Gentleman Lindsey

The New Neo Posted on by

This sort of thing is why Lindsey Graham felt so betrayed at the Kavanaugh attacks. It’s Graham’s statement in 2010, explaining his vote for Elana Kagan:

We lost. President Obama won. I’ve got a lot of opportunity to disagree, but the Constitution, in my view, puts an obligation on me not to replace my judgment for his, not to think of the hundred reasons I would pick someone different… I view my duty as to protect the Judiciary and to ensure that hard-fought elections have meaning in our system. I’m going to vote for her [Kagan] because I believe this election has consequences. And this president chose someone who is qualified to serve on this court and understands the difference between being a liberal judge and a politician. At the end of the day, it wasn’t a hard decision… She would not have been someone I would have chosen, but the person who did choose, President Obama, chose wisely.

If you read the article the quote comes from, you’ll find an ironic statement, this time from Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois:

Graham’s comments spurred Democratic Whip Dick Durbin to call him an “extraordinary senator” who had prompted Durbin to rethink some of his previous votes against conservative nominees.

I guess Durbin didn’t recall it during the Kavanaugh hearings. But I bet he was shocked when the previously mild-mannered Graham unloaded on the Democrats of the committee.

I recently came across a video interview of Graham taken back in the summer of 2015, when he was running for president. Here’s a passage I found very moving; I hadn’t known this about Graham’s history, and it tells you a great deal about him (I cued it up for the part I’m referring to, but for some reason it autoplays again after that, and although I’ve tried and tried to turn off the autoplay it hasn’t worked, so you need to stop it yourself after it’s gotten to the cutoff at 6:05):

Graham was orphaned at 22 and his younger sister was 13. He adopted her.

Pushback

The New Neo Posted on by

There are quite a few interesting things about this incident.

The first is that there are still Republican students and a Republican Club at Stanford these days.

The second is that involves a male college student filing assault charges against a female one, for pushing him in the chest during a political discussion.

The third—and to me the most surprising thing of all about it, by far—is that the male student, president of Stanford College Republicans, is apparently Susan Rice’s son.

As far as number one goes, I’m surprised mostly by the fact that Republican students are brave enough to come out into the open and reveal themselves, in the current university climate.

As far as number two goes, of course females sometimes assault males. But there’s a stigma against a male filing charges unless the assault leaves visible injuries. Even then, a great many men would just keep quiet about having been assaulted. Women are used to having their pushes and shoves and hits ignored as being of little consequence, because of their lesser physical strength. Of course, a woman can do great damage and even kill when armed with any sort of weapon. But even with just her hands, an assault is an assault is an assault and women should get used to the fact that if they assault a person it ought to be treated exactly the same as it a man had done it.

As for number 3, I think the reason for my surprise is probably obvious. I would love to hear the story of how John Rice-Cameron came to be a Republican, and an activist Republican at that.

NOTE: I had no sooner written the above post, and its last line, when it occurred to me that I could easily look it up. And here’s the answer to my question:

John David Rice-Cameron can trace his conservative roots to his middle school years. Back then, his father would often have talk radio on during rides home from school or tennis practice.

“Sometimes my dad would listen to Rush Limbaugh and he would kind of argue with him,” recalls Rice-Cameron, 20, a sophomore at Stanford University. “I just found myself agreeing with basically everything Rush Limbaugh was saying.”…

… despite his parents’ political leanings, “they believe extensively in debate and engaging the other side and exposing people to different viewpoints,” he said.

Well, good for them.

What was behind the Kavanaugh attack?

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that Judge Brett Kavanaugh is Justice Brett Kavanaugh, there’s a lot of analysis of going on about the nature of the process we actually witnessed.

While the battle was still ongoing, Christine Ford was treated by the GOP as well-intentioned, wounded, and mistaken rather than duplicitous. But now there’s a growing murmur (and sometimes shout) that Ford knowingly lied about Kavanaugh, and that she may even have had help in that endeavor from one person or many.

You probably have come across several of these stories. One line of thinking involves Ford’s high school friend turned “beach pal” Monica McLean (see here, for example); another theory involves a larger number of players than just McLean.

I can’t say whether any of this has merit; only time and a more thorough investigation has any hope of doing that. But these are the things I do know:

Christine Blasey Ford already has been caught in some serious lies (for example, see this) that seem to involve political calculations and motives. The involvement of McLean at some level does seem to be highly possible, in part because of Ford’s visit at the height of the whole thing to the place where former FBI lawyer McLean resides.

