Yesterday afternoon, as I found myself engaging in my normal routine of objectively unhealthy sh*tposting on Twitter, the following tweet made its way across my feed and immediately reminded me of two incontrovertible truths - there are still too many people out there who take Laurence Tribe seriously and goddamnit, nobody is doing anything to help them recover from this terrible affliction!
Naturally, the poor intern The Hill keeps chained to Twitter and on the lookout for sizzling hot beef, transcribed the occasion for her "news" agency - if for some reason you wanted to subject yourself to a news story, about the dumbest post on Twitter yesterday, you can check it out here:
Harvard's Laurence Tribe calls Bernie Sanders a 'phony'
For those of you who are somehow blessed enough not to know who Laurence Tribe is, we turn to Buzzfeed for the impressive part of his resume:
"Tribe is one of the country’s foremost constitutional lawyers, the Carl
M. Loeb university professor at Harvard Law School. He has argued dozens
of cases in front of the Supreme Court. He’s a major figure in American
public life, and in recent months Tribe has devoted much of his
activity on Twitter to outraged extrapolation about the Trump
administration."
This in and of itself is quite amusing because Buzzfeed has intentionally left out most of the reasons why Tribe is such a "major figure in American life" - namely that in addition to his distinguished role at Harvard and his impressive legal record, he's one of former President Barack Obama's friends and mentors. Tribe also served in Obama's Department of Justice and the rock star legal scholar has long acted as a reliably pro-Democratic Party, pro-liberal establishment law expert for cable news networks.
Of course it's not all gumdrops and lollipops as Tribe is also well known in "conservative" circles for numerous incidents of scholarly misconduct and at least one ghost written book that featured a little outright plagiarism. Furthermore, it must be noted that Tribe is an unhinged, Russophobic conspiracy theorist who spends most of his time trying to start a New Cold War and retweeting other, even less credible Russophobic conspiracy theorists to his roughly 500K Twitter followers; many of whom are themselves influential figures in what passes for corporate "liberal" media in America. If you were to make a #Resistance mad wall of online neoliberal hacks still pushing an absurd Cold War spy novel in the media, Larry would almost certainly be right near the center of your poster-board.
In Tribe's defense, I should also mention that he has recently become a vocal proponent of impeaching Downmarket Mussolini but I'm personally of the opinion that this is essentially a "blind squirrels sometimes find a nut too" situation and it should be noted that Larry only came to this conclusion after publishing a book that cautioned against impeaching Trump.
While all of this should certainly give the reader pause before they take Tribe's "expert and distinguished" opinions as fact, it still doesn't explain Larry's open animosity towards Vermont's Democratic Socialist Senator (and my pick to win the 2020 Dem Party nomination) Bernie Sanders. Tribe's hostility towards Sanders is hardly just a recent phenomenon either; in August, 2017 for example Tribe falsely accused Sanders of sexist attacks against fellow 2020 Dem Party nomination candidates Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren - before being forced to essentially walk the whole thing back when asked to prove Sanders had mentioned either candidate at all.
So why exactly is Larry campaigning as hard against Bernie Sanders as he is against our reality TV show fascist in chief? Class tensions? Typical rich-guy animus? Well, as it turns out the distinguished professor has been doing a little night work for America's largest coal company on the side, a corporation called Peabody Energy Corp - destroying both his professional reputation and numerous friendships in the process. Naturally, Peabody isn't super thrilled about Bernie's aggressive environmental protection platform or his longstanding open support for the New Green Deal and they've already given Larry at least 435,000 reasons to share their disdain for Sanders. Furthermore, in light of the fact that Tribe recently left the company's litigation team during the middle of its challenge against the Clean Power Plan, it was probably time for Larry to start showing his coal baron masters a little more return on their investment again.
As for Tribe's laughable assertion that Sander is somehow a phony, all one has to do is examine Bernie's long-known positions in government, his track record of being on the right side of history and his tireless efforts while fighting for the labor class in America, to expose Larry's pithy commentary for the fraudulent, elitist bullsh*t it is. If phony is fighting for the poor, marginalized people and working class stiffs, while "authentic" is taking $75,000 a month from a coal company to spout lies that protect monsters who're putting all our futures in jeopardy - then the choice is clear; sign me up for "phony" and f*ck Larry Tribe.
- nina illingworth
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