For the Trump years, he was the darling of progressives, lending his once-formidable gravitas to ideas ranging from the bizarre to the ridiculous. And even after Trump, Harvard conlaw prawf Larry Tribe was the “go to” guy for Biden to manufacture a nonsensical rationalization to “reimagine” a CDC eviction ban that no serious person could take seriously. But since that was the outcome progressives so desperately wanted, Tribe was the hero they needed.

Larry Tribe was flying high on the left, the worthier bookend to the Harvard crimlaw prawf, Alan Dershowitz, who shockingly played the same role for the other tribe. And then it all came crashing down.

California parole commissioners recommended on Friday that Sirhan B. Sirhan should be freed on parole after spending more than 50 years in prison for assassinating Robert F. Kennedy during his campaign for president.

In a very real sense, this was shocking news. The idea that Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian who was convicted of murdering RFK, the great liberal hope of our American Royal Family of Kennedy, would ever leave prison alive was unthinkable. He killed Bobby. If anybody deserved to die in prison, surely it was Sirhan Sirhan.

But that was how it looked through the passion of the moment, and that passion was born of an adoration of the Kennedys, of a family who were the future of a nation, pictured as perfect, living in Camelot. They were idolized by us boomer liberals. They were our hopes and dreams. And first Jack was murdered. Then his baby brother Bobby. All we had left was the lesser brother, Teddy, and not even leaving Mary Jo Kopechne behind to die at Chappaquiddick was enough to dull the Kennedy aura.

Yet, Sirhan Sirhan getting paroled at age 77, after 53 years in prison, was more than Larry Tribe could take.

The parole hearing was the 16th time Mr. Sirhan had faced parole board commissioners, but it was the first time no prosecutor showed up to argue for his continued imprisonment. George Gascón, the progressive and divisive Los Angeles County district attorney who was elected last year, has made it a policy for prosecutors not to attend parole hearings, saying the parole board has all the facts it needs to make an informed decision.

That no prosecutor showed for the parole hearing of Sirhan Sirhan wasn’t a reflection on Bobby’s murder, but Gascón’s policy, that the prosecution had its say at sentence and whatever decision the parole board made upon upon eligibility had nothing to with prosecution. He has a very good point. Parole isn’t a resentence for the original crime, but a determination of release after the mandatory portion of a sentence has been served. The parole board has all the information it needs to make a reasoned decision, if it’s inclined to do so.

At a time when people on the left, from moderate to radical, are coming to grips with the consequences of decades of unduly harsh and lengthy sentences, resulting in mass incarceration for no better reason than it was supposed to be the mechanism to end all crime by just making sentences longer and longer, Gascón’s reasoning was sound and the parole board’s decision to grant Sirhan Sirhan parole after such a very long time, after he has been severely punsished and poses no threat to anyone, is exactly what one would hope a parole board to do.

Yes, Sirhan Sirhan murdered Bobby Kennedy. Not even our adoration of the Kennedys means he, in particular, must die in prison. Larry Tribe could not bear this.

Whether RFK was the heir messiah to all that was good and liberal was certain at the time, though not quite as clear in retrospect. This is true of all passionate beliefs, as adoration invariably obscures the unpleasant realities that real people are never as perfect as they are in our imagination. But Tribe’s attribution of a generation’s hopes and dreams to this Kennedy, and his hatred of the man who murdered him, remains as intact today as it might have been 53 years ago.

But rather than step back and take a sober view of Sirhan’s parole, Tribe did what’s become so very popular and effective in these days of “virtiolic” political disagreements. He played the emotional hyperbole card. He played the insurrection card. He believed that he could salvage his progressive validation by playing the Trump card. It didn’t work very well.

Fuck the Boomer carceral mindset. Nostalgia isn’t a justice system.

To be fair to Ken, there is a boomer carceral mindset. Most boomers bought into the notion that just another ten years in prison was the answer to crime. Not boomer criminal defense lawyers, perhaps, but then we tended not to go with majority or the politicians on such matters. Then again, we similarly tend not to go along with the progressive carceral mindset, where financial crimes, sex crimes and white male defendants should get life plus cancer while black murderers should get a Yale Ph.D. The carceral mindset hasn’t disappeared. We’ve just changed the head on the corpse. But I digress.

But Larry Tribe’s emotionally manipulative effort to keep Sirhan in prison until he dies isn’t about a boomer carceral mindset. To chalk up Tribe’s putative flip flop to a generation’s carceral mindset is to miss the point. This was about Bobby Kennedy, the man who would have led us out of the wilderness to the promised land after Jackie’s husband was lost to humanity in the back seat of a 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible, ironically with suicide doors.

To Tribe, the Kennedys were our hope and dreams of all that we could be to achieve Utopia, and this guy ruined it. To Tribe, what Sirhan did was deprive the world of our perfect future. To the rest of us, Sirhan was just a man who committed murder and who has served his sentence. To Sirhan, he was a man willing to sacrifice his life for what he believed was the right thing to no matter what.

If any of this sounds familiar, it should. Blind hero worship. The certainty of the righteousness of outrageous violent radical beliefs. But after more than 50 years, and with a calm and dispassionate view, it all looks so very different, foolish and wrong. Larry Tribe isn’t a carceral boomer. He’s just an emotionally crippled Kennedy worshiper.