Tobin Harshaw, Teddy and Bork

(c) F. Bruce Abel

Who is Tobn Harshaw???

Whatever, the following, especially the comments, are very, very interesting. Once I figured out that Tobin is an arch conservative I went back and re-read what he was saying in this confusing piece.

August 28, 2009, 7:23 pm
Weekend Opinionator: Kennedy, Bork and the Politics of Judicial Destruction
By Tobin Harshaw
The death of a public figure, especially a polarizing one, always makes things a bit dicey in opinionland. Do the detractors speak ill of the dead? Do the defenders pre-empt such criticisms, or does that just inspire the critics? In the case of Ted Kennedy, whose many accomplishments got due recognition everywhere, most chose to duck the fight on anything more problematic. There was comparatively little talk about a Harvard scandal, a very sad end to a first marriage or a controversial rape trial. Even among the pundits and partisans, the name Mary Jo Kopechne was for the most part mentioned only in passing; those on the right who tried to make much of it seemed more petulant than aggrieved — perhaps even shrill — while those on the left who tried to make the best of it sounded patently absurd.

Can today’s political acrimony be traced back to a 1987 speech before the Senate Judiciary Committee?
No, when it came to Ted Kennedy’s less-than-admirable qualities, most accounts ran along the lines of this, from the obituary in the Times: “He was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly.” What “large flaws”? Well, you know …

But if this isn’t the occasion to dwell on the senator’s personal shortcomings, it should be one to examine his words. And in terms of both dramatic and lasting effect, nothing in his 46-year tenure in the Senate comes close to this:


In case you missed any nuance, here is the transcript including a bit more of the speech:

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, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy… President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice.

First, a fact-check, courtesy of my Times colleague Ethan Bronner, who covered the hearings for The Boston Globe.

Kennedy’s was an altogether startling statement. He had shamelessly twisted Bork’s world view — “rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids” was an Orwellian reference to Bork’s criticism of the exclusionary rule, through which judges exclude illegally obtained evidence, and Bork had never suggested he opposed the teaching of evolution…

Not good, but surely not the first time a senator stood before his colleagues and decided that the ends justified the means.


More troubling to Bronner, and to many other Americans any time a seat opens on the Supreme Court bench, was the precedent being set.

The speech was a landmark for judicial nominations. Kennedy was saying that no longer should the Senate content itself with examining a nominee’s personal integrity and legal qualifications…. From now on the Senate and the nation should examine a nominee’s vision for society … the upper house should take politics and ideology fully into account.

Kennedy did distort Bork’s record, but his statement was not the act of a desperate man. This was a confident and seasoned politician, who knew how to combine passion and pragmatism in the Senate. Unlike the vast majority of those who were to oppose Bork, Kennedy believed from the beginning that the nomination would be defeated and that the loss would prove decisive in judicial politics.

The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, for one, thinks it was a precedent well worth setting. “It was crude and exaggerated, but it galvanized the opposition as nothing else, and no one else, could,” he writes. “Four months later, Bork was defeated by a vote of fifty-eight to forty-two, and Reagan nominated Anthony M. Kennedy in his place. Justice Kennedy has been no liberal, to be sure, but he has been the single vote that kept Roe v. Wade on the books, was the first Justice to recognize the rights of gay people, and imposed a restraining hand on President Bush’s excesses when it came to the treatment of detainees. For that, and for his presence on the Court, the nation can look to Ted Kennedy.”

And A. Serwer at The American Prospect seems to think that some claims become truer over time:

In hindsight though, Kennedy’s statement wasn’t so much wrong as it was expressed in the kind of intemperate manner that ruffles feathers in Washington. The fact is, Bork believed only “political” speech was protected by the First Amendment; he, like many other conservatives, didn’t believe that women have the right to make choices about whether to carry pregnancies to term; he was critical of the idea that illegally obtained evidence shouldn’t be used in court; and while nominally agreeing that the 14th Amendment prohibited racial discrimination — as opposed to discrimination based on gender, which he thought it didn’t — in practice, he opposed every single piece of legislation ever passed in order to guarantee the civil rights of African Americans. Searching through old news reports, I can’t speak to Kennedy’s allegations on Bork’s views on evolution in schools, but it’s fairly clear that Bork’s personal beliefs are anti-evolution.

