least not in 2016.
The worst part about 2012 was the slander of a good man spearheaded by Harry Reid and Joe Biden and enabled by the press. Ironically Trump benefits from that because they’re saying the same things about him, but his supporters don’t listen.
Guarantee that they’d be saying the same things about Haley or Desantis if the 2024 primaries had gone differently.
I will note that Antonin Scalia was also nominated by President Reagan, was confirmed by the Senate 98-0, and probably pushed the Supreme Court further right than Robert Bork would have (see, e.g., Heller). Hard to see that “win” by the right as doing anything to get in the way of Trump. FWIW, in addition to reading Heller, I also read Scalia’s Reading the Law. The man was truly brilliant, even though I thought decisions such as Heller were absurd.
Great tweet and spot on. I’m old enough to remember Joe Biden saying Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney, was going to put black people back in chains. A vile slander that, I believe, went pretty much unanswered. And here we are.
You are not wrong. And I am old enough to remember being warned about Ronald Ray Guns. That nickname became appropriate when SDI was proposed but Ronaldus Magnus was not the monster he was painted to be.
I think this whole piece is a fine illustration of the pathology of X. It turns reasonable people with actual thoughts and meaningful arguments into one-line schlubs (nothing personal regarding Mr. Nordlinger) endlessly bickering about what someone twitted about what someone retwitted about what someone subtwitted. It causes people who could make real contributions to thought and discussion to waste time twitting, "I know you are, but what am I?" at figures who have no real existence except in that space.
It's not that Mr. Nordlinger's twit is "wrong": being a twit, it's almost worse than "wrong," it's goofballery, because the venue makes everything into vacuous goofballery.
Jay- this post compelled me to subscribe. I appreciate your writing and have been a long time fan from your national review days (why did you go??). I always look forward to your writings and count you as an important influence on my own conservative philosophy. I appreciate that you beat the drum for freedom world wide, whether Ukraine, Israel, Cuba, or other countries. And thank you for staying true to your roots, so to speak. Looking forward to what the future holds!
On the Village Idiwitt’s, I mean Anti Democrat Temper
I still remember where l was when I heard about this little, next big thing called twitter….on the Hugh Hewitt show, which I quit listening to the partisan hack, cold turkey, after the godforsaken Indiana primary in 2016…How dismaying it is to me that the anti social fora has gone off the speed rails and fittingly is now called XXX…where its most famous midnight tweeker gets his handle off from the literal Bada Bing, I mean Oval Office pictured above. God help U.S. We the Living in Idiocracy. (Forgive me Jesus, I pray for our sinners…but to the unrepentant that sold their immortal souls out to Heat Miser in the flesh…May there be a very, very special place in hell for Catholics in Claim Only [pronounced sicko] like Hewitt, Vance, Rubio…”collaborator behavior” [hat tip Matt Welch]). And there is absolutely, positively nothing wrong with your tweet Jay. Nothing wrong with shooting from the hip sometimes when it is coming straight from your frontal lobe, I mean heart….I can still remember the cancer survivor kid in my high school class plastering Bork’s Time magazine cover (remember when that was a really big thing, and really one of the only things to read….thanks internets) on our halls bulletin board, turning the B into a D. Clever, not wise, but funny all the same. I didn’t think care for it because it was about the same time I can remember that first class liar and certifiable schmuck Joe Biden started smearing his political opponents, only to make my blood boil for decades every time I saw his super polident smirk. And I do mean boil, for I have always despised phony, outwardly showy Catholics …but, to Witt
The New American Idol Barock Star Obama begot Trumpism
Trumpism begot Biden
Liar begot Liarer
Dumb begot Dumber
Bidumbnomics begot Idiocracy, Part Duh
Donald J Trump is simply the luckiest conman to be alive in our present Reality T.V. Show history gone wild. He had the cosmic fortune of facing Nurse Ratchet at the ballot box office in 2016….and then Selina Meyer in 2024. Thanks a lot loyal opposition party for nominating the best man….I mean a woman who did not know how to proverbially beat the living hell out of a preppy school yard bully. The fact that Kamala Harris did not chew The Don up and puke him out on the debate stage when he said the n*()’l! are eating peoples pets…and she did not look straight into the camera and declare Hilliary was right…”Any of you that believe this racist garbage man are ‘DEPLORABLES’ whose vote I not only do not want, I would like ‘you all’ not to just get out of my country, but get off my planet!!!” That is all, sorry for the digression. But I do not blame Republicans for Trumpism triumphing in November. And can you please stop calling the right trash republicans, they are “Rightists”, “Trumpers”, “ Trump Bible Thumpers” (contrarian populists who raise their collective right arms). God help U.S.
