A modest proposal: Let Harvard Professors talk and everyone else STFU!

 

100% totally original content by Yard Editor Larry Lowell with Finance Editor Samuel Insull

For Harvard these are the best of times and the worst of times. It's enough to try persons' souls. 

On the one hand, the Harvard Corporation remains a bastion of wealth, power, and privilege, sitting on an endowment well in excess of $50,000,000,000.  Yet at least if you believe what you read in the media, the great and the good of Harvard have never been more subjected to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, with only their $2,000-an-hour lawyers to protect them from the likes of Elsie Stefanik '06.

The University stands accused of taking sides, or not taking sides clearly enough, with respect to the Israel-Hamas War and the deeper problems of the endless bloody conflict between Israel and the Palestinians:

First school officials said nothing when a pro-Palestinian student group wrote an open letter saying that Israel was “entirely responsible” for the violence. Harvard followed up with a letter to the university community acknowledging “feelings of fear, sadness, anger, and more.” After an outcry, Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, issued a more forceful statement condemning Hamas for “terrorist atrocities” while urging people to use words that “illuminate and not inflame.”

What's a President to do? Should she bear nobly those slings and arrows, or should she take arms against this Dead Sea of troubles?

It is a truth universally understood that a billionaire having made his pile deserves to be heeded and obeyed in all pronouncements.  Some (but by no means all) billionaire hedge fund finaglers have piled on the University and urged it to do – what exactly?

Don't worry; they'll tell you and then jabber about it to anyone who wants to hear it.  Or not:

If you hit 22 twice on the Wall Street roulette wheel and trouser $3.8 billion for your troubles, you too think you get to decide whose uneasy tuchus sits on the throne in Massachusetts Hall.

But muses let's not sing just of the anger of the finaglers of Wall Street sulking in their Fifth Avenue triplex tents.  Let's give a decent respect to the opinions of Harvard Professors, deserved or not:

Have you ever met a Harvard Professor who said they didn't know something?  You might sooner move the mist on the Malvern Hills.

But we don't want to keep you in suspense any longer.  How can Harvard Professors turn dark night into day and make their blazing chairs into torches that will light the way?

Just listen to Harvard Professors!

[Harvard] should foster an intellectual climate where dissenting viewpoints are better tolerated, the faculty members said, while describing two cases in which Harvard academics had faced backlash over their views on same-sex marriage and biological sex.

Hmmm. “Backlash?” What does that mean? Does it mean the offenders were tarred and feathered in front of University Hall?  Were their parking spaces were moved to Allston?

Or does it mean that members of the Harvard community who expressed bigotry, homo-, or transphobia were called out for their very bad views, as they should have been?

By the way, if members of the Harvard community express bigotry against Jews, Asians, Palestinians, or Muslims, how should the University handle that?  “Better toleration?”

Speaking of which, whatever happened to those tenured Harvard Professors who supported the idea that IQ was mostly inherited (based upon obviously forged data) and then used that fradulent data to justify racial and other forms of inequality and mistreatment?  Were they hounded out of their aeries in William James Hall? 

But it's not just two loudmouths with bruised feelings that represent Harvard's dark and stormy intellectual climate.  There's more:

Harvard should rein in its diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracy, which, they contend, launched with virtuous goals, but has since expanded to include influencing faculty hiring decisions and policing speech in ways that have damaged the academic enterprise.

Imagine thinking that decisions on faculty hiring should be made by any criteria other than who manages to best brown-nose the existing tenured faculty, or in the case of Henry “the Mad Bomber” Kissinger, the Dean of the Faculty. Next thing you know, Harvard will stop taking advice from academic worthies like Larry Summers, who explained away the lack of women in the economics and science departments on the grounds that the ladies weren't too good with math.

Even worse, imagine seeking to build a faculty reflective of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. It's the thin end of the wedge!

It turns out that these the glittering prizes that are Harvard Professors are not necessarily representative of the full range of the faculty, some of whom contend that the whiners doth protest too much:

Critics of the council[the aforementioned gasbags], including Harvard professors, have questioned whose interests the group seeks to advance and what kinds of conduct it wishes to protect. After the council’s launch, the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson, the[sic] student newspaper, said that some of its members had faced “reasonable backlash” for, in one case, teaching an “unethical course on policing [that] completely disregarded racial concerns” and, in another, for serving as a defense attorney for Harvey Weinstein. 

