Others more qualified than I will tell you about his monumental contribution to the law, and there is no doubt he will be remembered for a very long time.  My favorite measurement of a man’s significance is the number of enemies he stimulates and the desperate measures to which they resort in order to destroy him.  By this measure, Bork was a giant.  The vulgar campaign against his nomination to the Supreme Court–spearheaded by Senator Ted Kennedy and embraced by Senator Joseph Biden–was so intense that it produced a new verb “to bork,” to describe the actions of political lynch mobs.

Bob was one of the great public intellectuals, but unlike most deep thinkers he had a fabulous sense of humor, featuring timing so perfect that I once told him that he’d missed his calling.  Instead of wasting his time with issues of Constitutional Law, he should have been a stand-up nightclub comedian.  He presented the annual AEI award to Justice Thomas one year, and the introduction/presentation was the equal of any Hollywood roast.  That sparkling wit stayed with him to the end, even as his body gave way and he was increasingly immobile.

He loved good movies, especially detective films, and happily watched the tv series about Nero Wolfe, based on the great Rex Stout novels.  He was delighted when we gave him a copy of “The Usual Suspects,” which he had somehow missed.

Like many great legal thinkers, he had an uncanny ability to get to the heart of complicated moral and philosophical issues, which you can see on display in his books about the degeneration of American culture.  They are so unrelentingly gloomy that I once asked him if there wasn’t at least one central ingredient in our culture that he thought worth saving.  There was!  “Absolutely,” he replied instantly…”the martini.”  He knew a lot about martinis, and if you had the time he’d explain its history, its mystery, and its proper handling and shaking.  But of course he was often horrified by the “barbaric” additions of unworthy fruits and veggies to his favorite drink.  No doubt the worst of his afflictions was the requirement he abandon the martini.  Second worst was having to give up the inhalation of burning tobacco leaves.

He took great pride in his service in the Marine Corps.  Hardly anybody knows that he was a tanker, but he regaled us with stories about his time curled up inside the armored tin can, as with his skill on the tuba.  Yes.  If only he’d given Senator Kennedy a few good oompahs…

The good news is that there will be 16 Marines at graveside Saturday, which will please him.

He bore his long illness with a mixture of self-deprecation, anger, and wit, he delighted in good food always, he maintained his fabulous intellect to the end, and we always came away from visits with the knowledge that we had been in the presence of a great American. It would not have been possible for him to bear his burdens as well as he did without his deep faith and his great love, both of which flowed from Mary Ellen, a truly remarkable woman, and the kids.  I have a special bond with Ellen, who was working with me while her dad was being tortured by the Senate Judiciary Committee…

Lucky man. And lucky us, to have known him.

****

See also Roger Kimball’s tribute.

I’ve been getting a lot of fascinating correspondence about the presidential election, much of it dealing with the technology used by the Obama campaign.  It documents a remarkable degree of precision that the Obama foot soldiers and cyberwarriors brought to bear on the American electorate, right down to identifying potential voters who might, if approached in the proper way, go to a voting booth and support their candidate.

Much of this technology was developed by the same nerds and geeks that have given us the social networks, and the tools upon which they depend. The process is a familiar one — we know all about it in the commercial marketplace. See, for example, the helpful analysis in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal.

Merchants routinely send us lots of material about products they know will tempt us.  They know this because of the very detailed information they have about our buying habits, our peer groups, our tastes, and our beliefs.

The same methods apply to  selling candidates, and the Obama organizations were far more effective than Romney’s at exploiting their understanding of our habits and desires.  They had a great deal of specific information about voters, and were able to target individuals with a degree of accuracy that was vastly superior to the Republicans’ methods.  Listen to one of my favorite commentators, Debra Saunders:

Team Obama conducted nightly surveys of 9,000 likely voters in 10 battleground states. Because of those surveys, campaign manager Jim Messina told the gathering, “We thought we knew exactly where the electorate was.” The campaign’s targeting was so tight that national field director Jeremy Bird was able to see support slacken at Ohio State University and respond by multiplying the campaign’s presence. Messina claimed, “We knew exactly who we had to go get.”

