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Home » The war against Kavanaugh: remember Clarence Thomas?

The war against Kavanaugh: remember Clarence Thomas?

The New Neo Posted on by

The Times hit piece on Kavanaugh that I discussed yesterday is still in the news, partly because the Times issued an addendum/correction to say that oh yeah, we forgot to mention it, but the supposed victim is reported to have said she has no recollection of the alleged event.

There’s much more along those lines, all of it to the disgrace of the Times. But this story wasn’t worthy of any newspaper except a gossip column scandal sheet even if the supposed victim had made the accusation herself. It’s about an irrelevant, ancient, unprovable, easily falsifiable charge. And even in the highly unlikely event that it was true exactly as written, it’s hard to know who the perp would be. Kavanaugh, or his penile-handling buddies?

I’ll leave that to everyone else to sort out. What interests me far more is the left’s goal in all this, discussed at some length here. And you can see that goal in action if you read this opinion piece by Jamelle Bouie in today’s NY Times (moving right along, the Times is) urging court-packing to offset the appointment of conservative justices and adding:

And of course Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed last September under clouds of suspicion that stemmed from accusations of sexual assault and sexual misconduct to a bevy of ethics complaints.

See how it goes? Make a bunch of bogus accusations, and then that person is forever “under a cloud” and “suspicious” and discredited.

But this is nothing new. The only thing new is the enthusiastic and unapologetic boosting of court-packing—and even that’s not new; it was advocated (with the screen excuse that it was to correct for justices being too long in the tooth) by none other than FDR. It’s also of interest that Bouie – or his editors, or whoever at the Times came up with the headline for his piece – appeals openly and nakedly to emotion rather than logic in the headline: “Mad About Kavanaugh and Gorsuch? The Best Way to Get Even Is to Pack the Court.”

Don’t get mad; get even.

Clarence Thomas was nominated for the Court nearly thirty years ago by George H. W. Bush, after the vicious Bork hearings. Thomas’s hearings were just as vicious as Bork’s on the part of the left, although they took a different (and now very familiar) form: accusations of sexual wrongdoing of an unprovable and salacious sort, although at least the Thomas accusations were made by someone willing to make them publicly, and they involved conduct alleged to have occurred when Thomas was fully adult rather than a college or high school student.

Why was Thomas’ appointment (or Bork’s) so offensive to the left, so unacceptable and unendurable? The Court had been moving to the left for many years, and the nomination of either man threatened that movement. Bork was nominated as a replacement for swing vote Powell (just as Kavanaugh replaced Kennedy, another swing vote) and Thomas was nominated as a replacement for the liberal Thurgood Marshall. The Thomas nomination was especially galling because he was black and therefore his conservative beliefs were a particular affront to a left that fully expected and demanded that all black people toe the leftist line.

But any conservative taking the seat of a liberal or even a swing vote was an abomination to the Democrats, and worthy of character assassination or any other weapon in their rhetorical arsenal. And ever since the Thomas hearings, has he not been (as Bouie says of Kavanaugh) “under clouds of suspicion that stemmed from accusations of sexual misconduct”? That was the plan.

As many others have pointed out, the courts are one of the main organs of the left these days, and the left relies heavily on them to advance the leftist agenda even when the public isn’t fully on board. That is why this is a matter of extreme importance to the left, and why they will not let up on this front or relinquish these tactics.

It is also one of their many beefs against Trump – why, that awful man got to appoint judges! Disgusting! And the judges he appointed trend not just Republican but conservative. There oughtta be a law against it!

[NOTE: A lot of people are saying this is all about Roe. It certainly is about Roe and the left’s fear of the Court upending it, but it’s about any and all of the left’s agenda and the Court’s role in advancing it.

By the way, just to refresh your memory, here is just a small excerpt from Ted Kennedy’s speech about Bork:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, and schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.

Absurd, but apparently effective.]

[ADDENDUM: Also see this.]

Comments

The war against Kavanaugh: remember Clarence Thomas? — 36 Comments

  1. Arthur Koestler explained all this decades ago, in “Darkness at Noon”

    “What was presented as right had to glitter like gold, and what was presented as wrong had to appear as black as pitch, while political confessions of faith and guilt were made to look colorful, like the gingerbread men sold at the fair.”

  2. How many leftists, when thinking of the “Lion of the Senate”, will be remembering those truly shameful words spoken on the floor of the Senate, or of Chappaquiddick and his often unchivalrous treatment of women, or of his part in the passing of Hart-Celler in 1965 (leading to the demographic suicide of this nation)?

