It looks like we'll be running this series all summer, while Mark is away overseas researching a forthcoming book.
A week ago The Toronto Sun's Tarek Fatah conceded that "Steyn was right and I was wrong" on the question of Islam and an enfeebled west.
A few days later, in the wake of Brexit, economist Bryan Caplan conceded that Steyn is likely to win their 2008 bet on the withdrawal of a major EU member by 2020 (although he's now pinning his hopes on bureaucratic torpor to pull it out the hat for him).
Just to make it a trifecta: Followers of Michelle Malkin and other bloggers will be familiar with the outrageous abuse of the court system by the thuggish Brett Kimberlin to hound his enemies. Four years ago, Mark wrote of one such lawsuit:
At a hearing in Maryland arising from Kimberlin's "lawfare" campaign, the blogger Aaron Walker was arrested. Aside from the merits of the case, I was struck by the appalling performance of the presiding judge, one C. J. Vaughey. As is increasingly the way with our decaying justice system, there is no easily searchable court transcript, only an audio tape that a few individual bloggers have been painstakingly transcribing. Judge Vaughey comes across as a near parodic combination of bluster, ignorance and narcissism...
Over the years, I've faced unsympathetic judges in various courts around the world, but I can't recall ever listening to such a stream of unjudicial drivel from the bench as that which poured from Judge Vaughey... I'm genuinely curious: Is this Vaughey clod unusually awful? Or all too typical?
Mark wrote that in 2012, in a piece headlined "Bozo The Jurist".
The wheels of what Steyn calls America's "sclerotic and dysfunctional justice system" grind exceeding slow, but, four years on, Bozo the Jurist got his. On Monday Judge Cornelius J Vaughey was belatedly reprimanded by the Maryland Commission on Judicial Disabilities for his outrageous conduct in the Aaron Walker case.
As usual, even a simple and clear-cut matter takes the best part of half a decade in the American courts, and Mark regards it as disgraceful that Cornelius Vaughey remains on the bench at all, even in semi-retirement. However, Maryland's reprimand of Mr Vaughey (no "Your Honor" here) is still very welcome - even if it came four years after Steyn's.
(For Mark's own four-year courtroom hell, see here.)
