The Kavanaugh-Ford hearings

I have little more to say about this. The whole spectacle sickened me; both participants were ill-used by the cynical politicians on both sides of the aisle. Perhaps the closest to what I would say if I could write more about this is summed up in Andrew Sullivan's perceptive piece yesterday: Everyone Lost in the Ford-Kavanaugh Hearings.

The fundamental principle of American law

It is a fundamental principle of English and America law, perhaps THE fundamental principle of English and America law, that a defendant is presumed innocent until PROVED guilty in a court of law. It is the principle that separates us from totalitarian regimes and banana republics and simple lynch mob rule. And we seem to have lost it.

I have no idea whether Professor Ford’s accusation is accurate, or whether she misremembered the facts and the people involved, or whether she made it all up. AND NEITHER DOES ANYONE ELSE!! Yet millions of our supposedly well-educated and sophisticated citizens, based on nothing more than what they have heard in the media or from friends, or what they want to believe for partisan or gender reasons, are absolutely sure (a) that her accusation is accurate, or (b) that she is lying, or at least has a faulty memory.

In fact, as several prosecutors have said in public, this is not a case any prosecutor would take – there simply isn’t any evidence, it is too far in the past and memories are unreliable that far in the past, she can’t remember when or where the party occurred or how she got to or from the party, and the three people she remembers as being there all claim under oath that they don’t recall any such party. No court in the land would convict on such flimsy hearsay evidence. Yet millions of citizens, and most of the media, are perfectly willing to convict.

This is trial by lynch mob, except that the rope has been replaced by the media and social media. And it is disgusting and immoral, just as it was when Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined careers with his unsubstantiated accusations. If this is what the nation has come to, then worrying about what Trump may do next is the least of our worries, because we really will have become like Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union or the Salem witch trials or Orwell's 1984 where anyone can be ruined simply by being denounced by someone.

Pardon my cynicism but…..

Professor Christina Ford, Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser, claims that she didn’t originally want to come forward, and had asked that her July 30 letter to Senator Feinsetein, and her contacts with The Washington Post, which according to the Post had been going on for several weeks before her name became public, be kept confidential, because she didn’t want the media and public attention on her family and herself (a wise decision). She claims she only came forward once she was outed by the press.

A question no one seems to be asking is just who outed her? Did she out herself? Did someone in The Washington Post reveal her name? Did someone in Senator Feinstein’s staff leak her name? Senator Feinstein says she forwarded the letter to the FBI. Did someone in the FBI leak the name?

If in fact Professor Ford herself is the one who actually outed herself, after claiming that she wanted to stay anonymous, then I would grow suspicious of her motives and veracity.

If Senator Feinstein or someone on her staff leaked the name to the press, this suggests the whole scheme has been pretty dirty politics, and Senator Feinstein’s claim that she withheld the letter from her colleagues because she keeps her word rings pretty hollow, and she sacrificed Ford’s anonymity for her own political purposes. Perhaps I am too cynical, but after her deceitful behavior last week I wouldn’t put it past her.

If someone in The Washington Post staff leaked the name, it certainly doesn’t make the Post look very good.  But then, the Post has hardly been impartial in this whole affair, or on much of anything in the Trump administration.

If someone in the FBI leaked the name, this is really serious. The FBI is already in trouble for deliberate, politically-motivated leaking. This shows the problem is even worse than we thought.

It seems to me we ought to be asking exactly how Professor Ford’s request for anonymity was subverted. It might make a great deal of difference in how we interpret her allegations.

The new McCarthism

It occurred to me, after I wrote the preceding post, that I am old enough to have seen this movie before, in the days of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the “Red Scare”.

Just as in the 1950’s the public was swept up into an emotional fear of Communist spies and sleeper agents embedded everywhere in American society, today we have the emotional #MeToo movement sure that every powerful man has been harassing the women around him.

Just as in the 1950’s the simple accusation that someone was a Communist sympathizer was enough to get them fired and blacklisted, without any proof being required, so today the simple accusation that a man has harassed or sexually exploited a woman is enough is some quarters to get him fired, without any due process or proof required.

Just as it was almost impossible to prove one wasn’t a secret communist agent (proving a negative is almost always difficult if not impossible), so today it is almost impossible for a man to prove he hasn’t harassed a woman, especially since it is almost always done without witnesses, so it is simply his word against hers.