Weinstein's Harvard Professor mouthpiece? We remember this tale of woe rather differently.  We remember a law professor named Ron Sullivan, who, like other Harvard legal giants up to and including Alan “Counselor Underpants” Dershowitz, trade on their expertise and Harvard credentials to pocket huge bucks for defending the rich and loathsome, was hired to defend the former chief of the Filmmakers Breast Inspection force (the FBI), Harvey Weinstein, better known today as Prisoner 1192234.

In addition to his sinecure at Harvard Law School, Sullivan then held another cushy no-heavy-lifting job as Master of Winthrop House, which involves living in a luxurious house on Memorial Drive and periodically talking to disgusting undergraduates, something no self-respecting member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences would be caught dead doing.

When the students learned that he would be defending one of the most notorious and powerful sex criminals in America, presumably by smearing his victims and casting doubt on the severity of the harm they suffered, undergrads wondered whether they might be some tension between speaking up for the mad rapist of Soho and protecting undergrads from – sexual harassment and exploitation.

They asked whether Sullivan could cynically denigrate victims of sexual abuse on Monday for $1,500 an hour and then protect students from those deeds on Tuesday.  It was an entirely fair question.  And it had nothing to do with “free speech,” but extremely well-paid speech on behalf of a character unsavory enough to have been represented by Counselor Underpants himself.

Harvard after due consideration saw the obvious and irreconcilable tension between the two tasks and asked Sullivan to step down as Master of Winthrop House.  He remained (and remains) a tenured (and chaired) Professor at the Harvard Law School, free to express his views that the women whose careers and lives were ruined by Weinstein were asking for it.  Or not.

Here he is on Harvard's website today:

Speaking of Harvard Law Professors, during Harvard's current travail, Counselor Underpants himself whined that his free speech was threatened when the Harvard Crimson, one of many student publications, exercised its constitutional right not to publish some piece of crap he submitted.  It was the worst attack on free speech since Larry David snubbed him on the porch of The Chilmark Store.

We recount all this not to praise the whining Professors seeking to define what speech is and is not acceptable and then demand that the Corporation go out and enforce their views, but to bury them.

As we have said before, the whole Cancel Culture debate on campus is really about who gets to define what speech is free and who gets to say it.   Of course, President Gay foolishly relied on idiot lawyers in refusing to condemn genocide, but why should a weirdo like Steven Pinker get to determine what's OK to say?

Looking for Minerva's owl in Cambridge?  Don't bother.

Here's a little selection of Pinker's sound and fury.  He called murderous racist Bernard Goetz “mild-mannered.”  He joined Larry Summers' idiotic opinion, supra, that women aren't genetically cut out for adding and subtracting.   He denied falsely that Blacks were not disproportionate victims of police violence.  And of course he still entertains the data-free notion that intelligence is heritable.

No one suggests that Pinker be stripped of his epaulets for promoting such trash.  But why should such nonsense be immune from criticism?  Because a Harvard Professor says it?  Because any criticism would “damage the academic enterprise?”  We think that a decent respect for the opinions of mankind demands just the opposite: whenever a Harvard or other Professor spouts dumb s***, he should be called out for it.

And we can't help but notice that behind the ragtag band of mouthy billionaires and insufferable faculty lies a huge reactionary enterprise: to bring down not just Harvard, but the entire apparatus of liberal higher education.  That, plus racism, is behind the continuing pressure on the Corporation to make President Gay walk the plank for omitted quotation marks on page 297 of her Ph.D. thesis, found by bad-faith wreckers like Chris Rufo through use of modern language comparison software.

By the way, if you ran the theses of all tenured faculty, not just the Black women, through that machine, what would you find out?  

Harvard's notorious insufferable arrogance and air of indifference to the concerns of its community, like the undergraduates (whose careers are normally solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short), this one time is, as we say at the Porcellian Club, a mechiah.  Their stalwart refusal to listen to anyone ever remains the best guarantee that a liberal education will not vanish from the face of this Earth or at least Cambridge.

