THe prince of hacks

National Review, July 31, 1987

The Prince of Hacks

TEDDY KENNEDY has never been likened to Lincolnfor eloquence, to Jefferson for relevance, or to Washington for veracity. But his remarks on the appointment of Robert Bork startled even those who have come to expect nothing from him. "The President,' he said, "should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate, and impose his reactionary vision on the Supreme Court.'

He went on: "Robert Bork's America is a land inwhich 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, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.'

He did it. He finally did it. He achieved the oratoricallevel of Gus Hall. Teddy, offering his assessment of one of the subtlest legal thinkers in America, managed to sound like a Party hack rendering the ideological verdict on Andrei Sakharov: "Reactionary' --enough said.

But not enough for Teddy. He went on to elaborate,with ponderous hysteria, the counter-revolutionary threat posed by the notorious Bork.

Soon the other kids were doing it too. RichardGephardt, varying the imagery slightly, said that Reagan had reached out of the "mire' of the Iran scandal to nominate "one of the villains of the Watergate scandal.' Jane Stern of the National Education Association called Bork "a compulsory pregnancy man.' (If you can read this, thank a teacher.) Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP vowed to oppose Bork's confirmation "until hell freezes over,' and also objected to Bork's presumed position on abortion, without explaining why that should be a specific concern of the black community.

Rhetorical totalism, the emblem of true ideology, isin the air. It concedes nothing in the way of human respect and legitimacy to its adversaries, taking instead a relentlessly accusatory tone toward them. It settles for nothing less than political annihilation. Strange that a Kennedy should wind up speaking like Lee Harvey Oswald.