Month: September 2018

Okay, I’ve had it!  At almost the same moment I finished and sent my latest column on the Kavanaugh smear to CO, another partisan leftist hack miraculously shows up with a decades-old recovered memory to try to reinforce the imploding Blasey-Ford story.   (I guess it’s like James Carville used to say: you drag a $100 bill through the Yale Women’s Studies Program and you never know what you’ll find.)

At first I just got even more blindingly furious, and stomped around Stately Simpson Manor with a Costco-sized bottle of scotch in my hand and murder in my heart.   But then I realized that it is time that we fight fire with fire.

After a very brief series of thoughts involving how one might find Dianne Feinstein’s house and set it on fire, I realized that I’d gotten a little off track.  So I sat down and I came up with a plan.  And although it goes against my modest nature to praise my own plan… it is quite likely the best plan since the Marshall Plan, and definitely much better than Plan 9 From Outer Space.

I call it, The Simpson Retroactive Last-Minute Supreme Court Nomination Scandal Plan™.   Here’s how it works.

If the Democrats can come up with 36-year-old tall tales about a SC nominee they don’t like, I say we go them one better.  Right now there are 4 leftist justices on the court, and I think we should re-open their nominations retroactively, because I’ve just discovered damaging allegations against one of them (so far) that deserve to be heard.

I know what you are thinking: who did Sotomayor harass this time?  Or, did Kagan really kill a man in Reno, just to watch him die?  But no.  They’ve only been on the court for less than a decade, and they’re not that old.  If the Democrats have taught us anything, it’s that the oldest charges are the most persuasive.  I mean, if 36-year-old charges are convincing, how much more convincing would charges from centuries ago be?

You know where I’m going with this: Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

Again, people with less ambitious plan-making abilities than mine might be deterred by the task of going back to investigate Ginsberg’s misspent youth.  But not me.  Just because she’s been on the court for decades, wreaking havoc on the constitution and making the Founders spin in their graves, I think that the #metoo movement has taught us all that it’s never too late to pursue charges of sexual misconduct.

So I’ve done a little digging into Ginsberg, and I’ve found a young man she went to high school with: Hammurabi.  You may know him best from his Code (Google it), but the kids in Mesopotamia High in the 18^th century before Christ knew him as “that guy who Ruthie Bader traumatized at that party.”

Although he was reluctant at first, I got him to sit down with me for an interview.

Me: Hello Mr. Hammurabi.  Thank you for agreeing to share your story with me.

H (laughing): My dad was Mr. Hammurabi.  You can just call me Hamm.

Me:  Thank you.  Okay, I’d like to ask you about the incident with Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

H:  She was just Ruthie Bader back then.  I thought she was a friend of mine, but everything changed… that night.

Me: I understand.  Let’s get some details clear.  Can you tell me when this happened?

H: Well, that’s a little tricky.  You see, it was a long time ago, and the details are a little foggy.  But I’m pretty sure it was either 1815 or 1816 BC.

Me: You don’t even know what year it was?

H: Look, it’s not that easy.  I mean, it was in the BC times, so the year went backwards, which was pretty confusing.  Plus none of us knew when Christ was going to come, so a lot of the calendars were way off.  So I’m not sure I can nail down the exact year.  I remember that there was a drought that year, if that helps.

Me: It really doesn’t.  How about the location where the event happened?

Hamm: I’m a little fuzzy on that, too.  I know it was in one of my friend’s parents’ ziggurats.  And it was near a river.  I think the Tigris.

Me: You think?
Hamm (shrugging his shoulders):  It could have been the Euphrates.

Me: But it wasn’t the Nile?

Hamm:  Ummmmm…

Me: Great.  Were there any witnesses there?

Hamm: Yes.  Noah was there for at least a part of the night, I remember that.  He was a year behind me in school.  And also Tutankhamen.

Me: Tut was there?

Hamm:  Yes.  I remember, because Ruthie bothered him, too.

Me: Ooh, tell me about that, because it may help establish a pattern of behavior.

Hamm:  Well, he already got teased a lot.  Everyone kept calling him “the boy king,” and he hated that.  Ruthie picked up on that right away, and kept at him with suggestive remarks.

Me: Like what?
Hamm: I remember she was teasing him along the lines of, “How would you like it if I made you a MAN king?” That kind of thing.

Me: All right, let’s get to the details of your story.  What did Ginsberg say or do that made you uncomfortable?

Hamm:  She was just aggressive about being interested in me.  A small group of us were standing around in one part of the room, wishing that beer had been invented, when she came over and asked if we wanted to play strip poker.

Me: What did you say?

Hamm: I reminded her that poker hadn’t been invented yet, and one of the guys pointed out that playing cards hadn’t been invented yet.  But she wouldn’t take the hint.  She asked us to play spin the bottle, but that went nowhere.

Me: Because bottles hadn’t been invented yet?

Hamm:  Exactly.  I thought that that had ended it, but about 10 minutes later, I had to go to the Little Pharoah’s room, and when I came out, she was right there.   She was all over me right away, and before I knew it, she had me pinned against the wall, and was tugging my tunic upward.

Me: Yikes!

Hamm (nodding):  I know.  I didn’t know what to do.  All I kept thinking was, “Man, I wish we’d invented pants and zippers and belts!  Or even a good, locking codpiece!”

Me: What happened next?

Hamm: I wrestled with her for a minute, but when I’d forced her hands off of my tunic, she started kissing me.  I kept saying, “No,” but she wouldn’t listen.  Finally I was able to get away from her.  I ran to the courtyard and called for a chariot to take me home.  I mean, I just cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled, “Chariot,” and eventually one showed up.

Me:  That sounds traumatic.  What did you do when you got home?

Hamm: Well, I felt so dirty.  I wanted to take a shower, but we hadn’t invented showers, or indoor plumbing yet.  So I went to the river with a reed basket, and just kept ladling water over my head until I could stop shaking.

