Romney’s Weird Campaign Turns Pro

Originally posted at www.gipsytim.com

 

In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson wrote, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” The campaign of Mitt Romney has recently crossed the threshold for mere quirkiness to full-bore professional weirdness with the addition of wild-eyed judicial activist Robert Bork. Even among the legal profession, Robert Bork is considered an extreme freak. We’re talking about a guy who makes disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales look like a model of ethical behavior (not an easy trick to pull off).

For those you who may have forgotten, Judge Robert Bork was an Appeals Court judge nominated to the Supreme Court by the Reagan Administration. It was not one of Ronald Reagan’s better decisions, since even by the standards of 1987, Robert Bork was an deranged nutjob on judicial matters. Bork views included such creation of a troubled mind, as:

• Opposition To Civil Rights: One year before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned whites-only lunch counters and other forms of discrimination, Bork criticized the Act as a moral abomination. “The principle of such legislation is that if I find your behavior ugly by my standards, moral or aesthetic, and if you prove stubborn about adopting my view of the situation, I am justified in having the state coerce you into more righteous paths. That is itself a principle of unsurpassed ugliness.”
• No Right To Contraception: In Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court held that married couples have a constitutional right to use contraception — a decision that was later extended to all couples. Bork called this decision “utterly specious” and a “time bomb.”
• Banning Porn, Art and Science : Bork also called for shrinking the size of the First Amendment until it is small enough to be drowned in a bathtub. “Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political. There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic.”
• Believes Government Can Criminalize Sex: In its landmark Lawrence v. Texas decision, the Supreme Court reached the obvious conclusion that it is none of the government’s damn business who anyone is having sex with — overruling a previous decision inBowers v. Hardwick. Bork, however, wrote that “Bowers v. Hardwick, which upheld the community’s right to prohibit homosexual conduct, may be a sign that the Court is recovering its balance . . . . I am dubious about making homosexual conduct criminal, but I favor even less imposing rules upon the American people that have no basis other than the judge’s morality.”
• No Constitutional Protection for Women: Bork also claimed that the Constitution does not shield women from gender discrimination. In Bork’s words, “I do think the equal protection clause probably should be kept to things like race and ethnicity.”

And to think all Alberto Gonzales ever did was try to BS a few half-baked legal excuses for torture.

The Senate and the American people rightly rejected Robert Bork in 1987 and we even got a new verb in the process (“to Bork”). Since that time Bork has proven to be afflicted by the dreaded Jimmy Carter Disease, which causes the victim engages a non-stop attempt to prove how wrong we were about them. But Bork retains a small cadre of supports in the Republican Party who cling to the curious notion of Judicial Originalism. This is exactly the crowd that Romeny the Red is trying to fool by having Robert Bork as a legal advisor. We’ve all heard of wedge issues but Mitt Romeny may be the first presidential candidate to have a wedge advisor. For that, you have to give Comrade Mitt a few points of innovative thinking. Not to worry though, its still early in the campaign season and we still have to see which GOP presidential pretender will doom their ambitions by bringing on Phil Gramm as an advisor. After all, he managed to kill of the chances of both John McCain (President) and Kay Bailey Hutchinson (Texas Governor) in their respective races.