Meanwhile President Gay and the Corporation will continue to have to put up with pressure from faculty bloviators and Republican plug-uglies.  We hope they remember that while the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk, in this country, it's perpetually High Noon.

News from Zontar: What Won't Democrats Give Up for Military Aid?

Editors’ Note: Every so often the Spy Deep Space Desk gets a transmission from the mysterious planet of Zontar, located in the Remulac galaxy millions of light years from Earth. The planet is apparently populated by a race of intelligent alien life forms whose communications, while largely incomprehensible to those of us here, may shed some light, however dim and distant, on the thought patterns of these strange creatures. The most recent signal seemed especially bizarre to anyone living here on Earth, but in the spirit of cosmic understanding, we present it just as a reminder of the vastness of space and the multiplicity of life forms – [They get the drift – Ed.]

By Dan Balls
Zontarian Post Political Editor

Republicanz have made it clear that future military aid to the embattled Republic of Zukraine will be conditioned on the passage of a national abortion ban.  Much to the chagrin of certain far-left critics in his own party, President Joe Ziden has let it be known that he is willing to consider such a trade.

Zukraine needs US help to counter Ruzzian aggression

President Ziden's concern is said to be triggered by alarming report from Zukraine that without further USZ military assistance, the country will be unable to resist the continuing onslaught of the savage Ruzzian invaders under the leadership of their bloodthirsty dictator, President for Life Vladimir Zutin. 

For months, Republicans have insisted on a hard linkage between aid to Zukraine and a national abortion ban. “We can't talk about providing security assistance to Zukraine without protecting the security of those walking, talking, laughing unborn children that have been slaughtered by the millions since 1973,” argued House Speaker Bridget Zeigler (R – Florida).  “No three ways about it: if Ziden wants the aid, a nationwide abortion ban is the price.”

The abortion ban issue was raised by the overturning of Zoe v. Wade, the 1973 Zupreme Court decision which had protected a woman's right to terminate her pregnancy in the first two trimesters.  That decision was overruled by order of Zupreme Court overseer Bishop Leonard Zeo last year. 

Since Zeo's decision, many Zontarian states have banned the procedure, forcing women to endanger their lives by carrying non-viable fetuses to delivery.  Other states, including those whose inhabitants can read and write, continue to protect the right to an abortion.

In the benighted State of Zexas, a woman who had a life-threatening pregnancy that would have resulted in a dangerous birth of a fetus that would shortly die was forced by the Zexas Supreme Court to flee the state, on the grounds that her three trips to the emergency room and her doctor's judgment that she was in mortal peril did not qualify for an exemption from Zexas forced-birth laws because the woman was not actually bleeding to death during oral argument.

Against the backdrop of outrages like this, some have questioned President Ziden's apparent willingness to trade abortion rights for military aid.

“Our bodies are not bargaining chips to be traded away for doing something that should be done as a matter of the national interest of the UZA,” influential singer Zaylor Zwift told her 180 million Zinstagram followers.  “It's an outrage.”

From her Zalibu castle, legendary entertainer Zarbra Streizand was even emphatic, saying: “How dare these extremist Republicanz extort the gross violation of our rights as their price for aiding our ally in wartime.”

This may be what women resort to to end a pregnancy

In Washington, informed sources emphasize the need for a bipartisan compromise to permit the Zukraine aid package to move forward.  “We need to unite behind a common-sense abortion ban together with an aid package.  That's the Third Way we need, ” said retiring West Zirginia coal baron Joe Zanchin.

Sources close to Senate leadership say the talks are making slow progress.  Some of the sticking points include whether women who obtain an abortion after the ban can be charged with murder, in addition to the medical personnel who perform the procedure.

“We need to be thoughtful and deliberate in how we proceed,” said Senated Majority Leader Chuck Zchumer.  “There are a lot of moving parts here but I believe we are making progress.”

A leading centrist brokering the abortion-ban deal, Arizona Senator Krysten Zinema said all parties were proceeding in good faith and with a genuine desire to see a deal reached by January.

Send her back to her death?  Unthinkable!

