The deal replaces, or amends, the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement between the three countries. From the moment he announced his candidacy, way back in 2015, until the day before yesterday, President Trump has assailed the original Nafta as ‘the worst deal ever.’ The fact that US trade with Mexico has gone from a modest surplus in the early years of Nafta to a $68 billion deficit now highlights his concern.
The President came to terms with Mexico last month, but Canada was adamant about not making the concessions that Trump demanded. Last night, burning the midnight oil, US negotiators finally hammered out a deal with Canada to preserve the three-country agreement just moments before the midnight deadline. The deal, which President Trump wants to rename the US-Mexico-Canada — difficult to acronymise, but accurate in its dramatis personae — will go some distance in levelling the playing field for trade among the three countries. As before-the-bell market indices suggest, the citizens and economies of all three countries will benefit. Even Justin Trudeau, Canada’s fountain-of-youth Prime Minister, acknowledged that ‘It’s a good day for Canada’ as he left a Cabinet meeting last night.
One of the many many benefits for the left of the extreme focus on the defamation of Brett Kavanaugh is that other news favorable to Trump can take a back seat:
The deal, which will be signed in late November, greatly reduces impediments to US farmers and manufacturers, especially automakers, and modernises the agreement by providing rules for the world of digital exchange which was in its infancy when the original deal was struck.
A last-minute concession by Canada will open the country’s dairy markets to the US, while for its part the US dropped its demand that special NAFTA trade courts be abolished. There was, in other words, plenty of give-and-take. All parties got important concessions.
The art of the deal
More here, including the fact that Congress may balk at this, and that’s especially true if the House falls into Democratic hands, as so many have predicted. I would think that the Republican turnout in November would be absolutely enormous. But I’ve been wrong before about the American electorate.
That’s based on a famous statement uttered by one of the most evil men in history, Lavrentiy Beria. Just reading his Wiki entry is enough to make you sick.
Yiddish is a language that has a lot of words that express personality qualities and types, particularly loser types or mean types or conniving types. These words often combine humor with rueful sarcasm and cynical realism about the vagaries of the human condition.
One of those words is “chutzpah.” You’re probably familiar with it, because it passed into the American vernacular some time ago. It is usually translated as something like “audacity,” and it most often contains an element of outrageous gall [my emphasis]:
Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish defines chutzpah as “gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts’, presumption plus arrogance such as no other word and no other language can do justice to”. In this sense, chutzpah expresses both strong disapproval and condemnation. In the same work, Rosten also defines the term as “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan”. Chutzpah amounts to a total denial of personal responsibility, which renders others speechless and incredulous…
The left’s attack on Kavanaugh involves the following, which I think sets a new standard for chutzpah: take a man with a sterling public record during his entire life, mount an attack on his integrity that involves an unsubstantiated, uncorroborated, impossible-to-defend-against charge of sexual attack (up to and including gang rape), and do it at the pinnacle of his career, unleashing a social media war against him of the most vicious kind, including death threats towards him and his family. Do that publicly while cloaking yourself in self-aggrandizing sanctity, and make him sit there and listen.
But that’s not the “chutzpah” part, although that does take some chutzpah. The real chutzpah part is this: if he acts at all angry in his response to being defamed in that way, say that his anger shows that he doesn’t have the temperament to be a justice, despite the fact that it is well-documented that he has shown an exemplary judicial temperament for his entire previous career as a judge.
And one more thing: if he hadn’t shown anger in response to these extreme charges against him and their public airing in the United States Senate, accuse him of lacking the appropriate outrage that would have been the sure mark of an innocent man. Does any fair-minded person doubt that would have been the outcome, had Kavanaugh not been angry?
“Chutzpah” is too light a word to describe that kind of ploy.
But still another word for what the left has done to Kavanaugh—a more technical and academic one—is that they placed him in a “double bind,” which is:
…a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other (and vice versa), so that the person will automatically be wrong regardless of response. The double bind occurs when the person cannot confront the inherent dilemma, and therefore can neither resolve it nor opt out of the situation…
Thus, the essence of a double bind is two conflicting demands, each on a different logical level, neither of which can be ignored or escaped. This leaves the subject torn both ways, so that whichever demand they try to meet, the other demand cannot be met.