Me: I’m so sorry.  I don’t suppose you have any physical evidence, do you?

Hamm: Well, I’ve got the notes that the police took when I reported it.  (Hamm pulls out two stone tablets covered with hieroglyphics.)

Me:  Wow!  This is great, but I don’t read ancient pictograms.

Hamm (laughing): Oh come on, they’re basically just old school emojis.  Here, I’ll show you.  (He puts his finger on a tablet, and moves it across the symbols.)  Do you see this?

Me: It looks like – bird head, eyeball, woman facing right, sun, goat head, man facing right, cat head, man holding spear, walk like an Egyptian pose, palm tree.  Can you translate that?

Hamm (clears his throat): “Victim states that the Bader chick had her hands all over his person.  Aggressive kissing.  Very gropey.”

Me: That is some explosive stuff!  Hey, what does this section here mean?

Hamm: Oh, you mean “cat head, equal sign, cat head?”

Me:  Yes.

Hamm (his voice cracking): That’s “No means no.”  It’s what the policeman told me when I said that maybe I’d led her on.

Me: I have to tell you, your story sounds pretty convincing to me, but a lot of people have a specific image of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and I think they might have a hard time believing this.

Hamm: Look, I understand.  I mean, right now she has the posture of the letter “C,” and it’s often difficult to tell if she’s awake or asleep.  But this was a long time ago, and Ruthie was a wild girl.  She was very aggressive.

Me: Okay, thanks for your time.  I’m going to report this to the US Senate, and they’ll be in touch.  Do you have anything else you’d like to say?

Hamm: Oh yes, I almost forgot.  One of my cousins left town right after this party happened.  He and a bunch of friends decided to head north because they’d heard that there was a lan0d bridge open to a continent in the northern hemisphere.  They planned to cross that, then split into different tribes, domesticate some horses, invent some arrowheads and tomahawks, and pretty much have the run of the place.

Me: Why are you telling me this?

Hamm: When my cousin heard where you were from and that I was going to be talking with you, he said to tell you that some crazy white lady in New England is pretending to be his great, great, great-grandaughter.  And that she’s absolutely full of it.  He also asked me to give you this.   (He handed me a small piece of stone with pictograms on it.)

Me: It looks like: standing lion, moon, triangle, bird feet, woman facing left, sheaves of wheat.  What does that mean?

Hamm: #wemustneverstopmockingher

And, scene.

All right, people.  Call your senators.  The day after Kavanaugh gets his vote, I want you to demand that they implement the Simpson Retroactive Last-Minute Supreme Court Nomination Scandal Plan™, and schedule some hearings to begin the process of having Ruth Bader Ginsberg removed from the court.

Early this week I was putting together a column on some of my favorite things that have happened recently, when the attack on Brett Kavanaugh hit.   I’m still going to finish and post that other column shortly, but this Kavanaugh thing has really gotten under my skin, stuck in my craw, gotten my goat, plus any other expression you can think of to describe an infuriating situation.

So here are a few thoughts, heavily redacted from my initial draft, which included so many Anglo-Saxon expletives that it read like a cross between the Grendel chapters in Beowulf and the “script” for a Stormy Daniels film.

First, I am trying very hard not to think the very worst of the woman who raised these allegations, because there is at least a possibility that they are true.  In the history of male-female interactions, teenagers drinking and making fumbling and ultimately abandoned attempts to grope or disrobe each other are not exactly unheard of.  So I resist the urge to dismiss her story out of hand.

On the other hand, anybody making a good faith effort to assess the story has to acknowledge that there is no corroborating evidence, because the accuser kept quiet for 36 years, and can’t provide even the most basic information about when and where it allegedly occurred.

So it’s “he said/she said,” and we have to try to guess which account is more credible.  Let’s put aside for a moment the absurdity of trying to scuttle a nomination based on the “we have to try to guess” standard, and just apply a common sense test.

Kavanaugh denies it.  Obviously, a guilty person would deny doing it.  (See the legal precedent established in the case of Clinton v. Anyone In a Skirt, and the famous “I did not have sex with that woman,” defense.)  Of course, an innocent person would also deny doing it, so no help there.

We might look to the question of motive: What does Kavanaugh have to gain by denying it?  He gets a prestigious appointment if he denies it, and a destroyed reputation if he doesn’t.  So he does have motive — but it’s the same motive as anyone accused of any bad action, and thus is not dispositive, to say the least.

Finally, we might look at Kavanaugh’s behavior pattern.  If we assume the worst-case interpretation of the accuser’s story, she feared that he was going to rape her.  Okay, spend 10 minutes perusing any reputable research into sexual offenders and recidivism rates, and what do you think you are likely to find is more common: a rapist who offends one time and gets it out of his system, never to rape again, or a rapist who victimizes woman after woman until he is caught?

By all accounts, until his accuser came forward with this story, Kavanaugh has an unblemished personal reputation, with no other reported sexual misbehavior or accusations from anyone in the last 36 years.

Compare that to other high profile men in their 50s who have been accused of sexual harassment or worse.  Was anyone who knew Harvey Weinstein shocked when his first accusers came forward?  How about acquaintances of Ted Kennedy, when rumors periodically surfaced of waitress sandwiches or other grotesque behavior?  (I know, Mary Jo Kopeckne was unavailable for comment.  But anyone else who knew him?) Think of anyone who knew anything about Bill Clinton and the rich oral tradition (HA!) of reports that he had harassed Paula Jones or Kathleen Willey or a bevy of other coeds and secretaries to be named later, or that he had raped Juanita Broaddrick, or that he had used Arkansas State troopers to run interference for him as he snuck a small army of women into and out of the governor’s mansion.

Do you think that ANY of them, when they heard that he was accused of defiling the oval office with Monica Lewinsky, jumped up in outrage and said, “The hell you say!”