But progressives and advocates for women's rights remain unconvinced.  “It is inconceivable to me that we would for one minute consider our bodies as a commodity to be traded away for military aid, ” Rep. Alexandia Ocazio-Cortez said in an MNBZ interview.

“I'm also concerned that once you start giving into Republicanz' extortion, where does it end?  What will they demand next year?  Taking away birth control?  Voting rights?  What's to stop Republicanz from doing something like demanding that we end asylum and lock up refugee babies in exchange for aid?”

“To the people who claim that we can compromise with extremist Republicanz, I would only ask, ‘What planet are you on, anyway?’”

 

 

Editors' Note: The Spy wishes its readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, if you'll forgive the plagiarism!

Does the President of Harvard really support genocide? Let's not find out!

By Yard Correspondent Larry Lowell with
Hebraic Affairs Editor A. Cahan

Think it's hard to get into Harvard?  Just look at this sample question from a recent admissions exam:

Don't worry if you flunked it – so did Harvard President and tenured Professor Claudine Gay.  

In fairness to her (and Harvard types always have a good excuse for bombing an exam), she was asked this question by a bad-faith Republican hack who spends her every waking hour advancing the political fortunes of a notoriously corrupt criminal who admires, dines with, and defends neo-Nazi Jew haters.  (We'll get back to Elsie Stefanik '06 later.)

Gay also made the fatal mistake of showing up for her lynching having been prepped by lawyers from one of the fanciest law firms on God's good earth, the result of a merger of Boston smarts with savvy Washington political instincts, now doing business under the ungainly name of WilmerHale.  (Even HaleWilmer sounds better, like a greeting that Templeton the rat would give to a Brooklin pig.)

According to the usually authoritative New York Times, Gay's ridiculous equivocation was done on the advice of those smart savvy WilmerHale attorneys:

Well, if you're going to go down in flames, might as well have WilmerHale as your wingperson, right?

Just ask them.  According to their website,

They understood the importance of Harvard's reputation with Congress?  They let poor Claudine Gay and two other college Presidents jump right off the cliff.

Gay would have been better off taking the advice of any $125-an-hour hungover criminal defense attorney hanging around Cambridge District Court, who would have told her: “Just tell the judge whatever the f*** she wants to hear and then let's get the f*** out of there and get a Jameson's.”

The resulting s***storm of fake outrage claimed the head of the President of Penn and threatened to bury Gay herself.

Jay Michelson of The Daily Beast explained how the calculated effort to discredit everybody the reactionary right doesn't like constituted yet another right-wing brew of hypocrisy and demagoguery.  Elsie Stefanik had begun her interrogation of the Presidents by asking whether they should condemn calls for intifada, claimed (wrongly) that intifada was synonymous with genocide, and then demanded a yes-or-no question to whether calls for genocide should be banned on campus.

The Presidents responded correctly that such calls, if intended as harassment or intimidation, would be banned but not if such statements appeared in footnote 214 of a scholarly work.  Such nuances are anathema to hacks like Stefanik, still fuming from her dismissal from the nothingburger job of member of the Harvard Institute of Politics Board of Advisers:

Elsie Stefanik isn't as nice as she seems

...this is the subtlety one would expect from a university president, and also what we would expect a would-be demagogue to exploit, which is exactly what Stefanik did.

What’s more, the same civil libertarians who are the darlings of Republicans when they defend conservatives in this case have defended [Penn President] Magill....

Of course, when it comes to conservative speech, Republicans like Stefanik are warriors against censorship of all kinds. In a 2021 interview, Stefanik complained of a “petition pressuring the dean of the Harvard Kennedy School to remove me from the bipartisan board of Harvard Institute of Politics,” due to her objecting to electors from four states in the 2020 election. “This is how cancel culture works,” she said.

But now Stefanik is practicing cancel culture on steroids. She and others are calling for Magill’s ouster—not for anything she personally said or did, but for merely stating that hateful antisemitic speech may or may not count as harassment, depending on the circumstances.

It’s cancel culture when it’s me, but not when it’s thee.

That's right, the same hacks, frauds, and Republican apologists whining about the lack of free speech on college campuses are now whining about – too much speech on campuses.

