Today's angry/bitter feminist.
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From an old friend and fellow memo reader regarding my previous posting. "Dick, Unfortunately you nailed it this morning. You are so correct. It’s heart-breaking for America. F---"
Another friend and fellow memo reader:
"Dick, agree whole heartedly. Each day the swamp and the stench gets worse. Maybe we have lived our lives when decency and honestly really meant something. But the real hurt is the impact all this is having on our children and grand children. Hard to explain all of this when the current day teachers profess the complete opposite of what is right and decent. B---"
And:
From two female friends and fellow memo readers:
"Well said and
"Couldn’t agree more- I am thoroughly disgusted by the Democrats using any means necessary to get their way. Anybody with a son, brother or father AND a brain should be very worried and repulsed by these actions. If this can happen to a really good & honest judge, it can happen to anyone. All I can do is pray that there are still honorable people who see through this charade, don’t talk to pollsters and vote these creeps out of office! S-----"
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Burning vermin at the stake and what feminism has come to mean. No male "ogre" named Brett should ever be allowed on The SCOTUS. (See 1, 1a, 1b, 1c, 1d and 1e below.)
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U.S State Department, generally is a day late and a dollar short. Far too many of the "good old boy crowd" seem to have a vested interest in failure. Bless their souls. (See 2 below.)
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Prager on Karl! (See 3 below.)
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Then there is always The NYT's whining because they do not get to have Socialism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/
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Dick
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1) The Burning of Brett Kavanaugh
Any thinking person today is hearing alarms going off in all directions over the Kavanaugh accusations. It’s obvious that this is all dirty politics; we can see that in the timing, in the fussiness about Ford testifying, in the nasty rhetoric that swirls in poisonous clouds throughout Washington. But the problem is much deeper.
In the first place, we have no clearly defined morés for sexual behavior anymore. The sexual revolution has opened a multitude of fearful doors. Our young women find themselves defenseless in compromising situations and we have no guidance to give them. We have no way to counsel them -- or our young men either -– about just where the line is. Sex is now allowed, performed, promoted. Women feel they can behave in any way they wish, wear whatever they wish, and men have to hold that line and read feminine signals with no idea of what they mean. This looseness has been trending for decades and suddenly now we’ve turned puritanical and are horrified at the very thought of sexual advances happening.
We have no clear idea of what, exactly, “sexual assault” means. From the precious little detail Ford has given, we can’t tell whether she’s describing teenaged roughhousing or attempted rape. She obviously wants us to picture the latter, but if she had suffered such a violent attack, would she not have been visibly distressed at the time? Wouldn’t friends have noticed? If anything happened at all between these two people, how do we know what it was, exactly? A hand brushing across a breast? Some pushing and shoving, playful or otherwise, that got out of hand? At what point do we know that a crime occurred? “Assault” is a violent, injury-producing attack. At least it used to be. A quick check with a dictionary defines “assault” as “an unlawful threat or attempt to do bodily injury to another.“ If Kavanaugh had actually committed such an act, wouldn’t that have been noticeable to others? Wouldn’t all the details be burned into her brain? You’d think so.
Secondly, we live in a time in which men, especially white men, are automatically guilty -- of most everything, and in which women are all victims –- of everyone male. It is, in part, the vague definitions of sexual faux pas that have made this possible. Almost any advance a man makes can now be interpreted as over the line because no clear line exists. I find this disturbing. I’ve been around for a long time, worked with men for decades and have never known any who were sexually threatening, so this intense enmity between the sexes is incomprehensible to me.
Thirdly, it seems that evidence is no longer of any importance –- for anything. Kirsten Gillibrand kept saying in her recent speech on Ford’s accusation, “I believe her. I believe her.” On the basis of what? Guilt or innocence isn’t determined by “belief” but by evidence, but Gillibrand had already made up her mind without meeting Ford, without examining her testimony, without any specifics at all. Even my religious beliefs are based on overwhelming evidence, not on how I feel at the moment. But today, logic and facts garner no respect –- every opinion is just based on emotional reaction. How is anyone to get a fair hearing under those circumstances?Fourthly, all this is happening at a time when few seem to understand how things are done, how our government works. Ever since Trump became president I’ve been aware of this confusion. The left acts as if they can get rid of Trump –- evidently by any means –- that Hillary will take over. They don’t seem to be aware that losing an election is an actual loss. Even Obama said “elections have consequences”. It means loss of control over administrative agencies; the whole Russia debacle stems from a failure to recognize this fact. An election loss means loss of control over who gets appointed to the Supreme Court and if you don’t have control of the Senate, that’s just done. So the leftists feel justified in throwing every hissy-fit they can drum up. Damn the law and ethics and truth.
