"The first Borking season of the new century."

Check out this short post about John Ashcroft/Robert Bork, if you are so inclined. It's by Sam McPheeters, who is like a musician/artist/concert reviewer in Orange County. I just started using Google Reader and put this blog in my subscriptions, only to find that he's on hiatus and reposting old articles. I used to love reading his articles in Punk Planet, and for some reason this is one of my favorites from that era. (It was actually not published in PP.) This was written on the eve of Bush's inauguration in '01, and it's a weird kind of trip back into a time when none of us could guess just how bad it would get over the coming eight years:

But Borking has deeper, cultural overtones, and on this front much ground has been lost by conservatives. The country is a far ruder place than the one the Bushes last controlled. In 1990, 2 Live Crew was the most controversial band on a major label. Barbara Bush's complaints about the incivility of "The Simpsons" only ten years ago stands out as the baroque prattle of a former century. Last week the highbrow New York Times forum on "Borking Ashcroft" received postings about "Borking" Brittney Spears. The publisher of the New York Times recently attended a Halloween party in a "penis nose" disguise. America has become a giant Spencer's Gifts. Who could have imagined, at the start of the 90's, that Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole would end the decade as a boner pill salesman?

The scariest thing about this article is the brief discussion of Ashcroft - "Ashcroft's from the old school of leathery, hardbitten sons of bitches and is himself expected to tack Borkward." Who would have imagined then that the leathery son of a bitch would emerge as a sort of marginalized victim of the Bush Administration? Remember those dramatic stories of soon-to-be Creepo General Alberto Gonzalez visiting Ashcroft at his hospital bed and forcing him to reauthorize domestic wiretapping? Oh dear.