At any rate, Elsie, having been served the head of Penn's President on a platter courtesy of their Wharton School plutocratic alumni, was hungry for more:

 

 But a funny thing happened on the way to Elsie's auto-da-fé.  The Harvard Corporation, not accustomed to being told what to do by some wayward alum, said:

Translation from the Harvard (for those of you who don't speak it): Elsie, go f*** yourself.

The usual suspects, not worth quoting here, have had their usual fake conniptions about the idea that Harvard would not fire its President for fumbling the answer to one loaded question thrown at her by someone who opposes every value that Harvard allegedly holds dear.

The same frauds are trying to portray Harvard as a hell on Earth for Jews, somewhere between Germany 1938 and getting in front of Alan Dershowitz during a live TV interview.

Is it that bad in the Yard?  Here's one recent incident:

Wait until Elsie Stefanik hears about this.

We spoke to some actual Harvard undergraduates a few weeks ago.  The little grinders didn't seem to be quaking in fear, regardless of their ethnic background. 

The situation at Harvard is tense, explosive, and fraught with fear and peril, as captured on the cover of the December 7 Harvard Independent:

The number of stories on the Indy's homepage describing the hatred, fear, and anguish amongst the little overachievers due to anti-Semitic or other harassment: 0.0.

Is it barely possible that the cries about how Harvard does nothing whilst a wave of anti-Semitism sweeps down from Pforzheimer to the River is not based on the actual concerns of actual members of the Harvard community, but on bad-faith Republican reactionary efforts to call into question the entire project of a liberal education and replace it with government-run promotion of nonsense as practiced by Ron “I could use a lift or two” DeathSantis?

Unlike President Gay, we don't have $1,500 an hour mouthpieces telling us to be careful what we say.  We'll just say what she should have said when asked if genocide is bad.

We'll say yes.

Good and Dead: Pathbreaking Woman Who Led the Way toward Judicial Subversion of Democracy

 

The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy

By Obituary Editor Luke Reschuss with Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who provided the deciding vote for the judicial overthrow of democracy that led to the installation of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, died last week at 93.

That should have been the lede for all her obituaries.  It was the most blatantly political and poorly justified Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott.  But O'Connor, in death as in life, led a charmed life.

The normally authoritative New York Times mentioned Bush v. Gore beginning in...paragraph 47.  It was there though:

The Rehnquist court’s federalism revolution was in full swing as one of the most disputed chapters in Justice O’Connor’s career unfolded: the Supreme Court’s resolution of the 2000 presidential election in Bush v. Gore.

Thank you, Sandra!

At an election night party, Justice O’Connor was reported by Newsweek to have expressed dismay at the news that Vice President Al Gore seemed to be narrowly winning the race; her husband reportedly explained that the couple wanted Gov. George W. Bush to win the election so that they could retire to Arizona and a Republican president could fill her seat. Justice O’Connor later denied the account and had shown no evidence at the time of any interest in retiring.

In any event, given the favor with which the Supreme Court majority had usually viewed states’ rights, many were surprised when the court agreed to hear Mr. Bush’s challenge to the way Florida election officials and judges were untangling a statistical tie for the state’s 25 crucial electoral votes.

After the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount, and with the Republican candidate a hairbreadth ahead, Justice O’Connor and the four most conservative justices granted the Bush team’s request for a temporary stay. Three days later, late on the night of Dec. 12, the court issued its 5-to-4 opinion declaring that the recount, lacking a uniform standard for evaluating the contested ballots, violated the constitutional command of equal protection and could not proceed. ...

In 2013, seven years after she left the court, Justice O’Connor for the first time, at least in public, expressed doubt about the wisdom of the decision. “Maybe the court should have said, ‘We’re not going to take it, goodbye,’” she told The Chicago Tribune’s editorial board.

Her comment stopped short of a full-fledged repudiation of her own vote. But it certainly reflected a lingering regret about the legacy of the ruling, which, she said, “gave the court a less than perfect reputation.” 

She told the Chicago Tribune a little more:

She added, according to the paper’s account, “Obviously the court did reach a decision and thought it had to reach a decision. It turned out the election authorities in Florida hadn’t done a real good job there and kind of messed it up. And probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.”  

Ya think?