  3. Oh, I remember that Kennedy speech attacking Bork. The “Lion of the Senate” was a disgrace throughout his career.

    Leftists are trying to discredit the Court and discredit our other institutions and discredit all of our history, to replace it with a new entity under their control in which they can finish the job of creating the American version of the New Soviet Man.

  4. The allegation that someone forced a female student at a freshman Yale party to hold Kavanaugh’s penis left out one important fact: She was screaming at Brett for over half an hour for being such a sexual pervert. After that long time Kavanaugh finally had a chance to speak. His response to her was simple, “LET GO!”

  5. “And even in the highly unlikely event that it was true exactly as written, it’s hard to know who the perp would be. Kavanaugh, or his penile-handling buddies?” – Neo.

    IMO, almost anything done by brain-dead college students (which included most of us, I suspect) up to the age of 21 should be off-limits if it wasn’t flat-out criminal*, and provable to boot.

    *And I don’t count the administrative state’s “three felonies a day” regulations as part of that group.

  6. Note to Ace’s post, which again points back to Packer’s whining that nothing about his kids’ problematic education experiences is his fault:

    So the New York Times reporters who wrote the Kavanaugh book have now placed blame on their editors and their social media

  7. I thought about fisking Bouie’s post, starting with the sub-headline, but I don’t have enough hours in the day.

    “Mad About Kavanaugh and Gorsuch? The Best Way to Get Even Is to Pack the Court
    Their lifetime appointments cry out for Democratic hardball.”

  8. “If Kavanaugh never votes to overturn or erode Roe, at least the volume of the vitriol against him will diminish.” – Rich Lowry.

    Are you serious? Are you serious?

  12. AesopFan:

    Actually, I think it’s likely that Vox understands what “corroboration” is. It just hopes its readers don’t understand, so it can get away with using the word when it does not apply.

  13. Both were nominated as a replacement for the liberal Thurgood Marshall,

    Bork was nominated to replace Lewis Powell, Thomas to replace Marshall.

    Powell had been appointed by Richard Nixon in 1971. Read John Dean’s memoir on the subject of judicial selections, where he’s unintentionally revealing about the incompetence of Nixon and also John Mitchell in processing judicial appointments. Four openings appeared during Nixon’s term, to which he nominated six judges (two being rejected). Dean delineates his discussions with three other candidates who were not selected.

    Powell was an uber establishment lawyer from Richmond. He’d never held any kind of judicial position before. Ultimately, when push came to shove, he behaved like a country club fool. Bork was an experienced jurist and lapsed law professor who had produced consequential articles on topics in constitutional law and anti-trust law. The left knew one of these men wasn’t a threat, and the other was.

    In Thomas’ case, most of his time as an adjudicator had been as chairman of a regulatory commission. (If the Democrats wanted to complain about that, you could have pointed out that Wm. O. Douglas had the same background, just with less time on the commission and no time on the bench). His approach to constitutional interpretation was unknown, but he was a Reagan appointee who had made some provocative speeches. He also had a sharp mind. Marshall had no conception of jurisprudence more elevated than ruling in favor of causes that pleased him and was, by the time he resigned, a triumph of the taxidermist’s art. What the left knew, is that they would lose ground. They had no clear idea how much.

  14. A brief clarification might be in order.

    Reagan nominated Bork, and Justice Kennedy was nominated and seated in the aftermath of the Bork defeat. Clarence Thomas was nominated after Kennedy (yes, by George H. W. Bush).

  15. Art Deco; Older and Wheezier:

    Thanks!

    Haste makes waste. I have now corrected the error in the post.

  16. Kevin Williamson did the fisking that covered most of the points that lifted my own eyebrows. As a bonus, he takes on the “belief they are doing good” problem raised by Solzhenitsyn, and then paraphrases my own “evil or mistaken” addendum.

    Bouie foreswears an intention of trying to “make the courts a vehicle for progressive policy,” and, of course, he does this as he writes of the ways and reasons for making the courts a vehicle for progressive policy. And here is the second common mode of partisan hackery: The belief that one’s own ideological preferences are not ideological preferences at all but self-evident moral truths. This belief can be held either insincerely (and cynically) or sincerely (and stupidly). For Bouie, it seems to be a bit of both.