No.  Obviously no.  1000 times no.  When Cosby’s first accuser – or Louis CK’s first accuser, or Roy Moore’s first accuser, or Anthony Weiner’s or Charlie Rose’s or Matt Lauer’s (etc.) – came forward, she was followed by a cast of dozens, if not more.

But we are supposed to believe that Kavanaugh, who has lived an assault-less life for 36 years, took the first step down Clinton Lane in 1982, but then just inexplicably quit.

Now let’s consider the “she said.”

Many leftist partisans – and a few alleged “conservatives” – have asserted that one reason we should believe her is that there is no possible motive for her to lie: “What would she possibly have to gain by telling her story?”

And they could be right.  Since she is a partisan conservative who has donated to a variety of right-wing causes and groups for years, and protested the policies of President Obama, why would she accuse an originalist judge nominated by President Trump?

Oh no, wait.  She is exactly the opposite of that.  She is a partisan leftist who has donated to a variety of left wing-causes and groups – including the DNC and Bernie Sanders, among others – and has protested Trump and his attempt to enforce our immigration laws.   As such, her motivation to try to keep a constitutional originalist off the SC is obvious.

It’s like asking what motive I would have for doing everything I could to keep Liz Warren from becoming president, even after you found out that I was a donor and founding member of the NAAPWDWWLFI-POTUS (i.e. the “National Association for the Advancement of People Who Don’t Want White Ladies who are Fake Indians for President of the United States). (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

(By the way, we are a 501-C3 tax-exempt organization, and for a donation of $10 or more, we will send you a bumper sticker with our name on it.  Please note that the sticker will only fit vehicles with a beam as wide as a supertanker, or a certain former first lady.) (CAW! CAW!)

Okay, so Blasey-Ford has a political motivation to see Kavanaugh’s nomination defeated.  But is that really enough, by itself, to get her to come forward with this kind of accusation?

Gee, I don’t know.  If only we had a precedent of some sort.  You know, like some other obscure female leftist academic who showed up at the last minute with wild accusations to try to stop some other conservative SC nominee.  But since that has never happened before, I guess we’ll never know—

Oh wait.  Anita Hill did that.  She did that same exact thing.

And you know why you didn’t just say to yourself, “Anita Hill?  Who’s that?  Is that just some obscure historical figure whom only Martin knows, because he is the kind of polymathic and very stable genius who knows things that we mere mortals have no chance of ever comprehending?”

You didn’t say that to yourself, because you know who Anita Hill is.  You may even know about the giant publicity tour and lucrative book deal she got after she smeared Clarence Thomas, and the lucrative and hagiographic biopic that HBO did about her, and her celebrity status on the left that has persisted even now, decades after she tried to do an 11^th hour hatchet job on Thomas.

So, what does Blasey-Ford possibly have to gain from coming forward to attack Kavanaugh now?  I mean, other than national attention, fawning media coverage, political satisfaction and the promise of lots of money and awards and praise that will be predictably showered on her for years to come?

Ugh.  Obviously, I’m not being entirely successful in my attempt not to think badly of the accuser.

But I’ll tell you one thing that I AM being entirely successful at: learning new reasons to absolutely despise the dishonest, hypocritical, sleazy ways that top Democrats and media figures are acting in this last, desperate attempt to subvert the law through character assassination.

They pretend they care about men abusing women, when they’ve been sheltering and covering for sexually abusive leftist men for their whole lives.

They claim with a straight face that we should always believe the woman in these cases.  Hillary Clinton even said that.

Hillary Clinton!  And God inexplicably did not strike her with a lightning bolt on the spot.  So… c’mon, God.  You’re dropping the ball here.

Some hateful sexist Asian-American Senator named Hirono blamed all men for the alleged teenage groping incident, saying that they should – and I quote – “Just shut up and step up. Do the right thing — for a change.”

Stereotype much, you female chauvinist jerk?

Dianne Feinstein has been even worse, if that’s possible.  She first heard Ford’s story in July, and she intentionally sat on it, not bringing it up in private meetings with Kavanaugh, or in the televised confirmation hearings.

Which brings me to perhaps the worst of the Democrats’ transparently bad faith arguments: that the FBI must investigate the Ford story before they can even think of voting on Kavanaugh’s nomination.

How would that possibly work?!  Can you imagine the position the FBI would be in if Christine Blasey-Ford sat down for an interview with them?

FBI Agent 1 (opening his notebook): Okay, we understand you want to report a crime?

Ford: Yes.  I was groped.

Agent 2: Let’s start with location: where did this happen?

Ford: I’m not sure.  In someone’s house.

Agent 2 (looking at Agent 1): “Someone’s house?”  Do you have an address?

Ford:   No.

Agent 2: A street?

Ford:  No.  There was at least one bedroom upstairs, I know that.

Agent 1: Okay, we’ll come back to that.  Let’s start with when it happened.

Ford:  It was… (looking up, in thought) 36…

Agent 1: Okay, that’s good.   You know that show “The First 48?”  The title refers to the fact that the odds of solving a crime drop a lot after the first 48 hours have passed.  But if this happened 36 hours ago, we should be able to gather a lot of evidence.

Ford: Years.

Agent 1: What?

Ford:  Not 36 hours.  36 years.

Agent 2: YEARS?!  This happened 36 years ago?

Ford: Or it might have been 35 years.  Or 37 years.  I think it was 1982.

Agent 2 (looking at Agent 1): I wasn’t born then.

Agent 1: Okay.  Do you have a date?

Ford: I know it was in the summer.

Agent 2: That’s a season, not a date.

Ford: What’s your point?

Agent 1: Can we see the original police report?  That will have the date on it.

Ford: I didn’t file a police report.

Agent 1: You didn’t file a report?  Okay.  Can you put us in touch with witnesses who saw the attack?