According to the Constitution it is within the purview of the Senate to “advise and consent” on SCOTUS appointees. The Constitution says nothing about grilling these appointees half to death, about setting land mines made out of vague and ancient fictions. The concern is supposed to be whether or not the candidate has the education, the clarity, the self-discipline to weigh issues brought before him. It is not about changing the world. It is not about getting the jump on the opposing party. It is certainly not about high school antics –- if in fact any happened. The left seems to think that a SCOTUS judge can just haul off and change laws, which explains their hysteria, but a little knowledge about the balance of power would calm those fears. SCOTUS can’t initiate lawsuits; they can only rule on what is brought before them.
We also have forgotten that the FBI doesn’t do this kind of inquiry. Ford wants a special favor –- an FBI investigation. But each federal agency has its own job, its own territory. The FBI can only do background investigations, investigate possible federal crimes, and teenage fondling doesn’t qualify -- unless the activity crosses state lines and involves kidnapping. It is also questionable that the FBI is even capable of objectively investigating anything that connects to Donald Trump and his choice for the Court. In the last two years this agency has demonstrated appalling bias and dishonesty in its dealings with our president; it is no wonder Ford is anxious for their support here.
We have also lost track of the concept of innocent until proven guilty -- beyond reasonable doubt. This has been slipping away for quite a while now. The media have become our judge and jury; the more sensational and politically potent an accusation is, the more likely it will be seen as true, and no amount of correction will undo that.
What bothers me the most, however, is that we’ve lost all contact with common sense, with any desire to arrive at the truth. The truth is that Democrats believe they will take Congress in November (The key word here is “believe.”) and they want to put off the confirmation vote until then. So, Ford’s accusations have burst onto the scene in a most orchestrated, obvious manner. She wants to raise a fuss, but not be held to account, which says to me that she is unsure about the whole thing. If it were me, I’d want to get on with it, get it over with, but her hesitancy feels really off. If she didn’t want the attention why write the letter in the first place? And where does she get off wanting Kavanaugh to testify first? Testify to what? This all flies in the face of thousands of years of jurisprudence. Common sense would dictate that we pay attention to policies that have worked for millennia, but common sense is dying.
Eventually the dust will clear, and Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed, and things will calm down -- until the next appointment comes up, until the next overblown accusation is thrown at the next decent man. How many drama-queen explosions can we put up with? How many lies can we absorb? How many crucifixions can one nation stand?
Deana Chadwell blogs at www.ASingleWindow.com. She is also an adjunct professor and department head at Pacific Bible College in southern Oregon. She teaches writing and public speaking.
1a) Kavanaugh: Feminism is Just Another Lefty Tribalism
The way to think about the political riptides of Kavanaugh Witch Hunt is through the lens of anthropology. Imagine that we are bug-hunters observing the Noble Savages of a heretofore undiscovered tribe in the Amazon rainforest.
This is what human communal life was like before the invention of the law: life in villages where everybody knows everybody’s business and remembers everything -- or think they remember everything -- that was ever said or done for the last 20 years.
And all that matters is, my tribe against your tribe. To the death.
Some ways back, a pack of notorious patriarchs decided that this was not perhaps the best way to advance the interests of trade, and so they decreed the Common Law, which is nothing more than a bunch of lawyers deciding, in a tedious and boring process, how to soften the barbarous instincts of tribal conflict with the notion we now call “due process.”
So, in our modern Anglo-American legal system we have abandoned the old form of conflict resolution -- of my tribe versus your tribe and no holds barred -- with a new form, the trial at law featuring judge, prosecution and defense, rules of evidence, all conducted before a jury. When you can get justice from a court then you don’t need “my tribe right or wrong” anymore.
So why are we all behaving like hunter-gatherer tribesmen and tribeswomen of olden times? I explain it all with my theory of the left as the Great Reaction.
Here’s how the left got us here.
When people leave their little tribal village and migrate to the big world of the city and its marketplace for goods and for labor, it is terrifying. Sure, everyone wants to get out of the poverty and the stifling hierarchy of the village, but when they get to the city they panic and immediately hunker down into a tribal ethnic enclave and their young men form an urban gang to protect their tribal ethnic enclave. When these people go to work in a factory, what do they do? They form a labor union to “protect” themselves from the terrifying power of their employer.
But eventually people will assimilate to the culture of the city. If not for the left.
It has been the world-historical role of the left to power the neo-tribalism of city newcomers into an almost world-conquering secular religion. Marx and Gramsci and Marcuse and Alinsky sold the frightened new arrivals in the city a fake class -- and now gender and race -- tribalism to replace the tribalism of the kindred they left behind in their ancestral village. And it hasn’t helped a bit.
