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To: ransomnote

An absolutely GREAT article. Too long to put all here, but WELL worth the reading.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/01/with-the-kavanaugh-fight-political-warfare-escalates/

With the Kavanaugh Fight, Political Warfare Escalates

Roger Kimball

Scorched earth. That’s the tactic the Democrats and their enablers in the media and George Soros-funded hit squads are employing against Brett Kavanaugh. We all know it. We all experienced that sharp intake of breath when it was first reported that Dianne Feinstein had a letter from some anonymous female accusing Kavanaugh of having engaged in sexual misconduct with her when he was in high school. Depending on your estimate of Judge Kavanaugh’s character, you focused either on “sexual misconduct” (“Now we’ve got ’em matey!”) or on “high school” (“Really? You’re going after a guy with a sterling record because he may have hit on a girl at a party in high school?”)

I belong firmly in the latter camp. But of course that was just the beginning of an extraordinary, and orchestrated (I want to emphasize that) effort to destroy a man of exceptional ability and exceptional integrity.

Eventually, we learned the name of his accuser: Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Almost three weeks after she went public, we still don’t know much about her. Before her accusation became public, she took great care to scrub her activities from social media and the internet. But have no fear. Even as I write, many people, outraged at her totally unsupported allegations, are piecing together a portrait of a rambunctious party girl who grew up to be an anti-Trump activist. I look forward to inspecting the portrait when it is finished.

Initially, the curious thing was how the letter—sent, Feinstein insisted, in confidence—was leaked. I believe I am correct in saying that only three sets of people had it: Ford’s lawyers (why did she engage left-wing anti-Trump lawyers just before this became public? Who is paying for them?), her local congresswoman, and Senator Feinstein’s office. I am glad that President Trump has asked the FBI to look into who leaked the letter. I’d like to know.

At first, I inclined to the idea that this obviously damaged person (I say that after having sat through her artfully incoherent, wounded-little-girl testimony) was just collateral damage in the Democrats’ effort to destroy Donald Trump’s nominee. She really did, I thought, want anonymity and was terrified at testifying before all those big meanies in the Senate.
...
The Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, brave souls that they are, declined even to question Dr. Ford (I love the “Dr.”) themselves. They thought that the optics of men asking questions of a women who has brought a career-ending accusation against someone nominated to the Supreme Court would seem mean—isn’t modern feminism wonderful?—so they foisted the job off to a female prosecutor who was only allowed to pose her ever-so-gentle questions in five-minute increments.

Christine Ford did present a pathetic spectacle and, as I say, I at first thought she was someone the Democrats were happy to use and discard to stop Judge Kavanaugh. I now suspect that she was in on the plot, if not from the beginning, then from well before her letter was leaked to the press.

There have been many efforts to rationalize or explain what it is that the Democrats have been doing with their search-and-destroy occupation of what Judge Kavanaugh aptly describes as “the Twilight Zone.” Yes, it is certainly true that the Democrats do not want Brett Kavanaugh, an ardent constitutionalist, to take Anthony Kennedy’s seat. That would rob the court of Kennedy’s impish interventions on many social issues, especially those issue emanating from the girdle of human experience: abortion, and sexuality in all its florid, increasingly polymorphous manifestations.

It is understandable that leftists—having gotten used to the idea that the court can be weaponized as an instrument of progressive social engineering when Congress, still subject to that pesky voice of the people, is recalcitrant to push ahead to utopia—should be unhappy about that prospect. But, hey, that’s how we run things in this democratic republic. We have elections, elections have consequences (as a gloating pol once observed), and we abide by the processes that have grown up in our institutions and that are the expression of the rule of law.

Besides, Brett Kavanaugh is not a fire-breathing reactionary. On the contrary, although personally conservative, he is a thoughtful, deliberate jurist, the hallmarks of whose practice have been impartiality and a concern to follow the law. The Democrats might—and God willing, eventually will—find the court populated with justices far more doctrinaire in their originalism. Kavanaugh, when he is confirmed (and I continue to believe he will be) will endeavor to uphold the Constitution, not twist it for ideological ends.

But increasingly I have come to believe that the satanic circus the Democrats have let loose around this confirmation hearing is only incidentally about Brett Kavanaugh.
...
There was a precedent crime, after all, but it wasn’t one that appears in the statute book. Rather, as in some common law traditions, it is simply part of the agreed upon and customary narrative of our polity—or at least the people who govern our polity. What is it? In short, the crime was Donald Trump’s election. More precisely, the crime was the fact that Donald Trump was elected without the permission, indeed, over the strenuous objections of that entitled cohort whose members believe it to be part of the natural order of things that they govern.

