The proceedings are supposed to begin at around 3:30 PM.
I’m in the middle of a big family event, so talk amongst yourselves for a while. I’ll try to check in later.
Richard Landes on fake news
Richard Landes, the man who exposed the al Durah hoax and coined the term “Pallywood” for the Palestinian staging of false scenes of victimization at the hands of Israelis, is writing a new book. It’s not out yet, but it will be called They’re so Smart cause We’re so Stupid: A Medievalist Guide to the 21st Century. Landes is a historian by trade, a courageous and brilliant man, and a good friend of mine.
Here’s an excerpt from his work in progress; it describes his discovery of how obvious the fakery of Pallywood was, and how complicit the news media in Europe has been:
Even had the child [Muhammad al Durah] died in a crossfire, blaming his death on deliberate Israeli action made it a classic blood libel: A gentile boy dies; the Jews are accused of plotting the murder; violent mobs, invoking the dead martyr, attack the Jews…The first blood libel announced by a Jew (Enderlin)[a renowned French journalist], spread by the modern mainstream news media (MSNM), and carried in cyberspace to a global audience. It was the first wildly successful piece of “fake news” of the 21st century, and, as an icon of hatred, it did untold damage.
Here’s how Landes was able to see the rushes, the raw video footage from which the much shorter version that had been shown around the world had been taken:
And that had brought me to see these rushes, the raw, unedited footage shot that day in September 2000 at Netzarim Junction. The film was in the possession of senior French-Israeli journalist and France2 chief correspondent Charles Enderlin, who was the employer of Abu Rahma, the cameraman who had shot the footage. He was known to only show the rushes to investigators “on his side” but coming on the recommendation of a friend, Enderlin assumed I was sympathetic. For the viewing, I had Enderlin on my left, and on my right, an Israeli cameraman working for France2, who had been with Enderlin in Ramallah the day of the filming.
What I saw astonished me. In scene after scene, Palestinians staged scenes of battle, injury, ambulance evacuation, and panicked flight, which the cameraman deliberately filmed, all the while standing around in front of the Israeli position, completely unafraid. To judge by Abu Rahma’s 21 minutes of film, and a Reuters cameraman’s two hours, Netzarim Junction that day of September, the “third day of the intifada,” was the site of multiple makeshift stages upon which cameramen, most Palestinian, some foreign, filmed “action sequences,” performed by everyone from military men with guns to teenagers and kids standing by…
The Israeli France2 cameraman snorted.
“Why do you laugh?” I asked.
“It’s so obviously fake,” he responded.
“I know,” I said, turning to Enderlin, “this all seems fake.”
“Oh, they do that all the time. It’s a cultural thing” The senior correspondent replied.
“So why couldn’t they have faked it with al Durah?”
“They’re not good enough,” said Enderlin. “They can’t fool me.” …
I already knew that Palestinians faked footage, but what I now understood was that the mainstream news media, whose first imperative was to filter out such blatant propaganda, had accepted it as a normal practice, and used the fakes to tell the “real” story…as they can cut it into believable site-bytes of Israeli aggression and Palestinian victimhood…When Esther Schapira, in her documentary Three Bullets and a Dead Child, asked a TV official with the Palestinian Authority why he had spliced into the al Durah footage a shot of an Israeli aiming his gun (at crowds rioting because of the al Durah footage, making it look like he was ‘targeting’ al Durah, he responded:
These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth … We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth…
A higher truth, of course.
Landes was shaken:
As I left the building, still stunned by Enderlin’s response—he had been using the cameraman, apparently never rebuking him for his unprofessional behavior, for twelve years!—thinking about the deep symbiosis of Palestinian staging and Western news reports. “It’s an industry,” I thought, “a ‘national’ industry, like Hollywood, or Bollywood… it’s Pallywood.
Had Enderlin had the courage to respond to Abu Rahma’s al Durah, lethal propaganda by firing him, and running a sensational piece on how his own Palestinian cameraman had tried to trick him into airing a staged scene in support of a potentially lethal blood libel… had he warned his fellow journalists of the danger to their professional integrity in running Palestinian-filmed footage without checking carefully… the course of the Oslo Jihad, and with it, the future of civil society in the 21st century might have been very different.