So Kavanaugh’s anger elicited intense criticism, and lack of anger would have done the same. I doubt that Judge Kavanaugh anticipated the nature of the bind he was in, unless he’s unusually psychologically astute. But even if he had foreseen it and tried to prepare for it, it’s nearly impossible to find a way out of a double bind and its contradictory demands.
Some of you may recall my previous discussion of the importance of understanding the difference between process arguments and content arguments (please see this post for more detail). If you are caught in a double bind—such as the dilemma Kavanaugh faced—it is best to “go process” and address the underlying double bind itself rather than just the content of the argument at hand. To “go process” takes an unusual amount of psychological and communicative savvy, and an understanding of the content-process distinction.
Most people don’t have that knowledge. But I think it might have helped had Kavanaugh said something like this:
You may think I may sound outraged and angry, and no doubt some people will criticize me for that. But I believe that any person who knows that he or she is innocent and yet is accused of the kind of offenses I’ve been accused of here today would feel and express the same very controlled anger. What’s more, if I showed no such emotion when faced with these charges, charges that violate everything I hold dear, you would criticize me just as strongly for not showing the appropriate emotion, and you would blame me for that. It’s a classic double bind, where no reaction is okay and all reactions are fodder for the criticism mill.
When I say that sort of statement might have helped Kavanaugh, I don’t mean it would have prevented the criticism. He would have been criticized for saying what I’ve suggested, too. But still, I have noticed that “going process” and revealing the underlying game being played by the opposition is usually a good tactic, because there may be some listeners who will then understand what’s happening. The tactic of going process offers the only chance of breaking the Gordian knot of the double-bind.
It’s also a tactic that often surprises the opposition; they rarely expect it. But to be successful, the person making the statement has to have either anticipated the double bind and the form it will take, or at least must be able to recognize the double bind while it’s in progress, which is also very difficult to do. One of the many goals of placing someone in a double bind is to confuse the person in real time so that, unless he/she is quite sophisticated about human communication patterns, that person will fail to recognize what’s going on.
Another aspect of the criticism of Kavanaugh’s anger is that it delegitimizes what is felt to be a typically masculine response. Even controlled and highly appropriate verbal anger, when exhibited by a man (a white man in particular), will now be labeled inappropriate and frightening and disqualifying as an example of toxic masculinity—if the man is on the non-leftist side of the political fence, that is.
[ADDENDUM: It is also true that you could look at his dilemma as a triple or even a quadruple bind. Probably even more than that.
“Double bind” is the technical term, though, for this general type of dilemma.
And it is absolutely true that Kavanaugh was also criticized for crying—thereby indicating that there was no response of his that wouldn’t have been criticized. In my suggested speech for him, I think he could even have added that tearing up and/or crying would be criticized, too.
Oh, and had he actually added that, he would have been criticized for being a whiny complainer.
The basic point is that all responses are forbidden and there are no choices left except to point out the game.]
Sunday is my usual day off, so I’ll make this brief.
The technical problems with the Bing bot crawler attack that began on Friday are continuing. My host is still working on it, as am I. I may end up changing hosts after this.
I expect a solution might take a couple more days, although I hope it will take less time than that. Please be patient if you’re getting error messages. Some people aren’t having many problems getting to the site, but some are having a lot of difficulty. My apologies. Believe me, I find this state of affairs very frustrating.
Another thought that has nothing to do with Bing crawlers—
I haven’t discussed the Kavanaugh fracas with any of my liberal friends, either female or male but particularly female. The reason is quite simple: I am fearful that their answers will anger me too much and cause too big a rift. Interestingly, none of them have brought it up with me, either, and since I’m not on social media I am spared that particular cesspool of what passes for human thought.
I probably will bring the topic up with one or two friends I’ve found to be open-minded and calm in the past. But I may wait a bit.
I’ve noticed that a lot of people on the right say they’ve never seen anything quite like the level of vitriol that’s been going down on social media on the topic of the Kavanaugh hearing. What’s been your experience with that?
You may have noticed some slowing down of the blog loading time, and also you might be getting some error messages. Generally, though, you can still get here and comment here.
It appears to involve a sudden Bing crawler attack. If any of you have any suggestions to offer about that, including why it would happen, please do.
My host is working on the problem, and I hope it will be fixed soon. Till then, please be extra-patient.
