What the New York Sun Doesn’t Understand

Yesterday I read, for the first time, an issue of New York’s latest sinkhole for the dollars of reactionary philanthropists, the New York Sun. They hit my price: they were handing them out free in the subway. (And I emphasize the “handing out”; if they were just freely available but needed to be picked up from a box, like the Voice or The Onion, I wouldn’t dream of expending the effort. But if it would require more effort not to take one, what the hell.) It’s hard to describe the sheer awfulness; imagine an entire paper written like the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. I did particularly enjoy this bit, from an editorial entitled “What Frist Understands” (Content doesn’t seem available online):

There are those of us who had hoped that the Democrats would have recoiled from what they did back in 1987, when they sank the nomination of one of the greatest jurists ever nominated to the Supreme Court [sic], Robert Bork. Yet as the voters have moved in the other direction, the Democrats have moved in the other. Judge Bork was stopped in committee, but during President Bush’s first term the Democrats signaled that they were going to be indifferent to the judgment of the Judiciary Committee itself and block actions on the floor.

Strange–every other historical source I have consulted, including Bork’s own account, shows Bork being defeated 58-42 by the Senate as a whole. How strange that Bork would forget the nature of his own defeat. If he can’t remember that, frankly I think we can all agree it’s best that his nomination was killed so that he could churn out some twelfth-rate books instead….