Conrad Black Quotes
It is galling to see such mendacious hypocrites as Kennedy and Biden at the Senate Judiciary Committee sitting in judgment on distinguished jurists.
Black, Conrad. A Life in Progress. Key Porter Books, 1993.
During the Iraq War, some Republicans claimed that Democrats who opposed the war were unpatriotic. This was very effective politically, with a number of Democrats opposing the war or military appropriations losing their seats, It turned out that almost all the Republicans who made those claims had never served in the military and like the leading war proponent Vice President Cheney had avoided the draft in the Vietnam war by getting deferments or like the President Bush of participating in the National Guard. Most of the opponents who the claimed were unpatriotic did serve in the military and fought in combat for their country. Several were wounded and Max Cleland lost three of his limbs in Vietnam. Most of them, like Kerry, were decorated war heroes. The Republicans who had fought in the military did not make such accusations even though they supported the war. Kerry finally became frustrated and revealed the non military history of the attackers.
In his boisterous dissent he read from the bench in the EPA v. EME Homer City case, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, made a mistake and in citing a previous opinion he had written, he made an error recalling what he had written previously. Critics of the justice not only castigated him but made fun of his seemingly foolish error that a law student should not make. Whalen’s quotation is important because it illustrated the highly partisan tone in American politics at that. Whalen, a partisan conservative explains how he would do the same thing if a liberal judge made a mistake. The error was corrected in the final published version of the opinion, and it did not affect the logic of the dissent or even the factual arguments for the dissent. Yet the quest for partisan advantage and trashing a political opponent was so in vogue that a minor mistake was treated as a major political scandal. The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st were not the most partisan and nasty era of American politics but it was one of the worst.
Conrad Moffat Black, Baron Black of Crossharbour, KCSG, is a Canadian-born British former newspaper publisher, convicted criminal, and writer. His father was businessman George Montegu Black II, who had significant holdings in Canadian manufacturing, retail and media businesses through part-ownership of the holding company Ravelston Corporation. In 1978, two years after their father's death, Conrad and his older brother Montegu took majority control of Ravelston. Over the next seven years, Conrad Black sold off most of their non-media holdings in order to focus on newspaper publishing. Black controlled Hollinger International, once the world's third-largest English-language newspaper empire, which published The Daily Telegraph (UK), Chicago Sun-Times (U.S.), The Jerusalem Post (Israel), National Post (Canada), and hundreds of community newspapers in North America, before controversy erupted over the sale of some of the company's assets.