Ford: There were no witnesses.

Agent 1: Okay, then can you give us contact information for the people you told about it?  We can question them, and that will help us firm up some of the details like location and date.

Ford: I didn’t tell anyone about it for 30 years.

Agent 1: Can you tell us anything about the perp’s record?  How many times was he convicted, and can you put us in touch with the other victims?  Is he serving time right now?

Ford: As far as I know, he never did this to anyone else.

Agent 2 (clearing his throat): If you don’t mind my asking, why are you reporting this now?

Ford: He’s about to be put on the Supreme Court, and his politics offend me. (Agent 1 sighs and closes his notebook.)  So you’re not going to investigate?!  I bet if I were a man, you’d investigate!

Agent 2:  Let’s recap.  You’re here to report a crime for the first time.  It happened sometime between 35 and 37 years ago, sometime between Memorial Day and Labor Day, in a two-story house with at least one upstairs bedroom, somewhere in North America.  There’s no physical evidence, there are no witnesses, and you were both drinking.  You never told anyone about it for 30 years, and you never brought it up in public until 10 minutes ago.  The accused has never done anything like this before or since, there is nothing he could say or do to exonerate himself now, and you hate his politics.

Ford:  Yes, and I demand an investigation before I answer any other questions about this.

Both agents: Get out of our office.

And, scene.

I don’t care what your politics are – the blatant, partisan sleaziness of this scheme should be obvious to everyone, and if there’s any justice, it will blow up in the slimy Dems’ faces.   And if you were planning to sit out the November election because of Trump’s occasional childishness or the establishment GOP’s fecklessness, you’ve got to re-think that.

First, I learned that Corey Booker is a ridiculous, narcissistic man-child who should never be within 1000 miles of the White House.

His dumbness was not revealed primarily by his coming up with his idiotic stunt of “bravely” revealing classified information in the most hackneyed, transparently publicity-seeking way.  (Although that alone would pretty much guarantee him a spot in the playoffs, if hack politicians formed a league to compete to try to out-dumb each other.)

No, his dumbness only reached full flower when some smart guys in the GOP pre-emptively de-classified the info he was going to reveal the night before he was set to take his star turn as brave secret-revealer… and he STILL WENT THROUGH WITH IT!  He got up there like a dope — knowing that the secret info he was going to dramatically release was no longer secret, and had already been released – and he read the same dopey, self-dramatizing script anyway.

And the stupidity chocolate sauce on his bonehead sundae was the fact that he set up the secret info dump by ominously saying that it would reveal Brett Kavanaugh’s position on the police’s use of ethnic profiling.  (Otherwise known by competent police everywhere as, “Not wasting your time frisking octogenarian Amish people when you are looking to bust a meth ring run by 20-something Aryan Brotherhood members with swastika tattoos on their necks.”)

And it turns out that Brett Kavanaugh’s scary, scary take on ethnic profiling was that – pause for spooky organ sting – he’s against it.  Cue the sad trombones, as kooky Corey’s political ambitions slowly deflate.

Plus, he called himself Spartacus.  Everyone knows that the first rule of being Spartacus is that you don’t dramatically call yourself Spartacus.  Especially considering that Spartacus is not known for that time when he tried to pompously reveal state secrets in front of the Roman Senate, only to have the Senators laugh at him because the state secrets had already been revealed, and he had to leave the Forum with his toga tucked between his legs.

Another thing I learned is that Kamala Harris is an empty suit who almost managed to look like a statesman, if only because she was sitting next to Corey.  She is allegedly an attorney, and allegedly at least semi-smart, but neither of those qualities was on display at the hearings.  She asked a dramatic series of questions about whether Kavanaugh had ever spoken to any attorney from a giant law firm in DC about the Mueller investigation.  Kavanaugh looked confused, mentioned that hundreds of attorneys work there, asked if she was thinking of some specific incident, and then said that he didn’t remember any such conversation specifically.

And she did nothing.  She didn’t dramatically leap up and say, “Ah HA!  Bailiff, bring in the star witness, who will testify that Mr. Kavanaugh did in fact talk with a principle partner in that law firm, and that he made video and audio recordings of that conversation, which will reveal that Mr. Kavanaugh is a Tea Partier, and a Mason, and quite possibly a pedophile serial murderer!”

Nope.  She just said something like, “Huh.”  Asked later about whether she believes that he did have some incriminating conversation, one of her (almost certainly embarrassed) aides said, “We have reason to believe that a conversation happened, and are continuing to pursue it.”

Wow.  Nice going, Nancy Drew.  You’ve practically cracked the case of The Vague, Inconsequential Hypothetical Conversation that Might Possibly Have Taken Place.

But at least she didn’t call herself Spartacus-ina, Spartacus’ lesser known little sister.  So she’s got that going for her.

But I don’t want to suggest it was only Booker and Harris beclowning themselves.  It was also the other Dems on the committee.  Dick “no one ever calls him Richard” Durbin and Richard “everyone secretly calls him Dick” Blumenthal also asked 15-minute “questions” that weren’t honest inquiries, but tendentious, misleading set-ups for passive-aggressive insults.  All of which Kavanaugh dispatched without breaking a sweat.

Even Lizzie Warren tried to entrap Kavanaugh into a discussion of obscure treaties that created Indian reservations in the 19^th century.  “My people deserve a response,” the pasty-faced professor said.

“Your people?” Kavanaugh asked slyly.  “You mean the northeastern tribe of Caucasian Academics?”

(Okay, I made that last part up.  Because a day may come, when the courage of we Men of the West falters, and our ability to continue a streak of uninterrupted columns with a Lizzie Warren #wemustneverstopmockingher joke finally fails us.  But IT IS NOT THIS DAY!) (If you don’t get that reference, Google “Aragorn at the Black Gate speech,” and thank me later.)