This is nothing less than a world-historical tragedy. Without the left, the workers would have slowly muddled through and become competent city dwellers, much as I describe in my Road to the Middle Class. Alas, no. Instead of slowly assimilating to the bourgeois tribe, the left taught the workers to form a class tribe, led of course by lefties. And so the working class became class soldiers, drafted by the left into a global class war. What a cool idea, for the left.
What we are seeing right now with the feminists and #MeToo and #BelieveAllWomen and the Kavanaugh moment is another tragedy, midwived by the left: a gender tribal war.
In the official narrative, we were to hear women roar as they stormed the citadel of male patriarchy, to demolish male supremacy, let women control their fertility, and climb up the corporate ladder. Yeah, right.
With a modicum of goodwill and good sense, women could have gently entered into the public square and given to it, in the words of German sociologist Georg Simmel, “a more feminine sensibility.” But the left doesn’t believe in that. So they launched a gender war on everything middle-class -- marriage, morality, abortion, divorce, microaggressions, safe spaces -- and what have we got?
Well, I would say we have got the rather sad case of Christine Blasey Ford. Whatever really happened to her in her teenage years we may never know. Today, and forever after, she is a victim, a draftee thrown into the meat-grinder of the left’s gender trench war.
In my view, the women believers in the left’s secular religion of feminism are being led into darkness in exactly the same way the workers were led into a box canyon of class warfare a hundred years ago.
That’s the problem with all this neo-tribal warfare, of class, of race, of gender, this “culture of activism.” When the “activists” have finished using their “little darlings” for their power games they abandon them on the side of the road, hungry and wounded, rather like Christine Blasey Ford this very minute.
My question is: how much longer are we going to allow the left to continue with its destructive tribalism of class and race and gender? We moderns are better than that.
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
1b)Jacques: No justice in guilt by accusation
Pretty much everyone has an opinion whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh is guilty or innocent of a sexual assault that allegedly happened three decades ago when he was in high school.
That’s sort of alarming, isn’t it? Because no one actually knows what happened, with the exception of those directly involved. It’s a he said, she said situation.
The court of public opinion is all too quick to issue its judgment, regardless of whether it knows the facts. And it doesn’t require the same levels of evidence as in a court of law. There’s no need to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt and there’s no presumption of innocence.
Raising doubt is enough to convict.
In this court, perception is reality. And you can forget about due process, which doesn’t apply -- at least in a legal sense -- to these Senate confirmation hearings on Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination.
“It’s not a criminal courtroom,” says Eve Brensike Primus, a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School. “It’s a different proceeding here. The senators can do whatever they want.”
There’s no question Democrats are using the moment for their own political grandstanding and to delay a vote. It’s less clear what Kavanaugh’s accuser, California professor Christine Blasey Ford, hopes to gain from going public with her story that when Kavanaugh was 17 he pinned her down at a party and tried to undress her.
Ford may be a credible witness, but her accusation against Kavanaugh has plenty of holes and raises more questions than it answers. She is unable to remember specific details, such as where the incident took place and exactly when it happened.
That’s the risk of letting so much time pass before bringing an accusation to light. Time clouds memory. This is why statutes of limitations exist.
One thing is clear: Once such an accusation comes to light, it does irreparable damage to the reputation of the accused -- regardless of its veracity.
It doesn’t matter that Kavanaugh has demonstrated a sterling character his entire career and that dozens of women who have known him personally and professionally are vouching for him.
The #MeToo crusade has created an environment in which an accusation of harassment or assault is equated with guilt and the need to eviscerate the accused’s reputation and career.
Some men have deservedly been called out. Others have been wrongly harmed.
“These are some of the challenges within the larger #MeToo movement,” says Primus. “An accusation can effectively destroy someone’s career.
“You want to make sure that the accusation is taken seriously, but at the same the time, you don’t want a mere accusation to take away someone’s livelihood.”
Primus says she thinks an FBI investigation, which Ford has requested, would be the best way to determine what happened and would be most fair to both Kavanaugh and Ford.
GOP senators aren’t so sure and are determined to go forward with a hearing on the accusation Monday.
As South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted Wednesday: “Requiring an FBI investigation of a 36-year-old allegation (without specific references to time or location) before Professor Ford will appear before the Judiciary Committee is not about finding the truth, but delaying the process till after the midterm elections.”
Women who may see Ford’s accusation as a win for #MeToo should also consider the precedent it could set.
In an excellent column in City Journal, Kay S. Hymowitz lays out what’s at stake: “Men and women are not angels. Someday a brilliant, highly experienced, well-regarded woman may well be sitting in Kavanaugh’s seat and be accused at the zero hour and after interminable vetting of, say, stalking a former boyfriend or snorting cocaine when she was going through a bad stretch in high school. Then what?”
1c) How close is #MeToo to full
riot mode?
