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    Finkelstein despatches another poseur---this time Laurence Tribe. Archived Message

    Posted by Morrissey on June 14, 2023, 11:22 pm

    http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/laurence-tribe-joins-woke-lynch-mob/

    It’s gratifying for an author when his thesis is validated post-publication. I argue in I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get to It! that the purpose of woke politics is to derail a class-based movement. Doing the bidding of the Democratic Party (and getting handsomely rewarded in return), the High Priests and Priestesses of wokeness went after Bernie Sanders with a vengeance. They’re presently targeting Cornel. First Amy Goodman. Then Joan Walsh. Now Laurence Tribe. He’s tweeted:

    WTF?! Does Cornel West really want to help the GOP nominee to win…. Ego trips come at a heavy price, Cornel. Please stop this foolishness before you end up hurting the things you care to help.

    Tribe taught constitutional law at Harvard Law School. He’s as woke as a newborn babe coming out of its mother’s (people’s?) womb. In 2008, Tribe was lickspittle-in-chief when Obama ran for president. Here’s an excerpt from my book:

    Of the Jewish-genius masseurs in Obama’s life, the distinction of most preposterous probably belonged to Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe. He went so far as to rave about Obama’s “deep insight” into physics. In subsequent correspondence with this writer, Tribe, who graduated summa cum laude in mathematics from Harvard, elaborated on “the rapidity and depth with which he [Obama] picked up on subtle concepts in physics … from the core ideas of general relativity to the competing interpretations of quantum mechanics.” Before stepping into Tribe’s classroom, Obama had taken “a minimum of science” at Occidental College, and a quasi-course in physics when he transferred to Columbia University—it was informally dubbed “physics for poets.” He apparently never took a math course. “Obama caught up quickly in subjects like physics, in which he had no background,” New Yorker editor David Remnick credulously reports in his hagiographic chronicle of Obama’s life, to the point that he was “going over the literature on Einstein” with Tribe. It would appear the New Yorker editor can’t distinguish between, on the one hand, the “very painful” and “very severe intellectual work” of a Bertrand Russell writing Principia Mathematica and, on the other, janitor Matt Damon nonchalantly solving equations on the M.I.T. blackboard in Good Will Hunting. Mastering relativity isn’t—no filial disrespect intended—yanking a wisdom tooth. (Remnick’s father was a dentist.) It could perhaps be urged, in partial mitigation of his sins against the mind, that the Harvard Law School professor was overwhelmed by sins of the flesh. It seems Tribe was smitten, big time, by the “lanky kid” clad in “jeans and a sweatshirt.” Although he professes that he and his student blissfully contemplated together the “curvature” of the Constitution, it’s more probable that Tribe was contemplating the curvature of his student’s constitution, while Obama was calculating how long he had to hang with this dork in order to get graded on a curve. In general, it cannot but bewilder that Obama, this nondescript nonentity with no academic record to speak of, would suddenly emerge, like Athene leaping full-grown from the head of Zeus, at Harvard Law School, amongst peers who graduated first in their class at the top universities in the country, as a once-in-a-generation wunderkind. To credit Tribe and Remnick is to credit miracles. Not being woke, this writer won’t go there. Obama’s classmates would later recollect his singular transactions with Tribe in class: “Jennifer Radding remembered that … ‘Tribe was like in love with him in a very intellectual way.’… Seated next to Obama, Scott Scheper had as close a view as anyone.… Scheper recalled that ‘Tribe spent a whole lot of time not six feet from me in what almost became personal dialogue between him and Barack…. He would leave the lectern and come over … to our side of the class and be right in front of the front row and then Barack would be talking to him.’” (It can safely be ruled out that it was Obama’s, as it were, intellect that aroused Tribe.) Pity no one videotaped these just-shy-of-fellatio scenes for posterity—or Pornhub.

    [Quoted from David J. Garrow’s Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama]

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