What I soon discovered, however, was the immense resistance of everyone involved, even the Israelis, to any effort to change the narrative.
Please read the whole thing.
Watch the trap being set for Ford by Mitchell
I am heartily sick of Christine Blasey Ford, and I hope her three weeks of fame is now over or will be over very very very soon, and she will return to the obscurity she professes to crave. Whatever happens, I believe the left will continue to laud and reward her as a great heroine.
Note that I didn’t call her “Doctor,” the title used 99% of the time when referring to her. I know a huge number of people with PhD’s and not one of them —not one—insists on being called “Doctor.”
I have no idea whether in Ford’s pre-Kavanaugh-accusation life she habitually used the title and insisted on others using it when addressing her, but I believe that the consistent use of it ever since she became the center of America’s attention has been an attempt to bolster her credibility (I have become quite sick of that word, too) by keeping her professional status foremost in viewers’ minds.
This post isn’t going to be a thorough discussion of all the reasons I find Ford not “credible” but rather “incredible.” But I do want to take a moment to analyze just a single brief clip of Rachel Mitchell’s questions about flying, that exposed Ford as a blatant, brazen liar. This passage makes me wonder why anyone would believe a word Ford says after seeing it. And yet many do.
Mitchell was extraordinarily low-key in her own presentation. I believe that is a very studied and practiced role for her, meant to disarm and put the interviewee at ease. Mitchell seems friendly, but here she is carefully and calmly asking a series of questions to which she almost certainly knows the correct answers, although she’s not sure how Ford is going to answer. This basic line of questioning also had to be one that Ford anticipated being asked by Mitchell, so no doubt Ford had prepared some basic answers in advance. But it didn’t go quite the way Ford had hoped.
At the start of the clip, a very friendly, seemingly relaxed Mitchell asks how Ford got to Washington, a question Ford had to know would present her with a conundrum. How could she possibly explain that, after having put out word that she was afraid to fly?
Ford answers in her little-girl voice, “In an [here we get a slightly abashed smile from Ford] airplane.” Mitchell then asks her more directly about her fear of flying, a question Ford had to have been expecting, and Ford responds that she was [emphasis mine], “hoping to avoid getting on an airplane, but eventually was able to get up the gumption [to fly to DC] with the help of some friends.”
This is a very carefully crafted answer. In it, Ford attempts to convey the idea that she is indeed afraid of flying and therefore was telling the truth about that when she had asked for the delay, but that in certain rare and very pressing circumstances, with a lot of help from her friends, she can manage to muster up the courage to fly. She’s indicating that she’s emotionally vulnerable, and that if Mitchell or anyone else pushes too hard she could crumble, but that she is also strong when needed, although only with the help of friends and after great effort. Thus she is vulnerable yet strong when needed, and dependent on others to be kind to her and help her out. She’s asking Mitchell (and the listeners) to be gentle and kind with her, too.
At that point I think Ford believes she’s established exactly what she set out to do.
Shortly afterward, in the same gentle, non-threatening manner, Mitchell asks, “In fact you fly fairly frequently for your hobbies and you’ve had to fly for your work, is that true?” Note that “hobbies” comes first. If Ford answers “yes”—and she pretty much has to, because she knows there are probably records of this—she sounds frivolous, as though she’s ready to jet off at a moment’s notice, for a lark.
So Ford fastens on the “work” portion of the question, and answers “Yes, unfortunately.” emphasizing her reluctance and fear again. Then there are questions from Mitchell about possible work Ford’s done in Australia, and Ford answers that, although she worked for a company based there, there’s no requriement to go there and she’s certainly not been there. With a little smile she adds, “No, I don’t think I’ll make it to Australia!” The clear implication is that Australia is way too far for her to travel, and Mitchell responds by doing another friendly thing, smiling and agreeing, “It is long.” Ford smiles, too. Again, I think she believes she’s dodged that bullet, which is what Mitchell wants her to believe.