Tristero at Hullaballoo knows that it can be proved that Kennedy relied totally on the facts, if only somebody else would actually go and find them.

By speaking this forcefully, and - equally important - reacting so quickly to Reagan’s awful appointment, Kennedy helped prevent Bork’s for elevation to the highest court in the land, for which this country owes the Senator its gratitude.

I have no doubt that Kennedy was 100% right about Bork. However, without backup, Kennedy seems over the top, beyond the pale, shrill, unstatesmanlike, etc. While [Serwer's post] tried, its links barely support Kennedy’s assertions. And as of this writing, no one in the Democratic party and no progressive organization has thought to compile easily accessible and truly comprehensive support for Kennedy’s charges.

No wonder we lose so often. No wonder we can’t make use of our victories.

One who has no use for Tristero’s victories is Doctor Zero at Hot Air. “Politicians have been spreading scurrilous lies about their opponents since the early days of the republic, but Kennedy used scurrilous lies to destroy a man who wasn’t a politician: Judge Robert Bork,” writes the Doctor,

Thus began the modern era of below-the-belt, win-at-any-cost politics, played for the highest of stakes…. Kennedy was a prince in the Aristocracy of Intent, absolved of every crime by the soaring nobility of his intentions. His constituents were delighted to watch him emerge from a warm bath of incredible wealth, to rail against men who were crass and selfish enough to accumulate their fortunes by creating jobs and meeting consumer needs… Kennedy is praised for his “passion” by the same people who recoil in horror from the passion of town-hall protesters and pro-life advocates. Awarding political power, and respect, on the basis of “passion” is another road to totalitarianism.

I’m not sure that Scott Johnson of Powerline thinks despotism is around the corner, but he agrees that, in some ways, the Bork debate has never really ended.

The tone set by Senator Kennedy in connection with the Bork nomination lives on in the Senate. It also lives on in the mainstream media — see, for example, John Hinderaker’s “A conspiracy so lunatic” — and on the left-wing side of the Internet. Indeed, we have seen it on display this month in the White House/Reid/Pelosi attack on the opponents of Obamacare.

We live in Edward Kennedy’s America not only in the consequential legislation that he sponsored and saw through the Senate, but also in the afterlife of the vulgar political sham on which Senator Kennedy relied to defeat the nomination of Judge Bork.

For Pejman Yousefzadeh of the New Ledger, Kennedy’s speech “was not only nonsense, it was nonsense-on-stilts.”

To be sure, there was a tactical advantage to the inflammatory rhetoric; it shocked the Reagan Administration and helped rally liberals to work against the Bork nomination with a sense of mission, urgency, and organization not often found on the liberal side. But Kennedy’s statements were patently untrue, and what’s more, the Senator had to know that they were untrue. It is nice and good that Kennedy was able to restore a sense of decorum and gentlemanly behavior when it came to a whole host of other legislative battles, but when it came to the Bork nomination, his sense of propriety, decorum, and fair play were sorely lacking. Those who wonder how American political debate became so coarse, so unrefined, and so demagogic, ought to look at Kennedy’s speech on Bork as a catalyst for the national descent into a prolonged political shouting match.

And in the eyes of the editors at National Review, the most infamous aspect of the Bork speech is less the personal attack than how it encapsulated a shift the senator had made on another issue entirely:

Senator Kennedy was famed for the power of his oratory. Another way of saying that is to note that he was a gifted artist whose medium was slander, and he found his canvases in Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Powerful a speaker as he was, it is not clear that Senator Kennedy’s rhetoric was powerful enough to sway the hardest hearts, including his own. Consider this: “Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain right which must be recognized the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.” A beautiful sentiment, beautifully expressed and callously ignored when the political winds changed and he felt himself compelled to denounce the “back-alley abortions” that would be necessitated in “Robert Bork’s America.” Like many of the most powerful Democrats — Jesse Jackson and Al Gore come to mind — Senator Kennedy left behind his pro-life convictions when they became a political burden. This is an especially painful failing in Kennedy, whose family has traded on its Catholicism so profitably.

