Requiem for Judge Robert Bork

Requiem aternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Grant them eternal rest, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.

~ Requiem Mass text

Prelude

To Judge Robert Bork, I loved you like a Father and for 30 years I modeled my scholarly efforts in law, history, philosophy and politics after my understanding of your morality-based jurisprudence and legal philosophy based on the original intent of the constitutional Framers. God Bless the Dead. R.I.P.

For 30 years I have labored in obscurity as a Black conservative intellectual. 24 years ago (1988) I attended Harvard for a year with Barack Obama (I have no distinct memory of him). During these emergent years while Obama took the easy road actively reaching out to and being celebrated by a number of affluent liberals, progressives, Marxists, communists, post-structuralists, anarchists, socialists and anti-American radicals, I took the Judge Bork/Justice Clarence Thomas road reaching out to Jewish and Christian intellectuals, neo-conservatives, libertarians, conservative politicians, academics, and impartial liberal professors.

For example, I reached out to people and organizations like—President Reagan, President Bush-41, President Bush-43, Thomas Sowell, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Antonin Scalia, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Judge Richard A. Posner, Dean Guido Calabresi, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, William Kristol, Randall Kennedy (my law professor at Harvard), Lawrence Tribe, Charles Ogeltree, Alan Dershowitz, Dean Martha Minnow, John Finnis, Robert George, Elie Wiesel, Walter Williams, Bill Bennett, William F. Buckley, President Derek Bok, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Hoover Institution, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Hudson Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Harry Jaffa, Claremont Institute, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Judge Robert Bork, and many, many others. I repeatedly sought them out to get wisdom, knowledge, and to perhaps obtain help in furthering my academic, media and lecture career.

After literally thousands of letters, emails, articles, essays, law review articles and books I sent to these celebrated organizations and individuals including Judge Bork, I received an email from him in the late 1990s-early 2000s when he was a Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. I was shocked when Judge Bork rebuffed me and basically said that by referring to him as a Natural Law jurist that I had mischaracterized his jurisprudence worldview. I thought to myself-Did Judge Bork read his own bestselling books? They are filled with references to originalist jurisprudence, the original intent of the constitutional Framers, and to the moral and religious ideas they used to forge America’s Republic integrating legality and morality (i.e., a Judeo-Christian worldview, Natural Law, Common Law, original intent, Grotius, Puffendorf, Montesquieu, Blackstone, Locke, Bolingbroke, etc.). Am I being obtuse?

In conclusion, we see how far a Marxist demagogue got with the help from just a few key, powerful liberals, progressives, socialists and radical anti-America allies during critical points of his life. America, just think how far I could have gotten if I had just a few MLK Democrats, Reagan Republicans, a few fair-minded Rabbis and pastors, Christian businessmen, impartial academics, libertarians and neo-conservative intellectuals answer just a few of the tens of thousands of letters and emails I sent out for 30 years begging them to give me equal treatment under the law, to notice my intellectual achievements, and give me a chance to achieve the American dream of becoming a tenured law professor and to become part of the Conservative Republican Braintrust.

Thank God for my friend Joseph Farah of WND.com for giving me a chance when I began writing for his publication in 2007.

I always loved America, but she often despises those of low estate. 30 years since becoming a conservative and since publishing my first essays on aesthetics, culture, and politics in my senior year at DePauw University (Dec. 1982-Feb. 1983) I zealously (and naively) endeavored to warn the university faculty and students from the menace of Marxism. America, I wonder if you gave to me just a fraction of the Braintrust you gave to Obama over 20, 30, 40 years ago, then just perhaps America we may never have heard of the infamous name… Barack Hussein Obama?

If interested in my existential struggle for ideological justice and intellectual equality see my biographical essay-Nice guys do finish last and spread Enlightenment during this Christmas Advent Season.

To Judge Robert Bork, I loved you like a Father and for 30 years I modeled my scholarly efforts in law, history, philosophy and politics after my understanding of your morality-based jurisprudence and legal philosophy based on the original intent of the constitutional Framers. God Bless the Dead. R.I.P.

Postlude I

From: Andrew Aceves [mailto:Andrew.Aceves@———-]
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2012 12:07 PM
To: ewashington@wnd.com
Subject: Robert Bork’s passing and poor manners

Dear Mr. Washington,

I read your little missive in the ABCnews comments on Judge Bork’s obituary. I was astounded at your brazen insensitivity and lack of decency. Comments to an obit usually take the form of expressing sadness for the loss of the individual, and wishing peace and love on the survivors. In addition, the old adage of if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all goes double in a public obituary.

That said, I did take note of your brazen self-promotion and assertion: “Just think how far I could have gotten if I had just a few Christian, conservative academics or conservative intellectuals answer my thousands of letters and emails begging them to notice my intellectual achievements I’ve sent over the past 30 years”?— Seriously? Have you ever considered that if none of the great conservative thinkers you admire return the compliment, then perhaps you are just a hack who sends out a lot of letters that get round-filed on receipt?

Out of prurient curiosity, I went to the website you posted and read some of your articles. Some unsolicited advice: you come off in your writings as either a political hack spinning liberal policies into a froth of communist evil in an attempt to sell books to paranoid, undereducated masses (ala Ann Coulter), or as one of the paranoid, undereducated masses themselves. But Ann Coulter is entertaining. You are not. You are a crank who uses obituary announcements of great men to self promote your own imagined genius. You Sir are a hack.