And later Mitchell says, without raising her voice or changing her friendly affect, that in Ford’s CV she lists as interests: surf travel, Hawaii, Costa Rica, South Pacific Islands, French Polynesia, and asks whether Ford has ever been to those places. The listener can’t help but contemplate how far away those destinations are—almost as far as Australia, a place Ford has just denied traveling to (and a place Mitchell almost certainly already knew that Ford had not traveled to but asked about anyway because Mitchell wanted to elicit the denial for contrast). And Ford says quite simply: “Correct.”
Correct. She’s flown to all those places. And they are vacation spots, too. It dawns on the listener that this women doesn’t just fly now and then, when she works up the gumption. This women is a world traveler, for adventure and fun. Nothing forced her to go to any of these places, and of course she wouldn’t hesitate to go to Australia too if she needed to or wanted to.
At this point Ford realizes how bad that sounded, and she regroups. Intensifying her little-girl affect, she says that it’s “easier for me to travel that direction when it’s a vacation”—which really makes no sense at all in terms of fear of flying. And what difference does the direction—east or west—make? At this point Ford’s body language also gives her away. She does a little flutter with both hands as though to say “Oh, whatever; I guess that wasn’t my most effective answer,” and then she shakes her head “no” almost imperceptibly.
An untrustworthy witness.
The surprising heroes of the Kavanaugh fight
So far we have:
Lindsey Graham
Mitch McConnell
Susan Collins
Collins was the goat until yesterday. But her speech made her the hero. I wonder whether she wrote it herself, and when. It sounded like it took a while to compose, and if so, then she’s been thinking “yes” on Kavanaugh for quite some time. I didn’t agree with everything she said—for example, I am much harder on Ford. But I think it was an excellent speech nonetheless, and all the more powerful for her being a woman from a blue-ish state, and for having a reputation as one of the most moderate people in the Senate.
Graham—well, Graham may have surprised even himself in this fight. But ever since I saw him speak at a small venue during the 2016 campaign, I’ve been impressed by his very well-developed sense of humor, which was on full display that day, and his sharp mind.
Ever since the Garland nomination it’s been clear that McConnell is very serious about getting people on the right on the Court. Very. But for years, people on the right have been criticizing him as an establishment squish, no different and no better than the Democrats. Not true, although he has his faults.
I said “surprising,” so I didn’t put Trump in there because his defense of Kavanaugh is unsurprising, although it certainly was necessary. And Kavanaugh himself perhaps should be listed, except that since we hardly knew him before this, we can’t be too surprised.
That’s not a trio that conservatives usually praise. But that’s the way this one played out, strangely enough. The Democrats’ conduct was so egregiously horrific that even those predisposed to reach across the aisle (Graham, Collins) felt as though their hands had been slapped, and they didn’t like it one little bit.
Of course, the fat lady has not sung yet.
Touching video: Holocaust survivor meets the Americans, and one American in particular
What was the role of Monica McLean?
[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”]
Quite a few commenters have referenced stories circulating about the role of Christine Blasey Ford’s lifelong chum Monica McLean in this entire mess. McLean is a lawyer who spent a great deal of her working life with the FBI, and the person named by Ford’s ex-boyfriend as the friend Ford helped take a polygraph long ago (something McLean has denied).
I have no idea what the extent of McLean’s role in the anti-Kavanaugh campaign has been, but here’s an article summarizing the speculations and allegations.
In addition, I read this today about the testimony of Leland Keyser, another high school friend of Ford’s, during the latest FBI investigation of Kavanaugh [emphasis mine]:
Ford identified Leland Ingham Keyser, a former classmate, as having attended a house party Maryland in the early 1980s, in which she accused Kavanaugh of pinning her to a bed, attempting to remove her clothes and putting his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream.
Keyser originally said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 23 she “does not know Mr. Kavanaugh and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present.” After Kavanaugh and Ford testified in front of the committee last week, Keyser wrote a letter to the committee dated Sept. 29 that said she did not refute Ford’s claims, but “is unable to corroborate it because she has no recollection of the incident in question,” according to CNN.
Keyser told the investigators that she was — as the Journal notes — urged to clarify her statement by Monica McLean, a former FBI agent and friend of Ford’s, the paper reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
McLean’s lawyer denied his client tried to influence Keyser to change her account, calling it “absolutely false.”…
A person close to the former classmates told the Journal she believed mutual friends of both Ford and Keyser – including McLean – simply reached out to Keyser to warn her that her statement was being used by Republicans as vindication for Kavanagh and if she felt she needed to clarify what she meant, she should. The person said the mutual friends did not “pressure” Keyser.
