It is not sufficient to observe the truism that the victors write the history. The battle over Judge Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was an epic moment in our culture war. For the modern Left, history is not merely a victor’s accounting. It is the unseen hand of Progress, the agent of Change. When the Left wins, history’s losers are not just consigned to unflattering portraits but to damnatio memoriae.
It was little surprise, then, that Bob’s passing a few days before Christmas was largely marked by not being marked at all—as if the death of this titanic figure were not significant enough a news story to rate mention between fiscal cliffs and the drama over a potential interruption of the First Family’s latest extended holiday. In its post mortems, the commentariat was typically spiteful, with a number of honorable exceptions—moving talk-radio tributes by Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin (the latter having been a top Reagan Justice Department official at the time of Judge Bork’s nomination), a touching remembrance by sometime Bork critic David Frum, and a laudatory albeit censorious appraisal by Bork’s oft-time academic critic Richard Epstein spring to mind. Bile from the Left, which surely hurled enough in the controversial jurist’s direction in life, was to be expected. Most disappointing, though, was the usually sensible Mickey Kaus’s assertion that, back in that 1987 hellfire, the Senate had “Borked a guilty man.”
Kaus’s snark owed to what he regards as Bork’s convenient conversion
