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Joe Nocera, in the NY Times, of all places, says the Bork nomination fight was the beginning of ugly in politics.
On Oct. 23, 1987 — 24 years ago on Sunday — Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was voted down by the Senate. All but two Democrats voted “nay.”
The rejection of a Supreme Court nominee is unusual but not unheard of (see Clement Haynsworth Jr.). But rarely has a failed nominee had the pedigree — and intellectual firepower — of Bork. He had been a law professor at Yale, the solicitor general of the United States and, at the time Ronald Reagan tapped him for the court, a federal appeals court judge.
Moreover, Bork was a legal intellectual, a proponent of original intent and judicial restraint. The task of the judge, he once wrote, is “to discern how the framers’ values, defined in the context of the world they knew, apply to the world we know.” He said that Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, was a “wholly unjustifiable judicial usurpation” of authority that belonged to the states, that the court’s recent rulings on affirmative action were problematic and that the First Amendment didn’t apply to pornography.
Whatever you think of these views, they cannot be fairly characterized as extreme; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, among many others, has questioned the rationale offered by the court to justify Roe v. Wade. Nor was Bork himself an extremist. He was a strongly opinionated, somewhat pugnacious, deeply conservative judge. (At 84 today, he hasn’t mellowed much either, to judge from an interview he recently gave Newsweek.)
I bring up Bork not only because Sunday is a convenient anniversary. His nomination battle is also a reminder that our poisoned politics is not just about Republicans behaving badly, as many Democrats and their liberal allies have convinced themselves. Democrats can be — and have been — every bit as obstructionist, mean-spirited and unfair.
I’ll take it one step further. The Bork fight, in some ways, was the beginning of the end of civil discourse in politics. …
Hot Air post on Jindal’s big win on Saturday.
Say, did you hear about the big election yesterday? Well, if you’re like the majority of the country, you probably weren’t even aware anyone was voting on Saturday. But for the politically addicted, you might have known that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was up for another term. So… how did that work out for him? Not too shabby. …
Writing in the Las Vegas paper, Sherman Frederick says Harry Reid is nuts.
Harry Reid is showing up the Occupy Wall Street protesters. He takes crazy talk to a whole new level.
Last week, the bard of Searchlight stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate. In front of C-SPAN and everybody, he said — and I’m not making this up — “It’s very clear that private-sector jobs are doing just fine. It’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers.”
And all the good people of Nevada, along with all the wild horses, cattle, ground squirrels and sheep, lifted their heads and said: “Is Harry Reid out of his ever-loving mind?”
Nevada’s economy has been missing for so long it’s pictured on the side of milk cartons. And free-spending, deficit-hiking Harry Reid is listed as the No. 1 suspect.
When Harry tells the nation to “go left” economically, Nevadans instinctively lean to the right.
If being wrong were an art, Harry Reid’s work would be on display at the Louvre. …
The great thinkers or Washington have dealt us another mess; this time student loans. NY Post has the story.
Three years after the housing-market meltdown, a college education may be the next part of the American Dream to turn into a nightmare.
For the first time, Americans owe more on their student loans than they do on their credit-card bills, with a tally that could soon top $1 trillion — leaving millions of Americans with a crushing debt burden at a time when decent-paying jobs are scarce.
“I’ve paid on my student loans, but I owe just as much as when I started,” says Laura Pounders, 56, who went back to college 16 years ago in hopes of securing a higher-paying job than the two she had.
“It makes me cringe when I hear politicians say we need people to go to college. Why? So you can accrue $50,000 in debt and get a job that pays $8 an hour? I’m going to die with this debt.”
John Smith, 31, of Brooklyn, works part time at a Trader Joe’s because he hasn’t found work in his field for over a year, despite having a master’s degree. He has about $45,000 in student loan debt. His girlfriend, Meropi Peponides, 27, a graduate student at Columbia University, will have over $50,000 by the time she graduates. …
Patrick Michaels writes about the green energy crack-up.
History — of the U.S., Europe, the U.K. and its former dominions — repeatedly shows that environmental protection is a luxury good. When per-capita income reaches some threshold, the citizenry tire of opaque air and sleazy waters, various agencies and permanent bureaucracies sprout, and, as long as times are good, regulation is good.
Our friends in the U.K. and Europe are especially green. Just hop off the plane in London and pick up the papers. Global warming is everywhere, and, for decades, the religion’s been that carbon dioxide reductions are fine, virtuous, and they’re going to make everyone rich. I have a social security system I would like to sell them.
This all splatters to a halt when economies go south. And the crash can be especially jarring if greenness is one of the causes. Thanks in no small part to the debacle in Europe, in a very few recent weeks, we have witnessed the great green crack-up.
Admittedly, the first glimmers showed up a couple of years ago in Spain, which suffered the malady of economic miasma brought on by environmental populism. …
Because he is such a good writer, and because the embarrassing quotes from Jackie were so off-the-wall, we have Andrew Ferguson’s take on the latest from the Kennedy BS machine.
Is there a more empathetic person in the world than Diane Sawyer, the top newsreader at ABC TV? I’m sure there must be—around seven billion of them, probably. But is there anyone who looks more empathetic than Diane Sawyer? Not a chance. When she peers at you through the camera she has the look of someone who’s just seen your lab results and is trying to figure out how to break the bad news. It must be terribly unnerving to see it close up, firsthand, in person—especially while she’s sitting next to you on a couch, no less.
I give Caroline Kennedy a lot of credit for retaining her composure with those two moist peepers trained in on her. This was during a long interview conducted for a two-hour TV special that ABC aired September 13 called Jacqueline Kennedy: In Her Own Words. (Diane Sawyer told us the proper pronunciation of Mrs. Kennedy’s first name is “Zsock-leen,” though everybody called her Jackie, which must have made life less embarrassing.) The special was the trumpet blast alerting the nation to the publication of another product of the Kennedy apparat, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. The book consists of previously unheard interviews Mrs. Kennedy gave Arthur Schlesinger in early 1964—eight CDs’ worth.
Every time you think that the Kennedy apparat is dead, there’s some new burst of publicity that makes you realize it’s st …ill humming, or at least wheezing. These guys know how to move units. Here in the twenty-first century, in keeping with contemporary “best practices,” a good deal of the work previously done by Kennedy toadies—court historians, speechwriters, bagmen, PR wizards—has been outsourced, and ABC is one of the chief contractors. For 36 hours the network became the Zsock-leen Channel, from Good Morning America to Nightline, and a week later, Historic Conversations was the bestselling book in the country.
The apparat continues work begun by the patriarch, Joe Kennedy, in the 1930s. One of his first moves was to hire Hollywood cinematographers to record the everyday doings (staged) of his toothy and, in a few cases, toothsome children, in Technicolor, on 35mm film. The scenes were then inventoried and cross-tabulated by activity and Kennedy kid—Touch Football w/Eunice, Part xxxvii; Touch Football w/Eunice, Part xxxviii—and stored in a flameproof warehouse in the Bronx. It was destroyed by fire, and the film canisters went up with it. That damn Kennedy curse.
The photographers kept at it, needless to say, and the stills and movies produced over the course of half a century are essential to the Kennedy mystique.