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The anti-Kavanaugh plan of attack — 130 Comments

  1. “The GOP had better come up with a strategy against this, or it will destroy the party. It may even destroy the country. Maybe it already has.”

    I don’t have an answer. Basically, the game is stacked so that we can’t win. No matter how innocent someone of the right is, the left will lie, and their lie means it must be true. No matter guilty someone of the left is, no amount of truth matters; they never even get investigated, and that built-in, institutional refusal to even investigate their own is even shoved in our face as “proof” of how pure they are.

    We tried to do things the right way – at the ballot box – only to have the left claim it was “Russians.”

    I agree that some percent of this disaster was made by the GOP squishes but some of it comes back to our insistence upon doing the right things, against an enemy that does whatever it needs to to achieve its ends. I just don’t know what to say because of all the things I believe, I believe that one must do the right thing; but when the societal protections that used to allow us that luxury are stripped away – things like due process and respect for constitutional rights for everyone, even Republicans – it becomes a suicide pact.

  2. Why don’t we start digging deeply into each of these accuser’s pasts? Are they saints? Are they above reproach? Why don’t we ever really fight back? This is so frustrating.

  3. If either of them is telling the truth, then they should be blaming the Democrats for treating their stories as fodder for maximum-damage manipulations rather than information to be submitted to the FBI for the background check.

    Kavanaugh has been on Trump’s list for months, and the Democrats have had plenty of time to do research on their own that they could bring forward the minute he was nominated. Feinstein does not care if the information is true or false, only how it might be used. Ironically, Flake, Murkowski, and Collins care more than the Democrats whether it’s true.

  4. KyndyllG:

    That is the dilemma, all right.

    It’s why they say “nice guys finish last.” And they say “fight fire with fire.” And they probably say a lot of other things to that effect.

    But when you match their methods you become what you hate.

    That scene from “A Man For All Seasons” is inspiring, but remember that he ended up being executed.

  5. But if this succeeds, Democrats will do the same to the next nominee unless it is the Democrat’s choice. There is no pulling the nomination to move on. Kavanaugh has to keep going for any hope of restoring his name. If he pulls out, they’ll go after him on the appeals court. And Republicans need to run this out until the voters see it as “America held hostage”.

  6. JK Brown:

    Americans need to say to the Democrats “Have you no shame?”

    But they will not, I fear. Now at least half of America has gone stark raving mad.

  7. One of the theories for mass hysteria (Salem Witch Trials ) was ergotism, but why such a malady (mass hysteria) would just affect progressives in the present age of reason, justice, and discernment is not understandable. (/s)They can’t all be eating contaminated foodstuffs, maybe it’s something in the water (or kool aid) that they drink, or something about the ends and the means.

    They care for nothing but power. They disgust me.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergotism#Salem_witchcraft_accusations

  8. My wife, who has made quite a study of sexual deviancy, said to me tonight that men who do what Kavanaugh allegedly did in HS don’t do what Kavanaugh allegedly did in college. The two behaviors are mutually exclusive. She’s probably correct, but we are operating now in an environment where reason and logic no longer apply.

  9. “The GOP had better come up with a strategy against this, or it will destroy the party. It may even destroy the country. Maybe it already has.”

    The let it burn sentiment, so worrisome to some during the run up to the last election, may have hardly gotten started.

    What’s to save in a relationship where the “personal is the political” party, has made the “good loser” party into an existential enemy plotted for elimination by any means necessary. The conceit of the former has convinced them it is a war which they are not only destined to win, but one which they get to have played out exclusively on their terms – lest the good losers suffer the fate which they fear worse than the deaths of their own culture and families; worse than even a charge of unprincipled hypocrisy – – the charge of “meanness”.

    Oh yes, much better to pull a “Bill” [I’m sure we all recall him] and writhe in your glorious self-abasement, like a dog in shit.

    And why should the left not assume they will have it their way? They have always been given it. Run up to the enemy, slash him, and then fall to the ground screaming that you are the victim; immune from retaliation. Hell, the technique has even been captured on film,as lefties attacked conservative speakers in public.

    It has always worked. And it has worked because conservative inhibitions let it.

  10. DNW:

    Trump was elected because a lot of voters realized some other way of fighting was necessary. Even prior to that, McConnell (whom many on the right felt was a squish) stopped the Garland nomination, which is the sort of move that previous Republicans would have been incapable of. I wonder what will happen now. The GOP must fight this in some sort of unprecedented way. They may realize that.

    I really don’t know, but this editorial appeared this evening in the ordinarily staid National Review, the paper that hated Trump during the campaign:

    Brett Kavanaugh is an excellent jurist who has earned his sterling reputation over decades of public service. If his career is going to be ruined and his reputation besmirched, it should require clear and convincing evidence. We are willing to follow the facts wherever they lead, but so far, they lead only to the belief that this is a disgraceful episode that makes Borking look above-board and responsible by comparison.

    If Republicans surrender on the basis of what we know now, they will face the fury of their own voters — and rightly so.

    Even NR—which represents the GOPe–may be getting a clue about this.

  11. I watched Part 2 of Day 1 of the so-called “hearings,” and all of Day 2. By the end, I was in a grayish, smoggy funk. My mind felt like the bottom of a birdcage, and I felt almost queasy.

    Classic depression.

    Why doesn’t somebody with impeccable Dem credentials (Dersh? He’s already stood up over the specific issue, but…) tell those horrible Senators, who refuse to let the candidate speak but just go on and on and on with the endless browbeating, that they are completely outside the realm of common civility and, yes, decency. You would not let your four-year-old get away with behavior like that!

    Come to that, why the h-e-double-toothpicks doesn’t one of the Republicans on the Committee take his questioning time to make the same point, instead of using most or all of it speechifying directly or indirectly about his own uprightness and/or the uprightness of the Pubs in general. And, of course, about his and their steadfast loyalty to the Constitution, the written one, interpreted according to the Originalism currently fashionable.

    In fact all the R’s on the Committee should get together and make a pact that in their speaking time, each will emphasize directly to the jackasses, in so many words, that their behavior is completely unacceptable.

    Repeat the sentence just above this one, for maximum emphasis.

  12. “Scorched earth” – “any means necessary”

    The progs aren’t going to enjoy what that eventually comes to mean for them.

  13. You fight it by ignoring the accusations that have no corroboration- you stand up for the principle of innocent until proven guilty. That is how you put a stop to it, don’t bend to it in the first place. You simply state clearly that the accusers can’t support their stories with even friendly witnesses, and as such they have no bearing on the qualifications of the candidate. To allow unsubstantiated charges to carry the day literally guarantees a parade of liars at every instance.

  14. The only difference here is that only Republican men are scum; for Democrats, the accusations bounce right off.

    Just going by the last year or so, Al Frankin was forced to resign from the Senate.

    Over in the House, John Conyers Jr was also forced to resign. Ditto for Eric Massa. David Wu too. Ruben Kihuen did not seek re-election.

    Maybe Alcee Hastings has survived (for now) but so far so has Donald Trump.

    People forget, but Barack Obama pushed Anthony Weiner to resign even before his illegal behavior was known. POTUS wanted him out just for the sexting.

  15. Manju:

    The majority of them were considered expendable by Democrats for one reason, and you know what it is: they would not be replaced by a Republican.

    Oh, and one more thing—they were not hounded out because of 35-year-old uncorroborated accusations from high school and college with supposed witnesses who deny that any of it ever took place.

  16. The good news I report is as a life long Democrat, I just voted early and only voted for Republicans. The Dems have lost their minds and I choose not to be part of it. I am not alone in this area. This current smear campaign has HRC all over it and this is a bad tack for the Dems. But it is not over and “we will see”.

    Thenewneo -You have great blog. Clever, insightful and witty, which is in short supply these days!

  17. I don’t have an answer. Basically, the game is stacked so that we can’t win. No matter how innocent someone of the right is, the left will lie, and their lie means it must be true.

    The game is not so stacked. Vague accusations are extremely difficult to refute, but quite easy to fill with your own story.

    You don’t have to prove that he’s innocent. You have to take for granted that he’s innocent, and to call out those accusations as a big hoax coordinated by the Democrat Party and the media, and the accusers as horrible people that lie, maybe because they were paid, maybe because of fanaticism, who cares? What matters is how horrible people they are.

    Of course, you could never present evidence for such a thing. But once it’s accepted that this is a ‘no evidence is required’ game, you can simply dismiss the question: Kavanaugh is the victim and requiring evidence about the Democrat Party fabricating this hoax is blaming the victim. Make people live up to their own book of rules.

  18. Will Roy Moore ever get an apology from backbone lacking republicans who didn’t support him because the “ooh he must be guilty because he has so many accusers, that many poor victims couldn’t be lying at the same time” bull crap. How right the trump supporters were choosing him to be the candidate because they realised only a man who is already wellknown for his notorious playboy lifestyle in contrary could have withstand dirty tactics from the left like this. The more holier than thou you promoted yourself to be in fact makes you the most vulnerable. Can’t wait to see how disappointed it would be for those who praised pence for the extreme measures he took to safeguard his reputation ends up being accused by multiple accusers of rape anyway.

    When will it stop? maybe if some innocent men actually beginning to commit suicide because of the false rape accusations.