So, you’ve watched the senator at work and read his words: Was it slander or did it achieve a higher sort of truthiness? Did it spare the nation a grave mistake on the bench or was it responsible for two decades of partisan rancor?

Few, it seems, are willing to split the difference on such questions. Somewhat surprisingly, the person who made the strongest effort at it was David Frum, the Bush speechwriter of “axis-of-evil” fame who now runs the site New Majority.

I know exactly the hour when my opinion of Sen. Ted Kennedy permanently changed. I had remained very angry at the Massachusetts liberal for many years since his 1987 speech so unjustly vilifying the great conservative jurist Robert Bork …

For 15 years thereafter I could hardly bear to hear his name spoken. Nor was my temper much improved by his rough handling of another great conservative legalist, Theodore Olson, at Olson’s confirmation hearings as solicitor general. I was always ready to laugh at the harsh jokes conservatives told about the senator’s legendarily self-indulgent personal laugh. It seemed a fair judgment on an unfair man.

Then came 9/11. Among the murdered was the brave and brilliant Barbara Olson. Ted asked some friends to help with the deluge of messages of condolence, and my wife Danielle volunteered for the job. Among the letters: a lengthy handwritten note by the senator so elegant and decent, so eloquent and (fascinatingly) written in so beautiful a hand as to revolutionize one’s opinion of the man who wrote it. It did not dishonor by ignoring or denying the political differences between the two families. It fully acknowledged them - and through them expressed a deeper human awareness of shared mortality, pain, and grief. Not all chapters of his life revealed it equally, but the senator was a big soul, and in his last years, he lived his bigness fully … Rest in peace, leader of the liberals.

And that, I think, is a pretty good place to end.
E-mail This Print Share
Close Linkedin
Digg
Facebook
Mixx
My Space
Yahoo! BuzzPermalink
Sign in to Recommendabortion, partisanship, robert bork, Supreme Court, Ted Kennedy, the senate Related Posts
From The Opinionator
Is Faith Supreme in the Highest Court?Does This Abortion Decision Matter?A Republic or a Democracy? Senate, Heal ThyselfMorning Skim: Judging the Judge
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Previous post

How Kennedy Mattered
From 1 to 25 of 136 Comments
1 2 3 ... 6 Next »
1. August 28, 2009
8:48 pm

Link
Pre-Bork: Debate
Post-Bork: Demonize

Thanks Teddy. R.I.P.

— CB

2. August 28, 2009
9:05 pm

Link
The reason Judge Bork needed to be defeated was because he is the best legal mind of his, and maybe this, generation. He would have been able to persuade other Justices to his positions, and write opinions that would have impressed the press and public with the strength of his logic. ‘ couldn’t have that !
Who would have thought someone could be “over-qualified” to be a Supreme Court Justice?

— Sam

3. August 28, 2009
9:29 pm

Link
Robert Bork would have been, and Clarence Thomas is, a catastrophe on the Supreme Court. Bork because he is a “strict constructionist” to the point that he judges the world by the standards of 1787. Thomas because he is simply Scalia’s creature, sent to nod and say nothing.

Sen. Kennedy saw, and appropriately drew, the battle lines. Should he have been genteel and and gracious? Not to the likes of them. They are the headmasters of the school for boys - forever figuring out how to torment the nation with irrefutable faith in …what? The literal words of a dried up old document in a vault? Compassion and understanding cannot come from these attitudes and Sen. Kennedy rightly said so.

— hal

4. August 28, 2009
9:55 pm

Link
It is naive and ahistorical to think that Robert Bork was the first person to be denied a seat on the Supreme Court based on his political stances rather than his ”personal integrity and legal qualifications” (the words of Ethan Bronner above).