    Second bonus, he addresses the core of the George Packer post on the lack of civics in elementary school curricula:

    Putting limits on democracy is what the Constitution is all about. That’s why we have one to begin with, and why we bothered writing it down. The United States is not the United Kingdom, and our parliament is not supreme in the way the British parliament is. You don’t have to agree with that, but to pretend that overturning that order is something other than an exercise in ideology and politics is intellectually dishonest.

    It is also civic miseducation. American government makes a lot more sense if you look at it from the point of view of how it was actually designed to function.

    Slam-dunk on the failure of the NYT to practice journalism rather than partisan propagandizing, with an implicit nod to Ben Rhodes no-nothing reporters:

    Bouie’s work here is a kind of journalistic malpractice, a willful refusal to deal with the facts of the case as they actually are — a first-order journalistic responsibility that is not removed by placing the column on the opinion page. Bouie doesn’t give much indication that he knows any better or that he is capable of knowing better, and his editors in the Times opinion pages do not seem to be very much interested in having their columnists know better:

    Isn’t it interesting the way so many of the moving parts of the Leftist / Democratic agenda come together?

  17. “…nothing about his kids’ problematic education experiences is his fault…”

    It’s never their fault. It’s always someone else’s fault.

    Always.

    Palestinian rules.

  19. neo on September 17, 2019 at 5:01 pm said:
    AesopFan:

    Actually, I think it’s likely that Vox understands what “corroboration” is. It just hopes its readers don’t understand, so it can get away with using the word when it does not apply.
    * * *
    Indeed true in many cases.
    However, given how often I read stories that egregiously misuse the English language, I wouldn’t be too sure the Vox writer knows what the word means.

  21. BTW, Gross may have added an update with the correction the Times had to make, but if she had done her homework the way Mollie Hemingway does, she should have noted it in the original interview.
    If she knew about the omission and failed to mention it at he time, well, that’s a different story altogether, isn’t it?

  22. I noticed this in the excerpts from the book in some articles: the authors just flat out lied.

    https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/17/witnesses-defended-kavanaugh-nyt-authors-falsely-claimed-they-were-silent/

    In a section explaining why they believe the accusers despite the lack of any evidence, they write that their emotional reaction to the claims was that the claims rang true. But they get major facts wrong:
    …
    It is not true that the alleged witnesses kept mum. This is another major error by The New York Times reporters.

    And this:
    https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/17/new-york-times-reporters-complain-their-reporting-on-kavanaugh-has-been-seized-for-politics/

    Ya think?
    That’s not why they wrote the book, they complain.

    New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly appeared on “The View” Tuesday, the release date of their book about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, where they attempted to explain their reporting errors and why they are facing so much backlash.

    When asked why they left out the crucial detail that an alleged victim of sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh does not recall the alleged incident, Pogrebin and Kelly admitted there was an “oversight.” Host Meghan McCain called the controversy “ground zero for why so many people mistrust the media,” and she asked Pogrebin and Kelly, “Can you understand why so many people think this is a hatchet job?”
    …
    Two times throughout the interview, Pogrebin said their reporting was being “seized” for political purposes, not because of its factual inaccuracy.
    …
    Pogrebrin then went on to explain that after ten months of digging into Kavanaugh’s past, presumably looking high and low for more evidence to disqualify him, the reporters actually found the opposite.

    …“Everyone we talked to couldn’t speak more highly of him on both sides of the aisle.”

    But even within the reporter’s attempt to praise Kavanaugh, she included baseless smears. There has yet to be a credible witness or factual piece of evidence presented to corroborate any allegations against Kavanuagh as a high school or college student, …
    Later in the show, Pogrebrin said as a reporter she “seeks the facts and puts them out there,” which is of course exactly the opposite of what happened with the concealed facts in her New York Times book excerpt.

    Again, she complained that “people have seized on certain things and magnified them for their own purposes,” in response to the question of whether these allegations are an impeachable offense. “It’s fine to have a series of Democratic candidates calling for impeachment, but that was before the book came out,” she said.

    Essentially, in a great twist of irony, the picture that Pogrebrin and Kelly begin to paint throughout the interview is that they are also victims of the political outrage mob.

  23. Any ’cause’ in which lying, deceit and character assassination is required for its advance, is one manifestly unworthy of support.

    And those who engage in lying, deceit and character assassination in support of such causes have embraced evil.

    “Mr. President, I’m using this opportunity to call you and everyone who supports you–an irredeemable white trash piece of s???.” [my emphasis]

    [his core voters] are “dim-witted frothing mouthed, servile, unevolved, knuckle-dragging dumbs????.”

