Urbandictionary.com defines the word "borked" as:
something that is f--ked up beyond beleif... [sic]
Judging by the references one finds by Googling this term, I'd say that's a pretty common usage. But then, of course, there's also this one:
The word recalls what happened to Judge Robert Bork when former US President Ronald Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court. He was tarred and feathered, depicted as close cousin of Attila the Hun, and made to seem so toxic in his conservatism that even Mr Reagan's political allies were forced to abandon him.
I somehow suspect that it was the latter usage that Daniel Pipes was employing when he wrote this column for the New York Post.
Conservatives have been trying to spin their devastating loss on the Bork nomination ever since the morning after, and you have to give them credit for the propagation of this new verb that reinforces that spin with every usage. New York Times editorial writer (and long-term Supreme Court reporter) John P. MacKenzie tried to counteract the spin in his May, 2001 article "Bork Wasn't Borked," and was promptly rebutted by a somewhat overwrought Jonah Goldberg here.
Goldberg hypothesizes:
My suspicion is that after eight years of Bill Clinton, the country's appetite for political mudslinging, perceived or real, is near zero. But at the same time, liberals are determined to keep Bush from appointing conservative judges, no matter how qualified. The only way to do that is to dust off the tactics and rationales they used to bork Bork.
Un huh. Because political mudslinging is a "liberal tactic" that conservatives never ever indulge in, right? And because conservatives weren't equally determined to keep Clinton from appointing liberal judges? Too much! Moreover, the limits of the country's appetite for political mudslinging were, alas, greatly exaggerated by Mr. Goldberg back in 2001 when he wrote this article and they remain so today.
Now I won't deny for a second that liberal tactics in fighting conservative judicial nominees have become offensive of late (and vice versa). Nor that such tactics were in large part encouraged by the success of the fight against the Bork nomination. I won't even claim that the tactics used by some opponents of Judge Bork were completely above board. But that doesn't denigrate the merits of the fight itself.
What all of this smoke and mirrors is designed to obfuscate is that, notwithstanding his brilliance and his scholarship, Judge Bork was the wrong man for the job. Historical revisionism notwithstanding, the nomination wasn't rejected on the basis of the real and noxious smear campaign that played out in the press. One must have just a wee bit more faith in our system of advice and consent than that. Yes, Bork was "tarred and feathered, depicted as close cousin of Attila the Hun, and made to seem so toxic in his conservatism that even Mr Reagan's political allies were forced to abandon him," but he lost the appointment because his conservatism was, in fact, toxic. And one would hope that, if ever a future (or present) President were to consider nominating to the High Court a candidate with views as extreme, in either direction, as Bork's are, similar sense would prevail.
In short, there's a huge difference between the so-called "borking" of Robert Bork and that of Daniel Pipes. Bork is every bit the fringe fundamentalist jurist he was portrayed to be. Pipes, on the other hand, is not an Islamophobe nor anything close to one. A thoughtful glance at the writings of each of these two men will quickly bear that out. And, while the potential influence of an irrevocable lifetime seat on the Supreme Court of the United States can hardly be overplayed, a 14-month appointment to a foreign policy think tank cannot honestly be represented as an apocalypse of any dimension.
In terms of both accuracy and hyperbole, these two campaigns simply can't, and shouldn't, be compared.