But I also don’t want to suggest that it was only the elected Democrats in the room who looked like total jerks.  It was also the Democrats in the audience.

So now we also know that Democrats should not be allowed in to Supreme Court hearings unless they are vigorously vetted to be sure that they’re not the kind of immature jackasses who will scream and chant and do their best to disrupt the proceedings.  After about the tenth idiot jumped up and started hollering, I began to get the idea that they may not actually have any substantive arguments to make.  (I know: call me Sherlock and congratulate me for cracking the case of the “Wailing Jackasses of Pennsylvania Avenue.”  My favorite part is when the Dem senators all get into a big wooden barrel and go over the Reichenbach Falls with Moriarty, never to be heard from again.)

I mean, has any human, in any time or any place, ever uttered the words, “You know, on second thought, that hateful crone shrieks a good point?  I may have to re-think my stance on constitutional originalism?”  (Spoiler alert: they have not.)

Coincidentally, I also learned that the police at judicial hearings go way too heavily on the, “Come now, please let me escort you out in a civilized manner,” and way too lightly on the, “Let’s see what happens when I fire this taser probe into your crotch and we send a little Edison-juice down the wire.”

Not that I’d be a stickler.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be a Taser.  It could be some bear mace, or a pepper ball, or a good facial squirting with the urine from a pregnant deer.

Wait.  That last one might be for hunting.  Either way, I’d be open to squirting a few of the ill-mannered louts with the female deer urine, then releasing a 10-point rutting buck into the room, and letting nature take its course.

Where was I?

Oh yeah.  Thoughtful leftist discourse.

There ain’t any.  There’s just tantrums and insults and black-belt-level whining.

But it didn’t work, and Kavanaugh’s going to the Supreme Court.  So stick it, Linda Sarsour and your hordes of yammering fascist weirdos.

The last lesson I learned from the Kavanaugh hearings is that sweet, sweet schadenfreude never gets old.  Because as I watched MSM commentators venting their frustration that Kavanaugh wouldn’t directly answer questions about how he’d rule on abortion or a dozen other hot button issues, I couldn’t help but think back to days of yore.

And as you know, “days of yore” traditionally refers to the early summer of 1987, when a bristly originalist genius named Robert Bork was nominated for the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan (peace be upon him).

Before then, the tradition had been that the opposing party would only vote against judicial nominees in the rare instance when a serious case could be made that a judge was incompetent or unqualified.  Political ideology alone was not seen as a justification for voting against a nominee.  Presidents nominated judges who lined up with their judicial philosophy, hearings determined whether the nominee had any serious flaws, and they were then voted on.

Bork was obviously extremely qualified, but the Democrats of that day – led by the Senior Inebriated Dirigible and Aquatic Homicide Aficianado™ Ted Kennedy – broke with that precedent, and viciously and dishonestly smeared Bork because of his ideology.   He answered their questions honestly, and they twisted and lied about his answers, and they killed his nomination.  Since then, all Supreme Court nominations have turned into partisan political battles, won on party-line votes.

Savvy nominees learned from Bork – and from the rule stated by Ruth Bader Ginsburg – to meet dishonesty with guile.  If the senators from the opposing party are going to pepper them with biased, specious questions that they pretend are genuine, the nominees will respond with bland, content-less boilerplate about precedent and stare decisis and nolo contendre and carpe diem and other Latin phrases that I don’t understand.

So it was sweet to watch the frustrated hacks at CNN and MSNBC whining that Kavanaugh wouldn’t answer any questions in ways that would allow them to torpedo his nomination.

But it was even sweeter to reflect, yet again, that we owe a great debt to the holder of the highest Simpson Face Punchability Index™ of all time: Harry Reid.  The blessedly EX-Senator – arrogantly, and against the warnings of everyone’s favorite Chinless Cartoon Turtle Mitch McConnell – triggered the “nuclear” option that reduced the number of yes votes necessary to confirm a judge from 60 to 50.

So today, we have Neil Gorsuch on the court, and we will soon have “you say Kavanaugh but I say Kava-YES!” on the court right beside him.  Neither of them received 60 votes, but both of them are going to be on the court, thanks to Harry Cassidy and the Chappaquiddick Kid.

Thanks, guys!

 

With the Mueller probe entering its second millenia, I’ve been thinking a lot about Russia lately.  Inexplicably, though, no one has been clamoring to hear what I think about Russia.

“Hey Martin,” people who don’t stop me on the street never say, “We’ve been wondering what you think about all of this Russia business.”  And then a small crowd never gathers, leaning close in a hushed silence, like in those old E.F. Hutton commercials, straining to hear my words of wisdom.

So I’ve been keeping my thoughts about Russia to myself.  But then I thought, “Hey, I haven’t written a CO column in a full week, and I’m sure that the entire CO nation has been losing sleep because they don’t know what I’ve been thinking about Russia.”

So, here you are, and you’re welcome in advance.

First, I have to admit that I’m no expert on Russia.  In fact, I could list just about everything I know about Russia pretty quickly.

I don’t like Russian dressing, and I would not care to play Russian roulette.   I hear the weather is not great there, and Siberia sounds unpleasant.  I also don’t care for the empty headed Russian pol Elizabeth Warrenov, who pretended to be a Manchurian just to get an affirmative-action university job and parlay that into a political career, even though she has obviously never been east of the Urals.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher.)  Also, Russia was once ruled by a guy called Ivan the Terrible, which suggests that they have not mastered PR.

I picture three Russians sitting in a tavern shortly before the election:

Russian 1:  I’m leaning toward Fyodor the Concerned this time around.  How about you?

Russian 2:  I’m partial to Boris the Prudent.  He’s for the children, you know.

Russian 1 (to Russian 3): Hey, we haven’t heard much from you since the primaries.  Who are you voting for?

Russian 3 (mumbling): Ivan.