    “all remaining Trump supporters are racist white supremacists. Every last one of them. No exceptions.” tweets by Gordon “Max” Heyworth, Aide to freshman Virginia congresswoman Abigail Spanberger

    I would remind the reader that the label “irredeemable” is a religious term, which asserts that such a person is beyond the redemption of even God.

    The activist left is so filled with hate that they have become the focal point for evil in the Western world. They are at least as dangerous as were the Nazis and Soviets and arguably more so because they are a cancer that attacks from within…

  24. https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/16/lindsey-graham-start-fighting-for-justice-for-brett-kavanaugh/

    Yes, Kavanaugh was confirmed. But that isn’t justice. Justice requires consequences for those who tarnished the man and lied to Senate Judiciary investigators and committee members. Justice requires consequences for Christine Blasey Ford and her handlers.

    Your inaction has so inspired the left that not even a year after Ford professed to senators, while under oath, that she was not “acting out of partisan political motives” in testifying that Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her while they were both high school students, Ford’s attorney Debra Katz felt no qualms about telling an audience that Roe v. Wade was part of Ford’s motivation.
    …
    Ford isn’t going away. She just laid low long enough to feel safe, as did Kavanaugh’s other putative accusers and the liberal press.
    …
    The left isn’t done. They aren’t nearly done. They will continue to hound Kavanaugh, either to twist him into a virtue-signaling pro-Roe vote, or to caution future conservative nominees to stay clear of the Supreme Court, or they’re coming for you.

    It’s still not too late, however, for Graham to put a stop to this charade.

    Of course, with all due deference to David French, the prosecution for perjury ought to be pursued with civility.
    There were no consequences for Anita Hill’s lies about Clarence Thomas, either, which (as many remarked last year) no doubt encouraged the attacks on Kavanaugh.
    And a lack of consequences now will convince the Left (again) that no amount of incivil behavior on their part will induce the Right to take action against them.

  25. Re: Vox — I’ve always been annoyed with their “We explain what you need to know” mission statement.

    I did enjoy that special moment when Vox “explained” that mean old Israel limits traffic on the bridge between Gaza and the West Bank. Even I knew enough to wonder, “What? There’s a bridge between Gaza and the West Bank?”

    There is no such bridge. (Though there have been plans for one.)

    “Vox’s Motto Should Be ‘Explaining The News Incorrectly, Repeatedly’”
    https://thefederalist.com/2014/07/17/voxs-motto-should-be-explaining-the-news-incorrectly-repeatedly/

  26. Maybe my impression back then growing up was wrong—and the rot had already set in, become pervasive, and deep-seated—there had been, after all, Duranty, and the famine in the Ukraine.

    But, back several decades ago, say, when I was in high school or even college, it seemed to me that the New York Times was seen as the best there was, that the highest aspiration of any “journalist’ was to work in their newsroom, and that their coverage was of major, serious issues and events; it was accurate, it was generally fair, and it was complete—the gold standard for the world—the Times was, simply, the United States premier “newspaper of record.”

    They just didn’t totally rely on anonymous sources, print mere, uncorroborated rumors, or “accidentally” leave out the key pieces of information that would—if included—invalidate a story.

    Flash forward to their last couple of years of reporting, and especially their reports over the last couple of weeks, and it is obvious that the New York Times has fallen far, far from those glory days, and has now become just a trashy propaganda rag, the PRAVDA of the Left; no more to be looked to for coverage of major issues of importance, standards, honesty, completeness, or accuracy than a supermarket tabloid that runs stories about women who have been impregnated by aliens from Arcturus, pictures of two-headed dogs, and features ads for rings costing $9.95 that are supposedly exact imitations of the diamond engagement ring Prince Harry gave to Megan Markle.

  27. One of the things that surprised me that the CBF was a re-run of Anita Thomas but not nearly as good.

  28. Ted C. Kennedy created the inexcusable verb “to bork” in 1987.
    Yet six years later, Republicans voted to confirm the far-left Ginsburg 93-3, because she was “qualified.”
    “Hapless doesn’t begin to describe the dereliction of duty there.
    Only after Thomas, Tea Party, Russiagate, do we finally begin to grasp the ideas of accountability and apply appropriate game theory
    https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/1998-99/game-theory/axelrod.html
    Punch back twice as hard.

  30. One of the first clients I had was an elderly gentleman who, with his brothers, had built a very successful business, a public company with ubiquitous stores on the East Coast. He and his brothers had retired, and their sons took it over. The sons looted the company, it went into Chapter XI and was finally liquidated.

