Brooks Borks Cruz
14th January 2016
David Brooks, the pet ‘conservative’ columnist for the New York Times, reveals himself publicly as just another shill for the Crust.
For our younger readers, the transitive verb “to bork” is an eponym from the late Robert Bork, whom Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully nominated to the high court in 1987. Political lexicographer William Safire defined it as to “attack viciously a candidate or appointee, especially by misrepresentation in the media.”
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Brutalism is a style of architecture, but Brooks means to repurpose the term as an ideological slur—and a religious one.
“In his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues,” Brooks writes. “Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy.”
That line of attack is redolent of the late Sen. Howell Heflin, an Alabama Democrat who—as George Will noted the following year—said he opposed Bork in part because, as the senator put it, he was “disturbed by his [Bork’s] refusal to discuss his belief in God—or the lack thereof.”
Scott Johnson, a Real Lawyer, reviews the Haley case that causes Brooks such heartburn here and concludes that Cruz had a legitimate case.
I would be surprised if Haley did not know that Texas has a three-strikes law. When he committed the second felony he obviously knew that he had been accused of the first felony (he was convicted three days later). More importantly, when Haley stole the calculator five years later he certainly knew that he had two separate prior felony convictions, which would usually be considered “two strikes,” and Haley obviously did not know that the second felony was not technically a second strike because he did not raise it at trial. Nor did he raise this on his appeal of his conviction, which he lost.
The sentencing issue was raised for the first time on a habeas corpus application in state court, which was refused because his argument was not based on any facts that were not known at the time of the trial (the timing of the convictions was obviously in the record, it was just that nobody realized that the two prior felonies were not technically sequential to each other), and Haley had not raised the issue on appeal.
To permit defendants after all their appeals are exhausted to raise arguments that should have been raised at trial is a dubious proposition at best. The discovery of new evidence is one thing, but does a defendant have a perpetual right to suddenly say, “wait, I should have said…”?