There's a lot to unpack here, some of which the Times, to its credit, tries to do.  First it notes, albeit in diplomatic language, the Republican-bent Court's blatant hypocrisy in advancing the supposed rights of states when they tried to f*** criminal defendants or minorities while stomping all over those same supposedly-sacred rights when they threatened to interfere with the coronation of the Republican who lost the popular vote by 500,000. 

To flesh out the Times's account a little, let's recall the results of the flawed punch card technology used in Florida at the time:

Thank you Sandra!

When Bush won Florida by just 1,784 votes, the razor-thin margin prompted an automatic recount per state law. That recount shrank the margin even more, reducing Bush’s lead to a mere 327 votes. After a flurry of lawsuits, the Florida Supreme Court weighed in, ruling for manual recounts throughout the state. Bush’s legal team appealed to the Supreme Court, asking for the recounts to stop and arguing that Florida was reaching beyond its election authority. 

The manual recount changed the totals as election boards examined disputed cards to determine the voter's intent when, for example, the voter had failed to punch the little paper square (or chad) hard enough to separate it from the ballot.  Such votes needed to be examined one-by-one to determine the intent of the voter – a clear and correct standard.

While that recount was proceeding, the Bush team, led by its mouthpiece John Roberts (whatever happened to that guy btw?) mounted a scorched earth legal attack not to ensure that the recount proceeded according to fair and reasonable standards but to stop it dead in its tracks.  You'd think they were worried about what such a recount would show.

As the Times says, O'Connor provided the decisive votes to stop the recount before it finished first temporarily and then forever, leaving Florida with no alternative but to certify George W. Bush as the winner.  

Don't worry – it all worked out great.  Bush, realizing that he had been installed in an undemocratic and lawless process, cautiously ruled in a modest and bipartisan fashion and did not at all fail to protect the nation from the worst terrorist attack in its history, start a war of aggression against a country that had nothing to do with the attack, and employ unspeakable and lawless tortures including waterboarding and rape against defenseless detainees, almost all of whom were later released despite Dick Cheney's growled lies about how dangerous they were.

[Intern, please fact check – L.R.]

But it's not fair to dwell on the death and agony that Bush visited on hundreds of thousands thanks to her without looking at the legal basis for her decision.

Actually, it is.  Here's the Times's verdict on Bush's blood-drenched first term:

We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course.

They also warned:

We have specific fears about what would happen in a second Bush term, particularly regarding the Supreme Court. The record so far gives us plenty of cause for worry. Thanks to Mr. Bush, Jay Bybee, the author of an infamous Justice Department memo justifying the use of torture as an interrogation technique, is now a federal appeals court judge. Another Bush selection, J. Leon Holmes, a federal judge in Arkansas, has written that wives must be subordinate to their husbands and compared abortion rights activists to Nazis.

Yeah, we'll get to that.  We'll just note that packing the courts with ideological hacks and hatemongers was not invented in 2017, despite what our Wonderful Republican Allies are now telling us.

After we consider the legal basis for O'Connor's fateful decision, which Nino Scalia, the reactionary Republican Catholic extremist who voted with the majority, summed up in his usual pithy fashion:

The late Justice Antonin Scalia joined the majority opinion but privately called the equal protection rationale, “as we say in Brooklyn, a piece of shit,” according to “First,” a well regarded 2019 biography of retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. 

As we say in Boston, go f*** yourself Nino.

Justice Stephens expanded on Scalia's theme:

In the interest of finality, however, the majority effectively orders the disenfranchisement of an unknown number of voters whose ballots reveal their intent–and are therefore legal votes under state law–but were for some reason rejected by ballot-counting machines. ...nothing prevents the majority, even if it properly found an equal protection violation, from ordering relief appropriate to remedy that violation without depriving Florida voters of their right to have their votes counted.

Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (Stephens, J., dissenting).

Thank you, Sandra!

O'Connor's decision to leave votes uncounted wasn't required by the Equal Protection Clause or any other law.  It was a naked assertion of Republican political power.  It paved the way for today's Republican judicial coup, a coup that she furthered by retiring late in the administration of the clod she put in office, only to be replaced by Sam Alito. 

