"Yes, both parties are now more united and energized. But one did so by enticing the recalcitrant back into the fold; the other, by warning them to join the revolution or be guillotined."

In National Review Victor Davis Hanson writes,

When the Christine Ford saga finally ended with the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, a lot of truth had distilled out, along with the evaporation of prior pretensions and misconceptions.

The hearing confirmed that the traditional JFK/Hubert Humphrey Democrat party, as once envisioned by a Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, or Jim Webb, is long kaput. In its place is being birthed a hard-left progressive movement that absorbs the ideologies and methodologies of its base and that now incorporates all sorts, from Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist hipsters to Black Lives Matters, Antifa, and Occupy Wall Street protestors.

The new progressives recently have come to believe that they gain traction by the theater of disrupting senate hearings, cornering senators in elevators, stalking them on the way to work, doxing their opponents on the Internet, and during the hearings throwing out the concept of due process. Any means is deemed permissible to enact visions of social justice, given legislative and executive power is lost for now — and as if proverbially ordinary Americans who watched the televised circus might applaud the performers.

Diane Feinstein, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and the Democratic fossils on the Senate Judiciary Committee may in their golden years try to lumber onto the departing progressive train, but their septuagenarian and octogenarian creaky efforts to get on board grow sad. Joe Biden was reduced to threatening to beat Trump up behind the locker room. Diane Feinstein staged a clumsy eleventh-hour ambush of the hearings that proved pure bathos. Even leftists such as Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren fear that they are suddenly pseudo- revolutionaries, compared with the new, far more radical Jacobins, who in cyclical French Revolutionary style call for massive repeals of all student debt, free tuition, packing the Supreme Court, Medicare for all, a specified end to fossil fuels, quotas based on identity politics, and an abolishment of Immigration and Custom Enforcement. No one quite knows how far this cannibalistic cycle will go.

The emotional powerbase of the new Democrats is now Corey “I am Spartacus” Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and thousands of state and local Ocasio-Cortezes. Barack Obama really did fundamentally transform the old Democratic party. Or rather from 2009 to 2017, he dismantled it at the congressional, state, and local levels while he was elected twice to the presidency. But even the now multimillionaire Obama appears to the new Democrats as a near has-been sellout. And in his fifties, he will have to hit the streets again, in his prior mode of “get in their face, bring a gun to a knife fight, punish our enemies,” to recapture his hard-left fides.

he hatred of Kavanaugh and the left-wing repudiation of due process and of Senate protocol and tradition united the Democrats by moving their party far more to the left rather than to the center. Apparently, Democrats must embrace or at least excuse Antifa-like tactics or they are no longer Democrats. Diane Feinstein’s reprehensible behavior must be seen in this context as seeking to be as radical as the unhinged expressions of Kevin de León, her election rival for the Senate seat.

Yes, both parties are now more united and energized. But one did so by enticing the recalcitrant back into the fold; the other, by warning them to join the revolution or be guillotined.

...Kavanaugh was not supposed to display too much anger at the Left that sought not just to thwart his confirmation, but destroy his person and his family as just deserts. At noon on the day of his final appearance, Kavanaugh was declared dead after the sympathetic but otherwise not credible testimony of Christine Ford. But by day’s end, Kavanaugh’s freelancing explosive defiance had saved the nomination, showing that conventional wisdom’s “judicial temperament” when smeared was merely a noble way to lose.

...Trump was for the nth time written off as crude, crass, and uncouth. But Trump haters so often let their venom blind them to Trump’s cunning: 1) He is reactive not provocative. All week Trump was demonized, and so his description of Ford and her enablers was seen as righteous retaliation not a bullying attack; 2) Trump has an uncanny sense of the pulse of public opinion. He waited to apply the coup de grace until Ford’s own narratives, which she changed numerous times, were being picked apart not so much as incomplete but as impossible to reconcile; 3) Trump realizes that it is his defiance as much as his message that wins him fealty. He never publicly flinched from his support for Kavanaugh and by doubling-down told his base that if Kavanaugh was going down, so would he. After eight years of perceived namby-pamby Republican contextualization, even mainstream conservatives seem to appreciate defiance. And they got it in spades with both Kavanaugh and Trump, whose both defied collective conventional wisdom of just letting it be.

The #MeToo movement is imploding. By its recent McCarthyesque excesses it is undoing a great deal of good that it had once done, in Hollywood and the media especially.

...A republic cannot survive any revolutionary movement that insist that its moral claims are so exalted that 2,500 years of Western jurisprudence must be jettisoned, as if “sincerity” established “believability” and believability in turn “credibility” — all without evidence, witnesses, or substantiated testimonies. The result of such ideas would be the nightmarish world of either a regimented Ninety Eighty-Four or the chaos of the Lord of the Flies.

The Kavanaugh hearing was the ultimate but logical continuation of the Duke Lacrosse and Rolling Stone travesties. The #MeToo excess was even likely to have pleased the ogre Harvey Weinstein — a sexual predator who for decades was exempted by liberal Hollywood enablers and appeasers either on the theory of “Well, he may be a predator, but he’s our predator” or “He’s bad, but not always bad for me.” Weinstein may now claim that what happened to the hated conservative Kavanaugh earlier had happened to him, the once beloved liberal, or he may say something like “See what happens when you lose liberal warriors like me.”