That last quotation grabs me by the throat and drags me to the question of digital communications, including email, texting, Facebook, and Twitter, in the global turmoil on whose outcome our own destiny now depends.

“We knew exactly who we had to go get.”  Instead of an American political manager,  put those words in the mouth of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, or Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and you get to the heart of a very big question.  The same sort of detailed, granular information about the Iranian and Syrian people can be used by their oppressors.  To go get them.

The insurrections against the tyrants, in the Middle East today as in the Soviet Empire in the revolutionary eighties, desperately need good communications.  They are certainly not going to get reliable information from the official state media.  Where will they get accurate reports?  Only from trusted sources.  During the Cold War, the fax machine was the revolutionary source of choice, along with Western radio broadcasts.  During the Iranian uprisings in 2009-2010, the social networks (Facebook and Twitter) and some Western broadcasts (more often televsion than radio, some of which was “official” like the BBC, while some was private, including Iranian-American broadcasts from southern California) played a big role.  Indeed, when the Iranian regime shut down Internet, the outside broadcasters “triangulated” information:  street fighters called a Western TV station with real-time information, which was then broadcast into Iran via satellite.

As we watch the Syrian dictator struggle to survive, and the Egyptian would-be dictator run from an angry mob, and as we think back to the many fallen dictators of the recent past – Gorbachev, Ceausescu, Pinochet,  and their numerous ilk– we might well ask ourselves two questions:

Why does that job look so good?

And why do so many intellectuals cozy up to the dictators?

Machiavelli knew that tyrannies were the most unstable form of government, while republics were the longest-lived. Anyone who has lived through this age of Revolution must be impressed with the spectacular number of fallen tyrants.  But most leaders know less and less history, and Machiavelli died a long time ago, so dictators continue to exercise a certain fascination. They inspire mass movements and strike down their enemies with abandon.  Democratic political leaders envy them, because the tyrants can just DO things;  they don’t have to negotiate, wheel and deal, split the differences, or look for middle ground.  They don’t have to run for reelection.  They wave their scepter, and that’s that.  Until the scepter doesn’t work any more…

Tyrants fall at a much faster rate, and usually in a much less pleasant manner, than democratic leaders. George W. Bush did not end up hiding in a hole in the ground like Saddam Hussein, and Nicolas Sarkozy was not raped and slaughtered as Muammar Qaddafi was.  To be sure, the French nation did not cry oceans of tears for Sarkozy, as the Russians did for Stalin, but the French Republic still stands, while the Soviet Union has been dumped in history’s dustbin.

Maybe it is not altogether good to be king, although the power to just DO things sure looks good to lots of folks in the free worlds.  Think  back a few years, when the Israelis were turning over territory to the likes of Yasir Arafat.  At the time, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres convinced themselves that things would now go better in Palestine because the new rulers would not have to worry about legal niceties or international criticism for ugly human rights violations.  President Obama is sometimes given to complaining about the existence of a political opposition to his designs, and you can be sure that tyrant envy seizes democratic leaders everywhere, even if only momentarily.

Fellow PJM columnist Jonathan Spyer, one of the best reporters on things Syrian, now believes that the tide of battle has turned against President Assad, and that the regime may be forced to retreat to a rump state in the western coastal region sometime in the next several months. If that happens, it would be a stunning defeat for Assad and his allies in Moscow, Beijing, and Teheran, even though the regime might well live on in an amputated form for many years.

The Russians and the Iranians have been arming and funding the regime’s Army.  We’ve read recently about Iranian airplanes exploiting Iraqi airspace to smuggle weapons, and there’s a busy ground traffic as well.  The Iranians have also been doing a good deal of the killing. You’ll recall that they started by sending snipers and advisers at the beginning of the uprising–figuring that the same methods they used in the streets of Iran would succeed in Syria as well–and today there are abundant Iranian Revolutionary Guards on the battlefields, thereby violating the regime’s strong preference for sending others (preferably Arabs) to fight and die for the Islamic Republic.  They are losing a considerable number of them; in the last 10 days alone, more than 45 RGs have been killed by opposition forces, and this does not take into account a significant number of Hezbollahis.