In 2000, it was shocking that the Supreme Court would issue a decision so transparently biased and political.  By lending her considerable prestige as a “moderate,” to the creation of today's monstrous politically bent court (see every other paragraph of her obituary other than the ones about Bush v. Gore)  O'Connor legitimized and normalized the transition, to the point where it is accepted with a shrug.

The outrageously corrupt and politically bent Sam Alito not only inherited her seat but also built on her legacy.  Now the court is willing to sit as an unelected court of political revision, empowering itself to overturn actions by the political branches even in cases when it transparently lacks the power to to do so.

Most people don't notice this unconstitutional seizure of power.  Most of the ones that do say there's nothing we can do about it.

If you're looking for Sandra O'Connor's legacy, you need look no further than women forced to carry lethally defective fetuses to term thanks to the Court she helped build.

If you think we're being a tad harsh in consigning her to an eternal damnation in the fiery furnaces of Hell, remember she's from Arizona.  She'll just think she's home.

Good and Dead: Beloved war criminal, liar, and election fraudster. Finally.

The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy

By Obituary Editor Luke Reschuss

He was a brilliant charming German emigré who played important roles in the U.S. Government for decades. He was lionized and fawned over by the American media as a visionary genius.

Some criticized Henry's Cambodia policy

He was also a war criminal.

His name was Wernher von Braun.  Whom did you think we were talking about?

We mention the father of the Nazi V-2 rocket, built by Jewish slave labor and aimed at British civilians in the waning days of the Second World War, who went on to fame and fortune advising NASA and later CBS News only to point out the soft spot that we seem to have for certain types of telegenic war criminals with a charming German accent.

Which brings us to war criminal Henry Kissinger, who finally met the Grim Reaper this week, aged 100.  Of course Henry and ol' G.R. went back decades, to Kissinger's days bombing the s*** out of helpless civilians in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam for no purpose other than to advance the political fortunes of his boss, paranoid hypocrite and great mainstream Republican Richard M. Nixon.

His litany of monstrous deeds is long and terrible, but they all have a common denominator: they were carried out to pursue his own relentless and insatiable quest for power and glory, principally by ingratiating himself with those even more powerful, like the devious paranoid Richard M. Nixon.

He proved his worth to Nixon by helping sabotage the Paris Peace Talks before the 1968 election, thus greasing the way for Nixon's election.  (The following litany is plagiarized from David Korn's helpful summary in Mother Jones.)

As Nixon's National Security Adviser, he took control of the national security apparatus to lethal effect.  His mission was to prolong the already lost Vietnam War until Nixon could extricate U.S. forces without the immediate collapse of the Saigon regime (That happened on Kissinger's watch in 1975, but not until Nixon had resigned in disgrace.).

The strategy was to replace American casualties with Indochinese ones.  That led to the illegal secret and then not so secret bombing of Cambodia, designed to cover withdrawal of U.S. troops.  It also led to several hundred thousand dead Cambodians and the replacement of the neutral regime with the bloodthirsty self-genocidal Pol Pot tyranny.  In 1970, Nixon and Kissinger ordered the invasion of Cambodia, resulting in yet another pointless effusion of blood.

To grease Nixon's re-election in 1972, he falsely stated weeks before the election that peace in Vietnam was “at hand,” which it was not.  He and Nixon then ordered a massive bombing of North Vietnam over Christmas, the objective of which was to persuade the South Vietnamese dictator that the United States would always be willing to unleash fire and fury to prop up that puppet regime.  Thieu was just dumb enough to fall for it.

He backed the illegal coup in Chile, which replaced a democratically elected President with a cruel military junta who later got away with assassinating a U.S. citizen in the middle of Washington, D.C.  Later he supported an even more bloodthirsty gang of butchers in Argentina despite their campaign of torture and assassination directed at anyone who dared defend democracy.  And let's not forget his support of dictatorships in Bangladesh and Indonesia that led to several hundred thousands more butchered.

No wonder Mr. Korn arrived at this judgment of the undear departed:

It’s easy to cast Kissinger as a master geostrategist, an expert player in the game of nations. But do the math. Hundreds of thousands of dead in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and East Timor, perhaps a million in total. Tens of thousands dead in Argentina’s Dirty War. Thousands killed and tens of thousands tortured by the Chilean military dictatorship, and a democracy destroyed. His hands were drenched in blood.

