Dianne
Feinstein questions Brett Kavanaugh.
As the spurious case against Brett Kavanaugh disintegrates,
splinters, and re-forms into a cacophony of whiny, irrelevant expostulations,
it is instructive to step back and survey the field upon which this battle took
place.
The ground is littered with dead and wounded ideals:
civility, dead; basic decency, dead; the presumption of innocence, gravely
wounded, ditto for the idea of due process.
And this disgusting carnage is all
on you, O ancient one, Dianne Feinstein, and your self-important, preposterous
colleagues. You were desperate to keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court
so you abandoned any semblance of decency and respect.
You travestied the
processes of the United States Senate for the sake of a cynical grab at power.
I’d say that you should be ashamed of yourselves, but, like the thugs that
you are, you have no shame.
You believe the acquisition of power is a
magical antidote to shame. You are wrong about that, and one can only hope that
you will one day reap some portion of the obloquy you have sowed.
It is not yet clear what the snarling, incontinent
attacks on Brett Kavanaugh will mean for him and his family. Early indications
are not encouraging.
For many years, Judge Kavanaugh has taught a course at
Harvard Law School. A couple of days ago, that Cambridge-based plutocratic
bastion of privilege, smugness, and political correctness announced that Judge
Kavanaugh was no longer welcome to teach there. Later, a coven of lonely
and unappealing Harvard feminists filed a battery of groundless Title IX claims
against him.
Hundreds of alumni, students, and faculty of Yale Law
School have signed an open letter denouncing the school’s implicit support of
Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Among other things, the
signatories of this malodorous missive say that Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination
represents “an emergency -- for democratic life, for our safety and
freedom, for the future of our country. ... Without a doubt, Judge Kavanaugh is
a threat to the most vulnerable. He is a threat to many of us, despite the
privilege bestowed by our education, simply because of who we are.”
What are these people talking about? But it is not
insanity that moves them. It is malice and the desire for power.
Judge Kavanaugh mentioned in his testimony that one of
his delights was coaching girls basketball. Will he be allowed to do that in
the future? It is unclear. A putrid column in USA Today by Erik Brady -- silently redacted after a
cataract of outrage -- said that “he should stay off basketball courts for now
when kids are around.”
Who knows what toll the mob hysteria against him has
taken on his wife and two young daughters. One of the most moving moments of
his testimony last week came when he mentioned that one of his daughters
suggested during evening prayers that they ought to pray for Christine Ford,
the hysteric who first accused Judge Kavanaugh of committing an impropriety 36
years ago at a high school party.
A wretched cartoonist for a large national
newspaper -- I won’t say which one, and I will forbear to link to that piece of
filth -- depicted the judge’s daughter on her knees praying that God forgive
“my angry, lying, alcoholic father for assaulting Dr. Ford.”
There are not words sufficiently contemptuous to describe
this repulsive display.
Several commentators have drawn parallels between the
unfounded attacks on Judge Kavanaugh and the tirades of Senator Joe McCarthy in
the 1950s.
A better parallel, perhaps, is the case of Captain Alfred
Dreyfus, who was ritually humiliated, drummed out of the French army, and given
a sentence of life imprisonment on trumped up charges of espionage. He was
eventually cleared, years later, but his career had been shattered and his life
ruined. “Where do I go to get my reputation back?”
The real crime of Captain Dreyfus was that he
was Jewish. The crime of Brett Kavanaugh is that he is Donald Trump’s nominee.
Here are some facts of the matter.
Until he was nominated
by President Trump in July, Brett Kavanaugh was not just widely admired, he was
universally commended for his intelligence, his judiciousness, and his
impartiality.
Everyone who worked for him, he worked for, and everyone he
worked with sang his praises. In the aftermath of Christine Ford’s accusation,
scores of women from Judge Kavanaugh’s past -- girls he had been friends with
and dated in high school, college friends, professional colleagues -- attested
to his integrity and decency.
On the other side, what do we have? We have Christine
Ford and in her toxic wake increasingly preposterous accusations by unhappy
hysterics like Deborah Ramirez, whom The
New Yorker spent six days helping to “assess” her memories, and various
lowlifes dredged up by Creepy Porn Lawyer™ Michael Avenatti. Stepping back, we
can see that the spectacle forms a sort of bell curve:
1.
Rumors of a letter in Senator Dianne
Feinstein’s possession are leaked to the jackals of the press.
2.
After the Senate hearings conclude, the
letter itself is leaked. It accuses a drunken 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh of
pushing Christine Ford on a bed and fumbling with her bathing suit. (That, by
the way, was the alleged “assault.”)