Sometimes when I’m signing a letter or an email I use the closing take care. It’s rather trite and formulaic, but it’s a convenient way to say take care of yourself, be kind to yourself, relax, enjoy and also be careful.
And it seems to me very appropriate for this moment in time to say to you all: take care. The last couple of weeks have been stressful, and it’s not even close to over. The rapid ups and downs, the repeated delays, the fast-breaking news of multiple accusations, the roller coaster ride of a day-long hearing filled with drama, the announcement that the vote would come on Friday morning and that enough people were onboard, and then The Flake Deal.
The level of outraged anger I see on the right side of the blogosphere is as high as anything I’ve witnessed before. It’s a different kind of anger than usual, a feeling that a Rubicon has been crossed. Shared values? Don’t think so. Rule of law? Gone. It really strikes home that, as a commenter here wrote recently: “The differences go to the metaphysical level, to the depths where conversation can only elicit, as a famous philosopher once said, an incredulous stare.”
The comments I read yesterday on articles at liberal sites exhibit a level of gleefully vengeful vitriol that rivels anything I’ve seen before online, and that’s saying a lot. It’s not just the invective, it’s the form it takes and the huge number of people expressing it. Just to take one example, there’s a vicious hatred toward Brett Kavanaugh for the crimes of having gone to private school and being a white man.
I’m not going to reproduce any of it here, because I think we all need to protect ourselves from spending too much time wading through bile mixed with acid.
If you find yourself thinking too much about politics right now, please take care. Take some time away. Distract yourself. Ease up. Remind yourself that we don’t know what will come of all of this.
Long ago, right after 9/11, I remember talking to a friend who is a very religious Christian. When I expressed anxiety about the final outcome of what seemed to me like an epic battle against a vicious and intolerant force, he said that evil never triumphs, not ultimately.
I didn’t ask what he meant by “ultimately.” I think he was taking a very long view. I hope he was right, and sooner rather than later. Because I see a lot of evil out there right now, and I see it laughing with delight. So I need to turn away sometimes and take care.
NOTE: And no, that doesn’t mean I plan to stop blogging about politics. But it does mean I plan to go out for a walk in a little while, and to go to a restaurant for dinner tonight.]
The presumption of innocence for the accused is one of the pillars—probably the main pillar—of our criminal law. Its importance to our liberty cannot be overstated.
But Chuck Schumer was at least partially correct when he said of the Kavanaugh hearing that there’s no legal presumption of innocence there:
“It’s not a legal proceeding, it’s a fact-finding proceeding…this is standard operating procedure,” Schumer said. “There is no presumption of innocence or guilt when you have a nominee before you.”
How is he partially correct? The hearing is not a criminal trial. A trial would guarantee much stronger protection for the rights of the accused than we saw in the proceedings on Thursday.
But that’s actually irrelevant, because what really happened was that Thursday’s hearing flipped the presumption of innocence on its head. Topsy-turvy-land, looking-glass world. Although not a trial, it was a quasi-trial of a shortened variety in which it was the accuser who was largely protected and given the kid-glove treatment, and the accused who had to be his own advocate because he was offered almost no protection at all.
Schumer can pretend that what happened to Kavanaugh was “standard operating procedure,” but of course it was not and let us fervently hope it never becomes so (perhaps Schumer would like to face a similar standard if some women who went to high school with him came forward to accuse him?). No one in this country—even someone as old as I am—has ever seen anything quite like Thursday, in a supposed “fact-finding proceeding” in the Senate in its “advise and consent” role regarding judicial nominations for federal judges. The only thing that came close was the Clarence Thomas hearings, and even then Thomas was afforded more of the presumption of innocence than Kavanaugh was, and Thomas’ accuser was faced with more challenging questions.
What’s more, there’s a huge gap between a legally required presumption of innocence on one side of the scale and the trial by tears that we saw on Thursday. In a criminal trial, the presumption of innocence is accompanied by another standard: the necessity of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But in the case of the hearing, no proof was offered except for Christine Blasey Ford’s shaky testimony with so many gaps of memory that it was highly suspect on its face.
Ford’s statement didn’t even meet the civil court test of preponderance of the evidence. It didn’t even meet any rational non-legal test. The only test it could possibly have met was that of the completely subjective and emotional, as I wrote here. That is not enough. That is not nearly enough.
