I mentioned back in this blog’s first year of operation that the vicious little (Estonian/Canadian) antiglobalization jackasses running the Canadian leftist magazine Adbusters did an article in 2004 with the whining title “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?” which simply listed about fifty prominent neoconservatives with a little mark next to the ones the magazine believed to be Jewish, accompanied by a disingenuous explanation that the editors aren’t anti-Semites, just keen to raise the question — as if it’d never come up — of whether these neocons might be biased in favor of Israel because of their heritage.
The article also implied that this neocon cabal was controlling U.S. foreign policy, of course, so I was amused to see my friend Ellen Bork on the list. I’m not saying she’s unimportant — she works with William Kristol and all — but I’d seen her not too long before that pounding the pavement back when she was in New York and complaining that she had no job (and she’s not technically Jewish, as I recall, but we’ll leave that aside). Now she was reportedly deciding the destiny of nations.
Well, today this mighty Elder of Zion mass-e-mails that you can now follow her on Twitter, not on @ControllingTheWorld, interestingly, but on @MattressShame. Apparently, Mattress Warehouse has sent her three defective mattresses in a row, and she’s not taking it lying down, raising awareness of their shoddy craftsmanship and possibly even picketing their offices, she says.
Stay on the case, Adbusters! What will be her next target after this mighty struggle against Mattress Warehouse? Iran? Syria?? If she proves capable of defeating Mattress Warehouse, I’d say no force on Earth can stop her. I also say good luck, Ellen. When we begin the rebuilding of the Middle East, we will need quality mattresses. We need to win their backs and necks, not simply defeat their troops.
I may well start doing this Twitter thing myself very soon, what with people’s attention spans getting shorter and me becoming so multimedia over the next several months. Perhaps the war on Mattress Warehouse should be an example for me of how to shape this new medium, in the way the first Gulf War was for cable news and the Iraq War was for bloggers. Even out of this sorrow and struggle, something good might come, I’m thinking?
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On an unrelated note, do you think her father, Robert Bork, would have had an easier go of it if he had to converted to Catholicism in the 1980s, rather than wait for that epiphany until later in his life?
I don’t know if it was a big issue at his confirmation hearings, but from what I recall he was a pretty stout agnostic until recently.
I think it’s safe to say that being a Catholic instead of an agnostic would _not_ make ones confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court in front of Democratic senators go more smoothly. In front of Republicans, yes.
Complaining about “Borking” was the first thing I ever wrote a college column about, by the way, using the then-witty-seeming pun “Bork to the Future” — but, alas, Ellen’s dad has since lost my support with his (a) defense of antitrust law, (b) claim in his book _Slouching Toward Gomorrah_ that he opposes all porn but watched a lengthy stretch of NY’s cable-access porn because he was “transfixed by the sociological significance of it all,” and the clincher (c) his lawsuit against the Yale Club because he fell ascending the podium there. Maybe Ellen should set up a Twitter account for him called @YalePodiumShame.
If ever write a book about being a shy nerd who liked monster movies, maybe I’ll call it _Slouching Toward Gamera_.
In other conservative-dads news, I went to a Francis Heaney party and discovered his neighbor Daniel Radosh was hiding away his dad, conservative writer Ronald Radosh, back home, so we sent word to the elder Radosh that there was a budding conservative TV news producer (me) and a National Review staffer (Helen) present and eager to talk to him. He praised an intriguing, eccentric political writer named Marty Sklar (not to be confused with the recently-retired Disney exec by the same name, though that would certainly add a whole new fascinating layer to things) who Ronald Radosh and socialist John Judis have recently fought to claim as their own, Sklar apparently being a lifelong Marxist-socialist yet now a right-winger who thinks Gingrich et al are the true inheritors of the leftist tradition, while Obama is a fascist. Odd but intriguing — as is Sklar’s apparent avoidance of computers and even telephones, which makes my lazy-Luddism look tame (and soon remedied, I might add!).
I will have to check out Sklar and am curious whether his arguments resemble the lessons I took from that book I recently reviewed here, _The Lyrical Left_, which chronicled how the centralizing Progressives — _New Republic_ specifically — were hated by the real leftist-anarchist Bohemians of Greenwich Village a century ago, a now-forgotten schism that gives one hope the punks may yet turn rightward, if you follow me…
Oh yes, I remember that passage. In fact, one of few amusing chapters from Al Franken’s best-seller exploiting the name of Rush Limbaugh for personal enrichment was his examination of that anecdote in Slouching Towards Gommorah
Don’t forget that Judge Bork is also in favor of a very restrictive view of the Second Amendment.
Here’s the entry in which I discussed _Lyrical Left_ — a reminder that the pro-government left back then, the Progressives, _really were_ admirers of proto-fascism in its early stages (they liked Mussolini until Hitler became the face of fascism and then denied ever having liked fascism, as Jonah Goldberg chronicled in _Liberal Fascism_), since centralization — and homogenizing the unruly immigrants and ethnic types — were seen as essential to creating a rational, modern culture back then (whereas the bohemians wanted individualism and experimentation — even though they fancied themselves _more_ socialist than the Progressives):
http://toddseavey.com/2009/10/30/book-selection-randian-gq-lyrical-left/
It’s a complex world.
Judge Bork — like Scalia, I should note — is also inclined to the view that while the left shouldn’t read things into the Constitution that aren’t there (good!), no one should really read much of anything into it that isn’t very, very explicit, including the libertarian assumption that government has only those powers explicitly granted to it by the Constitution (boo!). Both of them prevent some leftist excesses without offering much hope of restraining government across the board. When it doubt, government is allowed to act.
And if anyone’s unfamiliar with Gamera, here’s the “Appearance” section of his Wikipedia page, so you’ll be able to recognize him if you see him:
Gamera has the general configuration of a turtle, albeit a tremendously large one that is capable of bipedal locomotion. He occasionally walks quadrupedally in his first three films. Gamera demonstrates the ability to manipulate objects with his forepaws. His mouth is filled with teeth, with a pair of large tusks protruding from the lower jaws, a precedent unheard of in turtles, save perhaps for the prehistoric turtles Proganochelys and Odontochelys.
Yes, he does seem to exhibit undue reverence for judicial precedent, even when it conflicts directly with the Constitution.
That’s one of the problems I have with people like Jeffrey Toobin and Dalia Lithwick, who-although ostensibly graduates of accredited law schools-don’t seem to grasp the fact that ‘judicial activism’ does not entail overturning laws that are inconsistent with Constitutional obligations.
Jeffrey Toobin was legal analyst at ABC News when I was there, and I considered him an unprofessional joke just on the basis of his tendency to say crowd-pleasing and legally-irrelevant things such as that Bill Clinton’s legal troubles hinged on whether one thought oral sex was immoral, which was, to put it mildly, not the crux of the issue.
But, perhaps, an intriguing topic for a future debate at Lolita Bar.
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