I chose not to respond publicly on the ABC News forum, because it is likewise unseemly to make Judge Bork’s obit a place to get into a political scene. But I really needed to vent and let you know how offensive I found your post to be.

Good luck with everything. I hope you get famous someday. But before you do, I hope you learn some manners.

Sincerely, Andrew Aceves

Postlude II

From: Ellis Washington [mailto:ewashington@wnd.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2012 12:54 PM
To: Andrew Aceves
Subject: RE: Robert Bork’s passing and poor manners 

Dear Andrew:

If you took the time the read my comments more deeply and substantively, you would have seen that I meant no disrespect to Judge Bork, or to the others who have ignored my sincere outreach to them for 30 years. My primary apologetic was to use the passing of Judge Bork to demonstrate how we never know who we could have helped along the way. We should never ignore others (even seemingly irrelevant people) because they could grow up to champion your cause and defend your character (as I would have done with Judge Bork or any conservative intellectual unjustly attacked by the progressive and socialist left if some influential conservative would have just put me in that position over the past 30 years I’ve reached out to them seemingly in vain.

Andrew, ask yourself how many millions of dollars, billions of dollars, or perhaps even trillions of dollars good White liberals as yourself have spent on FDR’s New Deal welfare state, LBJ’s Great Society, on so-called civil rights legislation, affirmative action, and on education grants to “minorities” so you can self-righteously parade good Black success stories as myself only to then callously ignore them once your cynical, Machiavellian and propaganda purposes have been realized (e.g., Dr. Levon Yuille, Alan Keyes, Rep. Allen West, Herman Cain, Mayor Mia Love, every black college athlete who didn’t make the NBA or the NFL, or Jack Kerwick’s revelatory article in the American Thinker, Black or White: Forgotten Black Conservative, George S. Schuyler).

Bill and Hillary Clinton got help. Michelle and Barack Obama got help. The legions of black leftist, progressive, Marxist professors/TV commentators like Cornel West, Charles Ogeltree, Randall Kennedy, Michael Eric Dyson, Marc Lamont Hill and the insufferable Melissa Harris-Perry—all got help from someone. Are they better than me? Do they love America more than I?

In other words, I am exposing the hypocrisy of liberals, libertarians and conservatives alike. Everybody got help from someone to facilitate their career, help in their education and assist them in this existential struggle to become “somebody,” yet they ignore me without just cause. Why? Perhaps because I am a black conservative intellectual whose oeuvre has transcended the slave chains of Affirmative Action?! To allow Black conservatives to succeed in America would cause the entire hypocritical and unjust affirmative action system to collapse into futility, angst and oblivion.

Andrew, you call me a “hack” yet I have not profited from deconstructing America nor in undermining its founding moral and political values. I don’t need your cynical “good luck” nor do I want to be “famous.” You missed the entire point of why I’ve been in obscurity for 30 years and because of your mis-education you may never understand. As a gift of enlightenment I am giving you two of my law review articles—”Brown v. Board of Education”; “Social Darwinism in Nazi Family Law”). I’ve written over 2 dozen law review articles, edited over 25 books, wrote 7 books translated into 5 languages, published on 3 continents, all within 30 years of obscurity,  so I assure you that I am no hack.

Andrew, I will not be silent! nor should you if you value equality, justice, truth and American exceptionalism.

Peace, Ellis Washington, J.D.

Postlude III

Dear Mr. Washington,

I read your comment and took the time to digest it before formulating my thoughts and sending them to you.

By “hack” I meant that you are so deeply assured of your own brilliance, that when Judge Bork wrote to tell you that you had misunderstood his jurisprudence worldview, your response was that he must have not read his own books. By hack, I mean a guy who will tell someone else, anyone else, that their understanding of their own views is wrong. It means being immune to reality even when you hear it from the source. I understand that you have not profited from “deconstructing America nor in undermining its founding moral and political values” but I also read in the broader sense that you want to profit from your fight against it, and a sense of sour grapes that you have not. The term “hack” was not intended to refer to a profit motive.

You don’t want my pity and well wishes, and I don’t need you to see things from my point of view. So I think we’ve talked each other out. Thank you for the courtesy of a well-reasoned and polite response. If you wish to communicate further, I would be glad to. I doubt that you will convince me that I am a communist, and after the 10 years I spent in the Navy, including Operation Desert Storm, that would be a tough sell anyway. But you’re welcome to try. I doubt that I can convince you that liberals love America and act out of a desire to see people receive the freedom, education and opportunities they need to succeed as individuals and families.

I will read the papers you sent to me. I skimmed through them briefly before writing this email. Perhaps you will enlighten my thinking. I would send you some of mine (they are published and many are available online if you’re actually curious about who I am), but they mostly only regard subjects of engineering and geology and don’t shed any light on my worldview.

But I do believe in being polite, I will tell you that. And you’re not going to make friends in the conservative intelligencia by posting spam on Judge Bork’s obit. You might do better to find another venue to get the word out there about your intellectual achievements.

Sincerely, Andrew Aceves

Tags: andrew aceves, Ellis Washington Report, featured, jurisprudence, original intent, robert bork

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