Russians 1 & 2 (shocked): the Terrible?  Ivan the Terrible is your choice?!

Russian 3 (outraged): That “terrible” stuff is wildly exaggerated.  The media hates him!

Russian 2: I’m sure he wouldn’t be called “the Terrible” for no reason.

Russian 3: Oh yeah?  They did the same thing to Vlad the Impaler.  He was always just plain “Vlad,” until some polls showed him ahead in a few swing states.  Then some thinly sourced story comes out that he impaled one guy, years ago, in college.  And all of a sudden, he’s “Vlad the Impaler!”  It’s fake news!

(And, scene.)

 

On the other hand, From Russia With Love was a solid Bond film, and Back in the USSR was a fair to middlin’ Beatles song.  While I’m not fond of Molotov’s cocktail (HA!), a White Russian is pretty tasty.     Tolstoy and Dostoevsky could write a little bit, and Tchaikovsky had a way with a tune.  And one of their leaders was Peter the Great; I’m not super familiar with his work, but with a name like that, he must have been pretty cool.  (In a 50-state contest of “the Great” vs. “the Terrible,” I’m thinking Peter would have won in a Reaganesque landslide.  Sure, CA, IL and NY would go for Ivan, but only because they’ve been voting for terrible candidates for decades, and at this point it’s basically muscle memory for them.)

But one thing that I do know about Russia is that for the last 101 years – since their first-ever communist revolution – the Democratic Left has been in love – I mean head-over-heels, Bonnie-and-Clyde, Joanie-loves-Chachi IN LOVE — with Russia.   The affair started right after the revolution, and has survived every disastrous failing and famine and pogrom and Five-Year Plan for over a century now.

Consider just a few examples:

In 1919 American journalist/socialist John Reed wrote the first in a long line of romanticized accounts of the great and noble commie experiment in “Rescuing Humanity from the Evils of Free Markets, Prosperity and Respect for Individual Rights.”

That’s my title for his work.  He actually called it Ten Days that Shook the World.  In case you are wondering what kind of book a lefty American journalist would write about a bunch of leftists taking total control of a nation, I can sum that up by noting that the book received a rave review from Lenin.

Not the 1960s leftist with some musical talent but horrible taste in Japanese women; the early 20^th century leftist who kicked off an impressive slaughter, and whose corpse is currently lying embalmed in Red Square.  If you ever visit, it’s the dessicated husk under glass that still manages to look more lifelike than Bernie Sanders.

If you are really a glutton for punishment, you can watch the Warren Beatty biopic/hagiography of Reed, called Reds (1981).  With a running time slightly longer than the revolution itself, it is a film so sluggish that only a leftist hack could love it.  So naturally, it was nominated for a slew of Academy Awards, and Beatty won for Best Director.  If you’d like to catch it on cable, try the Watching Paint Dry network.

For another prominent lefty journalist’s take, I can cite Lincoln Steffens, who after a 3-week visit to the USSR in 1919, returned to promote the Russian communist miracle, famously stating that, “I have seen the future, and it works.”

Which is something like saying, “I have seen Bill Clinton, and he really respects women,” or “I have seen Ted Kennedy, and he’s sober as a judge,” or “I have seen Trump, and he’s a shy, unassuming fellow.”

Flash forward to the early 1930s, and the Russian progressive experiment is going swimmingly.  Stalin had appointed (I can only guess) the great-grandmother of Crazy Eyes Chavez-Guevara-Castro as Minister of Farming & Food Supply.  So naturally, the fertile farmlands of the USSR were now producing a bumper crop of dust and tumbleweeds and sorrow, and the bodies of millions of dead and dying peasants were piling up like cordwood.

Into this agricultural Mordor came intrepid NY Times journalist Walter Duranty, who apparently inserted his cranium into his rectum (a move later immortalized as “the Krugman Maneuver”) as soon as he got to the Russian border.  He then travelled around Russia not noticing a horrific famine, and wrote a series of articles so delusional and detached from reality that their fantasy quotient was not topped for nearly a century, until Barack Obama created a healthcare system.  His basic thesis was, “Everything is great, this communism thing is really the cat’s pajamas (because that’s how they talked in the 30s), and reports of a famine here are wildly exaggerated.”

It was the kind of Mount Rushmore of b.s. that only leftist hack journalists could love.  So naturally, Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his “reporting.”  You would think that the Times and the Pulitzer committee today would be ashamed about all of this.

Or I should say, you might think that.  I mean, if you haven’t been paying attention to the leftist MSM for the last half-century or so.  Because no – when the Times received some pressure starting in the 1980s to renounce Duranty’s Pulitzer, both the Times and the Pulitzer committee carefully evaluated the situation, and then decided to do nothing.  And the Pulitzer still stands.

Okay, this is getting tedious. So let’s just do a swift re-cap of the last 80 years or so:

1940s – Many American leftist thought leaders display a strange new respect for Hitler, after the dreamy Russians make peace with the Nazis by way of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.  They only become anti-Nazi again after Hitler betrays their beloved Stalin.

1950s — The lefty “it” couple the Rosenbergs steal American nuclear secrets and give them to their first true love, the Russians.  (That was back in the good old days, when we sent traitors like them to the electric chair, instead of trading 5 captured jihadi leaders for them and then giving them a welcome home ceremony in the Rose Garden.)(Thanks, Obama.)

1960s & 70s – Academic lefties spend two decades arguing moral equivalence (the USA and USSR are both evil superpowers, even though the USSR isn’t quite so bad), and cheerleading for every Russian-sponsored proxy war from Vietnam to Cuba to the liberal arts departments at every major US university.

