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The Neolibertarian Network20/20 Hindsight
I was not a defender of Robert Bork when he was nominated to sit on the SCOTUS bench. I’ll be honest though. More than anything it was his ridiculous beard. It made him look like the old neighborhood curmudgeon who relentlessly threatened to call the cops whenever the faint sound of Black Sabbath encroached upon aural sensibilities. He also looked like the type of guy that might bury teenage boys in his basement. But of course I’m being foolish with all of this.
Anyhow, Jacob Sullum today in Hit & Run takes up Bork who has written a bit for the National Review’s 50th anniversary special:
The December 19 issue of National Review, marking the magazine’s 50th anniversary, includes a feature in which 10 people offer suggestions on “How to Increase Liberty in America,” to which I contributed a few paragraphs about ending the war on drugs. Sandwiched between Clint Bolick on school choice and Ward Connerly on colorblindness is Robert Bork on censorship. Just to be clear: He is for it.“Liberty in America can be enhanced by reinstating, legislatively, restraints upon the direction of our culture and morality,” writes the former appeals court judge, now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “Censorship as an enhancement of our liberty may seem paradoxical. Yet it should be obvious, to all but the most dogmatic First Amendment absolutists, that people forced to live in an increasingly brutalized culture are, in a very real sense, not wholly free.” Bork goes on to complain that “relations between the sexes are debased by pornography”; that “large parts of television are unwatchable”; that “motion pictures rely upon sex, gore, and pyrotechnics for the edification of the target audience of 14-year-olds”; and that “popular music hardly deserves the name of music.”
Treating speech as a kind of assault and redefining freedom so that it requires its opposite are familiar tricks of the left that National Review usually is quick to mock. How are they any more respectable when deployed by a man who has elevated fuddy-duddyness to a political principle?
No kidding – on all accounts.
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I was never to sure about Bork myself…pretty much for the same reasons as you …lol…I do however think that he was treated abysmally by the left….I have to say now, with that kind of attidude I am glad he didn’t make it. I fully agree with Allan Nathan that we need to “keep the Republicans out of our bedrooms, the Democrats out of our wallets and both of them out of our 1st and 2nd Amendments Rights.” I will have to give the Republicans credit though…when they mean to censor they at least call it just that….instead of all the cute names the “progressives” use to do the same thing.
“keep the Republicans out of our bedrooms, the Democrats out of our wallets…” Under our Republican congress the payroll tax base just increased from $90,000 to $94,200, a 4.7% increase on, you guessed it, the middle class. Your statement about wallets and bedrooms is like so much folk wisdom, ass backwards.
Actually Charles, the increase in the FICA tax limit was passed under the Reagan administration to keep up with the COLA adjustments that Social Security pays the recipients. As for the actual tax increase (both employer and employee) someone making $94,200 last year will generate an additional $630 in fed revenue or a .67% increase in total taxes (.34% for the individual.)
But I don;t know what that has to do with burying boys in the basement?
I was never too fond of Robert Bork, even though i agree with him on most issues. My reason is because he fired Archibald Cox. Elliot Richardson was much more honorable.