Dirty Politics

            Ford vs. Kavanaugh.  It is not be a case being argued before the Supreme Court, but it may as well be for all the attention it is getting and for the lasting impact it will have on future nominations to the Supreme Court. In the process, Ford vs. Kavanaugh will have established new benchmarks for incivility, political weaponry, and utter disregard for judicial principles, such as the presumption of innocence and preponderance of evidence. It will also have set a new low for dirty politics.

            There is no question in my mind that Christine Blasey Ford is telling the truth when she says she was assaulted at a party when she was 15 years old. But I do question the clarity of her recollection after the passage of 36 years. How sure is she now that Brett Kavanaugh was her assailant, given the judge’s categorical denial and the contradictory statements by others who were supposedly in the room at the time? If, as she has said, alcohol was a factor in the conduct of her assailant, could it also have been a factor affecting her recall? Given her initial reluctance to testify under oath and given demands by her attorney to shield her from harsh interrogation, is there something she is afraid of revealing during questioning on these points?

            There is another gaping hole in this affair, and it has to do with Democrats on the Judiciary Committee. I’m not so much troubled by senators Hirono and Gillibrand pronouncing Judge Kavanaugh necessarily guilty because he is a man and his accuser is a woman; I think fair-minded people can see through their bias. But I am troubled by Senator Feinstein’s introduction of Dr. Ford’s allegations at the last minute, and especially by her refusal to give a copy of Dr. Ford’s letter to Chairman Grassley.* Is she so bent on destroying Judge Kavanaugh that she would withhold exculpatory evidence?

            If Judge Kavanaugh is guilty, his nomination should be withdrawn. But if he is prevented from taking his seat on the Supreme Court as the result of an uncorroborated accusation by one woman based on her fuzzy recollection of what happened 36 years ago, judicial fairness will have been turned on its head. Democrats will have found the way to prevent the accession of any conservative to the Court. Dirty politics will have won. America will have lost.

* As of this writing, only portions of the letter have been made public by the Washington Post and CNN. The full text has not.

Florence and Washington

            The disaster surrounding us in the wake of Florence is a perfect metaphor for the mess in Washington.  As the storm that struck and stalled over the Carolinas continues to inflict death and destruction, so the stench of corruption, scandal, and treason reeking from our capital is shredding the very fiber of our democracy. The stark difference is that rescue teams are out in force to save lives threatened by the storm, demonstrating an inexhaustible spirit of neighborly love, whereas nothing can stop the muckrakers, liars, and traitors consumed by their hate for a duly-elected president from tearing this country apart.

            Is there anyone not disgusted with the desperate methods Democrats have been using to prevent Brett Kavanaugh from sitting on the Supreme Court? Is there no end to Robert Mueller’s search for anything to destroy the presidency of Donald Trump? Has the integrity of the FBI and the Justice Department been permanently compromised? Has the mainstream media abandoned all sense of fairness and respect for the truth? Will the November elections turn the House of Representatives over to the likes of violence-inciting Maxine Waters and empty-headed socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

            I fear the wrath of Mother Nature less than I dread the answers to these questions.

Presidents Past, Present, and Future

            It was amusing—if not pathetic—to see presidential hopefuls Corey Booker and Kamala Harris make fools of themselves at the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings last week.

            Booker played Spartacus in his audition for an Academy Award: he was ready to sacrifice his position as United States Senator by breaking senate rules in daring to reveal confidential information that would prove Judge Kavanaugh to be a racist for supporting racial profiling. There were two problems with that. The confidential memo had already been released (and Booker knew it), and the memo showed exactly the opposite of what Booker claimed: Judge Kavanaugh had written in opposition to racial profiling.  But little details like that didn’t prevent the senator from grandstanding.