One of the strangest aspects of Ford’s story is that, by the time her identity was revealed, much information about that identity had been removed from the internet with an unusual degree of thoroughness for a layperson, indicating the participation of someone who knew exactly what he or she was doing, not an amateur such as Ford herself. How was this done, and who did it?

For me, one of the most curious aspects of all is that her high school yearbooks disappeared from their online site as well, not long after almost all of her personal information was scrubbed . Ford did not have the power to do this because the yearbooks were not displayed at her site or social media pages. So who did it for her, and why, and at whose behest? What’s more, the site that claimed to have archived and displayed the yearbooks disappeared as well not all that long after.

It takes quite a bit to get me into conspiracy theories, but this has been extremely odd. Are the yearbooks that were displayed at that site authentic? If so, why did the site that offered them disappear without any explanation? The yearbooks revealed massive drinking and partying by the young ladies of Holton Arms, including Ford herself. I’d love to get some clarification on all of this.

But as Hillary Clinton might say, what difference at this point does it make? After all, Kavanaugh is a SCOTUS justice now.

I think it still makes plenty of difference because of the desirability of clearing the cloud of charges that still hang over Kavanaugh’s head—not that those who judged him guilty with little or no evidence will ever judge him not guilty. And if Ford, alone or with others, planned and/or conspired to defame Brett Kavanaugh with knowingly false allegations, she and/or they need to be tried and punished for it. That may cause those who contemplate such a move in the future to cease and desist, although I doubt it.

I fear that the entire Kavanaugh incident and its denouement will serve as a different example. The left may learn something from it, all right, but what they learn may be how to do it better next time. For example, perhaps Ford got her story out before it had been sufficiently fine-tuned. She seems to have included elements that could be tracked down (the witnesses who were not actually witnesses, for example) and not corroborated. Next time, perhaps there won’t be any alleged witnesses (that’s what occurred with Roy Moore, to the best of my recollection). There are many other possibilities that come to mind, but I’m not going to give any suggestions to the left, just in case they haven’t thought of them. Although I’d be the last person to underestimate their creativity, I don’t want to make their task easier.

Jair Bolsonaro advances to a runoff in Brazil elections that will present a stark contrast

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve previously written at some length about Bolsonaro (“Brazil’s Trump”) here.

Bolsonaro has now advanced to a run-off against left-wing Workers’ Party candidate, Fernando Haddad. Neither managed to get the 50% total needed to have won outright in this first round of the presidential election. The next round is on October 28, and polls supposedly show them even.

More:

Mr Bolsonaro’s once insignificant Social Liberal Party (PSL) is poised to become the largest force in Congress following legislative elections held alongside the presidential vote, in what analysts have described as a seismic shift in Brazilian politics.

The politician and the PSL have ridden a wave of rising anger at the Workers’ Party, which their supporters blame for a prolonged recession, rising violent crime and widespread corruption in South America’s largest economy.

In his victory speech, broadcast live on Facebook and uploaded on to Twitter, he said Brazilians could take the path of “prosperity, liberty, family, on God’s side” or the path of Venezuela…

Across Latin America this has become a popular campaign strategy: don’t vote for the left or you will end up like Venezuela.

Gee whiz, I can’t imagine why they’d think that was a good political ploy. Maybe because people can readily see the terrible example of Venezuela right before their very eyes? Who are they going to believe, though: Fernando Haddad, or their lying eyes?

The Trump administration and China

The New Neo Posted on by

A lot seems to be going on between this administration and China:

On Thursday, Pence delivered one of the most hawkish speeches by a senior U.S. official since the two countries restored ties four decades ago.

Pence assailed China as a military aggressor, a prolific thief of U.S. technology and, controversially, as interfering in American elections.

Yet in a sign that the United States still sees a need for China, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will visit on Monday after his latest negotiations in North Korea, the nuclear-armed regime which counts on Beijing as its diplomatic and economic lifeline.

Pompeo, speaking to the traveling press on his way to Asia, said China was “determined to support our efforts” on North Korea despite the high tensions…

Pence’s speech “doesn’t completely preclude cooperation on narrow areas like North Korea, but it’s much more clear in the U.S. assessment of Chinese intentions and China’s goal of really replacing the U.S. and pushing back U.S. power,” [Jamie Fly, a former official in the George W. Bush administration who heads the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States] said.