By Virginia Heffernan
“The Godfather” ends with a famous scene in which each of the heads of the five most powerful New York mafia families is assassinated. One is exiting a gilded elevator. One is in a white tuxedo. One is on the steps of the Foley Square courthouse. One is on a massage table. One is in bed with a prostitute.
They’re relishing their privileges, in other words. And suddenly they’re gone.
So far, despite the feminist anger that now burns brightly from sea to shining sea, no one has been shot point-blank in the eye at the behest of #MeToo. And though hundreds of men by my estimate — Vox had it at 219 in May — have been questioned or sidelined following credible reports of sexual harassment and abuse, violence is unlikely, right? Among feminists, assassins are few. Female activists don’t tend to riot, either.
It’s staggering: #MeToo, in its early days, is already one of the most effective social-justice movements in American history.
Instead, this week, protesters thronged the lobby of the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill for #CancelKavanaugh, a demonstration to show support for psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford, who accuses Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in 1982.
“We believe Christine Ford! We believe Anita Hill!” they chanted, connecting Ford and Hill, the lawyer and academic who, famously, was called into the Senate 27 years ago to testify about allegations of sexual harassment by another Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas. Thomas was confirmed anyway. That grave miscarriage of justice from 1991 still rankles. Dozens of women were arrested at the #CancelKavanaugh protest.
For the last two years, feminists, their numbers swelling, have stuck to the letter of nonviolence doctrine, inherited from the civil rights movement. The Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21, 2017, which kicked off a new highly organized and seemingly dauntless phase of feminist activism, was organized in part at the Gathering for Justice, a nonprofit headquartered in New York and founded by civil rights agitator (and actor and singer) Harry Belafonte. The call for the January march, timed to coincide with President Trump’s inauguration, sparked a record-breaking single-day protest, the largest in American history. For a global protest of that size to be thoroughly peaceful, as the Women’s March was, is almost unheard of.
And without striking physical blows, #MeToo and the latest wave of feminist activism has been almost terrifyingly effective. Feminism now pervades liberalism, and it has become its leading edge, deftly sidestepping the defeatism that nips at the edges of other liberal causes in the Trump era, notably climate activism. Since the 2016 election, feminism has grown much, much faster, bigger and louder than Trumpism.
Armed anarchists at the turn of the century, literally gunning for the elites, didn’t manage to strip even one robber baron of his privileges. By contrast, the whistleblowers of #MeToo have gotten men fired, shamed, investigated and in a few cases charged. It’s staggering: #MeToo, in its early days, is already one of the most effective social-justice movements in American history.
One thing that’s making contemporary modern feminism so effective is that it’s become common sense, part of the air we breathe. The radical outliers now seem to be the strange affronted creatures who bristle and snap when accused of harassment or abuse, producing weird phonemes about how misunderstood they are. (Bad-faith Exhibits A and B: The essays by alleged abusers and former radio personalities Jian Ghomeshi and John Hockenberry, in which both men, aiming to extenuate their treatment of women, come across as worryingly unwell.)
As #MeToo continues to serve its purpose, innumerable people — of all genders — have added their voices to the chorus of those who have endured and witnessed sexual harassment, assault, rape, abuse, and coerced silence and complicity. Whistleblowers such as Hill and Ford no longer face stone cold disbelief as everyone from centrists to celebrities to churches declares their trust in them. Those whose spidey sense told them for years that something was wrong with some men they encountered — in the workplace, in the locker room, at the frat party — are now getting the details.
And justice is being served in a way we cannot fail to appreciate. Stripping male harassers and abusers of their power, their microphones, their hedge fund portfolios — as well as their reputations — seems not so much cruel or unusual but fair and square. Losing your job in broadcast or banking, in fact, seems a mild social sentence for people who have, at the least, created a hostile work environment and, at most, committed violent felonies.
And the work of #MeToo is not letting up. It’s hard to see any outcome of the Ford story except this: If alleged sexual assailant Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed it will serve as a catchy recruitment video for a still-more-activated feminist base.
The powers that be can be happy that women don’t riot. Or, not usually. Sure, there have been a few feminist incidents: The revolutionary women in Paris in 1789. British suffragists rose up violently in 1910. Oh, and there were the Aba Women’s Riots in Nigeria in 1929. All bloody affairs, but come on, American women would have to be furious to exchange pussy hats and protest signs for helmets and tactical vests.
Oh, wait.
1d) New sexual abuse allegations roil Kavanaugh nomination
Brett Kavanaugh’s embattled nomination for the Supreme Court faced further disarray Sunday night after an explosive new account emerged of alleged sexual misconduct when he was in college, putting the White House on the defensive and the judge’s confirmation in fresh doubt.