The strategic importance of Syria is demonstrated by the surprising fact that supreme leader Ali Khamenei has given Assad a blank check. The Syrian tyrant has been promised all the money, all the weapons, and all the manpower he needs to survive.   The Russians are acting with similar resolve.

It isn’t very difficult to figure out why the Russians and the Iranians are going all in: Syria provides the Russians with their only reliable ally in the region, as well as that warm water port the czars always coveted, while for the Iranians Assad’s country has provided the operational base for Hezbollah, and a training center for terrorists who killed so many Americans in Iraq.

So when you hear stories about the misery Western sanctions are inflicting on the Iranian people, remember that the regime is dispersing a lot of hard currency and a lot of bodies to the Syrian war.  And that comes on top of all the money going to Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and various terrorists and supporters of the Islamic Republic all over Africa and the Middle East, most notably Jordan of late.

The misery of the Iranians, which is real and getting worse, is the result of strategic decisions made by the Iranian tyrants, and their Russian (and often also their Chinese) allies, to arm the mass murderers from Syria to Nigeria.

But few things go according to plan in this life, and in recent weeks some of the most effective Russian weapons have ended up in the hands of Assad’s enemies in the Free Syrian Army.  Last month the opposition forces conquered “Base 46″ in the north, and “liberated” some valuable Russian antiaircraft missiles, the SA-16s, known as “Gimlets.”  Already, one helicopter and one jet fighter have been destroyed by Gimlets.

The FSA are so pleased they are bragging about their ability to create a “no-fly zone” even if the United States continues to withhold effective military training and support.

But don’t forget Khamenei’s (and presumably Putin’s) blank check:  Assad is entitled to use any and all methods to win.  No  surprise, then, when we learn that even the Obama Administration is “concerned” about the possibility that Assad will deploy chemical weapons against the FSA if push comes to shove.  Hillary is warning that the United States might be forced to act (imagine!) if that occurs.  Here she is in her finest stern schoolmarmish mode:

I’m not going to telegraph in any specifics what we would do in the event of credible evidence that the Assad regime has resorted to using chemical weapons against their own people, but sufficing to say that we’re certainly planning to take action if that eventuality were to occur…

I know what you’re thinking, and I quite agree:  what?  Obama is going to war in the Middle East on the basis of “credible information” of the use of weapons of mass destruction?  Do Sy Hersh and his loyal followers at Code Pink know about this?

Hard to believe, and I doubt Assad, Putin and Khamenei take it very seriously.  After all, this is the same American president who bravely intoned “Assad must go” on August 12th, 2011, and subsequently has done virtually nothing to advance the dictator’s departure.

The Europeans — and the American intellectuals who yearn to be European — have long believed that America was doomed. It goes way back.  There was already a significant literature on the inferiority of Americans during the colonial period, replete with scientific proof: those who lived in North America were held to be shorter, weaker, and stupider than those who stayed put under the old regimes. In the view of the transatlantic intellectual elite, we never really had a chance.

Even though the American Revolution is the only durable success among the Big 3 — ours, the French, and the Russian — the intellectual elites on both sides of the Atlantic rarely admit that America is the only truly revolutionary country in the world, and they routinely reserve the term for Russians, Cubans, Iranians, and even Chinese. No matter that they are all failures, and that the only good news from those unfortunate countries is the result of the occasional leader — the great bridge player Deng Xiaoping, for example — who emulates American revolutionary principles.

So the belief that America is a failure has been with us for centuries, and it’s snugly wrapped in the currently fashionable quiltie of multiculturalism/political correctness, according to whose poisonous doctrine all cultures are morally equivalent.  Except some — ours and the Israelis’ — are less equal than the others’.  And some other cultures — nowadays notably the jihadis’ — are more equal than the rest.

