So I burned down his house, killed all his friends, and sold his kids into slavery.
This is the "reasoning" behind Joe Nocera's ridiculous column in the New York Times, in which he faithfully transcribes Petulant Wingnut Excuse for being a Dick #237: You were mean to Robert Bork 30 years ago! (Since he has decided to troll in these waters, perhaps in the future Mr. Nocera would like to tackle such topics as "Al Gore is fat", "Robert Byrd was a Klansman." and "Watergate was a 3rd-rate burglary.")
From Mr. Nocera:
The next time a liberal asks why Republicans are so intransigent, you might suggest that the answer lies in the mirror.
Balloon Juice commenters had fun making sushi out of Mr. Nocera's assertion that there is a straight line between the Senate Judiciary Committee's rejection of reactionary, Federalist Society tool, Robert Bork, while Steve Benet also took a few minutes to kick Joe around the block in the Washington Monthly:
It’s hard to overstate how remarkably wrong this is. Indeed, nearly every paragraph in Nocera’s piece includes a fairly significant error of fact or judgment."Politics Not as Usual" has a fine, efficient summary of some of the highlights of Bork's career here ("What Joe Nocera Gets Wrong About Robert Bork"):
Bork denounced the civil rights and liberties protections granted by Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Supreme Court in the 1950s and 1960s (even while pledging fealty to Brown v. Board of Education), and even was on the record as endorsing Southern states’ right to impose poll taxes, which were historically used as a means of suppressing black voter turnout. His service in the Nixon Justice Department, given that administration’s record on the rule of law, was also a bit disconcerting.And just for the record, one of Robert Bork's many, many, many sins that does not seem to have been dragged back into the light by the rebutters and refuters of Mr. Nocera's terrible column was Bork's involvement in terminating the Fairness Doctrine, which I have touched lightly on once or twice in the past:In the conservative myth – now apparently accepted by the generally moderate-to-liberal Nocera – Bork lost his confirmation vote because of unfair efforts by the likes of Sen. Ted Kennedy to malign the judge as a bigot and misogynist. But when the Senate defeated the Bork nomination on a 58 to 42 vote, six Republicans – Sens. John Chafee (Rhode Island), Bob Packwood (Oregon), Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania), Robert Stafford (Vermont), John Warner (Virginia), and Lowell Weicker (Connecticut) voted against confirmation. Before dismissing these men as a bunch of liberal RINOs, it’s worth remembering that Specter, as the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was one of the foremost defenders of now-Justice Clarence Thomas when he faced credible accusations of sexual harassment in 1991. For 13 percent of the Senate Republican caucus in 1987, Bork’s extremism and poor civil rights record were too much to countenance.
And what of the claim that divisive judicial politics started nearly a quarter century ago with Bork? Nocera, who’s 59, is old enough to remember the late 1960s effort by conservatives to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren.
...
Seriously, it is one of those questions that just nags at me: In a world quite literally overflowing with talented, literate, pungent writers, how in the world do utterly talentless, debased hacks like Friedman and Brooks find themselves at the very pinnacle of the mediaverse?
I know the general answer -- Market forces compacting competent journalism into the ever more Procrustean Bed of Entertaining InfoHappyBytes. The rise of the Hatekrieg Xian Right blasting away at the press for 30 year, shellshocking them into giving the out lame, the crazy and the outright liars ever more column inches and prime time space in the name of Holy “Balance”. The deliberate murder of the Fairness Doctrine by Reagan, Bork and Scalia (That was just for you, Ivory Bill Woodpecker). -- but I still think the particular, specific answers would be interesting.
Finally, for you hard-core Bork-heads, at around the 22:00 minute mark of this clip from the "Power of Nightmares" you will find Robert Bork explaining why (per his expert diagnosis, based presumably on the "evidence" of the 101 "scandals" which his Neocon pals had ginned up out of thin air) Bill Clinton was a sociopath and a threat to America:
Why there are so many bad, damn-fool columns in the NYT these days all focused relentlessly on the same, absurd false equivalency claptrap I have no idea.
Why the NYT keep permitting its creative typists to stitch together asinine "Both sides are to blame" columns out of moonshine, Wingnut lore and goof pulled straight out of their asses, I have no idea.
But I do know that watching Joe Nocera trying burnish his Villager credentials by charting a straight-line course between some imaginary Liberal calumny 30 years ago...
...and this crowd:
Gretchen Carlsonis kind of hilarious.
Steve Doocy
Brian Kilmeade
Tony Perkins
Gary Aldrich
Mark Alexander
Bruce Bartlett
Pat Robertson
John Hagee
James Dobson
D. James Kennedy
Jerry Falwell
Rush Limbaugh
Bill O'Reilly
Laura Ingram
Sean Hannity
Mark Levin
David Koch
Charles Koch
Ralph Reed
Franklin Graham
Neal Boortz
Denis Boyles
Jay Bryant
Pat Buchanan
Michael Barone
Tony Blankley
Brent Bozell
William F. Buckley
Zev Chafets
Mona Charen
Jane Chastain
Linda Chavez
Richard Z. Chesnoff
Chuck Colson
Ann Coulter
Newt Gingrich
John Derbyshire
Lou Dobbs
Tom DeLay
Jack Dunphy
Larry Elder
Jesse Helms
Trent Lott
Jerry Falwell
Rick Santorum
Edwin J. Feulner
Suzanne Fields
Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.
