It's official, even Bloomberg says so:

[Turbineguy]

Reagan, Not the Left, Started Washington’s Partisan Fires

The grown-ups (i.e., voters) will tell you, of course, that they don’t care who started it: They want it to stop. But there can be no truce in the nastiness of recent years between Democrats and Republicans until Joe Nocera apologizes for his New York Times column last week blaming it all on the Democrats.

Joe, an old (and, I hope, not former) friend, says it all started in 1987, when Democrats in the Senate rejected President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork for a seat on the Supreme Court. Joe is right that the campaign against Bork was based on his ideology, not his qualifications (he was a professor at Yale and a federal appeals court judge), and that it got nasty. And he’s right that this was something new in Supreme Court nomination battles, though Bork was far from the first presidential nominee to be rejected. But it was Reagan, not the Senate, who changed the unwritten rules by nominating such an ideologue in the first place. Reagan chose Bork based on his ideology, not his alleged brilliance. The Senate was entitled to judge him by the same standard.

More:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-27/reagan-not-the-left-started-partisan-fires-michael-kinsley.html

[valerief]

1. We don't care about their dickering. We're so beyond their bullshit. nt

[yardwork]

2. Informative paragraphs further down Kinsley's column -

Founded in 1975, NCPAC flowered in 1980, targeting six incumbent Democratic senators and defeating four of them, including former Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. Exploiting a 1976 Supreme Court ruling that “independent expenditures” on behalf of a political candidate are protected by the First Amendment -- quite an “activist” constitutional interpretation, by the way, though Bork endorses it -- NCPAC was a pioneer in the techniques of raising money through vicious and often dishonest direct-mail packages, and used the proceeds to fund nasty attack ads on the radio.

.....

NCPAC’s founder, Terry Dolan, was a once-familiar type: a closeted gay man, politically conservative, wrestling with his inner demons on the public stage. He did a lot of damage before dying of AIDS in 1986, at 36.

-----------------------
If Dolan was 36 in 1986, then he was 25 in 1975 when he supposedly founded NCPAC. No 25 year old founds such an organization without help. We have to go further back, to 1971, when Nixon-appointed Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell drafted his Memorandum exhorting corporations to take over America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell,_Jr.

[Vincardog]

3. I do not only " want it to stop" The RW nutz lie and I want the left to call them out and expose

them/ I want the liberals to stand up and be counted.

[Chipper Chat]

4. I lived in Dallas in 1987 and I remember how shocked

the "christian community" was at the rejection of Bork. They simply could not understand how any American could be against such a godly man. Lots of anti-democrat party sermons were Sunday pulpit fare for months afterward.
NOW: if Senate democrats had just been as tough on Roberts and Alito and 'borked' them we would be in a much better position today.

[MedleyMisty]

5. I was six in 1987

And I don't give a damn about ancient history. Grow up and stop destroying the world based on some little thing that no one remembers or cares about.

[RagAss]

6. Who gives a shit...soon they'll all be irrelevant !