Of course, only
some of us feel sad at the judge’s passing. Jeffrey Toobin, by contrast,
seems positive giddy and disgraces himself—along with the publication he defiles with his presence—with a “postscript” of breathtaking dishonesty and meanness. It is bad enough to speak ill of the dead. It is worse to lie about them. But nothing is below Toobin, who only feels safe sliming Robert Bork when Bork cannot respond.
Robert Bork, who died Wednesday, was an unrepentant reactionary who was on the wrong side of every major legal controversy of the twentieth century. The fifty-eight senators who voted against Bork for confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1987 honored themselves, and the Constitution. In the subsequent quarter-century, Bork devoted himself to proving that his critics were right about him all along.
Bork was born in 1927 and came of age during the civil-rights movement, which he opposed. He was, in the nineteen-sixties, a libertarian of sorts; this worldview led him to conclude that poll taxes were constitutional and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not. (Specifically, he said that law was based on a “principle of unsurpassed ugliness.”) As a professor at Yale Law School, his specialty was antitrust law, which he also (by and large) opposed.
Word.