Maggie Gallagher
Doug Giles
Jack Abramoff
Eric Cantor
G. Gordon Liddy
John Fund
Neil Cavuto
James K. Glassman
Mitch McConnell
Rand Paul
Allen West
Dick Cheney
David Frum
Jonah Goldberg
Dana Loesch
Paul Greenberg
Andrew Breitbart
Rebecca Hagelin
Bill Kristol
Paul Jacob
Jeff Jacoby
Terence Jeffrey
Paul Wolfowitz
Liz Cheney
Max Boot
Erik Son of Eric
Les Kinsolving
Dave Kopel
David Brooks
Charles Krauthammer
Larry Kudlow
Stanley Kurtz
Michael Ledeen
John Leo
Hal Lindsey
David Limbaugh
Rich Lowry
Ross Mackenzie
Michelle Malkin
Clifford D. May
Michael Reagan
Ross Douthat
Oliver North
Michael Novak
Robert Novak
Ted Nugent
Kate O'Beirne
Marvin Olasky
Bill O'Reilly
John O'Sullivan
Roger Ailes
P.J. O'Rourke
Kathleen Parker
Rupert Murdoch
Micheal Medved
Neal Boortz
Pam Geller
Ramesh Ponnuru
Doug Powers
Dennis Prager
James P. Pinkerton
George Will
Karl Rove
Richard Mellon Scaife
Alan Reynolds
I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby
Norman Podhoretz
Peggy "Mai Tai or the Highway" Noonan
Jeff "Manwhore" Gannon
Lee Atwater
James S. Robbins
Debra Saunders
Phyllis Schlafly
Ben Shapiro
Ed Rollins
Barbara Simpson
Thomas Sowell
Ben Stein
Mark Gerson
The Entire Kagan Family
Cal Thomas
Rich Tucker
Mary Matalin
John Yoo
Emmett Tyrrell
Alberto Gonzalez
Diana West
Armstrong Williams
Kyle Williams
Gary Bauer
William J. Bennett
Donald Rumsfeld
Walter Williams
Dick Cheney
Byron York
Etc
Ad
Nauseum*
*(Thanks for corrections/updates to Tengrain, Suzan & the Captain!)
11 comments:
Over all it's Big Whore Media who has screwed us the worst I think. It's worse than ever. I hate to be like this but I don't think we can get this back. Not with the hand we hold. Not the media but all of it.
And on this post - no fucking shit assholes!
BTW - sign in was expacker. Doubt if there's many of them. If the repugs weren't so mind fucked we'd have a bunch of ex repuglicans. That ain't gonna happen either.
I assume David F. Brooks was listed twice because....well, he should be.
"Both sides do it" is the best argument Repugs can scrape up. They can't deny their party is racist, stupid, and mindlessly greedy. All they can do is try to convince Americans that Dems are exactly the same. And many of the Dem pols make it easy for them.
Paul Craig Roberts?
In that list?
I doubt he'd think anything positive of Nocera's article.
S
Drifty -
Peggy Noonan is having a celebratory Mai Tai that she did not make your list.
An oversight, no doubt.
Otherwise this is the Urtext of wingnut welfare recipients.
Regards,
Tengrain
I don't see Ronald Reagan on that list. Is that because his idea of balance was to sell missiles to Iran while selling chemical weapons to Iraq?
"Al Gore is fat", "Robert Byrd was a Klansman."
And you forgot "Lincoln was a Republican".
"Watergate was a 3rd-rate burglary," is of course a statement of regret; such experienced thieves as Republicans expected better of themselves.
I nominate Art Pope to the list.
It really sucks that I recognize a majority of the names on that list.
Just goes to show that these pigfuckers are having a seriously negative impact on our country.
Brad Delong also had a good piece on this:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/10/when-joe-nocera-became-an-op-ed-columnist-a-remarkably-good-long-form-reporter-became-a-flaneur-of-unsurpassed-ugliness.html
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/10/hoisted-from-comments-bork-bork-bork-edition.html
Maybe Nocera can attack liberals for being mean to Bush and Cheney next. And that nice John Yoo had a point about crushing a child's testicles.
Seriously, wouldn't it be nice to receive criticism with substance for a change, instead of yet another weak concern troll piece claiming "liberals are intolerant and mean"? Gosh, yes, all those mean Democrats voted against Nixon bag man and judicial extremist Bork just because, for no good reason. Never mind the Republicans who voted against him, too, or that he actually lost in a straight vote and wasn't filibustered. It is extremely rare that anyone who says anything approaching "both sides do it" has anything more than a shallow analysis. (The one real exception is bloggers writing in detail about American imperialism, and to a lesser degree, corporatism.)
And, to nobody's surprise, Nocera completely avoided mentioning the fact that it was Bork who actually carried out the Saturday Night Massacre for Tricky Dick, after both Elliott Richardson and William Ruckelshaus quit rather than do it.
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