One of the great advantages of having spent an embarrassingly large amount of my disposable income over a quarter century on books is that the darn things just never stop coming in handy. Although lack of space, blogging, and less travel in the last few years has sharply slowed my acquisition rate, for each Presidency from Nixon to Bush II, the two or three overstuffed shelves I have for each invariably offer treasure troves of both contemporary reporting and later scholarship, which is the good news. The bad news is how painfully clear it is that so few members or our media appear to have read any of them.
While I’m fully aware that, say, Ruth Marcus doesn’t live within walking distance of Powell’s, she nonetheless gets paid handsomely to occupy with her empty blather a considerable chunk of op-ed pages across the country a couple times a week; I type away at CHNN and, lately, Firedoglake.com for free, but unlike Ruthie, I bother to do my homework. Not only does it help me avoid the kind of humiliating blunders she made last week; It’s fun. (My mother, rest her soul, would be so proud to hear me say that…) You see, if Ruthie had a library of her own, along with a mad yet methodical system of dog-earing and footnoting as I do and wasn’t afraid to use it, she wouldn’t have made a more than usually complete ass of herself for all the world to see.
While Ruthie was munching on Village cocktail weinies, or perhaps having a much-needed session with Mitch McConnell’s personal trainer, I was delving into the sordid history of our current Supreme court, and it isn’t a pretty picture. Thus, she was “stopped cold” by Obama’s studiously mild admonition of the court’s right wing, while I, a week before, had both predicted the outcome and outlined the craven motivations of the notorious actors involved. When a righty nutcase Reagan-appointed judge predictably went all Glenn Beck on Obama the next day, she had to type up a pretty awkward mea culpa for her harebrained scribbles, and even go on TV to promote it, while I was free to devote myself to the more worthy and urgent endeavors of drinking to excess and demolishing kitchens.
It’s possible, though unlikely, that Ruthie reads books, but it seems indisputable that she doesn’t keep them around for future reference if she does. Not only could I have pulled out Alan Dershowitz’s Supreme Injustice from 2001, I also had on hand Robert Bork’s astonishingly unhinged 1990 screed, The Tempting of America, as well as many more that amply illustrated the systematic politicization of the Court under recent Republican Presidents, and could have helped save her from her wanton and laughably premature typing. But she didn’t call.
She also could have skimmed Michael Schaivo’s book about his brain-dead wife and the startlingly sinister Republican assault on the judiciary she spawned, which make abundantly clear what an actual threat to the separation of powers looked like, but I guess she had a deadline, or maybe a mani-pedi. Both John Cornyn and Tom DeLay explicitly warned at the time that “unelected” judges ought to fear righteous violence against them, but that inconsequential episode was lost in the fog of ancient history; i.e., 2005, for Ruth and her “editors” at the WaPoo.
Probably the most important book I have that could have saved Ruth from herself is one I just picked up for the second time, Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer’s 1994 exhaustive analysis of the Clarence Thomas (continuing) fiasco, Strange Justice. I’m only a few dozen pages into it, but I’ve already encountered enough evidence of a right-wing conspiracy to foist an unqualified opportunist on an unsuspecting nation by the most cynical means imaginable that I really need only skim my margin notes to set up a whole remedial history course for Ruth.
Since the liberal media, including Ruth’s hapless employer, got the story so shamefully wrong when it mattered, that is, before a bitter and perverted nincompoop was elevated to a lifetime seat on the High Court, Mayer and Abramson helpfully tried to set the record straight for those of us who cared to see it straightened. Unsurprisingly, they proved that Thomas was in fact the sexist, authoritarian, pathological liar Anita Hill accused him of being, traits only exacerbated under oath; but he was also a man whose stunning lack of judicial temperament didn’t belong in any courtroom, except perhaps as a defendant. Scalia, Roberts, and Alito are just nicer looking peas in the same rancid pod; the strategies, goals, and even the people behind them are virtually identical, a fact utterly lost on not just Ruthie, but virtually all the media.
It reminds me of a play I produced in the 80′s called The Housekeeper, wherein a homeless grifter wiles her way into the affections (and home) of a stuffy and pretentious failed “author,” recently bereft of his mother who amply supported him. I envision the first interview between Donald Graham and Ruthie just like the first scene of the play, when the potential housekeeper gamely fakes an interest in literature:
DG: (delightedly) I’m always so happy to meet a fellow traveler in Terris Librorum.
RM: (uncertainly shifting in her chair) I’ve been all over.
No, Ruthie, you haven’t, much to the detriment of your readers, and your own credibility.