  19. Questions for Ford: Given your long interest in the working of the human mind, I have a question. When you think back on your drunken, partying teen years during which someone may have tried to get under your clothes but didn’t, do you ever say to yourself, “Thank God I did not end like Mary Jo Kopechne?” Do you ever question your own behavior and the signals you were sending to teenage boys? What have you done to educate girls about how to behave?

  20. Zero times zero times zero times zero times zero is still zero, zero to the infinite exponent is still zero, when will people start see through this sheer number of accusations equal guilt fallacy that began with Cosby? Because Cosby drugged many women and he was exposed only because of the sheer number of women coming forward that implies any man who gets multiple allegations must all be guilty (regardless of how obviously fabricated all those are).

  21. Title IX was intended to be used by activists to reshape America. Little late to complain about its entirely foreseeable consequences now.

  22. What future potential nominee of a Republican President would ever accept the nomination knowing that the Democrats will generate dirt and destroy their lives in the process? If the Republicans don’t have the votes it would be better to stall the process rather than pull the nomination. They can use this as ammunition for maintaining control of the Senate in the upcoming election. The idea of replacing Justice Scalia with another conservative drove a lot of people to vote for Trump though they were not totally enamoured with him. This process can play out the same way.

  23. Grassley and the Republican leadership in Congress had better be talking to Flake, Collins, and Murkowski to secure their vote. Once they have it then move forward with the vote and confirmation. If, in the face of these shenanigans by the Democrats, they can’t secure their support, then it won’t ever be given. I’m willing to bet that no one, on either side of the aisle, believes these stories.

  24. There’s an old joke about how different political groups react to a terrorist or mugger threatening his family. The liberal ties himself in knots asking abstract, irrelevant questions, the Republican immediately shoots the terrorist and the southern Republican empties two clips into him.

    The different groups switched positions in real life. The Republicans contorted themselves into pretzels trying to appease an accuser with a very suspect story. They became passive and defensive. In contrast, Ellison simply told his accusers to go to hell.

    In the joke, the liberal is useless and pathetic. In real life, Grassley and company were the people without backbones. They have the numbers, but cannot make a decision.

  25. I am Italian, and I’m closely following what’s happening in the USA, since the fight is very similar to that happening in Europe: an elitist class pretending to impose what is socially acceptable even when they lose the elections, and whose force is that they own the media and most public institutions.
    From a certain point of view, your situation is potentially much better since you have a powerful conservative party and tradition – while our conservative stance, at least in Italy, was embedded in the Catholic thought but has crumbled with the present Pope. What I can’t understand is why your side is so passive: you and your leaders talk and write and talk, but very seldom act: when are you going to SUE these leftists, instead of compromise every time? What is Jeff Sessions doing? Why do you leave the media manipulate all issues, without legal reactions?

  26. I’m puzzled by the tone of despair in the comments. The extremity of the Democrats’ behavior — it is impossible to overestimate their cynicism; they outdo expectations every time now — is not going unnoticed in the country. Look at J.H. Corcoran, 3:07 above. Look at Candace. Look at @walkaway. These are the tip of a large iceberg. It is aimed straight at the guts of the Democratic leadership. It will take voter repudiation of politics like the Chrissyblasey gambit, but here comes an election right on schedule. It may take a couple more such repudiations, who knows, but anyone disgusted by this should speak just a little more to his neighbors and friends. That can be hard; we are surrounded by blues in a massively blue city, but sometimes the reception is better than one expects. People do notice and to some, it matters. If those some increase, these gambits get rejected clearly, in the way that matters most in our nation. Paolo, you are so right, and it would be good to get a little leadership from the Republican Party. I assume Trump will be out there more and more. Expat, you have written several posts over the past week that make eloquent points. My 0.02.
    And one last, third cent: the Democrats’ desperation stems from being in the weakest position of political office-holding in nearly a century. They have to uptick at some point, but it does not have to be this November. Republicans are in the strongest shape the party has held in 100 years. The voters are on the side of sanity already.

  27. Two items (have not yet read all the comments, but I do not believe that either of these have been mentioned:

    Advisor to Kavanaugh’s accuser was caught on audio in July predicting a coming plot to destroy nomination

    Link:

    https://www.bizpacreview.com/2018/09/22/advisor-to-kavanaughs-accuser-was-caught-on-audio-in-july-predicting-a-coming-plot-to-destroy-nomination-676531

    and the most depressing essay I have read in recent memory (Victor Davis Hanson):

    https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/23/obama-won/

  28. Paolo, you are right to say that these leftists need to suffer consequences for their evil behavior. How to accomplish that, while keeping our own principles somewhat intact, is the question. The principles are the thing, after all.

  29. ErisGuy:

    Why do you say “late”? The right has been complaining about the lack of due process with Title IX for a long time.

  30. “I’m puzzled by the tone of despair in the comments. ” [Kai Acker @ 8:34 am]

    I suggest that part of the sense of despair comes from the fact that (in Stephen Covey terms) this all falls in our circle of concern, but outside of our circle of influence; we can’t do anything direct about is and so it makes us seem to be battered bout by forces we can’t control.

    We don’t know what Grassley or McConnell are doing behind the scenes, but we know the Republicans have shown a history of folding under such circumstances. The deserve praise for being as tough as they have been so far, and the comment by Grassley (playing 2nd trombone in an orchestra conducted by Schumer) lets us know that he is aware of what’s going on. Hopefully he and McConnell will act on that. They must realize that if they can’t confirm Kavanaugh that they will never ever get a conservative justice confirmed to SCOTUS in the future.

    The most hopeful thing I can say at this point is: “It ain’t over yet.”

  31. “In the joke, the liberal is useless and pathetic. In real life, Grassley and company were the people without backbones. They have the numbers, but cannot make a decision.” [Doug @ 7:33]

    We do not know if they DO have the numbers. The rumor is that Flake has already made it known that he will vote “Present.” If true, Grassley may not have the numbers, while McConnell, with Pence acting as a tie-breaker, might.

  32. Two days I ago I despaired that this situation may bring CW II, now I’m almost certain that is going to be the result. This is going to be a very ugly week, and the left has the upper hand as they have been planning this for months. The GOP has been blindsided.

    The only ray of hope is what was mentioned upthread where it was stated that people may be waking up to the left’s games. My wife despises politics and is more MoR than I am. She hates when I start on a political rant saying “I don’t want to hear about it!” Two days ago she shocked me at dinner when she said, “What do the Dems think they’re doing?” I, in moderate tone, said that they’ve all lost their collective minds. They are filled with hate and rage and that is driving them. I cited what I hear at work (a college) every day. I then stated my fear that this is going to lead to violence and a possible CW. Normally she would scoff at such a statement as she takes the “things always will work out” view 99% of the time. This instance, she paused for about 3 seconds and then said, “Don’t they realize who has all the guns?”

  33. Kate, if the principles you are thinking of are the same ones I am thinking of — the founding principles, what others are there? — would not they be upheld by the fair and equal application of the law? That is why I think, and more-than-half expect, that investigations into Hillary’s server violations, Debbie Wasserman-Shulz’s server and the Awan espionage affair, and perhaps some other scandals along the way will reach fruition. I believe there will be charges. It takes some faith in Jeff Sessions to hold that belief, but I think there is just enough commitment to the truth and to justice to overcome whatever squeamishness also shares space in his personality.

    The case that blows everything out of the water is if the murder of Seth Rich is solved. That one looks like a longshot now, but it defies all probabilities that that awful act was merely an extraordinary coincidence.

  34. Neo, re: your addendum. I spotted this comment at Althouse (lifted verbatim from there) that mirrors your thoughts on the similarity to the Title IX events at colleges:

    Blogger wildswan said…
    This is what has been happening to men in colleges under Title IX. No one much has been paying attention and so it has spread out from there. Maybe men who have been accused of rape and convicted in a Title IX hearing on the uncritically accepted testimony of one or two bitter woman could write in to the Senate and describe the kangaroo court session that devastated their lives. Then the public would see that this awful anonymous unreal accusing by women “recalling” what happened when they were drunk sometimes months after the fact is something that is done fairly often in the universities but only to college men before this. So that this attack on Judge Kavanaugh is really exposing a practice which is ripping apart lives every year in the colleges. And now these Afficted, as they called them in Salem during the witch hunt, are emboldened and looking to get judges. This is what happened in the Salem witch hunt. First it was a few and obscure who were accused and then the Afflicted kept accusing more and more and the group included one minister and then there were hundreds in jail and hundreds accused – including prominent ministers and the wives of prominent politicians. So I am very sorry for Judge Kavanaugh but I see now that in the end some decent person not in college was going to go through this because these Title IX accusers, were always going to look beyond the colleges. And they’ll look beyond judges to Senators and politicians. I’ll laugh when Jeff Flake is accused and then all the idiots who think they can let this happen to Brett Kavanaugh and it won’t happen to them.

    9/23/18, 11:09 PM

  35. People lacks the long term memory that makes precedent matters, democrats can unleash the same smear tactics over and over people will still buy it. The left in America is especially evil, I would not in a million years use the tactics on people who might have killed my entire family that democrats use against republicans. Fu*k them

  36. Hat’s off to Paolo and @T – just read the Hanson essay and didn’t get depressed because I think the Obama neo-Marxist cultural wave has peaked. I leave it to McConnell and the GOP leadership to work out the political calculus with Kavanaugh, but I don’t think the Dems have endeared themselves to the independent voters who decide elections in these SCOTUS hearings. I think the #MeToo movement is rapidly approaching the tipping point like all witch hunts do. Roger Simon had a good article on #MeToo over at PJMedia comparing it to the French Revolution. He ended the article by pointing that Trump’s list of potential nominees has women on it who are younger and to the right of Kavanaugh.