Well, at least not pressure-pressure.
Keyser may turn out to be the unsung heroine here. Even if these “mutual friends” were indeed just “reaching out” to Keyser to helpfully point out what she couldn’t possibly have known—and what should be irrelevant anyway—which is that her statements helped the Republican cause. Well, d—uh.
[NOTE: And then there’s this article which, if true, indicates that Christine Ford blindsided her BFF Leland Keyser and never warned her in advance that she would be naming her as witness. What’s more, they haven’t been good friends for years. Again, I’m not sure this is true, but if so, it certainly explains Ford’s viperish demeanor when questioned about Keyser, the affect I highlighted in this previous post, with video. I will add that I really don’t know how anyone could watch that segment and still be utterly convinced of Ford’s sincerity and truthfulness. To me, it was a big red flag about both.]
Cloture vote: 51-49
Thanks to Harry Reid, the Democrats couldn’t filibuster.
Although you might say the last three weeks have been one long filibuster of sorts, of an especially pernicious kind.
At any rate, cloture was invoked this morning with 51 aye votes and 49 nay. Murkowski and Manchin were the only senators not voting along party lines, with Murkowski voting “no” and Manchin “yes.” This does not necessarily reflect the final vote, and I trust none of them, but it’s a promising sign.
The word on Senator Daines, who will be attending his daughter’s wedding on Saturday, is that somehow they’ll figure out a way to hold the vote at a time when he can be in the Senate, if needed.
I obviously hope that Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed and can put this nightmare behind him to whatever extent possible (perhaps Clarence Thomas can give him some advice on that). I hope that Christine Ford goes back to her surfing and her number-crunching and leaves the rest of us alone. I hope that Julie Swetnick is investigated and prosecuted if it can be proven she deliberately lied. I give kudos to the friends of both Christine Ford and Brett Kavanaugh who continued to say that nothing of the sort described by Ford ever came to their awareness, and didn’t bow to Democratic pressure whatever their party preference (and I believe that some of them are themselves Democrats).
And I hope that vast swaths of the American public has learned what kind of people the Democrats in Congress are, now that their masks have slipped even more.
I note that if Manchin votes “yes” in the final vote it will be because he sees that he must do so in order to have a chance of being re-elected. I see the other red state Democrats may have given up on their re-election chances, perhaps because the polls showed them losing even before the Kavanaugh brouhaha.
This has been one of the most depressing political events in America in my lifetime. My one consolation is that it seems to have done the impossible, at least temporarily: unite the GOP. It’s also made Lindsey Graham a hero in the eyes of those on the right who previously despised him, and gotten Bret Stephens to praise President Trump.
I doubt that those three achievements were the Democrats’ goals when Senator Feinstein first dropped Christine Blasey Ford’s letter on the world.
Speaking from experience: Carlson and Dershowitz on false accusations
Alan Dershowitz doesn’t think anyone should go easy on Julie Swetnick if it turns out she lied and knew she was lying:
DERSHOWITZ: If you have information suggesting it’s false, and any reasonable lawyer hearing her on television says you can’t any longer accept what’s in that affidavit, she has to be investigated independently of the background check, criminally investigated to see if she deliberately and willfully, with or without the aid of anybody else, made a decision just to frame somebody for something that he had nothing to do with.
The evidence seems to suggest they never knew each other, they were years apart, they were operating in different circles. It wouldn’t surprise me if an FBI investigation proved they never met each other. And if that turns out to be the fact, she belongs in a court of law, being prosecuted with a presumption of innocence–
CARLSON: Yes.
DERSHOWITZ: –defender (ph). But if the evidence shows that she committed perjury, prison.
CARLSON: Wow.
DERSHOWITZ: You know why, because–
CARLSON: I do know why.
DERSHOWITZ: –it’s important to protect people against being raped, but it’s so important to protect people against being deliberately and willfully, falsely accused of rape. That is a very, very serious crime and we tend not to pay as much attention to false — deliberately false. I’m not talking about people make–
CARLSON: Oh I understand.
