Ford v. Kavanaugh

            Some final thoughts on Ford v. Kavanaugh.

            Democrats complained that the FBI investigation did not go far enough: it should have probed more deeply into the backgrounds of Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh, even after their intensive grilling by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Democrats should be happy the FBI didn’t, because a further check into Dr. Ford’s background would surely have raised questions about her veracity.

            Senator Grassley had in his possession a letter from an old boyfriend of Dr. Ford’s accusing her of fudging the truth. The letter contradicted her claims of claustrophobia and fear of flying, and, even more seriously, her denial of ever having coached anyone on how to take a polygraph. The boyfriend wrote that he had personally witnessed Dr. Ford coach Monica McLean, a friend of hers who was applying for a job with the FBI. Of course, McLean denies this. But imagine the furor on the left if this accusation had surfaced at the Judiciary hearing. Now, Judge Kavanaugh could be targeted by all sorts of lugubrious allegations—as a man he was fair game. But nobody could question Dr. Ford’s veracity—as a woman and a victim she had to be believed. Just ask Senator Hirono.

            Senator McConnell appears to be gleefully grateful to the Democrats for their public persecution of Judge Kavanaugh. He thinks that it has energized a furious Republican base that will rebuke the Democrats at the polls next month. That remains to be seen. What is certain is that this whole business has polarized the electorate as never before. And it has likely dispelled any pretense of comity in Washington’s legislative bodies. The Senate well has been poisoned.

            Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Joe Manchin of West Virginia will be excoriated by their respective parties for their treason. Republican Murkowski, an intellectually-challenged lightweight who was appointed to fill a vacant seat by her father, then governor of Alaska, will never get re-elected. Sarah Palin, who booted her father from the governor’s mansion, will see to it.  

            Democrat Manchin’s days as an influential member of the “loyal” opposition are numbered. His vote for Kavanaugh’s confirmation may get him re-elected in red state West Virginia, but he may just as well cross the aisle and join the Republicans. Democrats have no desk on their side for a man of such character.

A 21st Century Inquisition

            The Spanish Inquisition is best remembered for torturing Jews until they disavowed their religion and converted to Christianity. I was reminded of this while watching the Senate Judiciary Committee pitting an accuser with no corroborating evidence against a candidate for high office who was denied any presumption of innocence.

            The Spanish Inquisition did not respect the rule of law because it invoked God as its authority. Dr. Ford’s allegations at the committee hearing, sincere and persuasive as they were, would not have brought a conviction in a court of law. But they did in the eyes of Democrats bent on destroying Judge Kavanaugh, regardless of the absence of evidence. Senator Hirono said it best. She believed Dr. Ford because she needed to be believed—because Dr. Ford is a woman and Judge Kavanaugh is a man. Besides, Judge Kavanaugh did not deserve due process because of his conservative philosophy. Grand Inquisitor Torquemada would have agreed with that reasoning: Jews could not be innocent because they were Jews and did not believe in Jesus.

            There was no one named Torquemada in the Senate hearing room. But it was torture nonetheless, a modern Inquisition designed to make the accused quit or be destroyed. The man in the dock refused to quit, so the effort continues to destroy him.

            If Republicans fail to confirm Judge Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, they will be defeated at the polls and may not recover for generations. Unfortunately for Judge Kavanaugh, even if he does ascend to the Supreme Court, he will never be able to heal the wounds to his family and his reputation inflicted by Senator Hirono and Democrat Inquisitors.

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?