Remember back in 2012 when Obama laughed at Romney when the latter said that Russia was our biggest geopolitical threat? At this point there may be a consensus that it’s China:

Few policymakers with ties to the rival Democratic Party raised broad objections when the Trump White House in December released a National Security Strategy that cast China as a competitor.

The bargain set forth by former President Bill Clinton when he welcomed China into the global trading order — that greater prosperity would bring reforms — has fallen flat, with President Xi Jinping increasingly clamping down on domestic dissent and religious freedoms tightly controlled.

U.S. business leaders, who long advocated warm ties with China as they coveted the world’s largest consumer market, have cooled markedly toward Beijing amid complaints of widespread industrial espionage, which Beijing denies.

Here’s another article on the subject, which calls it a possible Cold War II, but I can’t get behind the paywall.

Nikki Haley is resigning from her UN post

The New Neo Posted on by

Nikkii Haley was one of the best UN ambassadors ever, so I’m sorry to see that she’s leaving the post. That said, her job was a largely thankless task in terms of any change being effected in that body. The UN is the UN, and although she was a strong voice for the US there, her skills might be better used elsewhere.

In her announcement, Haley cited the following:

She preemptively sought to mute speculation she might run against her old boss, stressing that she will support Trump and will not campaign for the White House in 2020.

Haley called her time at the U.N. a “blessing,” but offered no reason for leaving other than a belief that government officials must know “when it’s time to step aside.”

Trump told reporters that Haley did “an incredible job” and is a “fantastic person.” He said she had told him six months ago that she wanted to take a break “maybe at the end of the year.”

“Hopefully you’ll be coming back at some point, maybe in another capacity,” he told her. “You can have your pick.”

Haley called her time at Turtle Bay the “honor of a lifetime” and said there was “nothing set on where I am going to go.” She also praised the work of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, particularly Kushner’s role in re-negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). She called Kushner a “hidden genius.”

That doesn’t sound to me like any sort of rift between Haley and Trump. Of course, looks can be deceiving. But that kind of praise between the sides is more than strictly necessary, and seems fairly convincing.

Others will spin it as they wish, of course, as described by Jim Geraghty:

Her departure set off a lot of breathless, and fairly inane, speculation, including claims that Haley was upset with the administration’s defense of Kavanaugh (when has Haley ever not spoken her mind?) or that there’s some sort of terrible scandal about to be revealed (how would Haley know about, say, the Robert Mueller investigation?). Occam’s Razor would suggest that the stated reasons are the true ones — that she has two college-age kids, the job is exhausting, and she’s accomplished a lot of what she set out to do…

Haley has explicitly stated that she plans to support Trump in 2020, so unless she wants to be called a liar, those who fervently hope she’ll primary Trump in that election are barking up the wrong tree. There’s also a widespread meme that the Trump administration was blindsided by her resignation, despite the fact that he says he’s known about it for 6 months.

I have no idea which of those is the truth, surprise or 6-month lead time; maybe neither. Maybe it’s actually something in-between the two.

It will be interesting to see whether there’s a next political step for Haley. My guess is that there will be, but she will be at the job until the end of the year so it may take a while to find out.

Bot attack: foiled!

The New Neo Posted on by

There was another bot crawler attack last night, unfortunately. My apologies to all of you who might have gotten “error” messages for a while when you tried to access the blog.

The good news is that it seems to have been thwarted fairly quickly by some changes I made behind the scenes. I think that now, with these changes in place, something similar is unlikely to recur. I certainly hope so.

Let me know if you’re still having some problems connecting. For me, it’s a little bit slow, so the situation is significantly better but not 100% better. I’m about to contact the web developer to see if he can fix the problem for good, but he’s pretty busy and it could take a little while. Once again, apologies.

Blogs are surprisingly complex things.

Happy post-modern, Indigenous People’s, Columbus Day

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]

There, did I cover enough bases? Did I get it right (I mean left)?

Like many things, Columbus Day has evolved. And here’s a discussion of the postmodern Columbus Day (from Dr. Sanity, circa 2009).

As for me, since I live up in New England and the weather has been good, I’ll should just play it safe and call it Leafpeepers Day. They’re out in force now (both the leaves and the human peepers).

I plan to take an official leafpeeping drive some weekday this week in order to try to avoid the worst of the vehicular congestion over the holiday itself.