  37. Does anyone have any practical suggestions on what to DO? Lucianne.com has the Senate phone number up. Will calling do any good?

    So far as I know, Ford hasn’t even definitively committed to testifying. Grassley needs to call their bluff, call a vote, and send the nomination to the full Senate.

  38. ” . . . Trump’s list of potential nominees has women on it who are younger and to the right of Kavanaugh.” [Igude @9:44 am]

    That is only important if they can be confirmed. That is why I wrote above(@ 9:10): ” They must realize that if they can’t confirm Kavanaugh that they will never ever get a conservative justice confirmed to SCOTUS in the future.”

    I hope you are correct that the Obama wave has peaked. I suspect that the Kavanaugh nomination is a touchstone and I hope that the Republicans recognize that.

  39. sometimes people just have to ask themselves what is more important? avoiding to confirm someone who might have 1 in million chances be a horny young man in his teens who might have been a bit too touchy feely around girls evidently just as horny after a few drinks, or punishing the opposition party for their nasty maneuvering of bringing up a questionable sexual assault allegations after sitting on it for months to destroy the incentives for being so manipulative in the future?

    What more do you need to exonerate a man when 4 out of 5 of the alibis the woman named said that they had no recollection of such party?

    caving to the left and intentionally not nominating men is playing into the left’s hand. they will find some boy against her like Asia Argento

  40. 1) Listening to talk radio and I haven’t heard people this worked up about Democrat shenanigans.

    2) This is destroying Democrats and Republicans

  41. The “sheer numbers” just makes it look more and more like a witch hunt. All the Dems need are some pitchforks and torches and the tableau will be complete.

    The American public isn’t watching The Handmaid’s Take play out in real time albeit not with the characters we were told were running the cult.

  42. You know how I feel like right now? the brave American soldiers during ww2 before pearl harbor sitting around wondering why America still haven’t enter the war to fight the axis of evil while millions of innocent people are being slaughtered.

    hope Neo doesn’t think I am cultural appropriating by overusing the nazi comparison. However, no matter how you look at it what the democrats are operating in this episode is very Nazi-ish

    Evil prevails when good people do nothing

  43. I’m convinced neither Ford nor this other woman have any real claim against Kavanaugh at all.
    Most likely neither of them ever even met the good man.

    They’re just actresses being coached and used by the DNC to destroy the poor man, and the entire government with him, leading inevitably to the destruction of the rule of law itself, which is their end goal.
    Step 1: delay any confirmation until past the midterms, when they’ll own congress and can block any confirmation based on vote count alone.
    Step 2: block anything the administration tries to get through congress until the 2020 elections when they’ll own both houses AND the presidency.
    Step 3: dismantle the constitution, especially the 1st and 2nd amendments, using their power in congress combined with copious executive orders.
    Step 4: outlaw every other political party.

  44. neo,

    “But when you match their methods you become what you hate.”

    I think it less the method and more the motivation. When a cop kills a criminal it’s not the same as when a criminal kills. Both may use a gun with the result of a dead person. The difference is the moral rationale. When we bombed Dresden and nuked Hiroshima did we become what we hate? We killed thousands of innocents, no less that the Nazis in the attacks on London. Moral intent was the difference, not the methods we employed.

  45. Ronan Farrow broke the Harvey Weinstein scandal into big print. “The New Yorker” published his articles. They deserved some credit for investigative journalism.

    I’m surprised Farrow and “The New Yorker” are now willing burn whatever reputation they have accrued for this flimsy hyper-partisan smear of Kavanaugh.

    This should not be forgotten.

  46. I am beginning to think there is no strategy than can succeed against this in Washington. Maybe the only remedy will be tar and feathers.

  47. I think adult film actor’s former lawyer, Michael Avenatti may have inadvertently saved Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination with his accusations that he participated in multiple gang rapes while in high school.
    I thought I was reading an Onion piece. I think as the accusations have gotten more bizarre, it may finally give those recalcitrant Republican Senator’s the reason to say ‘enough’.
    I think they now have the cover to vote for his confirmation and appeal to the average constituent that this has gone beyond credible.
    And in the process, this utterly unbelievable charge makes suspect the previous charges against Judge Kavanaugh.
    This last accusation will have the effect of peeling off sensible middle of the road voters.

  48. Geoffrey Britain,

    That distinction between Moral intent v. Methods (@ 11:37 am) is spot on. It answers the question of how vanquish an enemy that fights from the gutter. Fighting like him is not being like him.

  49. Just two comments:

    1. Their strong liberal bias is the reason I canceled “The New Yorker” years ago. I liked their cartoons and the “About Town” but I just couldn’t stomach their bias.

    2. I’ve said before and it bears repeating ” The quality of a democracy is only as good as the quality of its voters.’ Right now, I don’t think the quality of USA voters is very good and I doubt it will get any better because the teachers and professors at our schools and universities are brainwashing our young people with their bias. I hope I’m wrong.

  50. John Guilfoyle,
    “The progs aren’t going to enjoy what that eventually comes to mean for them.”

    Bingo.

    Yancey Ward,
    “You fight it by ignoring the accusations that have no corroboration- you stand up for the principle of innocent until proven guilty.”

    As admirable as that principle is, it will not be persuasive to red State dems who pretend at being moderate (84% of Fl Sen. Nelson’s votes were with Hillary) nor blue State RINO’s facing reelection. The democrats are providing the political cover (i.e. excuse) needed to vote against Kavenaugh (Trump).

    Yann,
    “You don’t have to prove that he’s innocent. You have to take for granted that he’s innocent, and to call out those accusations as a big hoax coordinated by the Democrat Party and the media, and the accusers as horrible people that lie, maybe because they were paid, maybe because of fanaticism, who cares? What matters is how horrible people they are.”

    Add to the rationale I offered to Yancey above… the additional fact that the media ensures that the dems propaganda drowns out the facts. The MSM makes sure that only the right has to live up to their own set of rules.

    Dave,
    “When will it stop? maybe if some innocent men actually beginning to commit suicide because of the false rape accusations.”

    Not a chance. After all being ‘deplorable and irredeemable’ they deserved to die…

    expat,

    Attacking the victim!!!?

    Stu,
    “If the Republicans don’t have the votes it would be better to stall the process rather than pull the nomination.”

    That’s exactly what Grassley is doing and getting crucified for it by many on the right.

    steve walsh,
    “Grassley and the Republican leadership in Congress had better be talking to Flake, Collins, and Murkowski to secure their vote.”

    Not as long as the dems continue to provide them even the thinnest of political ‘cover’. Collins, and Murkowski are pro’choice’ pubs and their base opposes Kavenaugh. Flake hates Trump, period.

    Doug,
    “Ellison simply told his accusers to go to hell.”

    It’s zero coverage by the mass media that allows him to get away with that. That’s not going to change.

    Paolo,

    Successfully suing the American media is nearly impossible. The Left has weaponized the media into partisan propaganda outlets. To address that would take a Constitutional amendment that cannot achieve the votes needed to install it. There’s also the issue of unintended consequences in creating such an amendment.

    Kai Acker,
    “People do notice and to some, it matters.”

    In order for that to matter, enough people have to believe it matters and, due to the indoctrination in the schools with each succeeding generation it matters less and less.

    physicsguy,
    “Don’t they realize who has all the guns?”

    Once you’ve rejected logic, reason and basic principles of external reality…

    lgude,
    “I think the Obama neo-Marxist cultural wave has peaked.”

    I’ll be delighted to learn that you’re right and equally surprised.

    Kate,
    “Does anyone have any practical suggestions on what to DO?”
    As T above points out, “this all falls in our circle of concern, but outside of our circle of influence” All we can currently do is vote. The dynamics that have led to Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, Cory Gardner and Lisa Murkowski (dems in repub clothing) are not going to change any time soon. The Marxist Left has created a rigged game, they and the world will reap what they’ve sown.

  51. Ronan Farrow was the guy who exposed Weinstein.

    Now he authors this ridiculous New Yorker article.

    Maybe Weinstein is actually innocent.

  52. Geoffrey Britain:

    You write:

    Successfully suing the American media is nearly impossible. The Left has weaponized the media into partisan propaganda outlets. To address that would take a Constitutional amendment that cannot achieve the votes needed to install it. There’s also the issue of unintended consequences in creating such an amendment.

    It would take a constitutional amendment OR a SCOTUS decision that overruled Sullivan. It was the latter that established the principle that the MSM can’t be successfully sued except in the rarest of circumstances.

  53. Kavanaugh has been on Trump’s list for months, and the Democrats have had plenty of time to do research on their own

    He was on Romney’s list. Have you seen the 2012 Planned Parenthood ad about Roe v Wade? It was a mock NY Times front page showed a 5 to 4 decision to reverse Roe and one of the 5 justices in the photo was Kavanaugh. Produced in 2012.