DERSHOWITZ: (inaudible). But deliberately false frame-ups of rape have to be taken seriously.
CARLSON: And they’re not, I happen to know.
Dershowitz continues to be one of the few—one of the very few—Democrats who applies what he calls (in that same interview) the “shoe on the other foot test”:
This is all about partisanship. If the opposite was happening, and if it was the Democrats who were putting up candidate, everybody would behave in the opposite way. And so it is partisanship and I think the framers of our Constitution never intended the confirmation process to look anything like this.
You may have noticed that at the end of that interview Tucker Carlson said “I happen to know.” What’s he referring to? He described it this way in November of 2017:
Not every accuser is telling the truth. I learned this the hard way a number of years ago when I was accused of felony rape by a woman I had literally never even seen.
She was a certified public accountant in Indiana and upstanding member of her community and also apparently delusional. Her claims were grotesque but they were highly specific. The assault she said took place in the back room of a restaurant in Louisville on a specific day at around 10:30 p.m.
She included loads of graphic and horrifying detail. It was stomach- turning.And, yet, none of it, one of it was true. I spent the next two months trying to stay out of jail. I couldn’t tell my children because I knew they would be ashamed. I couldn’t tell my employer because I knew I would be fired immediately. I spoke only to lawyers and I paid them spent a fortune. I took a polygraph exam from the former head polygrapher at the FBI. I never stopped worrying that the charges would become public and destroy my life.
Everyone accused of sex offense did something wrong. Everybody knows that.
And I knew no one would believe otherwise.
And Dershowitz? Well, he might have talked about his own experience. Here’s what happened (from April of 2016):
A defamation case against high-profile attorney and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz has been settled after two lawyers admitted it was a “mistake” to accuse him of having sex with a minor, their client.
In a statement issued on Friday, Paul G. Cassell and Bradley J. Edwards, lawyers for Virginia Roberts, the woman who alleged she was forced to have sex with Dershowitz and others, said they “acknowledge that it was a mistake to have filed sexual misconduct accusations against Dershowitz.”
“The sexual misconduct accusations made in all public filings…are hereby withdrawn. Dershowitz also withdraws his accusations that Edwards and Cassell acted unethically,” the statement reads,
Last January, Dershowitz filed a sworn statement in which he denied having sex with an underage girl while visiting the island of financier Jeffrey Epstein. Dershowitz was also accused of having sex with a minor on Epstein’s private plane. In that filing, Dershowitz said Jane Doe #3—later identified by Buckingham Palace officials as Roberts—was not on the plane or the island at the same time as him.
In a separate lawsuit, Cassell and Edwards sued Dershowitz for defamation after Dershowitz claimed the two attorneys failed to perform their due diligence when claiming their client, Roberts, was forced to have sex with Dershowitz.
“Edwards and Cassell vigorously denied the contention that they had acted improperly and asserted that it defamed them,” said a joint statement from Edwards, Cassell and Dershowitz, issued on Friday. “Dershowitz countersued Edwards and Cassell, alleging they had falsely accused him of sexual contact with Roberts—a claim he vigorously denied and that Dershowitz asserted defamed him.”
“I am pleased that the litigation has concluded,” Dershowitz said in a statement on Friday.
Did you remember that that little incident had happened to Dershowitz? I did, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most people don’t remember it. The reason is that none of it took place in the Senate with every media outlet riveted on the proceedings.
Dershowitz was also much more fortunate than Brett Kavanaugh in that the accusations against him were handled by the legal system. Same for Tucker Carlson, it seems. Brett Kavanaugh didn’t have that luxury in his own “job interview”-kangaroo-court-Kafkaesque trial-that-wasn’t-a-trial.
And now, finally, we get answers to the burning questions of our time
The guy who created the Devil’s Triangle drinking game calls himself the “founder” of it in the yearbook, and a guy going to different college than Kavanaugh sent a sworn letter to the FBI states that Kavanaugh’s friend from high school taught him the Devil’s Triangle game, and it is in fact just quarters with three glasses.
Also, an old joke book about farts says that “boof” means “fart.”