Presidents in the 1800s made nominations based on political considerations and personal connections more often than legal qualifications. And in fact, some nominees had little or no personal integrity except their subservience to the powers that be.

Mr. Bronner needs to do some more research.

— marik7

5. August 28, 2009
10:01 pm

Link
I might add that junking the exclusionary rule could open the door to all sorts of chicanery and dishonesty on the part of the police. Kennedy was merely stating the truth. Bork would not have minded if the police obtained evidence illegally.

— marik7

6. August 28, 2009
10:10 pm

Link
“Not good, but surely not the first time a senator stood before his colleagues and decided that the ends justified the means.”

Without an exclusionary rule, rogue police *could* break down citizens’ door without a warrant and trust any evidence they obtained could be used at trial. Your implication that Kennedy twisted the truth to bar Bork from SCOTUS seem to rest on a misunderstanding of how the exclusionary rule works. The misunderstanding is yours, not Kennedy’s.

— Terry

7. August 28, 2009
11:54 pm

Link
Those who cannot “let go” of the lost Bork nomination are the same folks who can’t “let go” of Rabid Ronnie Raygun (although he’s dead, and his policies — to the extent they were truly his or were just his “lines” — have brought little but grief to the majority of Americans) or cannot grasp that they LOST the 2008 Presidential election (to a black man yet!) and a whole lot of Congressional and Senatorial seats. Too bad. And from everything I’ve read on/by Bork, Teddy was right, as he was about many things over his 46-47 year career.

— Bob Walters

8. August 29, 2009
1:05 am

Link
The guy slandered a man, ruined a previously collegial process, and single-handedly politicized the courts by a factor of 100.

It was shameful in every way, and liberals who celebrate the ruining of Bork and nomination of Kennedy should remember that the sauce that is good for the goose is good for the gander. What goes around, comes around.

Pick your cliche, but when the court turns hard right, as it is bound to eventually do over the course of history, they will have no moral or intellectual foundation on which to justly complain.

But they will, nevertheless.

— Publius

9. August 29, 2009
1:08 am

Link
some day the late senator kennedy will be remember for creating a new verb for viciously and falsely ruining someone’s reputation: “to bork” to go along with the
witticism for making a mistake: “i’ll drive off that bridge when i come to it.”
pretty impressive.

— kit ramsey

10. August 29, 2009
1:21 am

Link
Oh hogwash, piffle and nonsense.

The content of that speech (and I jsut listened to every word again in the entire 3+ minutes) is NOT even CLOSE to the invective level of the Republicans all through the 1930s and even through WWII.

If you want to find real vicious and untrue polarizing invective go back the the Republican Senator who in the summer of 1941 announced that FDR was conviving to see every 4th or 5th American boy buried in a foreign grave.

Politics has always been vicious. It is only that the overblown sensitivies and the touch-feely nonsense of the past 15 -20 years that has changed.

Bork’s statements on legal principles and theories was a proper area of inquiry.

PS: The NYT’s pretentious commentators overlook the fact that fully 1/2 of the speech was a review of Bork’s employment record — to wit, being the high executioner in the firing of Archibald Cox as the Special Prosecutor on Watergate in order to drag out and delay the proceedings and done by Bork at the order of his master, Richard M. Nixon. (And the US Supreme Court later declared Bork’s action unlawful.)

Bork’s employment history was most certainly a proper subject of consideration!

— AnnS

11. August 29, 2009
1:21 am

Link
Mr. Toobin….

For that, and for his presence on a bridge in Chappaquidick, did a family in Pennsylvania lose their only child and that family can look to Ted Kennedy.