...“Fake News” is an overused phrase, but it proves a euphemism when describing the recent behavior of The New Yorker, the New York Times, and NBC.

...the progressive movement sought to use the Kavanaugh hearings to empower a larger race-and-gender identity-politics agenda, in which the perennial targets are old white guys. The operating theory is that women, the nonwhite, and young hipsters by their gender, race, or age — and their collective victimization — are innately preferable and more deserving people.

But once progressives drew up those insane rules, the subsequent spectacle was judged by their own standards. Mitch McConnell proved a far more adroit senatorial manager than Chuck Schumer. Chuck Grassley sounded more judicious and worried about the rules than did Diane Feinstein. Lindsey Graham was far more coherent and focused that Senator Spartacus. Prosecutor Mitchell was to the point, direct, and transparent in a way Christine Ford was not always.

More important, for millions of Americans watching the spectacle, the results did not play out so much as an old-white-guy melodrama as a class-and-gender psychodrama. Most men of all races and classes cannot accept a new reality that they can have their careers destroyed, without appeal to due process, at any moment by an unsubstantiated accusation dating from when they were 17 — all on the pretext that a destructive career inquisition “is not formally a criminal trial” and therefore not subject to the spirit of the U.S. Constitution. And if there was any stereotypical lesson to be had, it was that many on the senatorial panel and the legions of advisers and lawyers on the Ford Team, as well as Ford herself, by their class, education, and comportment, increasingly seem quite different, quite more privileged, and quite more self-absorbed than most average Americans of all backgrounds who have little sympathy for the psychodramas of a pampered and professional class.

Read more here.

It has been quite a week!

Ann Coulter says it is common for people to insert a memory on a public figure.

"Lindsey Graham threw off the mantle of John McCain in one of the great moments in American history!"

Joe DiGenova gives us his thoughts on the Ford v. Kavanaugh hearings. "Diane Feinstein is now infamous for her duplicity and dishonesty. The Democrats have eschewed all integrity, all honesty, in the pursuit of power."

What is this really all about? Protecting abortion!

Feinstein hides a story of attempted rape for six weeks so she can torpedo his nomination at the last moment! If Kavanaugh shows anger after being accused of rape, then that proves he is a rapist! If he doesn't, that proves he is insincere!

Results

Victor Davis Hanson writes in National Review,

...The Democrats were eager to see Republicans come off as crude and then ensured that they acted so themselves. They had no new argument either in supporting Ford or opposing Kavanaugh — other than the old saw of serially calling for a delaying “FBI investigation.”

Kavanaugh, in the end, himself proved the most reliable, factual, and transparent witness, and Republican Senators belatedly discovered that they were far better questioners than any expert prosecutor.

Politically, the result is twofold. It is not certain that Kavanaugh will be confirmed, but any Republican who believes that he is a sexual assaulter and unfit for the Supreme Court will likely face ostracism. Second, should he be confirmed, Kavanaugh will not just be a knowledgeable conservative jurist, but a skilled and unafraid advocate in the tradition of Antonin Scalia.

Read more here.

Slippery Slope

In CDN, Jacquie Kubin writes about "the quavering voice of Blasey Ford and the railroading of Brett Kavanaugh."

Her allegations may very well ruin one man’s life, career and family and erase two-hundred years of jurisprudence from our history.

Unfortunately for the #MeToo movement and women’s believability going forward, Ford and the Democrat senators who do less to seek the truth than bolster the ego of Dr. Ford, have done more to harm the credibility of women already reticent to come forward.

These hearing should not have been held based on what she said. Or he said. The legal term for that is hearsay.

These hearings instead should be based on the real, credible and actionable information that proves Ford’s statements. That is something Ford is unable to provide. And because of that, these hearings should not have been held.

...A marital spat over a home remodel led to emergence of the alleged attack in “recollected memories.” But then, a little later in her testimony, Ford changed her story and claimed that her second door is actually there for “sponsored interns from Google and students” to use. Really?

Seems like the purpose of the door is not exactly as Ms. Ford would ask us to believe. It was not installed as a second escape route for a person suffering from claustrophobia as a result of an attack. It was installed to give the interns and students they sponsored a private door to enter their area of the house.

...Because when we fail to demand verifiable honesty we, as Americans, lose. We take one more step toward living in an oligarchy run by a kangaroo court society that can destroy anyone at any time. Because they said so.

How convenient that no one caught that little omission of fact.

To date, there is no one willing to stand up and confirm her story. In fact, those she has identified as witnesses have all – to a person – denied being present or seeing Brett Kavanaugh ever act in the manner in which she describes.

...If you don’t know, for sure, before you destroy the life work of a man and toss America’s base of fairness into the wood chipper, you need to be 100% sure of your accusations.