Scrambling to respond, the White House and Kavanaugh issued swift denials of the report. Some Republicans on Capitol Hill said they were shellshocked even as they blamed Democrats for what they described as a political takedown based on scurrilous allegations.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the panel would “attempt to evaluate these new claims” but did not publicly respond to a call by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, to immediately postpone confirmation proceedings until the FBI could investigate.
The new allegations, reported by the New Yorker, date back to Kavanaugh’s freshman year at Yale University, when a classmate named Deborah Ramirez says Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at close range at a drunken dormitory party, forcing her to bat him away.
The White House quickly distributed a vehement denial from Kavanaugh, who last week strongly denied a claim by Christine Blasey Ford, a California professor, that he had sexually assaulted her when they were high school students in Maryland in the early 1980s.
The new allegations, reported by the New Yorker, date back to Kavanaugh’s freshman year at Yale University, when a classmate named Deborah Ramirez says Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at close range at a drunken dormitory party, forcing her to bat him away.
The White House quickly distributed a vehement denial from Kavanaugh, who last week strongly denied a claim by Christine Blasey Ford, a California professor, that he had sexually assaulted her when they were high school students in Maryland in the early 1980s.
“This alleged event from 35 years ago did not happen. The people who knew me then know that this did not happen, and have said so. This is a smear, plain and simple,” Kavanaugh said of Ramirez’s account, adding that he would defend himself when he and Ford testify at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing scheduled for Thursday.
In a separate statement, a White House spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, denounced the latest allegation as a Democratic-inspired effort to “tear down a good man” and said the White House “stands firmly” behind the increasingly controversial nomination.
The claims of abuse have turned Kavanaugh’s once near-certain confirmation into a fierce partisan battle, one of the most consequential such clashes in a generation. It has cast a shadow over the November midterm election, jeopardized President Trump’s vow to cement conservative control of the Supreme Court and added more fuel to the cultural reckoning that is the #MeToo movement.
The sense of chaos deepened Sunday when Michael Avenatti, the California lawyer who represents porn actress Stormy Daniels in her lawsuit against President Trump, wrote the Senate committee that he was “aware of significant evidence” of house parties in the early 1980s that Kavanaugh attended where women were “targeted … with alcohol/drugs” and subsequently raped. He offered no evidence.
Feinstein urged the FBI to reopen its investigation and “gather all the facts, interview all the relevant witnesses and ensure the committee receives a full and impartial report.” Several Democrats called on Kavanaugh to withdraw his name from consideration.
Kavanaugh’s fate in the closely divided Senate is almost certain to rest with three moderate Republicans: Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Jeff Flake of Arizona, none of whom weighed in publicly Sunday night. If two of them defect, his confirmation is probably doomed.
Some Senate Republicans said privately that they were stunned by the allegations and the worrying turn the confirmation battle has taken. Grassley complained in a statement that neither Ramirez nor her legal representative had contacted his office, but it wasn’t clear if Republicans on the committee knew about the allegations before Sunday.
The latest controversy erupted only hours after Ford agreed to testify to the Judiciary Committee at 10 a.m. Thursday about her claim that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a drunken party when they were teenagers, the charge that has roiled Washington for a week.
The New Yorker article, carrying the bylines of prize-winning investigative reporters Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, did not name or cite eyewitnesses Ramirez said were present at the Yale party.
Ramirez acknowledged that her own recollections were faulty because she was highly intoxicated during the party. She said she remembered having a penis thrust in her face, seeing Kavanaugh pulling up his pants immediately afterward, and hearing another student shout out what had just happened, calling Kavanaugh by his full name.
Her allegations, if borne out, potentially could carry heavier legal ramifications than the assault described by Ford.
During his Senate confirmation hearings, Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) asked Kavanaugh under oath — her usual practice with judicial nominees — whether he had ever committed sexual assault as a legal adult, and he denied it. Kavanaugh was over 18 when he was at Yale.
Earlier Sunday, Ford’s attorneys, after a lengthy phone call with committee staffers, said she would testify to the panel ahead of Kavanaugh — not after, as she had sought — to present their opposing memories of a drunken party more than three decades ago where she says she was nearly raped.
“We’ve made important progress,” Ford’s attorneys Debra S. Katz, Lisa J. Banks and Michael R. Bromwich said in a statement. “Dr. Ford believes it is important for senators to hear directly from her about the sexual assault committed against her. She has agreed to move forward.”
Depending how the confrontation plays out, the Senate showdown could provide the capstone to a painful political drama that has riveted Washington and has threatened to derail Kavanaugh’s expected confirmation to the nation’s highest court.
It still wasn’t clear Sunday who will ask the questions after Ford, a 51-year-old professor at Palo Alto University, takes the oath.
Republicans reportedly want to use an outside female counsel to question Ford and Kavanaugh. All 11 Republicans on the committee are men, and they are anxious to avoid grilling a woman claiming sexual abuse on live TV in the #MeToo era. They also could use staff attorneys, rather than ask the questions themselves.