— CC

12. August 29, 2009
1:53 am

Link
Great article, thanks. I believe that by politicizing the role of the Supreme Court so, and in effect making judicial activism the Democratic litmus test for judges, Senator Kennedy has cheapened not only the integrity of the Supreme Court but also that of the Congress. What Bork and his ilk say is that the rights so many people want to find in the constitution don’t exist and if the people want to create them, then that is up to Congress. Is that really so bad? How about we hold guys like Kennedy accountable for pushing through constitutional amendments when required versus strong-arming judges into legislating from the bench? Regardless, the nomination process of Supreme Court Judges was surely debased from this moment forward, and that is certainly a legitimate part of his legacy, aside from killing a young woman in an act of criminal and callous negligence. Sorry, I can’t not mention it. In my book, he crossed a line in 1969 that he can’t ever come back from and this one act eliminates him for consideration for public service. I mean really, what would he have had to do to be considered too personally flawed to run for the Senate if not drunkenly driving off a bridge and leaving his passenger to die?

— Glenn

13. August 29, 2009
2:00 am

Link
Ted Kennedy was a fallen angel. And the point that his above detractors are trying to make is what? Their arguments leave behind a taste as sour as the grapes that their whine is made from.

The intemperance and falsifications, of the current age, cannot be laid at Kennedy’s grave; each generation and each person is responsible for their own transgressions, no matter the provocation. Conservatives may lament that such a great conservative jurist, like Bork, was not elevated to the Supreme Court, but it chills my bones. When one notes that when people like John Yoo and David Addington were put in positions of power (below that of the Supreme Court and of limited tenure), the result was justifications for torture.

So explain to me again, just how Kennedy’s speech was unjustified. bc

— Bruce Crossan

14. August 29, 2009
2:02 am

Link
What a crock. Bork was -and is- a man who viewed the Supreme Court as a tool for reinstating a 19th century world view, including that the Supreme Court would not protect racial, religious and cultural minorities from local tyranny.

what that means, is what matters is not what Bork personally thought of abortion, or race relations, or evolution. That is irrelevant under Bork’s world view. What it means is that a Bork court would stand idly by and let hypocritical majorities in state legislatures eviscerate the rights of women, eliminate the separation of church and state, and undermine all laws against discrimination.

Tobin Harshaw is either too ignorant to understand how the law works to ensure equal protection and fundamental rights, and Bork’s central opposition to the Supreme Court’s role in protecting those rights, or he is deliberately ignoring Bork’’s clear writings on these issues and creating an entirely falsified picture, deliberately.

In either event, he is telling a direct lie, and smearing a great American in the same week as his death. Shame on the NYT for validating such a liar with a NYT byline.

— Ed Cummings

15. August 29, 2009
2:18 am

Link
You don’t just get to make a claim without a warrant over and over again and it be true. What, exactly, makes Kennedy’s statements about Bork untrue? Or, at least, unfair? I think it’s a fair point that, without the exclusionary rule, police would cheat the system and illegally obtain evidence. Therefore, in Bork’s America, rogue police would, in fact, break down your door more often, at least, than they do in real America. Bork doesn’t advocate rogue police action, mostly, I guess, but his policies could fairly be said to lead to that outcome–or, at least, saying his policies could lead to that outcome is fair political discourse when discussing a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

Bork really spoke out against desegregation–in 1963, against federal rules that required businesses to serve black patrons, and in 1971 against a 1948 requirement that neighborhoods not be allowed to sign restrictive neighborhood covenants barring home sales to African-Americans.

Kennedy went on to do stuff, or whatever, while Bork has made a career about whining about not be a Supreme Court nominee–notably, in a book that must, but Bork’s standard of scurrility, be equal: Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and the American Decline.

Look, I’m not going to tell you Kennedy was all great or all bad. I don’t care. That’s the people of Massachusett’s business–not mine. But Kennedy was actually a politician, and apparently, sometimes that means having to get your hands dirty. For the past two decades, Robert Bork has only been a pundit, and his hands are still dirty, and now history has greased the lens so much for New York Times writers like Toobin and fact-checkers-turned-arbiters-of-rhetoric like Bronner to defend him. Because the verdict in this column is about whether or not America is better off that Kennedy opposed Bork, and may have contributed to him failing to win the federal judicial appointment. I think it is.

— Pierce Randall

16. August 29, 2009
2:23 am

Link
Well, the part about back-alley abortions is true. Conservatives HATE it when anyone points this out, but in countries in which women lack abortion rights, they are, in fact, forced into back alley abortions.