One bit I think Sexton missed — Charles Lane, Washington Post reporter, and “Chuck” from the movie Shattered Glass — knew Chris “Squi” Garrett in high school, and says he does in fact say “fffffFUCK you.”
And so yeah, “fffffFourth of July” is just a reference to the way Garrett said the f-word.
I’m not going to bother to do any in-depth (as it were) research on this, but to the best of my recollection the whole idea that the terms meant something extremely R-rated came from none other than that fountain of truth and rectitude, Michael Avenatti. I wondered why everybody and his brother in the Democratic Party seemed to be adopting the arguments of that particular scumbag as though he was some sort of unimpeachable source, but I supposed they were just following the lead of party eminences, who were doing ye olde pig-f***ing thing again.
And here is Avenatti’s tweet about it, from September 23,which I think may be the origin of the charges:
Brett Kavanaugh must also be asked about this entry in his yearbook: "FFFFFFFourth of July." We believe that this stands for: Find them, French them, Feel them, Finger them, F*ck them, Forget them. As well as the term "Devil's Triangle." Perhaps Sen. Grassley can ask him. #Basta
— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) September 24, 2018
By the way, my very first post about the Kavanaugh allegations, which I published when Feinstein dropped them in the eleventh hour and we didn’t even know the name of the accuser yet, was the one entitled “Dianne Feinstein accuses Brett Kavanaugh of having f***ed a pig in high school.” I don’t usually start out with that sort of tone, and none of the more salacious accusations had been launched yet, but it was already obvious what they were trying to do and that they were more than willing to go as low as they felt they needed to go in order to do it.
And that has turned out to be extremely low indeed.
The real collusion
This:
Congressional investigators have confirmed that a top FBI official met with Democratic Party lawyers to talk about allegations of Donald Trump-Russia collusion weeks before the 2016 election, and before the bureau secured a search warrant targeting Trump’s campaign…
It means the FBI had good reason to suspect the dossier was connected to the DNC’s main law firm and was the product of a Democratic opposition-research effort to defeat Trump — yet failed to disclose that information to the FISA court in October 2016, when the bureau applied for a FISA warrant to surveil Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
“This is a bombshell that unequivocally shows the real collusion was between the FBI and Donald Trump’s opposition — the DNC, Hillary and a Trump-hating British intel officer — to hijack the election, rather than some conspiracy between Putin and Trump,” a knowledgeable source told me.
[ADDENDUM: I’m not sure where to put this doxxing story, but it’s horrific.]
[ADDENDUM II: More Lindsey Graham, here.]
“Key Republicans happy with report”
Well, if they’re happy, I’m happy.
Happiness is relative, of course. I won’t be happy till Kavanaugh is voted in, which is not even remotely certain to occur. There have been so many ups and downs (mostly downs) in this case so far that I cannot trust any of the “key” players (the vulnerable Democrats and the GOP wafflers, that is) to do the right thing.
It’s interesting that Heitkamp, vulnerable Democrat of North Dakota, has apparently announced that she’s a “no.” It had been speculated that she might be a “yes” because polls had shown she might lose her seat because of a “no” vote. Her “no” decision (if it holds, which I’m assuming it will) indicates to me that she either doesn’t think it will cause her to lose in November, thinks she will lose no matter what in November, and that in any case she considers blocking Kavanaugh worth the loss for her. If the latter, she may know that she will have a nice cushy life afterwards; the Democrats will certainly take care of her. Taking one for the team isn’t really that arduous; maybe she’s tired of the Senate anyway (I could hardly blame her) and wants a change.
I noticed today that Steven Hayward at Powerline has written a post entitled “Let us now praise Democratic Party incompetence.” In it, he writes:
Amidst the justified outrage at the Democratic Party’s actions in the Kavanaugh nomination fight, let us step back for a moment and revel for a bit in the sheer political incompetence of Democrats.
He then goes on to list as demonstrations of that incompetence several reasons, chief among them the fact that the Democrats have lost voter support in the midterms as a result. I hope that Hayward is correct about all of this and maybe he is. But it strikes me that this is not an example of incompetence on their part—it’s an example of a choice.
