Hewitt’s ridiculous “Borking” charge

An e-mail I sent to Hugh Hewitt, who apparently cannot tell the difference between a smear and a legitimate criticism:

You’ve got to stop this nonsense about Miers’s conservative critics having “Borked” her.

Here’s Borking: The week Clarence Thomas was nominated for the Supreme Court, the New York Times ran an op-ed by a black in which he compared Thomas to a snake, and then added an anecdote from the South in which someone advises someone to chop a snake’s head off. That was the New York Times. Telling people to chop Thomas’s head off.

Here’s Borking: Edward Kennedy saying that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, children could not be taught about evolution.”

Here’s Borking: Gregory Peck’s vicious media campaign against Bork charging that he wanted to bring back poll taxes and literacy tests against blacks.

By contrast, all that Miers’s critics said was that she was NOT QUALIFIED and was NOT A CONSERVATIVE. They did not smear her. They did not describe her as an evil loathsome menace to be destroyed. And that is what Borking is.

Your misappropriation of a phrase that properly describes the left in order to attack the right, creating a false moral equivalence between them, is typical of someone who is moving to the left himself. At the rate you’re going, you’ll be in David Brock country before long.

Sincerely,
Lawrence Auster

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 28, 2005 01:02 PM | Send