Just as then there were in fact enough actual communist spies and agents around to make the accusation plausible and creditable, so today there are enough actual proven cases of men using their power to sexually exploit woman to make the accusation plausible and creditable against any just about any adult male.

And just as Senator McCarthy saw how to weaponized this fear and mob justice to advance his own career, so today people have weaponized the #MeToo movement to use against any opponent. If you can’t bring your opponent down with such tactics, you can certainly ruin their reputation, because the gullible public will generally believe, without proof, that “where there is smoke there must be fire”, so the accusation alone is enough to do the damage. And if you need a little more leverage, just pay or persuade a few more women to come forward with the same accusation, because apparently numbers of accusations can substitute for actual proof in most people’s minds.

Think of this as you watch Monday’s Kavanaugh-Ford hearings.

The kangaroo court

Well, I see that Senators are going to call both Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh and his accuser, Professor Christine Ford, to testify under oath on Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Considering the travesty that was the four days of Kavanaugh examination before this same committee last week, with endless public outbursts in the gallery and grandstanding by Senators on both sides of the aisle, this looks to me like nothing more than a highly partisan kangaroo court.

What, exactly, can come out of such a hearing? Ford makes the accusation, but claims she can’t remember the year it took place, the house it took place in, how she got to the party, how she got home from the party, or apparently how many people were in the room with her (she now claims two, but when she told her therapist about this some years ago, she said there were four.)  How is Kavanaugh to refute such vague claims? Predictably partisan groups have begun lining up on both sides. 63 women who knew Kavanaugh over the years, including when he was in high school, claim he has never been more than a gentlemen. Now a group of Holten Arms alumni have sided publically with Ford, who was a student there. All very emotional, but none of it is proof one way or the other. Nor is any such proof likely to emerge from the hearing. She will claim it happened. He will claim it didn’t, and none of us will know anything more than we know now.  But liberals will be absolutely sure (without proof) that she is telling the truth, and conservatives will be absolutely sure (without proof) that she is not.

But of course Democrats will have accomplished what they set out to accomplish – to stain the reputation, and perhaps prevent the seating on the Supreme Court, of a distinguished jurist with whom in fact they only have a few policy differences.  It’s disgusting, completely at variance with the principles of American law (presumed innocent until proven guilty), and worthy of some third-world despotism or police state.  Liberals think Trump is destroying democracy. From my point of view democracy has already been pretty well destroyed in Washington, and liberals are as much to blame as conservatives.

As I say, it is disgusting and everyone involved, on both sides of the aisle, ought to be ashamed of themselves. The drive for power in Washington politics has become so all-consuming that common decency has been completely lost and mob rule and trial by social media has taken its place.

Pity the next liberal Supreme Court nominee

The current battle over Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court has gotten about as dirty as it can get. Between Senator Cory Booker’s fake “I’ll release confidential documents no matter the consequences to me” grandstanding (the documents weren’t confidential, and in any case he had cleared their release with the Committee Chairman that very morning) , Senator Kamala Harris’ setup photo of Kavanaugh not shaking the hand of the parent of a Parkland shooting victim (Harris arranged for photographers to witness the parent ambushing Kavanaugh as he was leaving the Committee room, and his security people naturally moved him away from this possibly hostile stranger they didn’t know), and Senator Pelosi’s editing Kavanaugh’s words to make it appear he said something he didn’t say, things seemed about as dirty as they could get.

Now we have, suddenly and at the last minute, the convenient appearance of someone who claims Kavanaugh tried to assault her back in high school. This is a wonderful ploy, because of course there is no evidence to either support or refute her claim, and in today’s politically-correct world the fundamental principle of English law, that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty, has long since been abandoned. So simply the insinuation, the possibility, that this might be true may be enough to destroy a man’s career.

These nominations have been getting dirtier and dirtier ever since Senator Ted Kennedy in 1987 shamelessly smeared nominee Robert Bork in a nationally televised speech, asserting that Bork held extremist views that Bork in fact had never held. That set the standard, and the Supreme Court nomination process ever since then has been getting dirtier and dirtier.

Whether Democrats manage to derail the Kavanaugh nomination with this ploy or not, you can bet that Republicans will remember this the next time there is a Democrat in the White House and she/he nominates a liberal judge for the Supreme Court. What goes around comes around. Pity that nominee.

