"The Borking Rebellion" by Jeffrey Lord (KatcoMedia, 310 pages, $21.99),
Posted on 08/30/2005 6:55:52 AM PDT by OESY
...Mr. Lord is at pains to note that, although Judge Smith is less known than other judicial nominees who have come under "borking" assault -- think of William Pryor, Miguel Estrada, Janice Rogers Brown and Charles Pickering -- his experience offers a kind of template of abuse: Activist groups unearth whatever harmful details they can find, no matter how dubious; they gin them up into screaming charges; the charges in turn get picked up by reporters, eager to keep pace with a potential "controversy," and by politicians, eager to find any stick with which to beat a "dangerous" nominee from the opposing party. Sometimes the conduit trail is explicit. Mr. Lord finds that all but seven of the 28 questions that Sen. Russ Feingold (D., Wis.) asked of Judge Smith came, often word for word, from activist-group memos.
For Robert Bork the result of such abuse was defeat as well as humiliation. But this is a story with a happy ending. A group of Pennsylvanians of all political stripes -- "The Phalanx," as its members called themselves -- gathered to defend Judge Smith.... Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania's centrist-Republican senator, did the rest, tirelessly lobbying for votes in the Judiciary Committee. He even managed to bring Mr. Biden onboard.
Mr. Lord's account is vividly anecdotal -- an entertaining read. He is not, though, a stylist. At one point we encounter nominees "frozen in the glare of the local public spotlight." Elsewhere "ominous pieces of borking graffiti" are "scrawled on the proverbial political wall that was the Internet." Such infelicities, and there are many, can make Mr. Lord's tale tough going. Still, it is an instructive one, with an uplifting moral. Republican virtues -- the small-"r" variety -- can still overcome powerful, malignant forces.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The content of the charge is irrelevant. The emotion and horror expressed is the whole operation. Republicans will then rise to the bait and either deny that Judge Xyz eats eggs for breakfast or will complaim that there is nothing wrong with eating eggs for breakfast and the damage is finalized thereby. As soon as such a charge is defended against, it is treated as verified by the MSM and all over the Left as something evil for which the subject is obviously and confessedly guilty.
The nature of the charge does not matter. The populace mostly hears only the vehemence of the charge and the defense by the Republicans and it sounds like Nixon- "I am not a crook..."
Got a pic of this author? I think I know him.
I don't, and I see there are many other Jeffrey Lords out there who do have googlable photos.
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