Bork

With the death of Teddy Kennedy, Robert Bork has come back to the nation's attention. Bork was a person who Saint Ronald Reagan tried to ram down the throats of the Senate as an allegedly fitting nominee for the Supreme Court. Kennedy was a leader in the eventually successful fight to keep him off of the court. To this day, Republicans point to this as the supposed start of behavior which justifies the smear campaign which they mount against any Democratic Supreme Court nominee; the most recent example being the insane collection of lies that they hurled at the moderate and totally unexceptionable Sonya Sotomayor.

Who was this Bork, and why did Democrats oppose his nomination to the Supreme Court? Bork first came to the nation's attention as a result of what came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre. This incident took place during the investigations of the Watergate affair which resulted in the resignation of Richard Nixon. Nixon was forced by threat of Congressional action to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Watergate. He chose Archibald Cox, a Harvard law professor and highly respected attorney. When Cox started to get too close to the truth, Nixon attempted to get rid of him. He demanded that Attorney General Elliot Richardson fire Cox; Richardson resigned instead. He then turned to deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus; Ruckelshaus resigned too. Nixon then turned to the Solicitor General, Robert Bork. Bork proved to be all too willing to do Nixon's dirty work, and promptly fired Cox.

Conservatives to this day cite Bork's brilliance when they take to abusing Democrats for fighting against his confirmation. Bork's intelligence was never in question- it was his morality that made him unsuitable for a position on the Supreme Court. The light of history turned on Bork on that day in 1973; and that day, the most momentous of his life, he showed that he would willingly put his personal advantage ahead of the clear rule of law. In his moment on the national stage, he proved to the country that he was, in a very real sense, not the most, but the least qualified person to ever sit on the high court, where we expect Justices to place the rule of law above all else.

Thus, as we see so often, Republicans attempt to cast a decent and honorable act of a Democrat into some sort of cynical partisan outrage; thus excusing their own unprincipled behavior. So, Democratic criticism of the execrable George W. Bush gives Republicans (in their own minds) an excuse to perpetrate endless vile smears against Obama; Democratic opposition to the fanatic, corrupt Republican appointees to various public offices gives Republicans the right to mount vicious lying campaigns against Democratic appointees, regardless of the truth, and finally, Republicans entitle themselves to attack any Democratic action with a variety of manufactured lies which, however ludicrous, are immediately accepted as gospel fact by their followers.

And thus, we reach where we are today. We can thank Mr. Bork for doing his best to get us here.

Above: The man himself. What a Dork, huh? Oops, I meant Bork.