Bureaucratic excess

I have argued before that the unelected “fourth branch” of government, the federal agencies, are out of control. Here is an interesting statistic. A recent project went through all federal criminal law and counted them. There are about 4,500 federal criminal laws, all passed by Congress.

Professor John Coffee of Columbia Law School has tried to estimate how many federal criminal regulations there are. His work leads him to estimate more than 300,000  federal regulations that carry criminal penalties – regulations that were never approved by congress and penalties that are applied outside of any court.

I rest my case.

The more I think about….

The more I think about the anonymous Op Ed piece in the New York Times, the angrier I get. Trump has been claiming since his election that there is a “deep state” within the Washington bureaucracy working against him. Others, especially liberal media figures, have claimed he is just paranoid. Well, now we know he was right, as proved by the public (if anonymous) self-confession of one of the very “deep state” figures working against him. Bureaucrats of course always try to shape the policies of their elected leaders to fit their own ideology, or to enhance their own power or line their own pockets. That was the substance of the highly successful  1980’s British comedy series “Yes, Minister” and “Yes, Prime Minister”. But this now borders on an outright coup.

Now I don’t think much of Trump’s style or language, but he was legally elected by the citizens of this country, and to be fair he has worked to implement most or all of his campaign promises, something politicians are not noted for. And indeed some things have improved, even if the left won’t admit it or won’t give him any credit for it (though they are quick enough to blame him for anything that goes wrong). Growth has almost doubled, unemployment is the lowest it has been in a decade, working class wages are climbing, and illegal immigration seems to have dropped. We may not like some of his campaign promises, but enough voters did like them to get him elected, and in our democratic system of government that is how the system is supposed to work.

The overweening arrogance of elite Washington insiders who presume to assume that their own personal judgement is better than that of millions of American voters is disgusting, but it is also dangerous. We are in danger, it appears, of being governed by a secret cabal of unelected elites who subvert the elected officials they supposedly work for and who think many of the voters are stupid “deplorables” (Clinton’s words) “clinging to guns and religion” (Obama’s words), and who are, in their self-righteous manner, absolutely sure that their Ivy League training qualifies them override the electorate.

There is indeed a constitution crisis at the moment as many on the left claim, but the source of that crisis is not the President but rather some of those who oppose him. The left apparently aren’t capable of learning. In 2013 when Democrats controlled the Senate Harry Reid unwisely eliminated the filibuster for judicial nominations below the Supreme Court, and that unwise maneuver is why Democrats, now out of power, are now powerless to oppose Trump’s Supreme Court nominations. Along the same lines, the vicious attacks by liberals on President Trump are setting the stage for the next president from their own party to be similarly attacked and mercilessly harassed.  Or as the old saying goes, “what goes around comes around”. This is not healthy for the nation.

The anonymous New York Times Op Ed

I assume everyone by now knows that the New York Times just published an anonymous Op Ed piece by ”a senior government official” alleging that senior White House officials, including him/herself, are deliberately and systematically sabotaging President Trump. The news is hardly new – the Washington establishment, Republican as well as Democratic, has been trying its best to bring down Trump since he first won the Republican nomination - their hardball efforts are visible every day. Nor is the piece very flattering to the anonymous writer, whose poor writing style, aggrandizing self-righteousness and inflated ego are all too apparent.

But it does seem to me dangerous in at least two dimensions.  First , that a major newspaper would publish an anonymous piece attacking a sitting president. Since we don’t know who wrote it, we have no way of judging how likely it is to be true, and what the motive of the writer might be. Or, for that matter, the motive of the newspaper itself.

Second, that the White House staff might harbor a person (or perhaps more than one) actively sabotaging the efforts of a duly elected President of the United States.  I’m no fan of Trump, but if we are worried about Russian interference in our elections, we ought to be far more worried about active sabotage among our own high government officials. It’s fine to disagree with the president. It’s fine to try to convince him to change his policies, It’s fine, if all else fails, to resign in protest.  It’s not fine to steal papers from his desk so he can’t sign them, or indulge in other active sabotage. That is, not to put too fine a point on it, outright treason.  Of course this person (or persons) may feel justified by their political views – just as traitors usually are. But it doesn’t make it right.

It seems to me the New York Times has put itself in a very dangerous position, actively abetting a self-confessed traitor. No doubt it makes good copy, but it makes terrible politics