  54. Ronan Farrow is a mentally unstable individual who is a lovechild of his mother cheating on her current husband with her former husband. The motivation for everything Ronan does is that he has a vendetta against his father who isn’t really his biological father for marrying his non biological sister which is in fact the only normal relationship that profess anything that resembles true love in the whole intricate more complicated than any typical soap opera family history of his.

    My guess is he had a crush on his non blood sister and is envious of his non blood father winning her love.

  55. Geoffrey Britain:

    Moral intent is not the difference.

    Following the rule of law is the difference. The cop is not supposed to go outside the law to kill the criminal. The cop is not supposed to plant fake evidence, or subject even a guilty person to unreasonable search and seizures. It doesn’t matter what the cop’s intent is. That’s why cases are thrown out of court if the authorities don’t follow the proper procedure. That’s what the “devil speech” in “A Man For All Seasons” is about.

    As far as civilian bombings go, during WWII it was generally accepted that it was not immoral to bomb civilian populations, although it was something relatively new. People differ on that, of course. But that was war, and the rules of war are very different than those of civilian life. But still, we try to follow some rules.

    You might say “this is war.” No, war is war. This is a bitter, nasty, and extremely important fight, that may end up in an actual hot war.

  56. “It would take a constitutional amendment OR a SCOTUS decision that overruled Sullivan.” [Neo @ 13:37 pm]

    The Dems are paranoid about Kavanaugh tipping the SCOTUS balance with regard to Roe v Wade. Just hypothesizing, but perhaps they should be more worried that they are making, in Kavanaugh, an enemy of Sullivan. Wouldn’t that be a just dessert?

  57. As far as I know, not a single Democrat has voiced objection to the travesty being played on in the Kavanaugh confirmation process. Their scalp hunters are seeking to overturn bedrock principles of Western Civilization: Innocent until proven guilty, the accuser testifies first, and the accused has the right to face the accuser. Even though such out-moded notions may no longer be taught in our elite universities, they are self-evident truths, understood by swarms of us deplorable dregs.

    The Democrats have jumped the shark. The original accusations were false and unprovable with regard to Kavanaugh, but the actions claimed were well within the realm of possibility, especially among teenagers. The second, “juicier,” set of accusations are a sicko fantasy. The third, by the porn lawyer who claims Kavanaugh was the leader of a pack that gang-raped little girls, is just bizarre.

    The Republicans must point out that the Democrats covet power so obsessively, that they will stop at nothing to get it. The Republican ads should feature Gollum.

  58. Neo,

    “This is a bitter, nasty, and extremely important fight,” Pretty much describes WW II to a “T”. (pardon the pun)

    As per Capn Rusty, “Their scalp hunters are seeking to overturn bedrock principles of Western Civilization . . . .” Sounds pretty much like war to me.

  59. Dave:

    Ronan Farrow has never done anything that indicates mental instability. He is a leftist, however.

    There is no evidence that he’s Sinatra’s child. Only a blood test could say whether that’s true or not. You can’t go just by looks, and anyway, Ronan Farrow actually looks a lot like his mother.

    Ronan’s vendetta against Allen is for the very real pain he put the entire family through when he had an affair with the very young Soon Yi, the daughter of Allen’s girlfriend. Among other things, Allen left hard-core pornographic photos of Soon Yi (full frontal spread-crotch shots) where Farrow would easily see them. Cruel. This, by the way, is all in the court document which you might want to read to get a full picture of what actually happened. Ronan Farrow also believes that his other sister, Dylan, was abused by Allen at the age of 7. She has long been called a liar for this. Whether or not she is I do not know (there are various reasons I believe her, which I’ve written about before on this blog), but it is certainly understandable that Ronan—and every other one of her many siblings except Moses and Soon Yi—believe Dylan and side with her.

    There is nothing sick about that on Ronan’s part. He was a small child when all this happened, and he was faced with a terrible family situation.

    None of that means that I don’t condemn this journalistic travesty, a political hit piece of major proportions.

  60. Perhaps I could sum up what I commented on Ronan Farrow in 1 short sentence.

    Ronan Farrow is the Rosemary’s Baby.

  61. Geoffrey Britain:
    Add to the rationale I offered to Yancey above… the additional fact that the media ensures that the dems propaganda drowns out the facts. The MSM makes sure that only the right has to live up to their own set of rules.

    That’s why you don’t use facts. You use stand-out narratives. This is how Trump won. If you only have one sentence in the sea of mainstream media, you make that sentence count. You need to convey a message so striking that the media can’t help but to reproduce it.

  62. He doesn’t have a problem with his mom cheating on his dad, but holds a deep grudge against his dad for the so called affair with her sister, as inappropriate as it was, has been proven to be a sincere, profound and enduring love sharing by two individuals that has stand the test of time.

    His hatred for his father clouded his judgement on everything that is related to sexual assaults, because he already has a very biased view on it.

  63. Yann:

    I read it long ago, when it first came out.

    No other person in the family backs up Moses’ point of view. No one. There are plenty of other siblings.

    Read that court document I already linked in my comment to “Dave.” It’s here. You understand nothing about this case if you haven’t read it. It has findings of fact in a court of law, not rumors.

    By the way, Moses was adopted very late after a difficult time during his formative years in Korea. I believe he was 5 years old already when adopted. That often goes along with a lot of disturbance.

    And the fact that he has a degree in Marriage and Family Therapy means zero to me in terms of his veracity or his own mental issues. Believe me, I know whereof I speak. I know plenty of MFT-trained people who are quite messed up.

  64. Dave:

    About Ronan’s mom cheating on his dad—

    Read the court document. Woody Allen rejected Ronan (whose given name at the time was “Satchel”) from the start. They had a very disturbed relationship from the start. This is not a matter of dispute; it is among the findings of fact.

    Mia Farrow and Allen were not married and never lived together, by the way. They were indeed in a relationship, however, although except for Dylan and Moses, Allen had virtually nothing to do with any of the children. With Dylan, though, Allen was so strangely close (getting into bed with her in his undershorts, letting her suck his thumb, spending time with her to the exclusion of the others) that a therapist engaged by the family before the split-up and before Allen’s affair with Soon Yi testified in court that Allen had had an inappropriate relationship with her. The therapist had seen Allen and Mia about this problem of inappropriate behavior from Allen for years (as I said, before Mia knew a thing about any affair with Soon Yi). Read the findings of the court on this.

  65. T:

    No, of course it doesn’t describe WWII. It is way too generic. A “fight”—even a bitter one—is not a war. In wars, the m o is to kill.

    Of course you know the difference.

  66. For myself, I have no interest in the Farrow-Allen household and whose child is whose.

    Whatever Ronan Farrow’s motivation might be, he has just taken what was a promising career in investigative journalism and destroyed it.

  67. And with the additional preposterous story today from the porn star’s lawyer that Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were running a gang rape scheme over and over at parties, the hysterical left is now like the crazy guy who drove up from North Carolina to shoot up the pizza parlor in DC where he thought Clinton and Podesta had a child sex dungeon.

  68. Read that court document I already linked in my comment to “Dave.” It’s here.

    I read it long ago too.

    At the end of the day, somebody is lying there. There’s two possible scenarios.

    (1) Mia is an extremely abusive person that creates dependency in their children, and manipulated them into this story.
    (2) Allen is a pedophile and someway he convinced Moses to side with him.

    My opinion is that the scenario (1) is very likely the right one. Why? Moses, Soon-Yi and Allen moved on with their lives. The Farrows kept pursuing. There’s an old tale about Solomon ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_of_Solomon ). He decided that the woman that would beg for the life of the kid was the real mother.

    I’d say, here, the ones that moved on with their lives are likely the abused, and the ones that can’t let them go are likely the abusers. Usually, it’s the abused person the one that moves on and it’s the abuser the one that can’t bear other people moving on from him/her.

  69. As soon as the Republicans agreed to postpone the vote to allow Ford to testify it was obvious that the Democrats’ strategic objective was to run out the clock until the midterms and hope for control of the Senate. Ford’s claims are so preposterously thin and/or Ford is such a basket case that they don’t dare let her make a public appearance. Ford’s unredacted original letter hasn’t even been shown to the Judiciary Committee and I can only think of one reason.
    Grassley must be completely naive (Washington echo chamber? Fear of twitter mob, #MeToo, or women voter backlash? All the above?) to announce that in some few remaining forums rules are rules. Feinstein can’t even claim “excusable neglect” because she sat on the screed for weeks without properly inserting it in the process. Where it could be thoroughly examined. Because she didn’t WANT it thoroughly examined. And now the icing on the cake is that Kavanaugh has to testify first, in a duck hunt that will make Mueller’s investigation pale by comparison. Ironically, all the Senate Democrats have announced that nothing Kavanaugh says will change their vote, making this even more of a show trial.
    Democrats are behaving execrably and have been since 2016; trying to behave like reasonable adults, the Republican leadership has played right into their hands and missed a golden opportunity to enact real change. November is coming and after that we are going to be living in a quagmire of Congressional investigations, impeachment hearings, and blocked legislation as we slouch toward the complete breakdown of the system.

  70. Yann:

    You need to read that court document again, then.

    There’s a ton of corroborative evidence from non-family sources for the inappropriate behavior by Allen towards Dylan. That includes babysitters who observed things and testified, and it also includes the therapist who observed Allen’s behavior and worked with the couple before the infidelity was ever discovered.