“We were told no decision has been made on this important issue, even though various senators have been dismissive of her account and should have to shoulder their responsibility to ask her questions,” Ford’s lawyers said.
Ford’s lawyers reportedly have pushed the committee to call other witnesses, including a former FBI agent who conducted a polygraph of Ford, and trauma experts who could testify to her long delay in coming forward.
The committee has decided it will not subpoena Kavanaugh’s classmate, Mark Judge, who Ford has said was in the room during the alleged assault. Judge has said he does not recall the incident.
Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, asserted the panel’s control over the proceedings, saying only its members would decide who to put on the stand, and who would question them.
“The committee determines which witnesses to call, how many witnesses to call, in what order to call them, and who will question them,” Grassley wrote to Ford’s legal team. “These are non-negotiable.”
The White House is wary about Ford’s testimony, nervous not only that she could damage Kavanaugh’s chances for confirmation in the 51-49 Senate, but also that her account could inspire more women to vote against Republican candidates Nov. 6.
For Republicans, the questioning of Ford will need to tread a fine line between defending Kavanaugh — who has strongly denied the allegation — and starting a spectacle reminiscent of the demeaning verbal attacks 27 years ago, in the same committee, against Anita Hill.
Clarence Thomas was confirmed for the Supreme Court despite Hill’s claims of sexual harassment.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) suggested Sunday that Ford could say little to sway him. Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” he promised a fair hearing but said that “unless there’s something more” to support her accusation, he’s not going to withdraw his support for Kavanaugh.
“What am I supposed to do, go and ruin this guy’s life based on an accusation?” he asked. “I don’t know when it happened, I don’t know where it happened, and everybody named in regard to being there said it didn’t happen. I’m just being honest: Unless there’s something more, no, I’m not going to ruin Judge Kavanaugh’s life over this.”
By contrast, Hirono, the Hawaii Democrat who has emerged as one of Ford’s strongest backers, declared: “I believe her.”
“I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases,” Hirono said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “He’s very outcome-driven; he has a very ideological agenda.”
Democratic leaders renewed their demand for an FBI investigation of Ford’s claims, contending it could be carried out quickly. Republicans have generally backed the White House in saying that reopening an FBI background check on Kavanaugh would be pointless.
“Their [the FBI’s] role in this case is not to determine who is telling the truth,” Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” describing that as the task of the Judiciary Committee.
“I hope that we will get to the truth,” he said.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said on ABC’s “This Week” that he did not feel Ford had been treated well, and that he believed some Republican lawmakers “feel uneasy with the way this has been handled.”
The unexpected blowup over a nomination that had been expected to sail through the Senate has also posed a challenge for politically ambitious women in the Trump administration, including Nikki Haley, the ambassador to the United Nations.
Interviewed on CNN, Haley was careful not to criticize Trump or fellow Republicans, but also said Ford should have her say before the committee.
“What I have said very clearly is: ‘Every accuser always deserves the right to be heard,’” she said. “But at the same time, I think the accused deserves the right to be heard. … The Senate has a huge responsibility here.”
Staff writers Jennifer Haberkorn in Washington and Mark Z. Barabak in Berkeley contributed to this report.
9:45 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details about Ford’s agreement to testify.
8:35 p.m.: This article was updated with Avenatti’s letter.
7:35 p.m.: This article was updated with Sen. Feinstein calling for a postponement in proceedings.
6:20 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details of the latest allegation.
5:50 p.m.: This article was updated to reflect the New Yorker article citing a second accuser, and the denials by Kavanaugh and the White House.
This article was originally published at 4:20 p.m.
1f) Why the Left Is Consumed With Hate
Even before President Trump’s election, hatred had begun to emerge on the American left—counterintuitively, as an assertion of guilelessness and moral superiority. At the Women’s March in Washington the weekend after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the pop star Madonna said, “I have thought an awful lot of blowing up the White House.” Here hatred was a vanity, a braggadocio meant to signal her innocence of the sort of evil that, in her mind, the White House represented. (She later said the comment was “taken wildly out of context.”)
For many on the left a hateful anti-Americanism has become a self-congratulatory lifestyle. “America was never that great,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently said. For radical groups like Black Lives Matter, hatred of America is a theme of identity, a display of racial pride.
For other leftists, hate is a license. Conservative speakers can be shouted down, even assaulted, on university campuses. Republican officials can be harassed in restaurants, in the street, in front of their homes. Certain leaders of the left—Rep. Maxine Waters comes to mind—are self-appointed practitioners of hate, urging their followers to think of hatred as power itself.
How did the American left—conceived to bring more compassion and justice to the world—become so given to hate? It began in the 1960s, when America finally accepted that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings. That acceptance changed America forever. It imposed a new moral imperative: America would have to show itself redeemed of these immoralities in order to stand as a legitimate democracy.