— JR

17. August 29, 2009
2:35 am

Link
I’m used to feeling informed, even enlightened, by your well researched arguments. Mostly because you take pains to present at least two sides of a position. Nevertheless, I’m overwhelmed with the sense that you’re carrying water for a man who’s widely considered by serious legal scholars to be one of the worst nominees since the 19th century. Bork was no mere conservative. He was a revanchist, a reactionary, a man of almost no vision and a limited understanding of process. Not even a 19th century mind, a 17th century mind, caught in narrow legalistic formulas, a torts expert with the insight of a calculator.
And you have the gall to blame the Senator for instigating the culture wars, as if you never heard Strom Thurmond filibuster! Give us a break, or at least you could have mourned poor Mary Joe just one more time.

— Gabriel ben A.

18. August 29, 2009
2:37 am

Link
Thanks to David Frum for transcending the partisan blinders that have distorted so much of the reaction to Kennedy’s passing.

— Ted Meckstroth

19. August 29, 2009
2:51 am

Link
One wonders whether Joe McCarthy ever wrote warm personal letters. But if he did, should that make a bit of difference in our judgment of him? To Ted Kennedy, savaging decent men may have been “only business,” but that hardly makes him more admirable. And as the essay points out, the victims were not only the men he savaged but the political process itself. Kennedy may have been the lion of the Senate, but he had blood on his claws.

— Rob

20. August 29, 2009
2:56 am

Link
I think Nixon was responsible for what the current rancor has become. Even in 1960 when he was unfairly judged in the debate and then in the election fixed by Daily in Chicago. At that point he had some real damages he needed to avenge. And then he avenged, with the way he conducted his campaign in ‘72, which in turn caused his impeachment in ‘74; however, it was probably the impeachment that created the intractability of the right and their retribution for the next 35 years.

And the left, as evidenced by Kennedy’s borking (which I confess to loving), were no shrinking violets in this game. And that’s what it should be treated as, a game.

At this point I’d be happy to see a lot more mentally happy adults in Congress.

— Pam Niedermayer

21. August 29, 2009
3:22 am

Link
Anyone who uses “great” in the same sentence as Robert Bork deserves to be completely disregarded. The man was as is a total disgrace, and no amount of conservative whining about how he was supposedly “misunderstood” can change that.

The fact is, Kennedy had the balls to actually describe the kind of insane world that Bork’s ridiculous philosophy might well have led to. That it’s not a pretty world is not a reason to disparage Kennedy. Conservatives have long held these ridiculous illusions about how grand the 18th century world of the Founding Fathers was, and have tried to indoctrinate generations into their fallacious rewriting of history.

The Supreme Court leans well to the right and has done so for 20+ years. Had Bork been elected, Scalia and Thomas would have looked like left-wing progressives by contrast.

— a

22. August 29, 2009
3:25 am

Link
Bork was not a man of integrity. He proved that in the Saturday Night Massacre.
Every statement in Kennedy’s speech was supportable. Speeches don’t require footnotes when delivered. Bork was the kind of right-wing reactionary pseudo intellect and apologist for the power structure who could justify anaything as long as it benefitted the rich and powerful or some right wing political constituencies.

A life time appointement for robotic tool of the right wing was unthinkable. I thank Ted Kennedy for standing up for the Constitution against Bork.