We'll get back to Kissinger's supposed mastery of the universe, but first let's check in with the descendants of the victims of his bloody deeds:

Kissinger, serving under President Richard Nixon first as national security advisor and then secretary of state, directed the carpet bombing of broad swaths of Cambodian territory where, he said, Vietnamese communist soldiers were hiding out.

In an now-infamous excerpt from a transcript of phone calls in 1970, Kissinger relays Nixon’s order for an expanded bombing to his assistant, Gen. Alexander Haig.

“He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. He doesn’t want to hear anything. It’s an order, it’s to be done,” Kissinger said. “Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?”

The bombing began as a covert operation against a neighboring state. It killed at least 50,000 civilians, but likely many, many more, and destabilized the country.

“That really laid the foundation for the Khmer Rouge genocide,” said Vesna Nuon, one of Lowell’s three Cambodian-American city councilors. “They used [the bombing] as propaganda and a tool for recruiting a large group of Cambodians to join them.”

The 60-year old Nuon recalled that as a child in Cambodia, he sometimes overheard his father and his father’s friends discussing Kissinger in the early 1970s. “My father would talk about how bitter he was and how Kissinger and the others who planned [the bombing] got away with it for a long time,” he said. 

With a record of atrocity and duplicity like Kissinger's, why did he enjoy such a glorious reputation as a diplomat, not to mention as a supposed genius?

He was great at sucking up to superiors who might be in a position to advance his career or line his pockets.  His patron McGeorge Bundy overruled the objections of Harvard's Government Department to award Henry an undeserved tenured professorship.  His endless flattery of Nixon gave him untrammeled power.  His lifelong affectation of a thick German accent not shared by any other contemporaneous emigré gave him a Strangelovian air of omniscience.

His diplomatic genius was supposedly evidenced by the opening to China in 1969.  Actually, the credit goes to Nixon and his fellow Cold Warriors, whose decades of persecution of anyone advocating a normal relationship with post-1949 China cowed Democrats for decades.  It was Democratic terror of what they feared Republicans would brand as a victory for “Red China” that led them to freeze out China and then pursue the Vietnam War right off the cliff.

If you seek his monument, look around

Later he made some arms control deals with the Soviet Union, again because Democrats would have been pilloried by Kissinger's patrons had they tried the same gambit.

Although he then made big bucks peddling influence and prestige to whatever loathsome regime would employ him, like the dismemberment artists of Saudi Arabia, in fact by 1980 his real power had ended.

The Reaganites never had any use for Henry, believing him to have been too soft on Communism (file under: The Postman Always Rings Twice).  He tried to worm his way in by leading a ridiculous commission on El Salvador, whose work product was variously mocked and ignored.  Later Democratic Administrations, aware of his stench, kept him at arms' length.  Only in the minds of gullible journalists was he perceived as the all-powerful seer  – the Karnak the Magnificent of Fifth Avenue.

His genius was widely reported but, except for his skill at manipulation and dissimulation, never seen.  His supposed academic masterpiece, arguing for “limited” nuclear war as a realistic Cold War option was fatuous, dangerous and just plain wrong.  In fact it was so stupid that it was one of the only things he ever did that he repudiated.

Ultimately the most disturbing questions about this loathsome non-genius was the unearned reputation he enjoyed throughout his life.  How could people who were thought to have both intelligence and integrity be sucked into this transparently evil web?

We don't have an answer.  We do note that similar undeserved deference was later extended to the next generation of Republican war criminals in the aughts and today to craven bent Republicans devoted to insurrection and white supremacy.

Maybe we need to stop listening to the great white moderate men sonorously telling us to defer to the great and the good.  Maybe we need to listen to those like, for example, antiwar liberal Americans who were right about Henry 50 years ago, right about the Iraq War debacle, and right today about the subversive nature of today's Republican Party and the threat to democracy that they pose.

You won't get tenure at Harvard or even an invitation to dinner at Mo Dowd's by holding those views.  But you won't be drenched in blood and hypocrisy, like dead Henry Kissinger and his thousands of apologists and bootlickers.