To this day, conservatives invoke the Bork nomination as a catalyzing event, one that made clear to them the full perfidy of the liberal establishment. They wave the bloody robe of Bork as justification for every hardball tactic, from impeachment to the "nuclear option" on filibusters, and vow never to let it happen again (at least not to them). Even some liberals are sheepish and apologetic about the Bork affair. Bork himself appeared on television recently to note, with evident satisfaction, that many dictionaries now define "Bork" as a verb, meaning "to attack with unfair means."

The funny thing is that the memory of the campaign to demonize Bork as a right-wing nut has grown stronger even as the intervening years have shown quite clearly that Bork is, in fact, a right-wing nut.

The most famous hyperbolic charge against Bork -- one which has been invoked far more often against Bork's accusers than it ever was against Bork -- was Sen. Ted Kennedy's claim that "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters," etc., etc.

Bork called President Clinton, among other things, a "sociopath," and insisted that, "given power, the sociopath will display totalitarian tendencies. Clinton does." He predicted that if Al Gore won the presidency "moral disapproval of homosexual conduct would be outlawed in any public and many private contexts." (Apparently, Gore's America is a land in which Rick Santorum and Tom Coburn would languish in prison, and no one could utter the word "homo" without fearing the knock of the police upon his door.) Even George W. Bush criticized Bork's cultural hysteria in 1999 -- one of the few times Bush has distanced himself from a fellow conservative.

As his nomination is now remembered, Bork lost only because of the viciousness of his opponents and the slow-footedness of his defenders. (Bork's beard, which gave him a passing resemblance to Ming the Merciless, probably didn't help either.) The truth is that although the attacks on him were over-simplistic, his rejection was the right outcome.

Constitutional protection should be accorded only to speech that is explicitly political. There is no basis for judicial intervention to protect any other form of expression, be it scientific, literary or that variety of expression we call obscene or pornographic. Moreover, within that category of speech we ordinarily call political, there should be no constitutional obstruction to laws making criminal any speech that advocates forcible overthrow of the government or the violation of any law.

For as Bork's First Amendment analysis shows, his deafness to the moral resonance of constitutional values leads inexorably to the triumph of majoritarianism over all else. It debases -- trivializes -- the Constitution. And it is a threat to our most basic freedoms.

In fact, nearly every chapter demonstrates some facet of Bork's apparently boundless ignorance.

On science: Bork claims that "the fossil record is proving a major embarrassment to evolution", despite the fact that not a single reputable paleontologist would agree with that statement.

He also likes to use dubious moral equivalences. We learn that wearing a jacket that says "F... the Draft" (Bork cannot bring himself to spell `fuck' in its entirety) is morally equivalent to assault. We also learn that 1960's radicals were the moral equivalent of Nazis. Funny, I wasn't aware that Jerry Rubin had ordered the killing of millions of civilians. Controversial song lyrics, Bork implies, are the moral equivalent of selling addictive drugs

So why was such an inept hatchet job deemed worthy of publication? Some hint can be extracted from the book's dust jacket. There one can find praise from such renowned intellectuals such as Ralph Reed, Chuck Grassley, and William Bennett. Slouching Towards Gomorrah cannot possibly have been meant as a serious contribution to the national debate. It is evidently merely a cheerleading effort for the religious right, probably to position Bork as a future far-right candidate for public office.

By mouthing all the bigotry of the religious right, from anti-evolutionism to anti-homosexuality to anti-choice on abortion, Bork illustrates the truth of William James' famous quip, "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."

The title of Slouching Towards Gomorrah, of course, is an allusion to William Butler Yeats' famous poem, The Second Coming, which is conveniently reproduced before the table of contents. As Yeats said, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." I wonder which camp Bork thinks he belongs to.