1980s – Ted Kennedy colludes with high-ranking Russian and KGB officials to counter what he thought were the aggressive militaristic policies of Reagan, and hopefully to hurt Reagan’s chances of winning re-election.  (I am not making that up – Google it, and behold what real collusion looks like.) Sting releases the sappy song “If the Russians Love their Children Too.”  (His first version of the song, “If the Mass-murdering Communist Politburo Members Love Russian Children Too” just didn’t have that ring to it.) Plus Bernie Sanders honeymoons in Russia, which I understand is absolutely beautiful at no time of the year.

2012 – Barack the Truly Terrible gets caught asking Putin’s puppet president to relay to Vladimir that he (Obama) will have more flexibility to decrease US military presence on Russia’s western borders with Europe once he gets re-elected.  (Again – THIS is what collusion looks like.) Later in the same year, Obama mocks Mitt Romney’s assertion that Russia is a huge foreign policy threat to the US, saying, “The 1980s called, and they want their foreign policy back.”

2016 – Hillary Clinton and the DNC fund a sleazy oppo research report on Trump that involves a Brit working with Russians to come up with all kinds of slanderous gossip to hurt his campaign.

And after all of that – after a century of deriding anybody who suggested that Russian communism might be a threat, and doing their best to undermine US opposition to Russia during the Cold War and after – the Dems and their lefty enablers in the MSM turn on a dime when it looks like the fantasy of Russian collusion is a cudgel they can use against Trump.

 

They pretend to suddenly be shocked and offended by Russian bad actors, and their malign influence in our politics.  And they spend many months and millions of dollars on an investigation that even they are now grudgingly having to admit was based on a sleazy, fallacious report cooked up by Democrat politicians who were – ironically enough — colluding with Russians, among others.

I don’t think the MSM and lefty elites know how ridiculous all of this looks to most Americans.   But after a century of mocking the idea that anything could possibly be wrong with Russian influence in the world, the leftist blowhards in politics and the media look pretty foolish trying to gin up a new Red Scare.

They may win Academy Awards and Pulitzer prizes when they stay true to themselves and embrace Russian commies, but I can only hope that their recent, amateurish attempts to pose as Red Hunters are unlikely to win them anything in the electoral college.

August has been ridiculously busy at chez Simpson, so I’ve been exhibiting less than my usual laser focus on the news.  I am digesting all of the latest Trump news, content to let CO and those more informed than me hash out the nuances.

In the meantime, I’ve been taking a few notes on what I have seen happening on the left over the last three weeks or so, and it has struck me as passing strange, even by the manifestly high strangeness ratings typically associated with the left.

Consider this:  within 24 hours a couple of weeks ago, I learned that Peter “the Z is silent” Stroke got fired (again: best porn name ever.  For an FBI agent?  Not so much.)  and John Brennan lost his security clearance.  And like you, I was shocked!

Shocked because I don’t believe that this hadn’t happened a year ago.

For the love of God, what do you have to do to get fired at the FBI?  Stroke was outed over a year ago as a biased, unethical hack.   He let his own partisan prejudices drive his actions at work, and taint several high profile investigations. He cheated with a co-worker, and left an email trail that proved that they were both scheming dunces.

And when he was called before a congressional committee, he displayed a combination of Comey-ian self-righteous cluelessness and Dan Rather-esque oily abrasiveness.  His two expressions were “smirking jerk” and “sneering comic book villain.”

Plus, his mistress is unattractive.  I cannot stress that enough.  It’s axiomatic that if you are going to risk your marriage and career to engage in an affair, she must at least be hot.  Maybe not Nikki Haley or 1983 Nena hot, but at least Crazy-eyes Castro-Guevara-Chavez hot.  Otherwise, after your wife kicks you out and you end up at 3:00 a.m., lying on the paper-thin mattress in your musty, next-to-the-airport apartment with the wheezily ineffective window air conditioner, you’ll have to stare at the ceiling and think about the horse-faced goon for whom you gave it all up.

And you’ll not be comforted, and you’ll realize that you are indeed too stupid to deserve a security clearance.

Speaking of security clearances, how in the world did John Brennan still have one?

Leave aside the fact that he’s spent the last year on MSNBC or CNN — or whatever left-slanted hack-fest that is just like MSNBC and CNN – spewing the most unhinged, reckless conspiracy theories and charges at the current administration.

Why wouldn’t he routinely – as a matter of course, and even if he wasn’t crazy “Heeerrre’s Johnny!” Brennan – be expected to give up his security clearance when he left government service, and therefore no longer had any legitimate reason to access classified information?

I honestly thought that people departing government jobs would of course routinely give up their security clearances.

When I finished my summer job of weeding soybean fields for a local farmer when I was 13, I had to turn in my bean hook.

When I finished my high school summer job of making milkshakes at the Laesch Dairy Barn in Illinois, I had to turn in my store keys.

As I understand it, when someone leaves the Hell’s Angels, he has to turn in his cool motorcycle jacket with the club patches all over it.

But you can be asked to leave the CIA and still keep your security clearance?  Just so that you can keep dipping into our nation’s secrets, in case you can pick up something juicy to leak to your fellow creeps on cable news shows?

Think about that.  Bill Cosby doesn’t still have access to roofies and women, and Bill Clinton doesn’t still have access to interns, and Kevin Spacey doesn’t still have access to boys, and Harvey Weinstein doesn’t still have access to would-be actresses.

But until earlier this month, Peter Stroke still worked at the FBI, and John Brennan still had a security clearance.  Ugh.

 

Speaking of Crazy-Eyes Castro-Guevera-Chavez, did you hear what happened when Ben Shapiro offered her a chance to come on to his podcast and debate any of the core issues of her socialist worldview with him?  He even offered $10K to her campaign or the charity of her choice to make that happen.

To be fair to Crazy Eyes, the offer was a bit of a gimmick, and there would have been no upside for her to accept.  She’s guaranteed to win in November in her far-left district, where her constituents wouldn’t recognize a reasonable economic argument if it hit them in the face like a big old hammer and sickle.  And she would have been guaranteed to lose a debate with Ben Shapiro, which would have looked like a boxing match between Mike Tyson at the height of his powers and Bradley Manning at the mid-point of his transformation into Chelsea.