What about Garland…I remember when the the cunning Republican McConnell pulled something out of the political sayings vault, spoken words of one Joe Biden, as to why it is okay to shelve a SCOTUS nomination til after the election….and what about Ginsburg…what if she had not been so convinced the rest of the country where with Hilliary, and retired in 2016….i think shelving not one, but two polar opposite nominees would have been a problem for cocaine Mitch (begrudging hat tip Geraghty).
Speaking of no quarter (love the mighty Zepps live at Knebworth), a minority, majority of voters in Republican primaries got this monstrosity nominated. Smoke filled rooms (i am not thinking Jonah’s remnant ruminations will ever come true again), rank choice voting in all primaries, and a complete overall of the stupid system where Iowa and New Hampshire are bell tower states…Let’s have like five super Tuesday’s, where entire blocks of our nations electorate vote in primaries, over let’s say five weeks. Anyway, Trumpers not gonna do it anything to help fix our broken system, and not until we the people totally De Nazify, I mean De-Trumpify will there be any hope. But speaking of serious self reflection, I always thought the New American Idol Barock Star Obama’s calm, cool hand Luke reflection was just a pose he worked hard on in the mirror….like Addie with his one handed salute, the dumbmasses ate the phony shitte up like bread and circuses. God help U.S.
R.I.P. Roger Scrutun, this here rebel punk nihilist (again, hat tip Welch) without an editor for the cause sure does miss you and your moral clarity…as I very much thank you Jay for still carrying his mantle. Gotta run on (“fuckin long, isn’t it [hat tip Joe Strummer]). Thanks for taking my rant Onward and Upward. Peace through superior mental firepower
I think you have a valid point regarding democrats and others who opposed Judge Bork. He was definately not unfit. I opposed his nomination because of a statement in his nominating hearings regarding the right to privacy not being referenced in the Constitution. I am only a citizen not a historian or constitutional scholar but it seems to me that rather than elucidate what rights citizens have, the constituion limits what powers government has. In fact it does specify that the powers and rights not referenced in the Constitution are reserved to the states or the people.
Thank you to one and all, for your comments. Good to be with you here at Onward and Upward!
Wonderful article as always, Mr. Nordlinger. Only two small gripes :
Regarding Twitter, "In any event, the ceiling was raised to 280 and everything was fine."
It wasn't fine to begin with. Twitter has always been a plague on the earth.
Regarding Merrick Garland, I agree that at the time it would have been hard to argue that he was unfit. However, after his stint as AG I would completely disagree that he is worthy of the office. (This is definitely not an endorsement of Bondi).
Many appear to believe that Democrats deserve Trump because of what they said about Republicans. I disagree. No one deserves Trump. Least of all us conservative former-Republicans who are now politically homeless and a vanishing breed.
101% agree with your tweet
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve said to somebody, ‘Trump is what you get when you Nazi-libel Reagan/Bush/Dole/W/McCain/Romney’
My good friend, I agree completely with your closing comment. At the same time I must observe that the GOP nominated that obviously unfit and unqualified individual in 2016 even as he campaigned on a racist platform. I am as conservative as yourself, sir - all the way back to Goldwater in 1964. Yet, as the years went by I began to understand that an ugly tone of racism and prejudice inhabits the Republican electorate. I remember well the "Communist" accusations used to taint the peaceful efforts of Doctor King, and the gleeful reports of hunting down and shooting black people in the hot summers of '66 and '67. Some of these were reported to with pride as late as the early 2000's. Based on my conversations with "respectable" people, Republicans were happy to overlook his lack of qualification simply on the basis of his racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric ... and his totally unfounded profession of opposition to abortion. Talk about the inability to distinguish truth from falsehood!
Would really be interested to see these “gleeful reports of hunting down and shooting black people”. I don’t think they exist other than in some fevered swamps, or, more likely, your fevered imagination. They certainly didn’t appear in any publication that I read.