Here are some photos I’ve taken during previous New England falls. The first isn’t a leaf, it’s a berry in its fall raiment. But let’s not get technical:

100_2449-001

The most spectacular colors are always the reds, which come first:

100_2437-001

In the mist:

100_2442-002

Fini:

100_2483-001

The Kavanaugh hearing has united the GOP for now. But why?

The New Neo Posted on by

You hear it everywhere right now: the Republican Party is united as never before.

Mitch McConnell was pretty witty about it: “I want to thank the mob because they’ve done the one thing we were having trouble doing, which was energizing the base.”

It’s not just the base, of course. The moderate right and the more conservative right and the more extreme right are all on the same page for the moment, thanks to the behavior of the Democrats.

But Democrats have behaved badly before, and it certainly didn’t unify the GOP. The Kavanaugh attacks and the GOP defense against those attacks had some very unusual characteristics that gave them that unifying potential and ensured that the potential was fulfilled:

(1) Kavanaugh is not especially conservative. He’s long been allied with the Bushes, and his judicial positions and decisions have not been extreme. In fact—although so much has happened since his initial nomination that it’s hard to remember the buzz at the beginning—quite a few people from the right wing of the party were unhappy about the nomination because they felt he’d be a squish as a justice and not conservative at all. And maybe he will be a lot squishier than we think. So initially it was actually the more conservative side of the GOP that wasn’t ecstatic about his nomination.

(2) Kavanaugh was seen by all as a sort of Boy Scout. He was nominated in part because there was no hint of scandal around him.

(3) And yet the most vicious attack ever seen against a SCOTUS nominee was launched against this particular candidate. The Roy Moore attacks worked in large part because the moderate wing of the GOP hated him, and he was seen even on the right as a bit loopy. Brett Kavanaugh had none of those characteristics. So although the GOP was expecting Kavanaugh to be attacked during his hearings, they were not expecting a combination of Borking (in the first stage for Kavanaugh) and the Clarence Thomas hearings (in the second, post-Ford stage), with the offensiveness of the accusations in that latter stage exponentially more serious than those leveled against Clarence Thomas by Anita Hill.

(4) The outrage and anger from both wings of the Republican Party was tremendous. But the far right of the party is often outraged and angry at what Democrats do. It’s the moderate wing that usually shrugs its shoulders or gives in. This time, that was not an option. Kavanaugh was their man, and he was being trashed.

(5) He was also being trashed in an exceptionally underhanded and extreme manner: sexual charges from when he was a teenager, minus any detail that would enable him to defend himself properly or disprove them, and with no corroboration. Then came the piling-on of even more scurrilous and less believable charges, and it was clear that the Democrats were championing trial by ordeal and mob rule.

(6) That was frightening to both sides of the GOP. But not one Democrat—with the single uncertain, wavering, and self-serving exception of Joe Manchin—was frightened by it. The rest jumped on board the USS Defamation.

(7) At that point, it was the moderate wing of the GOP that was galvanized. They suddenly discovered that the rules they thought they’d been playing by all this time, the ones they thought at least some of their Democratic colleagues shared, meant nothing to the opposition. They either had never held them at all, or were more than willing to abandon them—and all sense of decency—in their lust for power.

(8) And that’s why it was the moderate side of the right that stepped up to the plate and delivered the goods in the Kavanaugh fight. Lindsay Graham, Susan Collins, Chuck Grassley, Mitch McConnell, all of them harshly vilified in the past by the more conservative wing of the party, found themselves uttering words that those who had previously reviled them were now cheering.

(9) Those words from the RINOs had more power to rally the base than if the same messages had been delivered by senators further to the right. The factor of surprise made for a much more attention-getting story. Lindsay Graham’s tirade was much more newsworthy because it came from Graham rather than, for example, Ted Cruz. But in addition, because one of the biggest beefs the far right had previously had with the RINOs was the latters’ lack of courage and fight, the experience of actually seeing and hearing those RINOs fight, and fight hard, did much to evaporate the base’s former reasons for despising them.

And that, folks, is why the GOP is united for now.

Due process and other nonsense

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not going to bother to fisk this NY TImes op-ed by Alexis Grenell because Ann Althouse has already done it very well in this post. Instead, I want to concentrate on one phrase in one sentence of Grenell’s leftist, race-and-gender-obsessed screed [emphasis mine]:

Meanwhile, Senator Collins subjected us to a slow funeral dirge about due process and some other nonsense I couldn’t even hear through my rage headache as she announced on Friday she would vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh.