So I don’t blame the Latina lunkhead for spurning the offer.  But I do blame her for the lame, victim-card playing way she turned it down.  She said, and I quote, ““Just like catcalling, I don’t owe a response to unsolicited requests from men with bad intentions. And also like catcalling, for some reason they feel entitled to one.“

That’s a lot of bad faith crammed into just two sentences.  And a lot of stupid, too.

She’s a politician running to propose and defend her political ideas, so to characterize an offer to do so as “bad intentions” is more than a stretch.   Her analogy also suggests that she’s never been catcalled by a human male before.

Quick quiz:  Which of the following have never, ever EVER been used as catcalling statements before:

1. “Hey baby, those are some sweet ideological principles you’ve got there.  Care to debate them in a format of your choosing in a well-lit and controlled environment?
2. “Miss, while I enjoy the way you are strutting down this street, I think you would look even more attractive strutting your way across a debate stage!”
3. “You’re pretty good at proposals, but you’d really put the “butt” in “rebuttal!”
4. “Please come and debate me, Mrs. Warren. I really have a thing for exotic Indian women!” (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
5. All of the above.

I for one am glad that Crazy Eyes will apparently be on the political stage for the foreseeable future.  No matter how lame Republicans get, and how many shenanigans the media can find and exaggerate about Trump, it seems like the Left has an endless supply of knuckleheads to beclown themselves, and repel mainstream voters.

For example, did you catch NY Governor Andrew Cuomo – the sharpest knife in a drawer full of very dull, rusty hammers and an old horseshoe – respond to Trump’s desire to Make America Great Again by dismissively saying that, “America was never that great.”

This is not something he got caught saying on a hot mike, or whispering to some America-hating far-left woman he was trying to trick into bed, or drunkenly mumbling into his vodka tonic during the Cankles McPantsuit victory party after it turned into a wake.

He said this during a speech, into a microphone.  With people present, and functioning lighting.  And cameras turned on and pointed right at him!

And he’s not some homeless crank in a beret and a Che t-shirt, running for school board in San Francisco on a platform of “Free acid and sex changes for all!”   He’s the Governor of New York state, which I’m pretty sure is actually in America.

This was a gaffe so breathtakingly stupid that it boggles the mind.  Not because there aren’t a lot of lefties who don’t like their own country – duh! – but because it’s such a basic point that it should go without saying: DON’T SAY THAT OUT LOUD!

It’s politics 101.  Can you imagine anyone in any other state or country saying that?

Ever heard of a Greek politician saying, “The Greeks are a great and proud people, so it’s too bad that Greece sucks so much!”

Ever heard of a French politician saying, “The only thing wrong with France is that it’s lousy with French people!”

Ever heard a New Jersey pol say, “People are always asking me what is so great about New Jersey, and you know what I do?  I just shrug, and say, “You got me there, pal.”

Ever heard an Israeli pol say, “The state of Israel?  Feh!”

You have not.  But the Dem governor of one of the largest American states, apparently without any alarm bells going off in his big, empty head, said it.  Can you imagine what his internal monologue must be, if THIS was the part that he felt comfortable saying?

I can only guess that it’s something like this:

“My fellow New Yorkers, You disgust me.  I hate this state, and this country, along with mom, apple pie and baseball.  I don’t care for any of our allies, and I think criminal illegal aliens should be treated better than American citizens.  In conclusion, I believe that children are NOT our future, working class people are ill-educated louts, and I think Hitler got a bad rap. Good night, and see you in hell.”

Finally, a story so sad that even I cannot joke about it too much.

Jay Austin and his girlfriend Lauren Geoghegan were in their late 20s when they decided to go on a romantic-sounding adventure, spending over a year riding bicycles through much of the world.  They went through parts of Europe, Asia and Africa, before they chose earlier this month to include Tajikistan on their itinerary.

Quick tip: don’t go to any country with “stan” in its name if you can help it.  If you can’t, you probably want to be accompanied by some special forces guys and carry a belt-fed weapon.  I know it sounds harsh, but there hasn’t been a good Stan since Laurel and Musial.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, beautiful Tajikistan in the summertime.

So yada yada yada, a carload of jihadi freaks run over the bicyclists and then stab them to death.

The story has an especially poignant tragic element because of a blog entry that Austin wrote earlier in the journey.  He said, “You read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place.  People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil.  I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.”

These words have launched 1000 snarky comments, half of them involving Darwin Awards.  And while I share some commentators’ impatience with the folly of these young adults, and I recognize the dark humor in such a macabre and predictable outcome, I’m not mad at them, and I think they deserve better.

We’ve all done impulsive, rashly stupid things when we were young and impressionable. We chased women who were bad for us, and ingested dangerous substances, and drove way too fast, and looked up to idiots, and spouted political theories that now make us want to never stop face-palming ourselves.

But most of us never died from it, by the grace of God.

I know that young people can be given to romantic and utopian ideas, and in a wildly successful Western nation they can be sheltered from the harsher realities of life more than ever before.   But something has gone badly wrong for anyone who can make it into their late 20s and still believe something as oblivious to the human condition as “evil is a made-up concept.”

Now excuse me while I prepare tomorrow’s lesson plan for my two daughters.  In the morning we’ll start with “Countries you cannot ride a bike through,” followed by readings from Dostoeyevsky, Conrad and Elmore Leonard.  In the afternoon, we’ll do some philosophy, starting with two old proverbs (one Russian, one Latin) that should appropriately raise the hair on one’s neck, re: human nature:  “The tears of strangers are only water” and “Homo homini lupus” (“Man is a wolf to man.”)

In the meantime, yes, I’ve got locks on both of their bikes.  Why do you ask?