Hi Kevin,
I apologise for my lack of specificity and the conflation of published accounts with my personal experiences. I was a resident of Newark, New Jersey during the riots of the '60s, and watched the tracers flying to and fro from my Ivy Hill apartment on the west side of the city. One morning, a pair of neighbors, Newark Police officers, knocked on my door to display their new, spotlight-mounted long guns, which, they proudly assured me, would enable them to "target the whites of their eyes."
Forty years later, I had cause to relate this experience to a resident in the State of Michigan, and it was he who supplied the "gleeful report" of roaming the Black Neighborhoods of Detroit with his fellow National Guardsmen, firing randomly into the residences from the back of a pickup truck. I confess not to be a witness of the related incidents, but I can testify to the pride, satisfaction and good humour in the attitudes of my informants. As for "fevered imagination," I can think of none hotter than that of our current Vice President, who boasts of how he lies ("Creates stories") to incite fear about the behaviour of black immigrants.
I see the sins of the parties as somewhat different.
I am not familiar enough with Bork, but attended to Kavanaugh and Thomas who were attacked for alleged sexual improprieties, I see those as excesses of what came to be "me too", where unprovable allegations can be weaponized. The worst of the 'me too' ( and not all is bad, it is good the Weinstein got his comeuppance) is about, no sin or youthful indiscretion is ever redeemable and an allegation is a fact.
In the less partisan times of Bork it is notable that 6 Rs voted against him and 2 Dems voted for him, whereas with Kavanaugh only one senator, Joe Manchin went against party lines (Murkowski abstained).
Now the sins of the Rs with Garland was not that they besmirched his dignity, but that they channeled Machiavelli in an early iteration of what now is Trump's full on embrace of the advice of the Florentine philosopher - might makes right, the ends justify the means.
A difference is that the Dems did approve the following nominee Kennedy who was confirmed on a 97-0 vote. But the Rs on Garland were simply going to deny Obama any choice of justice simply because they could. We see something similar in Donald Trump exhorting Texas, Indiana, to redistrict in mid census restyle, a new form of power grab. That we have no norms about fairness and that we respect the wishes of the founders is what is at issue.
It seems reasonable that if the opposition holds the majority in the Senate they could veto the occasional choice on ideological grounds, which might fit Bork more than Thomas or Kavanaugh. If the Dems nominated a far left justice I wouldn't deny the Rs in power a rejection. My problem is using the approval process to just obliterate the founder's intention that a president gets to choose a justice, essentially rewriting how our system has worked.
There is an older conservative value about how men are to act, not in the service of raw power but with some deference and magnanimity and I see it clearly in Trump's instigation of the redistricting, where the already questionable edge the party had on gaming the system is pushed to an extreme and partisanship becomes more and more the coin of the realm. I see Garland as an earlier iteration of that.
Unprovable accusations aren't all that was weaponized, though.
I remember conversations at the time of the Kavanaugh kerfuffle with someone who I judged should not have regarded me as "on the other side". We both agreed that publicly bruiting an allegation of such youthful behavior without evidence that similar behavior persisted through adulthood was inappropriate (and when behavior persisting into adulthood is the problem, focus on the adult behavior, anyhow).
Where we differed was in whether we felt a need to defend Kavanaugh's youth. I did not. I said I could find the current hullabaloo inappropriate while also having judged the adolescent Kavanaugh risky enough to avoid in situations where his sobriety wasn't assured. (Among the truest things I can recall Trump saying is that Kavanaugh apparently had "difficulty as a young man with drink".)
Burdens of proof *should* differ according to occasion. Criminal burden of proof is appropriately quite high, civil burden of proof is lower, and the informal burdens of proof we use to decide the risks and hassles of associating with certain people, even lower. Competition for the most prestigious positions is fierce, and candidates are sometimes knocked out for trivial reasons – that's life. I disliked the spectacle, but if Kavanaugh had been quietly passed over for other candidates, no great harm to Federalist-Society-style jurisprudence would have been done: the bench was deep. I eventually drug out a probability calculator so that my interlocutor and I could compare numerical estimates of "Did the Kav do it?"
https://www.saund.org/kavanaugh-bayes/kavanaugh-ford-bayes-calculator.html
Our estimates were both under 50%, and mine exceeded his by only 5%. Yet that difference was enough for my interlocutor to sense I was "really on the other side" – the "woke" side. My interlocutor wasn't nuts – he was a reasonable man. But the situation was rather nuts. All I had to do to "betray my side", apparently, was rally to it insufficiently.