    And you are totally wrong about who moves on. It is very easy for an actual perp to move on if the perp isn’t found guilty of anything. Perp’s move on very nicely, because they have no anger at having been betrayed and violated (and often no conscience). But a person who was violated and who never got justice (and is called a liar, to boot) usually or certainly often has tremendous difficulty moving on and a tremendous sense of outrage.

    Allen and Soon Yi weren’t betrayed, Farrow was. Why should they have any trouble moving on?

    Moses is completely alone in his accusations against Mia Farrow and his defense of Allen (except for his wife, Soon Yi). No court has ever found that Mia Farrow was ever anything but a good mother, too. Moses’ position is something like that of Ford re Kavanaugh—none of the other witnesses agree with him (again, except Soon Yi, who has other reasons to want to get Mia Farrow into trouble and can hardly be considered an objective reporter).

  71. T:

    They called it the cold war for a reason.

    Also, the cold war featured a lot of hot wars as part of it, they just weren’t directly between the main parties, they used proxies.

    “War” can be used as a metaphor. But when it’s a metaphor it is not an actual war. The term “cold war” was part metaphor and part actual war, as I just explained.

    The present fight is not a war of any type. Not yet. But it is a very very important and bitter and vicious and dangerous fight nonetheless.

  72. Kate:

    But Ronan probably has only solidified his reputation with those who count, the New Yorker’s audience.

    You are correct, though, that prior to this he was regarded as a fairly objective reporter.

  73. huxley on September 24, 2018 at 11:45 am at 11:45 am said:
    Ronan Farrow broke the Harvey Weinstein scandal into big print. “The New Yorker” published his articles. They deserved some credit for investigative journalism.

    I’m surprised Farrow and “The New Yorker” are now willing burn whatever reputation they have accrued for this flimsy hyper-partisan smear of Kavanaugh.

    This should not be forgotten.
    * * *
    The New Yorker is trying to catch up to the National Enquirer for breaking the John Edwards story, but they forgot the essential part: the NE story was true.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-national-enquirer-got-the-john-edwards-scandal-scoop-2010-3

    “Now the Enquirer is in the running for the Pulitzer. Some critics will say they don’t deserve the prize, since they posted articles from anonymous sources and paid some tipsters for information. But other admired journalists, like the New Yorker’s Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Seymour Hersh, have used anonymous sources, although not without criticism.

    It comes down to whether the Enquirer fulfilled a journalistic mission–and they did. They dug up the truth about a politician who was deceiving his constituents. They combined hard-nosed shoeleather reporting with unconventional (to traditional media) reporting tactics. The Pulitzer board should hand them a prize, unless they are too snobby to give credit where credit is due.”

  74. Just for the record

    https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2018/09/24/new-york-times-commits-journalism-explaining-ignored-farrows-kavanaugh-slander/

    “If the New York Times threw enough resources at the story to interview “several dozen” people and not even manage to meet the Nikki Haley Smear standard, it is pretty safe to conclude that the level of proof used by the New Yorker only passed legal muster because Kavanaugh is a public person and can’t sue them–and he’s a Republican which makes it all okay.”

    https://www.redstate.com/joesquire/2018/09/23/mutliple-outlets-passed-second-kavanaugh-accusation…-new-yorker-run

    “This, to me, is an amazing revelation.

    4. The Ramirez accusation has been floating around several news outlets in the past week, including NBC, NYer, New York Times, & the Washington Post per five sources. Some reporters felt uneasy with it, but it apparently passed the rigorous fact-checking standards of the NYer.

    — Yashar Ali ? (@yashar) September 24, 2018

    That is three major news outlets and a magazine. The three major outlets declined to do anything on the story.

    In a follow-up tweet, Yashar Ali notes that Deborah Ramirez, Brett Kavanaugh’s second accuser, apparently would not talk to the Washington Post or the New York Times. But, she would talk to… the New Yorker? That’s a pretty weird call.

    5. One point of clarification, I understand, per two sources, that Ramirez declined to speak to the New York Times and the Washington Post, about her allegations. So while the accusations were floating around – she only shared her story directly with the New Yorker.

    — Yashar Ali ? (@yashar) September 24, 2018

    Weird unless you take note of who the writers at the New Yorker were: Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer. The two writers who have done a great deal of work in this area of journalism.

    Farrow essentially set off the #MeToo movement with the story on Harvey Weinstein, and Mayer joined him for a massive story that led to the resignation of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

    The fact that other outlets hesitated, especially the Post and the Times, tells you a lot about the strength of the claim.”

  75. Adding weight to the “run out the clock while we find more accusers” plan.

    https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2018/09/23/new.-washington-post-sandbagged-story-might-cleared-brett-kavanaugh

    “If you are keeping score, this makes four people–Brett Kavanaugh, Mark Judge, Patrick Smyth, and Leland Keyser–who have denied this incident ever happened under penalty of perjury. The only person who has not made a statement under oath is…Christine Ford.

    Now the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel reports that the Washington Post knew of Keyser, they knew of her denial, and they refused to report it.”

  76. Also, the cold war featured a lot of hot wars as part of it, they just weren’t directly between the main parties, they used proxies." [Neo @ 2:01 pm]

    Again we will have to agree to disagree. Steve Scalise? Antifa? Not proxies?

    https://www.npr.org/2017/06/16/533255619/fact-check-is-left-wing-violence-rising

    These may not have been done on orders from some central command but IMO they are left-wing proxy violence nonetheless.

    You, of course are entitled to your point of view. To explain my part, I see your definition of “war” as too narrow and restrictive. You seem to see it as m.o.; no killing, no war. I believe that war can be waged in many ways; I see it defined by Geoffrey Britain’s definition of moral intent.

  77. There’s a ton of corroborative evidence from non-family sources. That includes babysitters who observed things, and it also includes the therapist who observed Allen’s behavior and worked with the couple before the infidelity was ever discovered.

    Later on, one of the babysitters, Monica Thompson, declared that Mia pressured them to support her story.
    http://articles.latimes.com/1993-02-02/news/mn-952_1_woody-allen

    And you are totally wrong about who moves on. It is very easy for a perp to move on if the perp isn’t found guilty of anything. Perp’s move on very nicely, because they have no anger (and often no conscience).

    That doesn’t fit.

    I could fit, in case we were talking about one vs one, one sociopath vs one person that gets stuck. But here, you have three people in one side, are the three of them sociopaths with no conscience?.

    On the other side, you had 5 people, Mia, Ronan, Dylan, Lark and Thaddeus. Two of them basically killed themselves, and the other three can’t move on. I can believe that one person can get stuck for decades, but the 5 of them? two killing themselves and three stuck in this issue for decades? It’s too much.

  78. T:

    Those are murders (or murder attempts). A murder is not a war. You can try having words mean what you want them to, like Humpty Dumpty in Alice, but I believe that the word war should be preserved for war, and it is wrong for people to use it for things that are not war, in order to justify something they might want to justify.

    And I believe you have already seen my previous response to GB about moral intent. It stands. You know what they say about the road and good intentions. It’s a proverb for a reason.

  79. Neo and T,

    As for me, I’m trying to understand what is going on and how it relates to my circle of people. I have friends on facebook who have ACTUALLY gone to the Womens marches, wear Notorious RBG shirts and have posted pictures near women with p*ssy hats. What is their role in this war or non-war?

    In every other facet of life they seem normal. But I know I can’t ever expand my relationship with them or be open in my feelings with them.

  80. neo @ 12:37,

    Sorry for any lack of clarity, I was responding to Paulo’s question; “Why do you leave the media manipulate all issues, without legal reactions?”

    Overturning Sullivan would indeed render the media susceptible to potential lawsuits for libeling public figures. But would do little to nothing to hold accountable the media’s lying propaganda or as Paolo put it, “the media manipulate all issues, without legal reactions”…

  81. “Those are murders (or murder attempts).”<Neo @2:32pm]

    Murders inspired by political differences. Just like the murders of the Civil War, WW I, WWII, etc. were all inspired by political differences. Are they not “murders” just because someone has designated them war or do words only mean what we want them to mean?

    Again, you are entitled to your opinion, I mine, and after all, it’s your blog; I only visit here. I’m not saying this is a right/wrong issue. I just find your definition of war too restrictive, you find mine too general.

  82. Yann:

    Read the document I’m referring to. She was never one of the babysitters who testified in court. There were several others. She says they told her this and they told her that, but THEY have never said it.

    I am quite familiar with the dynamics of perp vs. victim and moving on, and I have described the situation as it most often occurs.

    You have obviously bought Moses’ narrative and swallowed it whole. But just to take one example, there is zero evidence (nor does he provide any) for his charge that Lark killed herself. No one else says that, and there is—as I said—zero evidence for it. No one disputes that Thaddeus kills himself, however.

    If my 56-year-old father had cheated on my mother with my sister who was 20 or 21, and left pornographic photos for my mother to see, and also sexually abused my seven year old sister, and then called that sister a liar, you’re darn right I’d have trouble moving on. I’d also have that same trouble if I was the mother of those two sisters.

