Do we still want to stop Roberts, considering who (or what) we might get in his place? Personally, I’m almost starting to feel sympathy for the guy — even if he is a greasy corporate whore smothered in coco butter.
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August 5, 2005
WB: Straight Judges Don’t Wear Plaid
Comments
First Jeff Gannon. Now, this guy out of nowhere. Could it be that George is trying to protect his rear, so to speak. There is a ton we don’t know about George, and with the Silver Fox as a mother, there is a ton that we could be missing.
Posted by: arbogast | Aug 5 2005 8:40 utc | 1
Damn Mr Billmon, I need a cold shower after reading that post. Wonderful writing.
Posted by: aemd | Aug 5 2005 12:31 utc | 4
Ever since you dropped comments your site has degenerated into a pitiful tabloid. What do you gain by mirroring those you abhor?
Posted by: Damon | Aug 5 2005 13:10 utc | 5
Could this be a Rovian stealth trick? Cover up the evidence (helping defend gays) in the questionnaire. Let the other side discover it, meanwhile being assured that Roberts is reformed from any errors he may have made as a “youth”. Put the other side in a quandry as to whether to exploit this “foible”, making the other side out as hypocrites if they do. A defense to going after Roberts hard, and ensuring a rather easy confirmation, installation as the stealth winger we all imagine he is anyway.
. . . rememeber, how easily the right seems to have forgiven junky Rush his dalliance.
Posted by: DonS | Aug 5 2005 13:23 utc | 6
What do you gain by mirroring those you abhor?>/i>
Because it’s fun – a concept Damon apparently is not familiar with.
Posted by: Billmon | Aug 5 2005 14:10 utc | 8
Posted by: Anonymous | Aug 5 2005 14:11 utc | 9
Damon,
Ever since you dropped comments your site has degenerated into a pitiful tabloid. What do you gain by mirroring those you abhor?
The pitiful tabloids I have known are folded down the middle, and offer a picture of a topless female model on page three …. On my monitor, at least, the Whiskey Bar is most definitely not folded down the middle.
Posted by: Jassalasca Jape | Aug 5 2005 14:12 utc | 10
The pitiful tabloids I have known are folded down the middle, and offer a picture of a topless female model on page three …. On my monitor, at least, the Whiskey Bar is most definitely not folded down the middle.
Yeah! And frankly, a topless judge Roberts is not a good substitute for the page three girls.
Though the bunny ears are rather fetching.
Posted by: Grep Agni | Aug 5 2005 14:58 utc | 11
Was this a well-designed leak to make Roberts seem more like a good guy so that opponents of his nomination have less reason to oppose him? If I were REALLY PARANOID, I’d say this was their design way back when he actually did help gays in the lawsuit. But I’m not quite THAT paranoid YET.
Posted by: Phil from New York | Aug 5 2005 15:02 utc | 12
LOL!! You are a great satirist…you got both the conservative’s and the liberal’s “whisper campaigns” that seem to follow on any issue.
…Damon, fwiw, Mark Twain in his day utilized the same sort of mockery…maybe it bothers you cause Billmon’s writing is so well done…or maybe you need to grow a sense of humor.
btw, I KNEW he had nipple rings… the plaid pants were a dead giveaway.
Posted by: fauxreal | Aug 5 2005 15:03 utc | 13
Let’s not forget, that most virile of Republicans, Ronald Reagan, frequently wore plaid suits.
Posted by: stvwlf | Aug 5 2005 15:50 utc | 15
You guys don’t understand how big law firms work. This wasn’t Robert’s case. It was handled by others in the office. Hogan & Hartson is a big firm with a very wide range of political views, and as part of old establishment Washington it tries to be bi-partisan in the pre-Gingrich and Atwater sense.
What happened here is that the partners in charge of the case came to Roberts and said, look, you know the law, you know the judges. Do us a favor — read our draft papers, listen to our prepared arguments, look at the key cases, and give us some suggestions. So he did. It would have been churlish of him to refuse- an insult to his partners, a sign that he placed personal ideology over loyalty to the institution of the firm.
Roberts’ work on this case shows that he’s a traditional lawyer with an old-fashioned sense of collegiality. That’s a good thing, but it doesn’t tell us anything about his personal views on gay rights.
Posted by: JR | Aug 5 2005 15:56 utc | 16
Roberts’ work on this case shows that he’s a traditional lawyer with an old-fashioned sense of collegiality. That’s a good thing, but it doesn’t tell us anything about his personal views on gay rights.
. . . nor his sexual proclivities.
Posted by: Night Owl | Aug 5 2005 16:02 utc | 17
Roberts also pulled sodomy detail for renowned perverted tobacco lawyer Ken Starr. From this we can deduce that he would support current legal precedent on blowjobs unless accompanied by withdrawal or eucalyptus breath mints. But he needs to be questioned on his personal views on mutual masturbation, analingus, fisting and privacy.
Posted by: vidkun | Aug 5 2005 16:19 utc | 18
It would have been churlish of him to refuse- an insult to his partners, a sign that he placed personal ideology over loyalty to the institution of the firm.