Exaggerated airs of injured innocence can be weaponized, too.
Midge, to Witt, Anita Hill and “Dr” [I forgot that part, but not the two last names, which is almost always a huge predictor of a woman’s politics, like a woman of liberal arts and phony sciences calling herself “Doctor”) Ford have something in common: The Eleventh Amendment Bill of Right to an Abortion is sacred and shall be defended by any means necessary, including, and definitely not excluding, making the worst possible allegations up…because the me too movement has always had something really big going for it, that no meteorology need be used for proving: Believe all women is a really sick thing that both shameless liars Hill and Ford had going for them, especially with Roe vs Wade in the imbalance of justice going for the fing despicable liars. Thomas and Kavanaugh are not the pigs they were betrayed to be. Don’t believe me, removed the whole cloth allegations from history, and unlike the pig President, there is not one iota of evidence to suggest that both sitting SCOTUS Justice’s are anything but eminently decent men…always and everywhere. And, of course, if I am wrong about the accusers, well that makes me a “r” in spirit. I am not, regardless of my venomous tongue, and neither are the black labeled Justices. Before Trumpism there has always been an anarchic, godless leftism. Like I have been saying for years: Truth is not a progressives value. Being progressive means never having to say you are sorry. All progressives have is smear itself. Gotta run on. Thanks for taking my rant. Peace through superior mental firepower
Midge. I like your meter, and my first estimate would be 50%, but there is a caveat in that both people could have seen what was done from totally different perspective and a perspective that changes over time. For me, I just dont see the point of judging a jurist on whatever teenage misdeeds occurred. In the current political climate it is almost inevitable that allegations will come out of the woodwork. There were all kinds of allegations about Biden, who strikes me as a fairly straight arrow. I am not that concerned about personal misbehavior unless it reflects on the job being done. There is a partisan tinge inevitably to judging the sins of our friends and enemies, because I as a conservative Dem, tend to forgive Bill Clinton's womanizing more than Trump's, but ultimately even with Trump it is the least of my concerns. Imo the anti Trumpists, and I am one, spend all their time looking for a smoking gun that is somehow going to nail him to the wall, where his transgressions are so obvious and in the open, certainly from the Obama not born here libel to whatever string of lies he has spun in the preceding week, that why even bother looking through the garbage. Going afield there, in these days hard to get Trump out of my head, like an ear worm song.
“For me, I just don't see the point of judging a jurist on whatever teenage misdeeds occurred.”
I doubt you literally mean that. Maybe you mean, “Within a realm of whatever’s considered ‘normal’ teenage misdeeds (or, for adults, ‘normal messing around’), I don’t see the point.” But once a teen has committed first-degree murder, for example, rehabilitation to the point of becoming qualified for SCOTUS, much less making it through a contentious nomination process, seems unrealistic, no?
Pressing Kavanaugh’s nomination, instead of someone like Barrett’s, during the #MeToo moment was a *choice* to escalate the culture wars by championing perceived male boorishness. It was part of the choice the US right has been making to champion a predatory “conservative” sexual ethic, rather than one expecting sexual restraint from both the sexes.
Kavanaugh the individual may not have deserved the spectacle over his youthful past, but, considering some of his own dubious testimony during the matter (adolescents who drink that much cannot be so cocksure they never got blackout drunk), he himself was willing to join in the escalation, if only to serve his ambition. I’m sympathetic to serving ambition with dishonesty under social expectations that make honesty effectively impossible, but my sympathy doesn’t extend to considering it right. It remains wrong, if the kind of wrong that takes uncommon virtue to resist in moments of barmy social ferment.
Very fair and well written. There is no shame in arguing Dems are to blame for Trump. Don't let the commentariat make you feel bad about doing that. Just as one example, no one sees reviewing Smithsonian history as anything but fascist but for the woke approved scripts there now. Those make a review necessary, even inevitable.
That's how I felt the first time he was nominated. Numbers two and three I placed the blame squarely on republicans.
Jonathan V Last had a response over at The Bulwark.