The implications of this conviction—that the primal crime of Trump’s administration was his election, compounded by his infuriating habit of meeting any attack with a potent counterattack—are huge.

Among other things, it follows that Donald Trump’s tenure is, for these people, existentially illegitimate. And from that conviction it follows that a policy of resistance, obstruction, and illegality is (in the minds of these people) sanctioned. It is OK, for example, for a Justice Department official to boast that he is conducting a guerrilla war of “resistance” behind the scenes. It is OK to stalk Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and his wife to their favorite restaurant and scream at them until they are forced to leave. Why? Because Cruz supports Kavanaugh. And so on. (Wouldn’t you like to know what Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said to the spineless GOP Senator Jeff Flake the other day just before Flake announced that he would allow Kavanaugh’s confirmation to proceed to the Senate floor only if there were another FBI investigation authorized into his behavior in high school?)

Here is my thought. The scurrilous attempt at character assassination directed at Brett Kavanaugh is part of a larger war: the war to demonstrate that Donald Trump, though duly elected in a free, open, and democratic process, is fundamentally illegitimate.
...
In the normal course of events, I’d say the situation of the Republicans was nearly hopeless. They are not used to fighting back. Many (most?) of them seem to feel, deep down, that the Democrats are right that only they truly have the right to exercise power, that, at the end of the day, Republicans are really just conservative window-dressing for the real business of government, which is pursuing the transnational progressive agenda. (Not to mention how many Republicans are really just Democratic deep-state actors with an “R” after their name.)

The silver lining in all this is the fact that these are not normal times. Donald Trump won, elections have consequences, and we are seeing the consequences all around us, not just in the astonishing success of the Trump agenda but also in the new energy Trump’s example has imparted to some (not you, Jeff Flake, not you) of the Republican brethren.

Has Lindsey Graham ever given a more impressive performance than he did at the Senate hearing the other day, castigating the despicable behavior of his colleagues for exactly what it was? I see that the Senate Judiciary Committee has begun to pursue people who emerged from the swamp to hurl unfounded accusations at Brett Kavanaugh: lying to a federal officer is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Those whom the FBI is now contacting as part of their “supplemental” background check into Brett Kavanaugh ought to keep that in mind. So, I’d reckon, should Christine Ford, supposing the FBI ever gets around to questioning her. The Democrats wanted all-out war. All-out war is exactly what Donald Trump is going to give them.


1,333 posted on 10/02/2018 5:32:30 AM PDT by mairdie
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To: mairdie

Q’s words on data disappearing seems to be coming to pass.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/website_that_archived_blasey_fords_high_school_yearbook_disappears_from_googleowned_blogspot.html

Website that archived Blasey Ford’s high school yearbook disappears from Google-owned Blogspot

By Thomas Lifson

Now that the high school days of Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford are the most important issue facing Americans (according to the media, anyway) it is certainly odd that evidence of student norms at Blasey Ford’s own alma mater is being “disappeared” from the web. First, the yearbook of Holton-Arms high school the all-girls private academy she attended was scrubbed from the web on September 17, 2018.

But that effort to withhold from the public pictures like this
...
was foiled by a website – one I had never before heard of – called “The Cult of the 1st Amendment,” which archived the whole thing, making it available for study.

Now, most curiously. The Cult of the 1st Amendment has disappeared from its host, Blogspot, which happens to be owned by Google. It has been “removed”:
...
Fortunately, another website, The Washington Standard, also archived the pictures – for now. Tim Brown writes:

I received an email today asking that I make sure to preserve the information that was obtained and written about at the now removed Google blogspot site, Cult of the 1st Amendment, which quickly grabbed up several pictures of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s yearbook and provided at least three articles on various aspects of the yearbook and campus life. In following through with that, I have preserved both the articles and the pictures on TheWashingtonStandard.com.
...


1,335 posted on 10/02/2018 5:36:43 AM PDT by mairdie
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To: mairdie

Great insights, beautifully stated.


1,340 posted on 10/02/2018 5:44:33 AM PDT by AZLiberty (Even decent people like Bagster.)
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To: mairdie

Whew Mairdie, another great article linked. You just keep ‘em comin. :)


1,513 posted on 10/02/2018 10:43:16 AM PDT by Wneighbor (Weaponize your cell phone! Call your legislators every week.)
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