The genius of the left in the ’60s was simply to perceive the new moral imperative, and then to identify itself with it. Thus the labor of redeeming the nation from its immoral past would fall on the left. This is how the left put itself in charge of America’s moral legitimacy. The left, not the right—not conservatism—would set the terms of this legitimacy and deliver America from shame to decency.
This bestowed enormous political and cultural power on the American left, and led to the greatest array of government-sponsored social programs in history—at an expense, by some estimates, of more than $22 trillion. But for the left to wield this power, there had to be a great menace to fight against—a tenacious menace that kept America uncertain of its legitimacy, afraid for its good name.
This amounted to a formula for power: The greater the menace to the nation’s moral legitimacy, the more power redounded to the left. And the ’60s handed the left a laundry list of menaces to be defeated. If racism was necessarily at the top of the list, it was quickly followed by a litany of bigotries ending in “ism” and “phobia.”
The left had important achievements. It did rescue America from an unsustainable moral illegitimacy. It also established the great menace of racism as America’s most intolerable disgrace. But the left’s success has plunged it into its greatest crisis since the ’60s. The Achilles’ heel of the left has been its dependence on menace for power. Think of all the things it can ask for in the name of fighting menaces like “systemic racism” and “structural inequality.” But what happens when the evils that menace us begin to fade, and then keep fading?
It is undeniable that America has achieved since the ’60s one of the greatest moral evolutions ever. That is a profound problem for the left, whose existence is threatened by the diminishment of racial oppression. The left’s unspoken terror is that racism is no longer menacing enough to support its own power. The great crisis for the left today—the source of its angst and hatefulness—is its own encroaching obsolescence. Today the left looks to be slowly dying from lack of racial menace.
A single white-on-black shooting in Ferguson, Mo., four years ago resulted in a prolonged media blitz and the involvement of the president of the United States. In that same four-year period, thousands of black-on-black shootings took place in Chicago, hometown of the then-president, yet they inspired very little media coverage and no serious presidential commentary.
White-on-black shootings evoke America’s history of racism and so carry an iconic payload of menace. Black-on-black shootings carry no such payload, although they are truly menacing to the black community. They evoke only despair. And the left gets power from fighting white evil, not black despair.
Today’s left lacks worthy menaces to fight. It is driven to find a replacement for racism, some sweeping historical wrongdoing that morally empowers those who oppose it. (Climate change?) Failing this, only hatred is left.
Hatred is a transformative power. It can make the innocuous into the menacing. So it has become a weapon of choice. The left has used hate to transform President Trump into a symbol of the new racism, not a flawed president but a systemic evil. And he must be opposed as one opposes racism, with a scorched-earth absolutism.
For Martin Luther King Jr., hatred was not necessary as a means to power. The actual details of oppression were enough. Power came to him because he rejected hate as a method of resisting menace. He called on blacks not to be defined by what menaced them. Today, because menace provides moral empowerment, blacks and their ostensible allies indulge in it. The menace of black victimization becomes the unarguable truth of the black identity. And here we are again, forever victims.
Yet the left is still stalked by obsolescence. There is simply not enough menace to service its demands for power. The voices that speak for the left have never been less convincing. It is hard for people to see the menace that drives millionaire football players to kneel before the flag. And then there is the failure of virtually every program the left has ever espoused—welfare, public housing, school busing, affirmative action, diversity programs, and so on.
For the American left today, the indulgence in hate is a death rattle.
Mr. Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is author of “Shame: How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country” (Basic Books, 2015).
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2) Has The State Department Finally Given Up On Palestinian Fantasies?
By A J Caschetta
After President Trump’s futile attempts to forge a deal between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, many in the Trump administration now appear to recognize that the PA is not really interested in peace at all. Although the diplomatic corps has been reluctant to walk away from its longstanding investment in the PA, the annual assessment of world terrorism released today by the State Department suggests that it, too, is finally coming around.
The secretary of state is required by law to provide Congress each year, by April 30, “a full and complete report on terrorism” from the previous year. The Country Reports on Terrorism, or CRT, as it is known, provides an annual glimpse into U.S. policy regarding nearly every nation on earth, some of which require only a paragraph or two while others go on for pages.
Israel, forever adjoined to the Palestinians, is described in one of the longer sections, titled “Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank, And Gaza.” During Barack Obama’s presidency, this section reflected a naïve trust in the PA and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, and a marked departure from the Bush-era’s skepticism about the PA’s ability to make peace.
This year’s CRT, the first of the Trump administration, was produced during a chaotic period, under two different Secretaries of State, following some very public resignations and a hiring freeze, and under the direction of a new boss of the Bureau of Counterterrorism (Nathan A. Sales). The report, released yesterday at noon, suggests a change is underway at the State Department.