            Senator Harris, self-appointed prosecutor of anything Trump, tried to trick the judge into admitting he’d had contacts with someone at a law firm regarding Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s collusion with Russia. She hinted she had the goods on the judge. He flatly denied the contacts and called her bluff. She lost—she didn’t have the goods. Even the Los Angeles Times, normally a supporter of the senator, called her performance a miserable failure.

            Do these senators want to be president so badly they are willing to risk ridicule on national TV?

            Speaking of presidents, Barack Obama returned from a distant planet to attack President Trump in a speech at the University of Illinois in which he claimed, among other delusions, that he was responsible for the booming economy, not President Trump’s tax cuts and reversal of Obama’s job-killing regulations. With utter disregard for the facts, Obama shamelessly insisted the economy was already booming while he was in office.

            It has been accepted wisdom that former presidents should not come out of retirement to personally criticize their successors. But then Obama’s speech was not so much about President Trump as it was about himself, a speech in which he used the pronoun “I” no less than 108 times.  Proof that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton suffer from the lack of yet another kind of wisdom: they just don’t know when to go away.

Children of Socialism

            The Roman statesman and orator Cicero once said, “Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child.” That’s a perfect comment on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Socialist darling of the Left and all her fawning, naive acolytes.

            How is it possible for the thundering herd of young people heading for destruction off the socialist cliff not to know anything of the calamitous history of those countries that suffered the consequences of that failed ideology in the 20^th century and profess it even today?          

            Let’s start with the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe: Poland, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Hungary, all of them failed states with repressive regimes until freed by the collapse of communism in 1991. Then, how about our despotic friends in Mao’s China, Ho Chi Ming’s Vietnam, Kim’s North Korea, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, all of them with hands bloodied by mass murder and enslavement. 

             But we don’t have to go that far. In our own hemisphere we have the decades-long disaster in Cuba and now the starving populace in oil-rich Venezuela to give daily testimony to the utter bankruptcy of socialism.

            Yet, we have hordes of clueless admirers of Bernie Sanders heading to the polls in November, dreaming of Utopia: free healthcare, free college, free food, free housing, and free lollipops. And no idea whatsoever about how nanny government is going to pay for all of it.

            Oh, let me take that back: we’ll get the money by confiscating the profits of corporations making over a billion dollars a year, a brilliant emanation from the deluded mind of Elizabeth Warren. And, if that’s not enough, we can save the rest by shutting down ICE.

            If Cicero were witnessing this insanity today, he would no doubt express his disbelief by switching from his Latin to our American vernacular and asking our entranced young voters, “What are you? Nuts?”

Bombs Away

            I feel like a soldier in a foxhole trying to take cover from all the bombs going off over my head. There are so many, I’m not sure I could list them all. But here are some of the big ones.

            President Trump has to be shell-shocked at this point from all the attacks aimed at him, not only from his customary adversaries in the mainstream media and Congress, but now from members of his own party and from former trusted associates like “flipping” attorney Michael Cohen and soon-to-testify accountant Alan Weisselberg. Even Jeff Sessions has thumbed his nose at the president, who would love nothing more than for his attorney general to pursue corruption in the FBI and Hillary’s collusion with Russia, both studiously ignored by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

            Meanwhile, Big Labor continues to make direct hits on Trump’s agenda. In May it gained a toe-hold in Boeing’s South Carolina operations by organizing machinists. Then, after unions got a sympathetic judge to side with union picketers in Ohio, the American Federation of Government Employees managed to get another sympathetic judge to overturn a section of a Trump executive order that would have made it easier to fire incompetent federal employees and cut down on government bureaucracy. Finally, earlier this month the AFL-CIO poured millions into a victorious campaign in Missouri to overturn that state’s right-to-work laws, the first state ever to do so.

            As for myself, I haven’t yet recovered from the effects of a mega-ton bomb dropped on the Catholic Church by Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, a former apostolic nuncio to the United States. His 11-page testimony accuses top church officials up and down the line, both in Rome and in the U.S., of covering up sexual abuses of and by seminarians and priests in Chile and Honduras and by Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and others in this country. Worse, Vigano accuses Pope Francis of reversing sanctions imposed on McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI. For this and for the pope’s role in the cover-up, Vigano calls on the pope to resign.

