JUDGE Robert Bork woke up one day to find that his surname had become a verb – as in “borked.”
“I suppose it’s a form of immortality. Frankly, I think it’s amusing. So do my wife and kids,” he told me yesterday.
To be “borked” is to get screwed by the liberal establishment when you come up for confirmation.
In 1987, the Senate Judiciary Committee did in this fine man whom President Ronald Reagan nominated to the Supreme Court.
The veiled and sometimes not-so-veiled charges by a bunch of lefties made libel lawyers rewrite their books.
A case, perhaps, of “When did you stop beating your wife?” I suggested.
“No,” said Bork, who now works for the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “It was a case of ‘Why don’t you stop beating your wife?'”
Yesterday’s disgrace in Room 215 of the Taft Building showed that lightning doesn’t strike from the heavens when hypocrisy screams.
As John Ashcroft happily went on the grill over his convictions, there was Sen. Teddy Kennedy standing in judgment.
Sen. Kennedy on Sen. Ashcroft: “I have deep concerns . . . so far out of the mainstream . . . it’s extremely troubling.”
What is extremely troubling is that Teddy Kennedy didn’t do at least two years in Walpole State Prison in Massachusetts for leaving the scene and failing to report a 1969 accident resulting in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. She drowned when Kennedy’s car went off the Dyke Bridge. He reported the incident 12 hours later.
Instead, in Room 215 of the Taft Building, strutting morons were trying to look like they were doing business yesterday.
“The gladitorial games there are a disgrace,” Bork was telling me. “It started in the Reagan era, when the liberals couldn’t quite believe he had won.
“As far as I was concerned, it was a case of accusations, distortions and outright lies.
“I was not confirmed because of ideological reasons, because they thought I would have tried to overturn Roe v. Wade . . . and I would have.”
Patricia Ireland, boss lady of the National Organization for Women, said yesterday that a confirmation of John Ashcroft would be “dangerous to women’s health.”
She said nothing about how partial-birth abortion is dangerous to an innocent infant’s skull that gets caved in with scissors.
Julian Epstein, another big lib who, thankfully, is the House Judiciary counsel for only a little while longer, was outraged because Ashcroft “praised former Confederate leaders.”
You dolt. You don’t think the South exists?
But so much has been made about Ashcroft being religious. Can you believe it?
Here is a guy who really practices sitting behind a desk, rather than having someone get under it.
Mark Klein, spokesman for the Zionist Organization of America: “John Ashcroft’s belief in God is no stronger than Joseph Lieberman’s view of God. And I don’t see that as a bad thing for either man or their faiths.”
Back to Bork: “In the 1930s, nominees never went before the committee. It was considered beneath the dignity of office.
“Now, on television, the senators have an incentive to posture,” he said.
Brother, did we see that during the O.J. Simpson trial.
“Dignity of office? That all disappeared when the Senate tried to strip Clarence Thomas of that dignity,” Bork said.
“You see, the liberal left doesn’t actually regard conservatism as legitimate, they don’t believe that conservatives have a right to govern.
“Arrogant? A little more than that, I would say.
“I would say that the politics of personal destruction began and ends with the Democrats. Look what Clinton did to his accusers – Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky.”
I mean, let’s forget that the fearless leader lied to a grand jury, and let’s hope Dubya will pardon him if he is indicted.
But it’s clear what it means in the lexicon when you have your surname turned into a verb, as in “borked.”
What could we derive if we said you were “Jacksoned” or “Clintoned” or “Kennedyed”?
I jest, of course.