The Misanthrope’s Corner

OU see before you, as it were, a [woman who has yielded to the forces of change. It rarely hap- pens but there are some things we just can’t fight, so I gave up and moved the red flag in my quotations notebook.

This is the little plastic gizmo I use to mark my all-time favorite idiotic state- ment by a brain-dead American leader, to help me find it fast amid the cluster of slightly less idiotic statements by American leaders still capable of regis- tering an occasional blip on the EEG machine. One must discriminate in this life. The red flag had been on the same page for 28 years. I remember the day in 1969 that I put it there. Richard Nixon had just had his first Supreme Court nominee, Clement F. Haynsworth, shot down. He named another, G. Harrold Carswell, but the flak started again. Citing the many times Judge Carswell’s decisions had been reversed on appeal, the Democrats called him a “legal mediocrity.”

About the Author

Florence King

Florence King was a contributing editor of National Review.

OU see before you, as it were, a [woman who has yielded to the forces of change. It rarely hap- pens but there are some things we just can’t fight, so I gave up and moved the red flag in my quotations notebook.

This is the little plastic gizmo I use to mark my all-time favorite idiotic state- ment by a brain-dead American leader, to help me find it fast amid the cluster of slightly less idiotic statements by American leaders still capable of regis- tering an occasional blip on the EEG machine. One must discriminate in this life. The red flag had been on the same page for 28 years. I remember the day in 1969 that I put it there. Richard Nixon had just had his first Supreme Court nominee, Clement F. Haynsworth, shot down. He named another, G. Harrold Carswell, but the flak started again. Citing the many times Judge Carswell’s decisions had been reversed on appeal, the Democrats called him a “legal mediocrity.”