These doctrines are dominant among our intellectual elites, and have been for at least a generation.  It should not surprise us to see their consequences applied by men and women who were taught them throughout their schooling. The president’s world view can be found in most any dormitory bull session at our top “educational” institutions.  And it is no small source of alarm to me that our best and brightest military officers are routinely sent for reeducation to such places.

SIDEBAR:  True confession.  I told our children that I wouldn’t pay for tuition at an Ivy League college.  The boys went to school in Texas, served as Marine officers, and, along with an impressive number of friends, are combating these doctrines and their political/cultural consequences.  Just to show that it can be done, our daughter went to school in Massachusetts, got a graduate degree in Italy, served in both Iraq and Afghanistan,  and keeps me intellectually alert.

BACK TO TEXT:  Inevitably, the “America is doomed” sermon is preached in many places, both by prophets who welcome it, and by those who dread it.  Lots of true believers in the American Revolution are currently whining that all is lost, that the counterrevolutionaries have won an irreversible victory, and that we should either trim our sails and adopt the multiculti doctrines, or emulate the heroes of Red Dawn and take to the hills, fully armed, and fight back a la Davy Crockett.

Maybe it comes from the failure to study history (we historians love to blame current error on the lack of historical knowledge).  Somebody should tell the garment-renderers and sackcloth-and-ashes crowd that we’ve been through a lot worse than this, and recovered well enough to save the world.  We fought, amongst ourselves, the bloodiest war of the 19th century.  We’ve been through recessions and depressions.  You think we now have it worse than our parents and grandparents, who survived the Great Depression and World War II?

I don’t know him personally, and there have always been elements of his personality and his performance that did not enthuse me. In the early days of Iraq, I believe that he overstated the success of his mission to train local police forces in Mosul. And as Angleton mentions in our recent conversation, General Petraeus always paid a great deal of attention to his public image. I was always told that he went around with several public affairs officers who could explain to inquiring journalists what was “really” going on.

In this, as in so many other ways, I’m hopelessly oldmannish. I want my generals to spend their time defeating our enemies and protecting our guys, not polishing their images, and decidedly not spending many hours on email.

I take a dim view of adultery, too, in case you were wondering. Yes, I know it’s very popular, I know it’s in our DNA. I’ve read the Old Testament. And yes, I know “man is more inclined to do evil than to do good,” Machiavelli’s terse summary of the human condition. But I also know that virtue is possible, and I want my leaders to be virtuous. I think that winning is the most important thing, and if you win you don’t need to brainwash the observers. The victory speaks for itself.

Which brings us to the whole discussion of the “surge.” I have always said that the surge was not a strategic breakthrough, but rather the application of tried-and-true principles regarding “revolutionary wars.” According to those principles, the outcome of such wars is determined by the people, that is to say, the local population. They provide both the information and the critical mass to one side or the other, thereby determining who wins and who loses. Their dilemma is that they do not wish to be involved in the conflict at all. Preferring to remain neutral, they abstain as long as possible and only throw their weight at the very last possible moment to what they believe to be the winning side. In Iraq, that moment came first in Anbar Province, where the locals became convinced that the Marines could not be defeated and that the Marines were not going away.

And no, contrary to what some are saying, Anbar was not won by bribes. It was bullets. The money came afterwards.

Notice, by the way, that just a year before the Marines won in Anbar, the head of Marine Intelligence in the province glumly assessed that they had lost, and that they could not win. Which reinforces another of my core beliefs: you never know, life is full of surprises, and the only thing to do is keep fighting.

I may have awakened him.  The late James Jesus Angleton, once the chief of CIA counterintelligence, sounded kinda groggy to me after I got him–loud and clear!–on my famously untrustworthy ouija board.  Of course I have no idea whether he gets to sleep at all.  I don’t quite know exactly “where” he is, after all, and he doesn’t answer direct questions on the subject.  Anyway, there he was, and I started right in.

ML:  So what am I supposed to think about Petraeus?

JJA:  That you’re living in a country where espionage is rampant.

ML:  Huh?

JJA:  Have you read those stories about the “software breakdowns” in the Romney get-out-the-vote program “Orca”?