I understand Jay’s frustration—it’s true that many liberals spent years arguing that mainstream conservatives like Mitt Romney were evil. (Remember “Chimpy McHitler”?) But in response I’d observe:
(1) This lack of perspective is an American problem, not a liberal or conservative problem. Liberals claimed that Bork bore the mark of the beast. Conservatives swore that Bill Clinton was a socialist who was running a drug ring out of a secret airstrip in Mena. This is what we do in America. We pretend that George H.W. Bush is the worst fascist ever while he’s in politics—and then we revere him when he’s gone. Just like people accused FDR of being a commie and said the New Deal was socialism.
(2) I’m skeptical that this crying-wolf effect has much influence on people’s actual behaviors. Why? A couple reasons.
First, voter coalitions are constantly shifting, both in demographic makeup and in the actual humans, who age in and die off. How many presidential elections does the average American vote in over a lifetime? Ten? Twelve? This is not nice to say but the conservatives who were most outraged by the Bork fight died years ago. A large percentage of them weren’t around to vote for Trump the first time, let alone the second and third times.
Instead, Trump was powered by a huge cohort of new voters—many of whom never (or only rarely) voted before Trump entered politics. It’s not merely the case that Trump’s base has no idea who Bob Bork was today—it’s that these low-info mouthbreathers wouldn’t have known who Bork was if they had been of voting age in 1988.
FDR was a commie and the new deal is socialism.
So, if Bork had been confirmed to be a Justice of the Supreme Court, then might we have avoided having Trump as President? Or might we be just as likely, if not more likely, to have Trump as President? I think I understand your concern about Bork, particularly given how well you knew him, but I do not think that the one thing had anything to do with the other thing. I do think people on both sides should put aside their differences for now and unite against Trump, but that does not change what was done in the past and why it was done. And, FWIW, I don’t think “unfit” in the case of Bork was really based on his credentials, but instead more on his views regarding civil rights and the results of the Saturday Night Massacre. If Senators (including the six Republicans who voted against Bork) had said that, would you really feel any different about Bork’s rejection?
Yes, I do believe that if normal, conservative republicans had won more the right wouldn't have turned to populism. But there's no way of knowing.
I guess I would question how much “won more” would have been required to keep the right from moving to Trump. Maybe Mitt Romney beating Barack Obama would have been enough? I do tend to think that Robert Bork on the U.S. Supreme Court would have led to a more aggressive right, not a less aggressive right. As you say, there is no way of knowing, but I respect your view and your willingness to express it.
If Romney had won, you wouldn’t have had Trump. At least not in 2016.
The worst part about 2012 was the slander of a good man spearheaded by Harry Reid and Joe Biden and enabled by the press. Ironically Trump benefits from that because they’re saying the same things about him, but his supporters don’t listen.
Guarantee that they’d be saying the same things about Haley or Desantis if the 2024 primaries had gone differently.
I will note that Antonin Scalia was also nominated by President Reagan, was confirmed by the Senate 98-0, and probably pushed the Supreme Court further right than Robert Bork would have (see, e.g., Heller). Hard to see that “win” by the right as doing anything to get in the way of Trump. FWIW, in addition to reading Heller, I also read Scalia’s Reading the Law. The man was truly brilliant, even though I thought decisions such as Heller were absurd.
Great tweet and spot on. I’m old enough to remember Joe Biden saying Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney, was going to put black people back in chains. A vile slander that, I believe, went pretty much unanswered. And here we are.
You are not wrong. And I am old enough to remember being warned about Ronald Ray Guns. That nickname became appropriate when SDI was proposed but Ronaldus Magnus was not the monster he was painted to be.
I think this whole piece is a fine illustration of the pathology of X. It turns reasonable people with actual thoughts and meaningful arguments into one-line schlubs (nothing personal regarding Mr. Nordlinger) endlessly bickering about what someone twitted about what someone retwitted about what someone subtwitted. It causes people who could make real contributions to thought and discussion to waste time twitting, "I know you are, but what am I?" at figures who have no real existence except in that space.
It's not that Mr. Nordlinger's twit is "wrong": being a twit, it's almost worse than "wrong," it's goofballery, because the venue makes everything into vacuous goofballery.
I admit it. That time when Bill Clinton came on TV, and I pointed and yelled, "It's the Anti-Christ!" was probably not called for. But no regerts
“Regerts.” ISWYDT - good one!