And here we have the nub of the political problem the Republicans fade — Bush likes the “loyalty to the firm” part, but his fire-eating coreligionists are more into the “placing personal ideology over loyalty” part. And churlishness is not a quality they find objectionable, as long as it’s in the service of an anthropomophic Divine Geezer with a nasty sadistic streak.
Posted by: Billmon | Aug 5 2005 16:20 utc | 19
The corporatistas have never intended giving the bible thumpers any real victories. How are they going to get them to the polls if they can’t whip them into a gay\abortion\flag burning hate frenzy?
Posted by: + | Aug 5 2005 17:23 utc | 20
Wonderful —
Who would have predicted that the Roy Cohn Club would become so powerful? But having one of them on the SCOTUS is a scary thought to me.
Posted by: Marie | Aug 5 2005 18:01 utc | 21
In their attempts to cater to the religious fundamentalists, while, at the same, time trying not to appear too radical to the rest of the Republicans, those in the Bush administration inevitably put themselves into situations where their words/actions will come back to bite them in the ass.
Posted by: janeboatler | Aug 5 2005 18:45 utc | 22
I haven’t snickered nor laughed so
much since I read Billmon’s
“Peak Snark” post.
Posted by: possum | Aug 5 2005 21:40 utc | 24
The bunny ears are fabulous.
What is it with this administration’s fixation on homosexuality? The tabloid isn’t the Whiskey Bar. It’s the government of the United States.
Posted by: jm | Aug 5 2005 21:49 utc | 25
Although for the life of me,I can’t
decide which was more available in this post: Light,sweet snark; or
heavy snark.(For those who do not get the allusion,I highly recommend
reading Billmon’s “Peak Snark”post,
in his archives.Enjoy.
Posted by: possum | Aug 5 2005 21:50 utc | 26
I’d think the gay angle is a bone for the right to chew, or suck, on. There’s plenty of — ‘meatier’ seems to overdo it as an adjective here — substance in Roberts’ work for the center and left to oppose. From what I’ve seen of Roberts’ writings and record, he’d make the perfect Gilded Age justice, barring his extreme deference to the chief executive’s powers. Let the left oppose him on his blindered reading of protections for women, workers, the environment, and the unfortunate. Leave the lifestyles and cultural muck to the conservatives — they do seem to so love wallowing in it. In the end, we might get an honest, bipartisan rejection of the nominee.
Posted by: optional | Aug 5 2005 23:41 utc | 27
It seems perhaps the the Neoconservative machine is detaching itself from part of the religious right platform. Frist on stem cell research and a few other little news items this week on the evolution/creationist nonsense may suggest it. I am very curious what the next four months will bring in this arena. But now, to resisit this judicial nomination? I think we can get much worse. Even if the Republican moderates join and stop it, to misquote a famous political cartoon of my era: “Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a recess appoiontment out of my hat!”
Posted by: Diogenes | Aug 6 2005 0:02 utc | 28
decide which was more available in this post: Light,sweet snark; or heavy snark
I saved the heavy crude for my next post — on the undead one.
Posted by: billmon | Aug 6 2005 0:15 utc | 30
Maybe…MAYBE I could live with the emotional scars brought on by the nipple rings. But the tuxedo Speedo?
Why..? WHY???
sorry,I should have been more helful about the “Peak Snark” post.
The title is “The SCLM Strikes Again”, and was posted 6/18/04.
Posted by: possum | Aug 6 2005 17:10 utc | 34
here ya go, possum
best line: Industry sources tell me that long lines of supertankers – each filled to the brim with crude snark – are currently being held just off the eastern and western seaboards for prices to rise before unloading their cargos at U.S. refineries.
Posted by: fauxreal | Aug 6 2005 17:42 utc | 35
The Land of Wingnuttistan is also in for a shock when they find out that Roberts is a fan of the atheist philosophy of existentialism, even to the extent of quoting a French philosopher in one of the memos he wrote when he was working as a Special Counsel to the Office of the Attorney General. Here’s what he wrote in a memorandum of November 12, 1981 (titled “Possible Reforms of the availability of Federal Habeas Corpus”) about why habeas should be abolished or drastically limited:
“The claims most likely to be barred are the frivolous ones that arise in a prisoner’s imagination when he has nothing to do during a long incarceration. See Cams [sic], The Rebel. (‘In prison dreams have no limits and reality is no curb.’)”
O.K., so he mis-typed “Camus”; still, how many of Bush’s flunkies ever even heard of Camus, let alone are given to quoting French existentialists in an official memorandum to the boss?
When the Wingnuts hear about this, Roberts will be in big, big trouble.
Posted by: Basharov | Aug 7 2005 4:53 utc | 37
Roberts wouldn’t have got the gig if he didn’t have a reputation for hawking his fork. The question is did BushCo think they would be the FIRST ‘diners at the Y’?
Whatever the answer is it hardly matters since even if Roberts was caught at the end of the Gitmo daisy chain the dems wouldn’t have the heart, wit or capability to do anything about it except wonder why the repugs seem to get ALL the action.
Of course none of this explains why Roberts one foray into lobbying was for the cosmetics industry. Perhaps he was just angling for cost on his shipment of FakeBake.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 7 2005 7:14 utc | 38