This is what Susan Collins actually said about due process and all that other nonsense that Times writer Grenell couldn’t hear through her rage headache:

…[T]his debate is complicated further by the fact that the Senate confirmation process is not a trial. But certain fundamentally legal principles about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them. In evaluating any given claim of misconduct we will be ill served in the long republic if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness tempting though it may be.

We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy. The presumption of innocence is relevant to the advice and consent function when an accusation departs from a nominees otherwise exemplary record. I worry that departing from this presumption could a lead to a lack of public faith in the judiciary and would be hugely damaging to the confirmation process moving forward.

Some of the allegations levied against Judge Kavanaugh illustrate why the presumption of innocence is so important. I am thinking in particular not at the allegations raised by professor Ford, but of the allegations that when he was a teenager Judge Kavanaugh drugged multiple girls and used their weakened state to facility gang rape.

This outlandish allegation was put forth without any credible supporting evidence and simply parroted public statements of others. That’s such an allegation can find its way into the Supreme Court confirmation process is a stark reminder about why the presumption of innocence is so ingrained in our a American consciousness.

We’ve heard a lot from Democrats for the past couple of weeks about “due process” and how irrelevant it is when men are accused by women of the most serious sexual crimes in the court of public opinion. So that sentence of Grenell’s—which appears to be saying that due process is some sort of “nonsense”—is not some strange and idiosyncratic statement. Apparently the idea has become mainstream among Democrats, which is yet another sign (as though we needed any at this point) that leftists have taken over the Democratic Party.

Democrats used to champion due process. No more. But that was when there were more liberals in the Democratic Party than there are now. Alan Dershowitz just may be the only liberal left standing, because he actually does believe in applying the same rules to everyone accused, because he believes that process protects us all. But Alan Dershowitz seems pretty much alone in his own party, although Joe Manchin could at least claim that devotion to principle rather than naked self-serving political interest drove his vote for Kavanaugh.

It is completely understandable that the left thinks due process is “nonsense” when it might benefit someone they consider the enemy. If a political group is focused entirely on certain results and holds the banner of “ends justify means” aloft as their standard, then what would due process mean to them and why on earth would they value it? Due process is a process that is supposed to ensure the fairest possible end result, but sometimes a fair end result doesn’t benefit your side. If a political movement is only interested in what benefits its side it cannot possibly support a process that would be applied equally to all comers.

“Process” then becomes “nonsense,” mere meaningless babble that can be safely ignored because a person is having a “rage headache” at not getting the desired results. Results are the only thing that matter, after all.

Post-Kavanaugh-confirmation thoughts

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m still at that big family event, so I’ll be relatively brief.

—I wonder what older Democratic senators such as Feinstein and Schumer, who started out as liberal Democrats rather than full-on leftists, see when they look in the mirror today. I’m not referring to their physical selves and the ravages of time, I’m referring to their consciences and the proverbial mirror rather than the actual one. Do they like what they see, or do they feel any sense of shame whatsoever? Was the path to this point so slow and gradual, with compromise after compromise and rationalization after rationalization along the way, that they no longer have any consideration except “ends justify means” in the path to power? Or did they never care about anything else, right from the start? I don’t ask the question of the younger ones like Kamala Harris, because she is now exactly what she was the day she was elected.

—I hope Justice-to-be Kavanaugh has remarkable powers of recuperation, and a good set of bodyguards for his entire family.

—Those who praised the #MeToo movement in general have been misguided, IMHO. It always contained the pernicious idea “believe the women”—a rubric that is incompatible with fairness and justice—plus a built-in contagion effect in which the very title of the movement encourages a willingness to join in the accusative chorus and be part of the victim group. If one harks back to the days when women’s accusations were often ignored even when they had substance, then something like “take women’s accusations seriously” or “don’t disbelieve the women” might make sense as a slogan (although I realize they’re not the least bit catchy). But a requirement to automatically believe any class or group of people is always going to lead to a dangerous miscarriage of justice. So this isn’t really a perversion of the #MeToo movement or a highjacking of it. #MeToo always continued that mob element.

—It will be interesting to see whether the energy on the right holds through the election of 2018. I fervently hope it does. It certainly has a decent chance of doing so, because this has been an exceptionally painful and difficult episode to witness and to experience. My guess is that it won’t soon be forgotten.