    There is also zero evidence that the suicide of Thaddeus has to do with the dispute regarding Allen’s alleged abuse. Thaddeus had plenty of other problems, lifelong ones, including being a paraplegic. Here is Thaddeus’ history, by the way:

    Farrow adopted Thaddeus from an orphanage in Calcutta, India, in 1994 at age 12. As a child, Thaddeus was diagnosed with polio and was paraplegic as a result of the disease…

    The longtime activist and actress adopted Thaddeus after she ended her 13-year relationship with director-actor Woody Allen…

    After she adopted Taddeus, Mia, who suffered from polio herself, spearheaded a campaign to rid the world of the disease.

    According to the New York Post, she lost the ability to walk and breathe on her own at age nine and spent three weeks in a hospital’s isolation unit due to the disease.

    ‘I perhaps am more motivated than most people because I had polio myself and it was a real struggle to come through it, and what I saw will never leave me – in the hospitals and in the public wards for contagious diseases,’ she told the Post in 2000.

    ‘Perhaps even more so because I have a son who is only 12 years old and who is paralyzed from the waist down because of polio. “…

    In a Vanity Fair profile from 2013, Thaddeus, who walked with crutches or used a wheelchair at times, said he was studying to become a police officer and working as a car mechanic.

    ‘It was scary to be brought to a world of people whose language I did not understand, with different skin colors,’ he told the magazine of his adoption.

    ‘The fact that everyone loved me was a new experience, overwhelming at first.’

    Thaddeus also spoke about thanking his mother after he had a spiritual awakening the Christmas prior.

    ‘I came back at Christmastime (sic) to tell Mia, ‘I know I never really said thank you, Mom.’ I just let out emotions I would never let myself express. Finally I was able to.’

    Do you have any idea how many difficulties a child like this would be facing, not just from his physical condition but because of 12 years in an orphanage in Calcutta? And by the way, Moses is the only one who ever alleged that Mia Farrow abused Thaddeus in any way. Let me add that Thaddeus was adopted in 1994. At that point Moses was 16 years old. I don’t know when Moses went away to college, but it probably was only a year or two after that. I doubt he observed anywhere near the amount of interaction between Mia and Thaddeus as the other children did, and the other children do not agree with Moses at all.

    Moses was adopted by Woody Allen prior to that court battle, by the way. Moses was the only one of Mia Farrow’s previously-adopted children that Allen allied with and took an early interest in. He apparently saw Moses as an ally early on, or at least somehow special to him.

    I had previously thought Moses was adopted at 5, but I found something just now that says he was adopted at 2. As I said before, Thaddeus was definitely adopted at 12. Moses had (and I suppose still has) cerebral palsy and had come from Korea; my assumption is that Mia also found him in an orphanage. Older adoptions of that sort are always risky in many ways, not the least of them the fact that the children often have trouble bonding to anyone and are psychologically damaged from the outset.

  83. T:

    You’re doing the Humpty Dumpty thing again.

    Words have commonly accepted definitions, and they don’t mean something else even if you want them to. “Murder” does not apply to casualties in war, unless of course there is (for example) a prisoner of war who surrenders and is then murdered by the capturing military. Even then, it’s called a war crime, a somewhat separate category from murder.

    Murder is a civil crime not a military one. It does not occur when troops kill each other in combat. It does not occur when bombing military targets, or even in bombings that are part of a military campaign in an official war, even if those bombings kill civilians.

    Murder is murder. It is not mere killing. Killing is generic. In fact, the commandment “thou shalt not kill” was apparently mistranslated. It actually is “thou shalt not murder.”

    It is not MY definition of murder I’m pushing here. Mine is the commonly accepted one for the word. Yours is the idiosyncratic one.

  84. T:

    By the way:

    According to the Priestly Code of the Book of Numbers, killing anyone outside the context of war with a weapon, or in unarmed combat, is considered retzach, but if the killing is accidental, the accused must not leave the city, or he will be considered guilty of intentional murder. The Bible never uses the word retzach in conjunction with war.

    “Retzach” is the word used in the commandment.

  85. neo @ 12:48,

    Arguably, is not moral intent the underlying basis of the rule of law? The procedures you cite are intended to preventing a cop from acting as a vigilante, which is regarded as immoral in and of itself.

    The rules of war are indeed different than those of civilian life but that doesn’t preclude Western civilization having embraced the Geneva Conventions, which is an implicit declaration that moral considerations fully matter in war as well.

    This is indeed “a bitter, nasty, and extremely important fight”, that will almost certainly end up in an actual hot war because the fanatical Left will have it no other way. Commitment to “by any means necessary” ensures it. Does anyone here imagine that the Left’s treatment of Kavenaugh plumbs the full depth of their depravity? 50+ MILLION slaughtered innocents argue otherwise. 100 MILLION dead and over a BILLION lives enslaved confirm it.

    Given the antithetical principles on each side, our coming civil war is no more avoidable than was our first.

    When the disagreement is profound enough, it can only be settled through force of arms. Would that it were otherwise but fanatical totalitarian movements and ideologies inherently consist of “there can be only one”.

  86. Neo,

    So do you not believe that the fundmental values of western civilization and its rule of law are at stake here?

  87. T,

    As it relates to my life, me and my daughters are not affected. You can draw up the case that Bork was the point you are making. You can say that the budget battle and the government shut downs were. Or… the election of Obama himself.

    In the scale of things if Kavanaugh does or does not get confirmed – it is a serious indicator but maybe we should all step back and realize the decline or incline or whatever we are on started many moons ago and we have to do the best we can for our families.

  88. “. . . realize the decline or incline or whatever we are on started many moons ago and we have to do the best we can for our families.” [Baklava @3:27 pm]

    I agree. And, in fact, Neo herself has discussed this Gramscian march through the institutions in many, many posts. Whether we focus on the Bork hearings, or take it all the way back to Woodrow Wilson, it is clear that this, as you say, started many moons ago.

  89. t:

    You write, “So do you not believe that the fundmental values of western civilization and its rule of law are at stake here?”

    I have made it crystal clear that I do believe that, and what’s more that I have for quite some time. Your question is irrelevant, though, to the question of the definition of the word “war.” It has a specific definition. If people are using it as a metaphor, than it’s a metaphor, but people seem to be saying that this is an actual war at this moment in time. It is not.

  90. I linked to the post by Sarah Hoyt on the “Second Accuser” thread, but I think this comment is relevant here as well. It kind of relates to the latest by VD Hanson “Obama Won.”

    https://accordingtohoyt.com/2018/09/24/outsourced-violence/#comment-557705

    herbn | September 24, 2018 at 2:05 pm | Reply
    “When was the last time someone replied to a “Can I…?” with “It’s a free country.” ?

    Probably about the same time the phrase “Don’t make a federal case out of it” disappeared.

    Or about the same time the Left won (and they have) by making sure the personal became the political. Before you dispute the Left has won at least on that front consider right now politics is front and center in the NFL, movies, comic books, the Linux operating system, and Dungeons & Dragons with failure to have the right politics meaning you are being pushed out of each of those areas.”

  91. Neo,

    My question is hardly irrelevant.

    If one believes that the fundamental values of western civilization and its rule of laws are at risk, then the legalistic definitions you proffer, coming from that rule of law, are only of value if that rule of law can be maintained; they become meaningless if we lose that war because then the real Humpty Dumpty variable definitions take over. Likewise, the classic “we are better than that” approach (I’m not here implying that you espouse it) is ultimately doomed to failure when it fights an enemy (not adversary) whose motto is “by any means necessary.” The fact that so many people refuse to see this as a war is what ultimately leads to the real killing.

    As the late Charles Krauthammer noted: “Republicans think Democrats are wrong. Democrats think Republicans are evil.” This, then, goes back to Geoffrey Britain’s discussion of moral intent (as opposed to good intentions).

  92. T:

    In times of war martial law is often used and abused; military tribunals, summary execution, suspension of habeas corpus, internment of suspect populations you know the list. Don’t be coy and play Humpty Dumpty with our hostess.

  93. T,
    “Just hypothesizing, but perhaps they should be more worried that they are making, in Kavanaugh, an enemy of Sullivan. Wouldn’t that be a just dessert?”

    Someone on another blog pointed out that McConnell can recess the Senate for even just ten minutes and during that recess, Trump can then make a recess appointment of Kavenaugh to the Court. Only good for 4 years but what havoc upon the Left could five justices seeking revenge visit upon the Left?

    Yann,
    “That’s why you don’t use facts. You use stand-out narratives. This is how Trump won. If you only have one sentence in the sea of mainstream media, you make that sentence count. You need to convey a message so striking that the media can’t help but to reproduce it.”

    Trump was the republican nominee, so they had to cover it. That is not the case with 95% of today’s coverage, which in the mass media is negatively slanted if they even report it at all. I’m not suggesting it not be employed, I simply don’t see it as being as effective as you do.

    MOS,
    “Grassley must be completely naive (Washington echo chamber? Fear of twitter mob, #MeToo, or women voter backlash? All the above?) to announce that in some few remaining forums rules are rules.

    OR… he’s trying to maneuver Flake, Collins and Murkowski into a position where the political cover is too thin for them to take what for them is the safe route and vote against Kavenaugh.

    Baklava,

    “we have to do the best we can for our families”

    Yes but that includes long term as well as short term considerations. Ayers and Doryn opined in the 1970s that up to 25 Million Americans would have to be sent to the killing fields. Surely you don’t imagine that their brand of radicalism has since lessened? Protecting our families has to consider the path upon which the left has embarked us and especially the end of that path; “imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever”.