And Chuck Schumer knows it full well. But he doesn’t care.
[NOTE: And please read this by Stacey McCain. It presents quite a timeline for the coordination of Ford’s story by Feinstein, lawyers, and the press for their hit job on Kavanaugh.]
I keep reading that Christine Blasey Ford was highly sympathetic on Thursday and that her emotionally intense rendition of her story made her testimony especially “credible.” But long before Kavanaugh was even nominated, I had already written about the relative meaninglessness of the word “credible” when deciding if an accusation is in fact true or false. The context of this discussion was the Roy Moore brouhaha:
All “credible” means is that the story might be true—that it’s not incredible.
For example, if I said “John Smith sexually abused me when we were drifting in outer space while flying to Mars under our own power,” that would be an incredible story. Not believable. Literally impossible. But to craft a credible story, all I’d have to do is have a history that involves some proximity to the accused, and do a bit of research as to where he worked, etc.. Stuff that would be easy to find out.
Even better if I’d had some connection to him.
People who are out to get a politician in trouble through false accusations have a lot of information to work with. It also helps if it was long enough ago that there is no way to fact check…
…]P]roof doesn’t have to rise to the level of courtroom proof to believe someone is probably guilty. But credible accusations doesn’t cut it and shouldn’t cut it. Persuasive accusations would be better. What “persuades” you sure doesn’t persuade me…
Nor does any of this mean I think the women [who have accused Moore] are liars. As I’ve also said many times, they may indeed be telling the truth. But women and men lie at times, for many reasons, and it’s not even all that unusual. Sometimes they lie very credibly. Sometimes they lie while demonstrating a lot of emotion. I’ve seen it many times; so have you. Sometimes they even believe their own lies—or come to believe their own lies [or errors]. I think we should be very very careful about coming to conclusions unless the evidence for something is very powerful.
I wrote that in December of 2017, but it could apply just as well to the present situation and in particular to people’s reactions to the hearing on Thursday.
I’ve written quite a bit on this blog about Brett Kavnaugh’s emotional state of outrage during his testimony, an affect that is extremely consistent with his being an innocent man falsely accused. But, just as Christine Blasey Ford’s apparent upset and emotional fragility while telling her own harrowing tale tells us next to nothing about whether Brett Kavanaugh did it, and only slightly more about whether it happened at all, so Kavanaugh’s affect during his testimony hardly rules out the possibility that he’s either lying or simply doesn’t remember the incident.
(There’s also the issue of whether an unsuccessful groping incident at the age of 17, which would have amounted to a misdemeanor even if he had somewhow been found guilty at the time, would matter at this point anyway in light of his later life. But I’ll put that question aside for the purposes of this particular post).
Demeanor isn’t nothing; it tells us something about a person. But it tells us much less than we think, unfortunately, and it cannot tell us whether that person’s story is true. That’s what the other evidence is about.
Why would I care how much Ford’s voice quavered when she testified, or that other women watching cried along with her? On a human level, sure, it’s of interest. But on a true/false level, it is one of the least important parts of the episode for me. As Ammo Grrrll wrote at Powerline:
I think the #MeToo “Movement” is the most dangerous movement since the KKK, which it resembles with its mob mentality. And, I speak with total moral authority because I am a woman, whose every squeak and whine is, therefore, “credible.” I can credibly accuse any male from my kindergarten, high school, college, or long-ago workplaces, of the most lurid crimes, with no corroboration or even dates of occurrence…
Even after Tawana Brawley, and Mattress Girl, the Duke LaCrosse team accusers, and the fraternity gang rape that never happened, after every poop swastika and banana peel in a tree, all men and most women feel they HAVE to give an obligatory genuflection to “but, of course, the #MeToo movement is an important and wonderful thing.” No. It is not.
It is a deadly cocktail of Professional Victimhood, Neo-Victorianism, the hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials and the certainty of being found guilty of the Stalinist Show Trials.
I will add that the #MeToo movement was also the warm-up act for the Kavanaugh accusations. It involves the norming of the “believe the women” mantra that is not only one of the most dangerous ideas I’ve ever heard but also one of the most profoundly stupid.