ML:  Sure, it didn’t work, passwords didn’t work, it was a gigantic snafu.

JJA:  Uh huh.  And has anyone raised the possibility that the Romney organization was penetrated in order to introduce “fatal errors” in their computers?

ML:  Actually I don’t believe I’ve seen that in print, although I’m sure somebody must have thought of it.

JJA:  I mean, the Obama people know all about Stuxnet, right?

ML:  Yes, the killer worm that was fed into the computers that run the centrifuges in the Iranian nuclear program.

JJA:  So if politics is war by other means, why shouldn’t they use similar methods in the election?

ML:  Haven’t you inverted that?  Didn’t Clausewitz say that “war is the continuation of politics by different means”?  You’re the literary expert, but still…

JJA:  I expected you’d like the inversion.  Anyway, “Orca” is a good case for espionage, don’t you think?

ML:  Ok, I’ll buy that.  But what does it have to do with the Petraeus story?

JJA:  Everything.  Both are potential espionage stories.  On Petraeus, for starters, we’re told that the FBI was investigating some “broader” thing, and they just happened to come across emails between him and her.  As if the bureau weren’t running an investigation into Petraeus all along.

ML:  Why would they do that?

JJA:  Jeez, nobody knows anything any more!  (coughing again, he’d probably lit up a Camel).  It’s routine.  The FBI always monitors the top levels of CIA, especially the director, any time there is reason for them to worry about a national security counterintelligence matter.  Everybody in the business knows that.  And all they need to open one of those investigations is a complaint, or a tip, from anybody.  You can’t imagine how many hours are devoted to checking out anonymous leads.  I can give you lots of recent stories about promotions and nominations being held up because some fabulist sent a little whisper across the transom of an inspector general’s office…

ML:  And the CIA guys know that?  Petraeus knew that?

JJA:  Of course.  And he also knew what any moderate geek knows, namely that gmail is an open book.  Any skilled nerd can read most anybody’s emails.  We don’t ever use email here.

ML:  You’ve got computers?

JJA:  Indeed.  What do you think that “cloud” thing is all about anyway?  We control it.

ML:  I should have known!  So Petraeus knew that people were reading, or at least could read, all his passionate emails to his lover.

JJA:  Yes.  And he knew enough about such matters to realize that when the counterintel people became aware of the affair, the bureau would instantly worry that he could be blackmailed.  So they would go back through all his emails, and all hers as well, to everyone.

Some years ago, back in 1984, Ronald Reagan won reelection over Walter Mondale, carrying 49 states.  Afterwards, the most prestigious columnist at the most prestigious newspaper–James Reston of the New York Times–permitted himself a confession:

Among the losers in this Presidential election campaign you will have to include the nosy scribblers of the press. Not since the days of H. L. Mencken have so many reporters written so much or so well about the shortcomings of the President and influenced so few voters. Mr. Reagan beat the newspapers by ignoring them. From his nomination in Dallas to election weekend he has not held a single national news conference. He gave one or two interviews to sympathetic writers and allowed a few small-time high school and college audiences to toss him some questions, but he dismissed the White House press corps with a wave and a smile.

In other words, the MSM went all-in to defeat Reagan, and were decimated by the voters.  You can almost hear Reston gnashing his teeth when you read the headline: “Reagan Beats the Press.”

This little flashback set me wondering who’s today’s James Reston, and who, if anyone, would be man enough to make such a confession, if Romney wins on Tuesday. David Brooks? Nah, he’s had dozens of chances to out himself but never gets there.  Matthews?  Not a chance.

There’s a better chance of True Confessions from some of the pollsters. Just remember that Reagan-Carter in 1980 was “too close to call” for the pollsters, including Gallup. And if either candidate wins big in this election, there will be a target-rich environment for poll skeptics.

Reviewing the bidding:  the media don’t have nearly the power that they, and many of us, think they have.  And the pollsters, who get to talk to one out of every eleven people they (or their robots) call, are very afraid that they’re going to have to come up with some sort of scientific-sounding explanation for what happened.

Maybe they should take a poll on which explanation sounds most convincing, huh?

