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Rich,
It has always seemed to me that the modern era of “the politics of personal destruction” began not with right-wing hatred for Bill Clinton but with the Teddy Kennedy-led character assassination of Robert Bork.
Now from an unlikely source comes support for that view — at least as far as judicial nominations are concerned. In an online article, the New Yorker’s legal man, Jeffrey Toobin, concedes that Kennedy’s attack on Bork was “crude and exaggerated.” And, Toobin adds that his passion in that episode “has defined Supreme Court fights ever since.”
I wish that some of the GOP senators who were so charmed by Kennedy’s clubbish good humor in their private corridors would give a little more attention to the damage that this man’s public conduct did. . . .