Last year’s CRT was the last one of the Obama era. Parts of the Israel section read as though they were written by an advocate of sanctions against Israel. Particularly egregious was the conclusion that “Continued drivers of violence included a lack of hope in achieving Palestinian statehood, Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank, the perception that the Israeli government was changing the status quo on the Haram Al-Sharif/Temple Mount, and IDF tactics that the Palestinians considered overly aggressive.” When it came out, I wrote that “the only logical explanation for the State Department’s inaccurate and misleading report is that its authors still believe, as Barack Obama put it in a 2013 speech in Jerusalem, that Israel has ‘a true partner in President Abbas.’”
This year’s Israel section is much shorter (2267 words) than last year’s (3799 words), mostly because such uncritical praise for Abbas has been deleted. The 2016 CRT applauded Abbas for “his commitment to nonviolence, recognition of the State of Israel, and pursuit of an independent Palestinian state through peaceful means.” It somehow found that the “PA has taken significant steps during President Abbas’ tenure (2005 to date) to ensure that official institutions in the West Bank under its control do not create or disseminate content that incites violence.” It also laughably asserted that “Explicit calls for violence against Israelis, direct exhortations against Jews, and categorical denials by the PA of the possibility of peace with Israel are rare and the leadership does not generally tolerate it.”
Not one of these foolish and false claims appears in the 2017 CRT, except the line about how “Abbas maintained a public commitment to non-violence.” Maybe someone will correct that next year.
Last year’s CRT guilelessly explained that “the PA provided financial packages to Palestinian security prisoners released from Israeli prisons in an effort to reintegrate them into society and prevent recruitment by hostile political factions.” Not only has that passage been deleted, but in its place, this year’s CRT acknowledges that “The PA and PLO continued to provide ‘martyr payments’ to the families of Palestinian individuals killed carrying out a terrorist act.”
Unfortunately, the report fails to list important events from the year it analyzes. There is no mention of the “ Days of Rage” protests initiated by the PA in July 2017 after Israel installed cameras and metal detectors at the Temple Mount following the murder of two police officers there. Nor is there mention of the Fatah Central Committee’s call for Days of Rage in December 2017 to protest the U.S. embassy’s move to Jerusalem.
This year’s report also lacks the simple candor of earlier assessments, like the 2005 assertion that the PA’s “counterterrorism efforts fell far short of U.S. expectations” and the 2004 alert that “President Abbas’ public condemnation of terrorist acts was not matched by decisive security operations.”
The movement of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, the de-funding of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, and the closing of the PLO mission in Washington, D.C., all demonstrate an awareness that Abbas and his allies are unworthy of the trust they gained through the Oslo Accords. The 2017 Country Reports on Terrorism suggests that the State Department is finally reconsidering its failed investment in the Palestinian Authority.
A.J. Caschetta is a Ginsburg-Ingerman fellow at the Middle East Forum and a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Last year’s CRT guilelessly explained that “the PA provided financial packages to Palestinian security prisoners released from Israeli prisons in an effort to reintegrate them into society and prevent recruitment by hostile political factions.” Not only has that passage been deleted, but in its place, this year’s CRT acknowledges that “The PA and PLO continued to provide ‘martyr payments’ to the families of Palestinian individuals killed carrying out a terrorist act.”
Unfortunately, the report fails to list important events from the year it analyzes. There is no mention of the “ Days of Rage” protests initiated by the PA in July 2017 after Israel installed cameras and metal detectors at the Temple Mount following the murder of two police officers there. Nor is there mention of the Fatah Central Committee’s call for Days of Rage in December 2017 to protest the U.S. embassy’s move to Jerusalem.
This year’s report also lacks the simple candor of earlier assessments, like the 2005 assertion that the PA’s “counterterrorism efforts fell far short of U.S. expectations” and the 2004 alert that “President Abbas’ public condemnation of terrorist acts was not matched by decisive security operations.”
The movement of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, the de-funding of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, and the closing of the PLO mission in Washington, D.C., all demonstrate an awareness that Abbas and his allies are unworthy of the trust they gained through the Oslo Accords. The 2017 Country Reports on Terrorism suggests that the State Department is finally reconsidering its failed investment in the Palestinian Authority.
A.J. Caschetta is a Ginsburg-Ingerman fellow at the Middle East Forum and a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
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3)Who Is Karl Marx?
When writing The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx thought he was providing a road to utopia. But everywhere Marx’s ideas were tried, they resulted in catastrophe and mass murder. In this video, Paul Kengor, Professor of Political Science at Grove City College, illuminates the life of the mild-mannered 19th Century German whose ideas were embraced by the most brutal dictators in world history.
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