    He said to me one of the most poignant things I have ever heard. I still remember it vividly, 42 years later. About his sons and nephews, he said, “They took my pants down in public.”

    A.G. Sulzberger, the current publisher of the NYT, took his father’s pants down in public.

  32. A.G. Sulzberger, the current publisher of the NYT, took his father’s pants down in public.

    No, his grandfathers pants, and AM Rosenthal’s. His father, ‘Pinch’ Sulzberger, wrecked the paper in a double act with a succession of editors (Max Frankel, Joseph Lelyveld, Howell Raines, Bill Keller, Jill Abramson). Howell Raines was the editor who ran 30+ stories about the membership policies of a golf club in Georgia as well as being personally responsible for hiring Jayson Blair and maintaining him in his position. Camille Paglia offered in 2004 that The Times self-understanding as ‘the paper of record’ was a fantasy and had been for about 20 years. Rosenthal’s retirement in 1986 was the beginning of the slide in quality.

  33. Pingback:It is just | gregormendelblog.com

  34. “Camille Paglia offered in 2004 that The Times self-understanding as ‘the paper of record’ was a fantasy and had been for about 20 years.”

    So, 1984?

  35. Confession is good for the soul – Democrats drop their masks yet again and show what they intend to do if they get to appoint justices. They’re terrified that a conservative court will “legislate” from the bench if they can only regain control of the courts. We may be compelled to resort to their “impeachment” tactics to stop their court picks from doing so.

  36. Oldies but goodies on the original smearing of Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings. Nothing happened in the last year that makes the conclusions & observations of either writer less compelling.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/brett-kavanaugh-limits-of-social-class-privilege-for-conservatives/
    Brett Kavanaugh and the Limits of Social-Class Privilege for Conservatives
    By DAVID FRENCH
    October 3, 2018 3:53 PM

    But as real as these petty resentments were and are, they pale in comparison to the most important thing. They miss the real roots of Ivy rage. Brett Kavanaugh’s true sin isn’t his connections, his popularity, or his prep school. His true sin is that he’s a conservative. And now he’s a particular kind of conservative — a conservative who matters, a conservative who will have the power (and might actually have the convictions) to threaten one or more of the most sacred elements of progressive jurisprudence. He can potentially affect the law and the culture in a profound way.

    So what we’re watching is the systematic revocation of his elite privilege. We’re watching the Ivy Borg — and its associated media infrastructure — turn on a man who was never truly part of the collective. The real resentments Ross outlines in his piece act as penalty enhancers, but the true crime remains. The rage would exist even if Kavanaugh had been born in a double-wide and was the first of his family to attend college.
    …
    There is also value, especially for idealistic young conservatives struggling to navigate a hostile elite culture, in understanding the ways of the world. Speak the truth. Treat people with respect. Maintain the courage of your convictions. But never, ever be deceived into believing that — outside of a precious few close friends — those virtues will earn you one ounce of mercy or compassion when the mob howls for your head.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/brett-kavanaugh-hearings-fight-recalls-jokers-two-boats/
    The Battle of Brett Kavanaugh and the Joker’s Two Boats
    By KYLE SMITH
    October 4, 2018 6:30 AM

    But the American capacity to dehumanize the Other is gaining strength in these fraught weeks, the days of the Battle of Brett Kavanaugh. Picture one boat full of New York/San Francisco/D.C.–based Hillary Clinton–loving pro-choice activists and the other full of rural, Evangelical pro-life Christians and National Rifle Association members. Give each boat a detonator to blow up the other one. Would either group be able to hold off on mass murder under the circumstances devised by the Joker?

    I doubt it. We’re more afraid of our political adversaries than at any time in many decades. People who are truly terrified may be capable of acts of great malevolence. People who believe they are acting in self-defense, even preventive self-defense in advance of anticipated attack, might do horrific things.
    …
    The Left — the Democrats and their public-relations arm in the mainstream media –thinks that the abortion rights they cherish above all else are under siege, that Kavanaugh is about to blow up the foundation of their politics, and so they do not hesitate to seize upon any smear as a weapon. Why hesitate to blow up the other ship when you’re absolutely convinced the people on it will blow you up as soon as they get the chance?

    The wells of truth, in Johnson’s phrase, are once again being poisoned.
    …
    Vague cries to “rise up” don’t look so vague when masked Antifa demonstrators join the party. “We must not be enemies,” Lincoln counseled us in his first inaugural address. “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” Anyone feeling confident today that our bonds of affection are stronger than our passions?

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