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RELATED LINKSInternal LinksGrants to:
MORE LINKSJohn P. MacKenzie Bork Wasn't BorkedHere is news to many who were not there in 1987 when the Senate rejected Robert Bork for the Supreme Court: Character assassination, smear tactics or dirty tricks did not defeat the nominee. He beat himself.
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PERSON PROFILERobert BorkRobert Bork is perhaps best known for his 1987 rejection by US Senate Democrats of his nomination for the US Supreme Court for his conservative ideology and judicial philosophy, including his well-known positions against abortion, affirmative action, and First Amendment protection for nonpolitical speech. Bork also played a dark role in President Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal. After presidental assistant Alexander Butterfield revealed Nixon's office taping system, special prosecutor Archibald Cox demanded that Nixon turn over the tapes. Nixon refused to turn over the tapes, and in retaliation ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire Cox. Richardson resigned instead, as did the next in line, Williams Ruckleshaus. Bork, next in line, had no problem, and promptly fired Cox. Public reaction to this chain of events came to be known as the "Saturday Night Massacre," and eventually forced the appointment of another special prosector (Leon Jaworski), and the eventual release of the Nixon tapes. Bork served as acting attorney general in 1974, then returned to his position as solicitor general until 1977. He taught at Yale from 1977 to 1979, and served as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge from 1982-1988. Lately, Bork has taken to writing cultural scolds such as his most recent book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, in which he blames "liberals" for America's "cultural decline." A Process of Denial: Bork and Post-Modern Conservatismby James Boyle [EXCERPT] Mr. Bork's...work follows a lapsarian pattern -- a tale of a fall from grace, coupled with a strategy for redemption. A state of corruption and decay is identified in some institution or area of law. The rot is traced to a particular departure from the proper state of affairs, a wilful violation of an authoritatively decreed scheme of things. A method is prescribed by Mr. Bork which will allow us to escape our current fallen state and return to a condition of righteousness. Mr. Bork speaks strongly in favour of his method, pronouncing it "inescapable" or "unavoidable." Yet it is obvious that Mr. Bork's panacea has all the same issues as the disease it is supposed to cure. At first, Mr. Bork offers a lengthy and thunderous denial that the cure is indistinguishable from the disease. Eventually, he falls silent for a while, only to emerge in two or three years with some new, and newly ineluctable, redemptive method. The process then repeats itself. Readers familiar only with Mr. Bork's most recent writings will be surprised to find that in the past he has been, successively, a libertarian, a process theorist, a devotee of judicial restraint, a believer in neutral principles, a "law and economist" and an advocate of two distinct forms of originalism. At the time, each of these theories was offered as being the only possible remedy to the subjectivity and arbitrariness of value judgements in a constitutional democracy and the other theories he had held, or was about to hold, were rejected out of hand.
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MORE LINKSAmericaBlog Bork Borks HarrietWell, well, well. Look who's doing the borking now: Robert Bork - whose nomination to the high court was rejected by the Senate in 1987 - called the choice of Miers "a disaster on every level."
MediaMatters.org CNN wheels out Bork, unchallenged, to discuss "Borking"...Though Bork complained in the interview that he had been "Borked," he offered no evidence to substantiate the claim of unfair treatment...
Dr Dobb's Journal Programmer's journal denounces Netscape hiring of BorkThe computer programming journal "Dr Dobbs" denounced the hiring of Bork by Netscape in their anti-trust cast against Microsoft: "Robert Bork, Tricky Dick's hatchetman, is still with us. He doesn't have to be with Netscape. There are plenty of fine, principled conservatives who would be happy to lobby for Netscape. The company should fire Bork like he fired Archibald Cox."
David Futrelle "Slouching Towards Gomorrah" [is] pretty much what one would expect from a book with such a title, only worse"It seems a tad preposterous for a man whose writing is so aggressively unwieldy, whose use of evidence is mercenary at best, and whose facts are often glibly wrong, to prattle on about the decline of intellect and the abandonment of objective truth"
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