Democrats are fighting a political war in the short term and would dearly like to win. But I think this Kavanaugh ploy was a gamble of theirs, and they are betting on the following: (1) they may be winning the cultural war, which is the long war compared to the short-term political war in the election of 2018, and (2) a very key part of that long war for the Democrats involves the courts. They rightly see the bulk of their power as residing there, and that power isn’t quite as subject to the vagaries of election years, particularly in the Supreme Court, where justices are appointed for life.
The Democrats are terrified of a conservative Court. The last time SCOTUS was conservative was before FDR, and that’s a long time ago. Not only have Democrats made a lot of strides because of Court decisions, but it may just be the main vehicle for the strides they have made. The Court is the branch of government least subject to the voters’ will. The voters cannot turn the justices out by voting against them. Impeachment is very very difficult because it requires such a huge majority in the Senate.
Simply put, the Court is the Democrats’ most powerful governmental weapon over time. They may feel that they simply cannot afford to let it go, and be willing to sacrifice short term goals to accomplish that. Hopefully, it will not work this time, but I think the idea that it will work is why they have pulled out all the stops on this one.
The fat lady has not sung.
In the piece by Steven Hayward, he quotes today’s article by Bret Stephens in the NY Times. You may recall that Stephens is a rabid NeverTrumper who has written he would rather Hillary Clinton had won. But this is what Stephens wrote today:
For the first time since Donald Trump entered the political fray, I find myself grateful that he’s in it. I’m reluctant to admit it and astonished to say it . . .
I’m grateful because Trump has not backed down in the face of the slipperiness, hypocrisy and dangerous standard-setting deployed by opponents of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. I’m grateful because ferocious and even crass obstinacy has its uses in life, and never more so than in the face of sly moral bullying. I’m grateful because he’s a big fat hammer fending off a razor-sharp dagger.
That is quite extraordinary. The transparent hypocrisy, viciousness, and injustice of the Kavanaugh attack (and recall that Kavanaugh is a moderate conservative formerly allied with the Bush family) seems to have brought the likes of Brett Stephens into the pro-Trump camp, at least temporarily. I don’t know whether he’ll be turning back, but eyes once opened can be difficult to close. The Kavanaugh attack has offended a lot of moderate Republicans on a very deep level, and they see the Democrats as a ruthless enemy whereas before they may have seen them as part of a genteel game.
This is no game.
The UN court, the US, and Iran
This headline made me chuckle: “UN court tells US to ease Iran sanctions in blow for Trump.”
Why would anyone care what the UN says, or consider this a “blow”?
More:
It remains unclear whether the judgment will be anything more than symbolic because both Washington and Tehran have ignored ICJ decisions in the past.
To the propagandists who wrote that Agence France Presse piece I’m quoting: no, it doesn’t remain “unclear.”
More:
The judges at the court in The Hague ruled unanimously that the sanctions on some goods breached a 1955 “Treaty of Amity” between Iran and the US that predates Iran’s Islamic Revolution.
Those judges at The Hague; always making with the jokes.
Pompeo’s response was to terminate the 1955 treaty.
If you want to learn my general opinion of international law, please see this post I wrote back in 2005. Excerpt:
Why were we able to hold the Nuremberg trials, and to sentence Nazi war criminals and afterwards carry out the sentences? Quite simply, it is because we had won the war. That is what gave us jurisdiction, and that is what gave us the actual men to put in the actual docks. If we had attempted to put them on trial before that, it would have been merely a form of propagandist theater, a way to label them as war criminals but not to actually do anything about it. We would have lacked jurisdiction, one of the major elements of any case. Simply declaring that we had jurisdiction would not have made it so–except in our own minds, for propaganda purposes.
So, what of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, set up to try war criminals? It only has jurisdiction over those countries who consent to give it jurisdiction, because it has no natural territory (the Hague, after all, is rather small, as is the Netherlands) which it governs. Furthermore, it makes rulings only with the consent of the signatories, since it has no method of enforcement in the face of defiance (the order part of law and order). Therefore, the Hague court is merely a propaganda machine, albeit one with a large worldwide audience. As such, it can (and most definitely will), be used for propaganda purposes–to further a certain agenda or agendas, such as focusing on the actions of the US allies in the Iraq War. It would go after the US too, of course, if we had signed onto the Court, but we have not done so.