I have heard nothing that convinces me Ford’s accusation has one iota of truth to them. An investigation would have proven this out. But then that would have been fair to Kavanaugh. Just another Republican mistake.

...A jurist Democrats are attempting to destroy for the sake of hard-left, take-no-prisoners power politics.

...Christine Blasey Ford is accusing Judge Kavanaugh of a moral crime, and she does so freely, knowing she has zero responsibility to provide some verifiable proof. She must offer some proof beyond “I believe this happened,” “I do not remember date details, or “who I talked to after being assaulted.” But under the current kangaroo court proceedings the Democrats have so predictably engineered, she has no need to do so.

... first, it is Brett Kavanaugh. Then it is your son, husband, brother, father or friend. We have arrived at a point where we are one slippery slope away from what the German Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemöller described in

“First they came …“
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Read more here.

I highly recommend this podcast!

Michael Knowles does not believe Christine Blasey Ford. Feinstein is impressed that Ford has a PhD and is a college professor, therefore Ford should be taken seriously.

Knowles said, "Oh sure, we don't know any whacky college professors, do we? This is about the fictitious right to kill a baby in the womb! Collegial? This is anything but collegial! This is about destroying a man's life, and his family's!

The Left (Cory Booker) says, "Tell your truth (not the truth, but your truth)." The reason they say that is because they know they can't stand on the objective facts. Michael then goes point by point taking apart her story.

Ford v. Kavanaugh

Tucker devotes his entire show tonight to the Ford v. Kavanaugh hearings. Superb coverage!

Is it a game of chicken?

Ann Althouse writes that the Ford v. Kavanaugh thing feels like a game of chicken. Advice: roll up your sleeves! Read more here.

Undermining the credibility of future valid claims of sexual abuse

In American Greatness, Ned Ryun writes about the Ford accusations,

...this has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than the Democrats and the Left’s collective meltdown over losing their favorite tool for expanding the administrative state: The Supreme Court.

By placing an originalist like Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, the Left is fully aware that we are in the process of shutting down their favorite route for achieving most of their extra-legislative victories over the past 50 years. It will be foreclosed for perhaps a generation.

The shame in all of this is that there are men and women who should be called to account for their sexual abuse. It’s just that in the case of Brett Kavanaugh, that real problem has been cheapened and manipulated into a political tool for the purpose of trying to destroy political enemies. It is utterly revolting for it now undermines the credibility of future valid claims of sexual abuse. Let’s hope this entire issue is still fresh on the minds of voters when they go to the polls on November 6.

Read more here.

Can women lie?

Cheryl Chumley writes in the Washington Times,

...If Ford has proof, it should’ve come at the same time as the accusation.

If Ford has a compelling reason why that proof couldn’t come at the same time as the accusation, she should’ve made known that reason.

If Ford has anything, anything at all that could show her claims against Kavanaugh are rooted in fact and truth, she needs to cough it up and cough it up quick. It’s not incumbent on Kavanaugh to prove his innocence.

It is, however, incumbent on Ford to prove his guilt — to prove she’s not lying and using a shameful, despicable tactic to disrupt the Supreme Court proceedings and kill Kavanaugh’s nomination. After all, it may not happen often, but women can indeed lie about such matters. And when they do, they don’t just hurt the accused.

They hurt the real victims, the ones who’ve already come forward in truth and courage to tell their stories of abuse and injustice and, more egregiously perhaps, the ones who are yet to come, and need to be believed.

Read more here.

Fed up with this charade

Roger L. Simon writes at PJ Media,

It took the French Revolution ten years (1789-1799) to go from an idealistic fight for freedom to the one-man rule of Napoleon, but these are fast-moving times and the #MeToo movement has gone from the necessary correction of monsters like Harvey Weinstein to an all-out assault on the rule of law and hatred of the entire male sex in about eighteen months. (Well, it was men who came up with the Magna Carta.)

Think I'm exaggerating? How about the nauseating misandry of the senator from Hawaii, Mazie Hirono? Not only, in the eyes of Ms. Hirono, is Brett Kavanaugh automatically culpable without verifiable corroboration or evidence of any sort beyond a vague accusation nearly four decades old, but all men should "shut up and step up."

Essentially Hirono has gone Comrade Beria one better. "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime" has become: "Show me the man and I'll show you the sex abuser." Proof of the abuse is completely unnecessary. An accusation will suffice. (Where is Torquemada when we need him?)

And she's not alone. That Queen of Hypocrisy Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, longtime buddy of the very Harvey Weinstein and idolator of super randy sex abuser Bill Clinton and his enabling wife, now excoriates Kavanaugh as what we might call "Son of Weinstein," if we were making a horror movie.

Meanwhile, the three then high schoolers -- Mark Judge, Patrick J. Smythe, and close Ford friend Leland Ingham Keyser -- who were supposedly at the party with Ford and Kavanugh where this dastardly deed occurred back in 1982 (if that was indeed the year -- it's far from clear) have all now issued sworn formal denials of having been there or knowing anything about it. Ms. Keyser even denies knowing Kavanaugh at all.

Read the whole thing here.