— PJS

23. August 29, 2009
3:28 am

Link
Frum refers to Bork as a great conservative jurist. The America that Ted Kennedy warned of wasn’t some Orwellian future but a recognition of the past that American conservatism embraces. Bork stood for turning back the clock on decades of progress in the rights of women and minorities. Back alley abortions were the reality before Roe. The teaching of evolution was banned in many states before the courts intervened. The KKK was the defacto government of the southern states. The police arrested and interrogated suspects without informing them of their rights before Miranda. So when a jurist and his supporters choose the label of conservative to describe his ideology what is any educated person to believe they stand for but to return America to the “bad old days”? The days when gays were forced into the closet. The days when a religious minority dictated a woman’s reproductive options. The days when separate but equal was the law of the land. The days when law enforcement operated without regard for an individuals civil rights. Ted Kennedy gave voice to the fears of the majority of Americans and in doing so shed light on the real goals of Americas conservatives. The moment that some want to define as the beginning of partisanship in our politics was really the moment that our representatives were put on notice that this back door attempt by an ideologically driven minority to stop social justice in this country wouldn’t be tolerated. Conservatism demands that we tolerate its intolerance of equality in our institutions. It vilifies those who have the courage to call them what they are as ideologues when they are the ones driven by a purist ideology. We owe a debt of gratitude to Ted Kennedy for having the conviction to oppose Bork. We can only imagine what a dark place this country would be if Bork and his ideas were the law of the land.

— Scott in Oregon

24. August 29, 2009
3:30 am

Link
“Can today’s political acrimony be traced back to a 1987 speech?”

No, it can’t, and it may not the ideal time to make such a patently ridiculous assertion either. There’s nothing wrong with cutting through the myth-making with some less charitable observations, but the political failures of a generation do not stem from the fact that occasionally someone made an honestly political speech which hurt the feelings of some of our more gentle-minded leaders of perpetually wounded dignity.

— Miles Jacob

25. August 29, 2009
3:45 am

Link
Ted Kennedy was right about Bork. I am blad he “borked” Bork. I think Bork would have been a very, very poor choice for the Supreme Court.

— Debra Garson

1 2 3 ... 6 Next »Add your comments...
Your Name Required

Your E-mail Required, will not be published

Your Comment
Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive. For more information, please see our Comments FAQ.


Search This Blog Previous Post:
How Kennedy Mattered
About The Opinionator
The Opinionator provides a guide to the wide world of newspaper, magazine and Web opinion.

Eric Etheridge writes in the blog on weekdays. Tobin Harshaw writes a weekend Opinionator column.

E-mail The Opinionator Go to the Writers' Bios »Advertise on NYTimes.comFeatured Posts
Counterterrorism
Henry Louis Gates

RaceHealth CareThe Internet

Newspapers GoogleRecent Posts
August 28
(136)
Weekend Opinionator: Kennedy, Bork and the Politics of Judicial DestructionCan today's political acrimony be traced back to a 1987 speech before the Senate Judiciary Committee?
August 26
(59)
How Kennedy MatteredReactions to the death of Senator Kennedy.
August 25
(166)
Did Cheney Blink?Based on Dick Cheney's brief statement, are the former vice president's claims regarding the effectiveness of detainee interrogations supported or undermined by the C.I.A. report?
August 24
(51)
Holder Names Prosecutor: Progress or Whitewash?Reaction to the C.I.A.'s detainees report and to the attorney general's appointment of a federal prosecutor to look into prisoner abuse.
August 21
(92)
Weekend Opinionator: Politics on Red AlertTom Ridge says Bush politicized terror threats. Is the press to blame?
Follow The Opinionator on Twitter »
Archive Select Month August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 Tag List
BARACK OBAMA 288 WORTH A CLICK 200 HILLARY CLINTON 143 ELECTIONS 2008 134 JOHN MCCAIN 94 IRAQ 86 DEMOCRATS 84 REPUBLICANS 84 GEORGE BUSH 84 NATIONAL SECURITY 72 CONGRESS 43 ELECTIONS 2006 40 INTERNET 37 IRAN 36 ECONOMY 36 DEBATES 33 SARAH PALIN 32 MEDIA 31 RACE 29 TORTURE 29 POLLS 29 CONVENTIONS 2008 28 HEALTH CARE 27 ECONOMICS 27 MIDDLE EAST 26 SUPREME COURT 26 RUDY GIULIANI 24 CONSERVATIVES 24 JOHN EDWARDS 23 RELIGION 22 From the Opinion Blogs
Paul Krugman
Going fishing
Well, cycling actually.
Nicholas D. Kristof
Your Comments on my Sunday Health Column
Our existing health care system is dysfunctional, erodes family values and costs 18,000 lives a year.