  94. Someone at Hoyt’s place also referenced this old essay by Margaret Atwood, who manages to be the Ultimate Goddess for the Left when LARPing is wanted, at the same time she is accused of being a Bad Feminist for advocating fair treatment for alleged sexual offenders.

    Go figure.

    https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/am-i-a-bad-feminist/article37591823/

    “My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They’re not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn’t need a legal system.

    In November of 2016, I signed – as a matter of principle, as I have signed many petitions – an Open Letter called UBC Accountable, which calls for holding the University of British Columbia accountable for its failed process in its treatment of one of its former employees, Steven Galloway, the former chair of the department of creative writing, as well as its treatment of those who became ancillary complainants in the case. Specifically, several years ago, the university went public in national media before there was an inquiry, and even before the accused was allowed to know the details of the accusation. Before he could find them out, he had to sign a confidentiality agreement. The public – including me – was left with the impression that this man was a violent serial rapist, and everyone was free to attack him publicly, since under the agreement he had signed, he couldn’t say anything to defend himself. A barrage of invective followed.

    But then, after an inquiry by a judge that went on for months, with multiple witnesses and interviews, the judge said there had been no sexual assault, according to a statement released by Mr. Galloway through his lawyer. The employee got fired anyway. Everyone was surprised, including me. His faculty association launched a grievance, which is continuing, and until it is over, the public still cannot have access to the judge’s report or her reasoning from the evidence presented. The not-guilty verdict displeased some people. They continued to attack. It was at this point that details of UBC’s flawed process began to circulate, and the UBC Accountable letter came into being.

    A fair-minded person would now withhold judgment as to guilt until the report and the evidence are available for us to see. We are grownups: We can make up our own minds, one way or the other. The signatories of the UBC Accountable letter have always taken this position. My critics have not, because they have already made up their minds. Are these Good Feminists fair-minded people? If not, they are just feeding into the very old narrative that holds women to be incapable of fairness or of considered judgment, and they are giving the opponents of women yet another reason to deny them positions of decision-making in the world.

    The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn’t get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? The legal system can be fixed, or our society could dispose of it. Institutions, corporations and workplaces can houseclean, or they can expect more stars to fall, and also a lot of asteroids.

    If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers? It won’t be the Bad Feminists like me. We are acceptable neither to Right nor to Left. In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. “

  95. T:

    That’s sophistry.

    War means war. It doesn’t just mean “really really really vitally important fight.”

    Look, I’m not trying to pick on you. But I do NOT think that the reason people don’t take this seriously (the ones who don’t, that is) is because we don’t use the word “war” to apply to it.

  96. Neo,

    One of the differences between a war and a fight is that most often after a fight one can go on living the life they were living before the fight. The aftermath of a war is very different. If you lose a war your entire life changes. Whether one gives up assets or not, one can not continue as before (Think Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Deep South). That’s precisely what we see now; one already cannot live as we did just 10 or 15 years ago.

    Om mentions military tribunals above; how about campus kangaroo courts accusing men of sexual harassment? Suspension of habeas corpus? How about Nassely Nasely and the video that “instigated” the Benghazi uprising.

    These things are happening now because too many people think that even if we lose this “fight” life will go on as it has; after all it’s only a fight. I do reject the sophistry label, though.

    Apologies. Wrote this quickly. Gotta go. Will be back later

  97. T:

    Another difference between a war and a fight is that in war the combatants ordinarily wear uniforms.

    But that doesn’t mean that anyone who wears a uniform is in a war.

    Look, you can set up all the false comparisons you want. It is sophistry.

    You are of course free to use idiosyncratic definitions of words. But I believe it doesn’t help people understand you or respond to you. I think it is best to call things exactly what they are. Things can be very very bad without being an actual war.

  98. Thanks Carl in Atlanta, I’ll have to YouTube it because my fantasy football counts on me watching the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. LOL

  99. T,
    In the middle of this war, I am saving thousands of dollars per month. 🙂 Tough war. I’m middle class.

    I surely want these shenanigans by the Democrats to end – but they won’t. They will do ANYTHING to gain control. We have to spread the word that we will do to best we can for our families with or without the right leaders in place.

  100. NEO — re the Woody Allen tangent in here — when you say “I read it long ago, when it first came out,” it sounds like you are referring to something other than the blog account that Moses only recently published. That is the link given by Yann’s 1:08 comment. Plenty of Woody Allen’s behavior was creepy or at least unsettling, but it is obvious from Moses’ account that Judge Elliott Wilk was conned by Mia Farrow. The rehearsing Moses experienced was revolting; and Mia’s own family background raises a lot of red flags as well. That Judge Wilk simply dismissed the Yale-New Haven report as “sanitized” — what was that about? Sanitized when it said Mia Farrow had coached Dylan? Maybe it was just an obstruction to Judge Wilk fully expressing how repugnant he found Woody Allen to be. Moses directly contradicts, with specific anecdotes, several of the assumptions Judge Wilk made.

  101. T:

    You have found the path to Mt Hyperbole, The high place where everything is cut and dried and there are no colors; only black and white.

    Let me know when the firing squads come to your neighborhood, or are you of the BLM persuasion already. You didn’t mention the internment of the Japanese American citizens by FDR. Maybe you can see them from your lofty vantage point?

  102. Kai Acker:

    I’m referring to everything Moses Farrow has written or publicly said on the subject. It started around 2014, to the best of my knowledge (see this). I also read his May 2018 piece when it first came out. That was three months ago, which I suppose is only “long ago” in terms of comparison to today, when Yann linked it, and all the things that have transpired since. I called it “long ago” because I wanted to make it clear that I was quite familiar with it and had read it at the outset. Obviously wasn’t all THAT long ago, but it sure feels like long ago right now. So much keeps happening.

  103. Kai Acker:

    One more thing—it’s not the least bit obvious that Judge Wilk was conned by anyone. Did you read his report? He wasn’t basing his judgment on Mia Farrow’s word. He based it heavily on reports of other people, including and in particular the therapist who had treated the family for about 2 years prior to the abuse allegations, and had long observed Woody Allen’s interactions with and around the child (Dylan), and how he spoke of her. There were plenty of other witnesses to Allens’ inappropriate behavior. No witnesses at all ever said that Mia Farrow was abusive. No evidence for anything Moses has said about her (or about the death of his sister), no corroboration of any sort (except a little bit from Soon Yi, not exactly an unbiased source). Why would you believe him? I find such a belief extremely mysterious.

    The Yale report had these problems:

    A child psychiatrist testified yesterday that experts at Yale-New Haven Hospital had mishandled interviews and used faulty methodology to conclude that Woody Allen had not molested his 7-year-old daughter, Dylan.

    Testifying at the custody trial of Mr. Allen and Mia Farrow, the psychiatrist, Dr. Stephen Herman, called the Yale report “seriously flawed.” He said the investigators had developed questionable interpretations of many of Dylan’s statements to them, inappropriately destroyed original notes of the meetings and leaped to unsubstantiated conclusions about people whom they had not even interviewed.

    Nevertheless, the psychiatrist took issue with how the Yale team interpreted its findings, especially regarding what Dr. Herman said the report characterized as Dylan’s “loose thinking” and inability to tell a story consistently. He said anecdotes the Yale team cited as evidence of thought disorders — like Dylan’s reference to having found “dead heads in the attic” of Ms. Farrow’s country home — had logical explanations. Judge’s Consternation

    Ms. Farrow, in a brief re-appearance on the witness stand on Monday, had testified that she kept wigs on dummies’ heads in a trunk in the attic, and that Dylan had been taken aback the first time she saw them.

    “There is no evidence from reading this report that the child has thought disorder,” Dr. Herman said.

    Somewhere—although I can’t recall where and don’t have time to find it now—I read more about the report, and it seemed a whitewash to me. They came to conclusions about things they simply knew nothing about, and there were a lot of people they never interviewed.

  104. T:

    Personal note: my late father didn’t speak to much about being wounded by a mortar while serving in France as a machine gunner in WWII, After the war he was a guard at for a while at Ft. Leavenworth, The inmates included rapists, murderers, black marketeers, all US soldiers, The Army hanged the worst. Your examples of injustice by the left are not correlative to martial law.

  105. Neo, that “child psychiatrist” who criticized the Yale-New Haven report was Mia’s own hired witness. Yes, I read the court ruling from Judge Wilk — much of it reads ludicrously in company with Moses’s description of their family life. His version may not have a lot of backup, in your view, but since three of his siblings died at early ages, one or two by suicide, some of the backup potential is unavailable.

  106. Btw, in my view one of the clearest proofs that Ronan Satchel is Frank’s son, besides his matching blue eyes, is that he couldn’t stand Woody (supposedly his biological father) and kicked him every time Woody stood faithfully alongside Satchel’s bed when the boy was getting up in the morning, trying to follow one of the (many) psychologist’s recommendations for a better “relationship.” : )

  107. Kai Acker:

    What would you expect, that someone hired by Woody Allen would discredit the report? Surely you’re not naive enough to think that expert witnesses don’t favor one or the other side. That’s why both sides call them, you read their reports and/or listen to their testimony and on what it’s based, and you decide who is more credible.

    As I said earlier, a while back I read some of the records to this case, including some of the facts about the psychiatrists’ reports. The Yale report was singularly unconvincing, not just because that other shrink said so, but because on studying all the facts and testimony at hand I concluded the criticism was correct.