3.
With Deborah Ramirez, the volume increases in
this Wagnerian drama. Now an 18-year-old Brett Kavanaugh is accused (no
witnesses, though) of exposing himself to Ramirez at drunken party at Yale.
4.
Volume now at full blast, Creepy Porn Lawyer™
Michael Avenatti pushes Julie Swetnick into the jackals’ klieg lights. She says
(but offers no proof or witnesses) that she had been at 10 parties -- 10! I
guess she liked those soirées -- at which Brett Kavanaugh participated in
drugging and gang-raping women.
5.
Another chap, now under criminal
investigation for offering false information to the Senate Judiciary Committee,
said that Brett Kavanaugh participated in assaulting a woman on a boat in
Newport.
6.
Diminuendo now. The Newport story falls
apart. The Ramirez story falls apart. The Julie Swetnick story falls apart.
7.
The music is very soft now. Almost every
particular of Christine Ford’s story disintegrates.
Remember the second front door she wanted installed in
her house as an emergency escape route in case the boogeyman came back and
assaulted her?
She said it was in an argument with her husband over that that
she first mentioned Brett Kavanaugh.
But that was in 2012, when she was in
couples therapy. (It would be nice to know more about Christine Ford’s
psychiatric history.)
In fact, the Fords got a permit for the front
door in 2008, years before.
Over the years, the front door was used by
renters and then for Ford’s psychology practice (though I can see how her
patients might have regarded it as an escape hatch).
Remember her supposed fear of flying? It
turns out that she flies all the time. The real question is, who
gets her frequent flier miles?
Rachel Mitchell, the sex-crimes prosecutor that
the GOP senators employed to question Christine Ford at the hearings because
she was too delicate to be questioned by men, has released a memo detailing the many contradictions in Ford’s
testimony.
8. Back on the ground floor now, the New York Times,
in one last, pathetic effort to smear Brett Kavanaugh, runs a piece titled “Kavanaugh was Questioned by Police After Bar Fight in 1985.”
The story, written by an anti-Trump, anti-Kavanaugh Times opinion
writer, reveals the astounding fact that Brett Kavanaugh might have thrown ice
at someone in a bar.
It’s so quiet now that you can hear the titters in the
background. From drugging and gang raping women to throwing ice at someone in a
bar in one week. Swift work!
At a rally last night, President Trump, speaking about
Judge Kavanaugh, said: “A man's life is in tatters. His wife is shattered.”
Musing on the attempted public execution the country just witnessed, the
president continued, “They destroy people. They want to destroy people. These
are really evil people.”
Yes, they are. But here’s the saving grace. The
president, like Brett Kavanaugh, is a fighter.
The president’s support has
been as unwavering as Judge Kavanaugh’s determination to stay the course.
Senator Spartacus (neé Cory Booker, and the accent is not a mistake) says that whether Judge Kavanaugh is “innocent or guilty” the Senate
should “move on to another candidate.” Why? Because he’s tainted.
So: Democratic jackals on the Senate
Judiciary Committee, aided and abetted by their loyal public relations firms --
the mainstream media -- and hectoring unpleasant people funded by George Soros,
heap mud on Brett Kavanaugh for weeks and then step back and say: “He’s got mud
all over him! Let’s move on to a more pristine victim.”
This is of a piece with the spurious claim that Judge
Kavanaugh’s impassioned testimony last week shows that he lack the requisite
judicial temperament to be a Supreme Court Justice. Andy McCarthy dispensed with that ridiculous meme with some
portion of the contempt it deserves.
But since some of the squealers in the
press have castigated Judge Kavanaugh for the condign anger he displayed in
answering the scurrilous attacks on his character, let’s give the last word to
Aristotle on the just deployment of anger. “We praise a man,” says Aristotle,
“who feels anger on the right grounds and against the right persons, and also
in the right manner and at the right moment and for the right length of time.”
Indeed, those who do not get angry at things it is right to be angry at “are
considered foolish.” After having been groundlessly accused of drunkenness,
belligerence, and rape, Judge Kavanaugh was right to display anger towards
those who had slandered him. He did so in a fitting manner, in an eloquent,
heartfelt address.
And he did so at the right moment, the Senate hearings, and
for the right amount of time.
The travesty that was the smear campaign against Brett
Kavanaugh is disintegrating.
He will be confirmed, but the mephitic stench of
the attack against him and the rule of law will linger.
I wonder if the
Democrats will remember it when the tallies come in on November 6 and their
vaunted blue wave turns out to be a moist, impotent trickle.
