Wash. Post's Gerson invents Franken quote, gets mad at it
June 23, 2010 8:32 am ET by Simon Maloy
Michael Gerson, one of the Washington Post's growing stable of Bush administration officials-turned-columnists, is upset at Sen. Al Franken, taking to the Post's op-ed pages to denounce the Minnesota Democrat as an "ideologue" who has become an "embarrassment." The source of Gerson's ire is Franken's remarks to the American Constitution Society last week, writing that Franken "has tried to control his bile addiction, at least in public," but his ACS speech was a "relapse."
Gerson writes:
Most of the traditional elements of a Franken rant were employed against Chief Justice John Roberts and conservatives on the Supreme Court. The attack on motives: The "Roberts court has consistently and intentionally protected and promoted the interests of the powerful over those of individual Americans." The silly hyperbole: "What individual rights are so basic and so important that they should be protected above a corporation's right to profit? And their preferred answer is: None. Zero." The sloppy, malicious mixed metaphor: The Roberts court is putting not a "thumb" but "a fist with brass knuckles" on the "scale" of justice. Franken was clearly summoning all his remaining resources of senatorial dignity not to say something like Roberts is a "lying liar who lies along with his lying lackeys for his lying corporate lying masters."
You get the sense that about halfway through this paragraph, Gerson realized that his examples of "bile" weren't particularly bilious, so he delves into Franken's psyche to tell us what he was really thinking and invents a supposed train of thought that quite (un)cleverly plays off Franken's book, Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
Gerson goes on to attribute some more invented opinions to Franken, claiming that the senator's view is that "judges should be more like the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revoltuion -- an unelected group of super-legislators who issue binding verdicts based on their advanced conceptions of justice and class warfare." This is obviously ridiculous, particularly since Gerson's column is based on the premise that Franken engages in "silly hyperbole" and spouts "bile." And yet here's Gerson claiming that a sitting senator thinks judges should be akin to the infamous revolutionary body that directed the Reign of Terror in France in which tens of thousands of people were killed.
Now that's "bile."
This is their stock-in-trade: They tell us what Democrats, liberals, progressives and populists really mean. Because their enemies are too stupid or dishonest to simply say what they believe, their comments require translation. Which the gasbags are quite happy to provide.
It's essentially three hours of Prager telling his audience, in a disgusted and authoritative voice, what "The Left" thinks and believes.
As somebody who I'm sure Prager would place squarely in "The Left", he constantly surprises me by revealing the amazing things I believe. I hate The Family and marriage, I hate the military, I hate business and anybody who makes money, and I hate Judeo-Christian values in general.
The worst part is that, according to Prager, many things I thought were good are very, very bad. I knew I believed in concepts like justice, fairness and equality, but it took Prager to explain to me that these things all are code for giving everybody the same drab, identical results regardless of their very different choices and efforts.
He may be better at unintentional comedy than even Rush Limbaugh.
Here's just one great passage:
If you listen to the U.S. Senate talk about judicial nominees, you’d be forgiven for thinking that originalism was a time-honored American value, one of the things we fought the British to protect.
But ironically enough, originalism – like the designated hitter – only dates back a few decades.
Indeed, as Cass Sunstein has pointed out, it was Robert Bork who first popularized the notion that the Constitution should be interpreted according to what we believe was the "original understanding" of its authors.
Just to clarify: That’s not Robert Bork the Founding Father. That’s Robert Bork the 20th century conservative legal activist.