Also read: Election Predictions from PJ Media Columnists

More: Romney Wins Newspaper Endorsement Switchers by a Landslide

To my European friends:

I see from various polls that very nearly all of you support President Obama’s reelection.  The numbers are remarkable, indeed incredible.  More than ninety percent of you would vote Obama (94% of Italians, for example, and the numbers for Great Britain, France, Spain, and Germany are even higher).  Other numbers show that nearly half of you think you should somehow be able to vote in our elections, since American policies have such an enormous effect on you.

All of which reinforces my belief—speaking as the grandson of Russian immigrants who arrived in Harlem and western Massachusetts early in the last century–that the American Revolution was a great thing, and that Americans were right to abandon authoritarian Europe for the possibility of creating a free country across the ocean.  Anyone who truly values liberty has to see that Obama is a threat.  He wants to turn the United States into a version of Europe:  big, meddlesome government, constantly higher levels of taxation, and intrusive regulation of almost everything, combined with a deliberate and systematic weakening of military power and a foreign policy that shrinks from decisive action against freedom’s enemies.

That’s you, sadly.  So it’s understandable that you’d favor Obama (although the numbers—reminiscent of plebiscites rather than normal elections—are ridiculous).  It’s yet another sign of the decadence of Europe.

When I started my studies in Europe back in the mid-sixties, I was enthralled.  European literature, music, fashion, philosophy, scholarship, cuisine, movies, and theater were manifestly better than most of what America had to offer a young intellectual.  Conversations were more cultured, and in many ways I was more comfortable, more stimulated, more alive in Europe than in the United States.

There’s a lot to talk about, especially when it comes to Benghazi, and I’d been trying for weeks to contact my old friend, James Jesus Angleton, the former head of CIA counterintelligence.  Since he’s been dead for a long time, it’s not so easy, and I have to rely on my singularly untrusty ouija board, which has been in and out of the repair shop for years.  Finally, with lots of static (maybe due to Hurricane Sandy), I got him.

Or, rather, I got his spirit, easily recognizable by his high-pitched gravelly voice (LOTS of cigarettes) and his quizzical tone.

JJA:  If you’re calling about the weather, forget it, I don’t do hurricanes.  Anyway, the intel on Storm Sandy was excellent.  A bad day for mankind, a good day for computer modeling…

ML:  No, it’s an intelligence matter.  Benghazi and all that.

JJA:  One of the most disgusting events I’ve ever seen.

ML:  Let’s start with the intel, ok?  Did we have enough information to expect the attack on 9/11?

JJA:  Listen to me.  Carefully.  The whole point of “intelligence” is to understand the world we’re in.  Sometimes you need secret information to achieve that understanding.  You might need to know about foreign leaders’ real intentions, as well as their real capabilities, for example (think Iran, think al Qaeda).  You can’t get that sort of information without conducting espionage.  You need agents, moles, penetrations, intercepts, the whole panoply of spycraft.  But sometimes you don’t need any of that, all you need is to open your eyes, nose, and mind to what is right in front of your face.  Benghazi is mostly–not entirely, but mostly–that sort of thing.

ML:  Yes.  There were two previous assaults on that compound, after all.  Ambassador Stevens was constantly asking for increased security, and the date–9/11–was an obvious red flag.

JJA:  Indeed.  Even the Red Cross had left Benghazi, and the Libyan government had warned about the bad, and worsening, security in the city.  So you didn’t need “assets” inside the terrorist groups to worry about an impending attack.

ML:  But the State Department says that, after all, there was no “specific” information that warranted greater protection for our guys there:

State Department officials have asserted that there was no specific intelligence that warned of a large-scale attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, which they asserted was unprecedented. The department said it was careful to weigh security with diplomats’ need to meet with Libyan officials and citizens.

JJA:  Of course they would say that.  It shifts the blame to CIA.  In essence State says that CIA did not have assets inside the terror groups, including AQ, and so it was inevitable that Stevens would be insufficiently defended.  The implication was that, if only State had known it was coming, they’d have had adequate protection in place.