            Is “Bombs Away” to be this year’s universal call?

How Far "Me Too"

            The “Me Too” movement began quietly enough in 2006 when Tarana Burke, a black woman and survivor of sexual assault coined the term. She wanted to help other women and girls who had also been victims of sexual violence. She could not possibly have known how the term would explode into an international movement demanding the heads of famous people all over the world who have been identified as sexual predators.

            In the United States, “Me Too” erupted with the New York Times story on October 5, 2017, that exposed Harvey Weinstein for decades of sexual harassment against women, including Ashley Judd who described in detail the Hollywood producer’s assault against her. In rapid succession, accusations rolled in and claimed the careers of notables in the media and in Congress, as well as the entertainment industry. Even the worlds of sports, music, medicine, academia, and the military have not been immune. And new light was shone on the long-ignored or excused sexual predations of people like Bill Clinton and Roman Polanski.

            For me, as a Catholic, the newest revelations of the Church’s abysmal response to the widespread abuse of as many of 1,000 minors by 300 priests in Pennsylvania decades ago are particularly troubling. Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who was archbishop of Pittsburgh at the time, is accused of covering up the abuse instead of dealing with it forcefully.  Wuerl is also in big trouble with the pope for defending retired Cardinal Theodor McCarrick, his predecessor as archbishop of Washington, who reportedly preyed on seminarians and had a 20-year history of molestation.

            How much farther will the offshoots of “Me Too” reach? Will we see positive results like the end of the sex trafficking and pornography rackets here and abroad? Will the practice of sexual mutilation of women by Muslims earn the universal revulsion and condemnation it deserves? Indeed, what will it take to eradicate sexual abuse and degradation of women and children in this world?

            As the movement created by Tarana Burke has shown, victims must not be afraid to speak up. Silence, even in the most sacred precincts, is not an option when innocence and human dignity are at risk.

Making a Friend Happy

            A friend of mine, an avid Trump supporter, gets upset whenever I criticize President Trump. I voted for Trump and have often praised him for his domestic policies on tax reform, deregulation, judicial appointments, energy, and the environment; I support his foreign policy on Israel, Iran, and military action in the Middle East; and, with some reservations, I approve his show of strength on North Korea, Russia, and now Turkey. His list of accomplishments is impressive and deserving of praise. But there is another side to the ledger. Regrettably, it threatens to undo the positive results of the president’s first term in office.

            President Trump’s policies on immigration (sanctuary cities, the wall, law enforcement, etc.) are sound, but implementation has been shaky and inconsistent and often thwarted by a leftist judiciary. His trade policies (TPP, Nafta, import tariffs) are a disaster; the trade war with China is at best a stalemate that will have long-lasting consequences both on the American economy and on foreign relations with our allies in the Pacific.

            Affecting all these policies is the president’s management style. His unfortunate method of communicating with tweets and ill-considered off-the-cuff remarks may energize his base, but it fuels the Trump-hating media, divides the nation, and gives Democrats visions of surfing a blue wave to congressional majorities in the fall elections.

            And then there’s the Mueller investigation. It has been a millstone around the president’s neck for more than a year, but he has not found an effective way of dealing with it. Calling the probe a witch hunt is not it. The best way for the president to pull the fangs from Mueller’s vampires is to declassify all documents relating to the anti-Trump intrigues in the FBI and the Justice Department and order Rod Rosenstein to turn them over to Congress. “Sunshine is the best disinfectant,” as the saying goes. Let the sun shine on the intrigue and the corruption in the Deep State. And have Mueller’s prosecutorial powers turn to a real Russian collusion scandal.

            Maybe that will make my Trump-supporting friend happy.