    I read Wilk’s report, both long ago and recently, and I have no idea what you’re talking about. It does NOT read like anything Moses says, and certainly nothing in there is remotely corroborative of anything Moses said about Mia that was critical. Au contraire.

    And no, it was only one by suicide, unless you want to believe Moses’ completely and totally uncorroborated report of what happened. As I said before, he is 100% alone in this and doesn’t even bother to offer a single piece of evidence to back it up. The siblings didn’t die “at early ages” in the sense of being children, either. The custody battle and Woody’s affair with Soon Yi occurred in the early 90s. The separation between Mia and Woody occurred at the same time.

    The three deceased children of Farrow’s are Lark, Thaddeus, and Tam. Lark died in December of 2008 at the age of thirty-five. She was one of the older kids, the first adopted child actually, adopted when Mia was married to Previn. At the time of the custody hearing she would have been nearly twenty years old, and she lived about fifteen more years after that (she had AIDS, and apparently died of an AIDS-related illness). She had had plenty of time to go on record against Mia if she wanted to, but she did not. She was the mother of two teenage children at the time of her death.

    The second death of Mia’s children was Thaddeus (I already wrote a lot about him in an earlier comment). He committed suicide in 2016 at the age of 27. No child, although certainly young to die. He had been adopted (as I already said) at the age of 12 in 1994, so it was after all the custody battles and abuse allegations. But between then and 2016 he certainly had ample opportunity to back up Moses’ claims, and as an adult. He never did.

    Then there is Tam, the daughter Moses claims killed herself. She apparently died of heart failure at the age of 19 in the year 2000 (from a heart condition she was supposedly born with—she was also blind, by the way, which I believe Moses fails to mention). That would have made her around 11 or 12 at the time of the custody fight. She also had opportunity (although not as much as the rest of them) to make allegations against Farrow. She did not. There is zero support for Moses’ claim. Mia often adopted children with physical problems (that includes Moses, who had cerebral palsy) as well as older children. That population is greatly at risk for both physical and emotional problems later in life.

    As for the surviving children who might agree with Moses’ story but do not, there are 10 of them (originally 14, with 3 dead and one being soon Yi), all adults now. That’s a lot of people who disagree with Moses.

    I don’t know why you persist in believing the unsubstantiated and uncorroborated solo story Moses tells.

    And no, it’s not my view that Moses’ accusations are uncorroborated. They are indeed uncorroborated, except to a very small extent (not all of them, just some of them) by Soon Yi, who is not an objective witness.

  108. Neo, you’ve lost me. Of course the judge’s version is opposite to Moses’s–that was my point in saying that it reads ludicrously when one is read alongside the other. I think Moses’s has the ring of truth.

    So your “au contraire” is absolutely right. Because a reading of both those documents, one from someone who lived there, the other by someone relying on whichever testimony he decided to believe, leads to opposite conclusions. Mine is that devious Mia — proven devious, ask Dory Previn — conned that judge, probably with ease. His version sounds silly, mommy good, daddy bad. Moses’s just sounds much more realistic, to me. And not too good, which may factor into those not-suicide deaths at early ages. Or maybe not.

    Moses’s version does not exonerate Woody, in my view. I don’t know what Woody did, and I agree with you that there is some disturbing testimony about how Woody related with Dylan from the earliest ages. But, without going back again to check on this, I believe all of the findings of the judge in that regard were drawn directly from Mia.

    The justice was blind on this one, imo. Read Moses’s account again and tell me you think Judge Wilk had Mia pegged correctly. I don’t know why you persist in disbelieving every aspect of the account of this particular child, now a mature man. In favor of “experts” who contradict one another. Does it matter that the state of New York Social Services also found no basis to the Dylan claims? I don’t care about that one myself, in trying to figure this out, but they are experts, by some definition.

  109. Kai Acker:

    Why don’t you go back and read the judgment yourself? I read it two days ago, every word. And the reason I read it was because I had read another defense of Moses’ point of view, and I wanted to review the report and not rely on my memory of reading it years ago.

    The report is even more negative about Allen than I had remembered. There is nothing and no one that corroborates Moses’ story. I’m not wasting any more time on this. You’re free to disagree with me, of course. But I’ve done my homework on this, and I’ve done it recently as well.

    No, it means zero that they could not substantiate the claims. That happens all the time. I’ve been part of research in this field, both the legal and the psychological aspects of it, and I’m well aware of how difficult it is to legally substantiate and “found” claims of child abuse. I know how incompetent the authorities are at times, but at other times their hands are tied because it is a he-said-she-said game with little physical or forensic evidence, and very young children giving testimony, which is also difficult to evaluate.

  110. Kai Acker:

    And Farrow’s having an affair with Previn while he was married of course was devious. But it has nothing to do with conning a judge about custody over twenty years later. Mia of course is capable of lying, but as I have said before if you read that report you will see independent corroboration of some of the problems involving Woody and his relationship with Dylan, based on the reports of others and in particular a therapist who worked for quite a while in therapy with the family—and that includes direct observation of and conversations with Woody over a long time. That therapist had very little to say about him that was good. In fact, he sounds quite disturbed as a parent.

  111. They both stunk, in my view. Anyway, for anyone following this tangent, it makes sense to read both documents before drawing your conclusions. The train set that was not in the “attic,” which was only a crawl space; Moses’ heartfelt tone…. oh, whoops, I am arguing again. Woody sounds selfish and possibly perverse; Mia sounds selfish and Mommie-dearest monstrous. Thanks for dancing with me, Neo!

  112. Kai Acker:

    Dylan was 7 years old when she gave her testimony. It is not surprising that she might conflate some things. It does NOT mean she’s telling the truth, of course. But it definitely does not invalidate her testimony. As I said (many times already), reread that Wilk report and you’ll see that it presents a convincing case that something very fishy was up with Allen vis a vis Dylan, as well as with Allen and virtually all the other kids (with the exception of Moses, interestingly enough). And leaving those photos for Mia was certainly depraved. I’m amazed she retained any sanity at all.

  113. “Another difference between a war and a fight is that in war the combatants ordinarily wear uniforms ” [Neo @ 4:15 pm]

    WIth all sincere respect, this is a stretch. Sometimes they wear uniforms, sometimes they wear the enemies’ uniforms, sometimes they wear civilian clothes.

    “But that doesn’t mean that anyone who wears a uniform is in a war.”

    The converse is also true, just because they don’t wear a uniform does not mean they are NOT at war. Are we in a war with terrorists? I think we are. What is ISIS’s uniform?

    “I think it is best to call things exactly what they are.”

    I believe that is precisely what I am doing. You disagree. Again, that is your prerogative.

    Several years ago I argued with a commenter here over illusionistic art. My position was that it was one of many points of view; the other commenter, however, was wedded to the belief that good art should only be, and was only, illusionistic. There was no winning that argument because s/he was already indebted to a certain point of view. Likewise, your point of view is legalistic. Your definitions seem to derive from a very precise legal use of the particular words under contention. Your own training has structured those definitions. They are not “wrong,” neither do they make me “wrong.”

    I think it’s fair to say that we see the same conflict from two distinctly different points of view. I offer my ideas in good faith. That we disagree is not sophistry on my part; I’m sorry that you believe it is.

  114. T:

    I was taking a fairly absurd comparison—the wearing of uniforms—and making the point that just because two processes share a trait doesn’t mean there’s any unity between the two processes.

    And I don’t mean your arguments are meant to deceive or anything of that sort. I absolutely believe you are making what you think are good arguments, in good faith. I apologize if my using the word “sophistry” indicated otherwise. By using the word “sophistry” I meant to indicate the first of these two definitions, the part in italics here: “Sophistry is reasoning that seems plausible on a superficial level but is actually unsound, or reasoning that is used to deceive.”

    I think the stress of the last week or so may have gotten to all of us, including me.

  115. T:

    By the way, the answer to the question of whether we are at war with terrorists is not clear or easy. I would say “no, but almost,” because I think the word “war” can only rightly be used against state actors. A better term would be “guerilla war”—that is, they are in a guerilla war against us. But maybe that’s not even right, because they target almost exclusively civilians, although they sometimes target military if military are nearby and/or vulnerable (as in Iraq). We are in an intelligence and financial operation against them, and a series of actual wars that are now officially over but were against countries (like Afghanistan) that we thought harbored them, and a large police action that in many cases doesn’t follow the rules for fighting lawful enemy combatants in war,

  116. The stress of the past week . . . a la Stephen Covey and the circles of influence and concern. It’s been difficult to watch when one would like to jump into the fray and with a slap to the back of Grassley’s head declare: “Let me show you how it’s done. Here, hold my beer.”

    I can’t tell you how many of the world’s problems I’ve solved (over which I had no influence whatsoever. with 3:00 am discussions just like this.

    No harm, no foul. Thank you, as always, for the opportunity to stretch the mind.

  117. The stress of last week, and Stephen Covey’s circles. It’s frustrating to have an issue we care about so much but are powerless to do anything about.

    There is never harm nor foul here. I always appreciate having such an open forum to test ideas and flex minds. I can’t begin to count the number of world problems I and my colleagues have solved at 3:00 am with discussions just like this, although they usually included some form of fermented or distilled grain.

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