Have you ever watched the TV show Forensic Files? I went through a period of fascination with it, because it showed true stories of criminal investigations with many twists and turnings and much real documentary footage. But one of the side effects of watching so many episodes of the series was that I saw, over and over, video that showed how convincingly people can lie, and how intensely liars (even criminals) can pull on the heartstrings. Their motives are varied, but their ability to dissemble convincingly knows almost no bounds.
The grieving husband who later is proven to have murdered his wife to be with his mistress. The tearful wife who later is proven to have murdered her husband for the insurance money. It’s a humbling experience to view their testimony, so very convincing, and then see the denouement. Wow. I can be fooled, the watcher has to admit. Wow, that person was so convincing about being an innocent victim, and he or she is guilty! It’s a stark lesson one doesn’t forget.
And then of course there are people who are simply mistaken. They are probably the most consistently convincing of all in the emotional sense, because they’re not lying. The fact that Christine Blasey Ford may have been riveting in her testimony and her emotions right on point has no bearing—absolutely none—on whether Brett Kavanaugh was the perpetrator. Her affect tells us, quite literally, nothing about that. Only other evidence can, and so far not a single scrap of other evidence exists to back her up. And I’m sure the Democrats and her lawyers tried very hard to get corroborating evidence. They completely failed.
It was Kavanaugh who provided whatever evidence we have, and it was exculpatory evidence about himself.
There is also the little matter of Blasey Ford’s known lies. We know she lied about her fear of flying—or her lawyers did it for her, and she refrained from correcting them. That has come out in the hearing, as well, and it casts doubt on her veracity. And what about her lack of knowledge of one of the Committee’s offers regarding her interview? Did her lawyers not tell her? Does she not read the news? We also know someone scrubbed her entire social media history before this all came out, which could certainly indicate a desire to hide evidence. Why was that done? These are things that she might be able to explain in some innocuous way, but they are all red flags, flags that her sympathetic affect while telling her story cannot eradicate.
We know little about her history except what she has chosen to tell us; we know a lot more about Brett Kavanaugh, and the vast and overwhelming majority of it is good. But for many people, knowing little about Ford has no bearing on their decision because they know the only facts they deem important: she’s a woman who convincingly described a trauma with appropriate emotion.
This isn’t the American way. It’s the mob rule way. Western civilization struggled long and hard against the forces of irrational hatred to replace them with the rule of law that protects us all, and that’s a rare achievement that runs counter to some of our natural propensities for evil and tyranny and must be guarded for the precious thing it is (as Sarah Hoyt has so eloquently described here). But there are many who would throw it out in their race for power, and/or their race to validate and install their own feelings as the standard instead.
That is why what we face what now is perilous.
Trial by tears is not much better than trial by ordeal, except that the latter caused the death of those who failed to pass it. We fought to become better than that, and to maintain the new standards, and now we stand at the very brink of throwing it away.
Flake earlier had announced his support for Kavanaugh, but then disappeared from the committee room as lawmakers offered hours of statements on the proceeding.
When he returned to speak, he said he would vote to advance Kavanaugh in exchange for a one-week delay in a Senate floor vote on his nomination.
“I think it would be proper to delay the floor vote for up to but not more than one week in order to let the FBI to do an investigation limited in time and scope,” he said.
Flake was reportedly in discussions with Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) and other members of the panel.
Flake said he was voting to advance Kavanaugh “with that understanding” and said he has spoken “to a few other members on my side of the aisle who support it as well.”
He said senators should do “what we can to make sure that we do all do diligence with a nomination this important.”
It’s highly uncertain that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will agree to delay the vote, which is on pace for Tuesday of next week.
As I’ve written many times before, the fact that the GOP has such a razor-thin margin in the Senate gives people like Flake (who is essentially a lame duck) the ability to wield disproportionate power. He—and Collins or whoever else on the right is part of this—is playing with fire, and he must know it, because if the GOP “moderates” betray the right on this one and prevent Kavanaugh from taking a seat on the Court, the fury on the right will be indescribable.
The idea of some sort of FBI investigation is absurd, and he also knows that. The FBI cannot possibly investigate something over which it has no jurisdiction, that occurred approximately thirty-six years ago with no time or place, in which the named witnesses all have already sworn under penalty of perjury that it never happened, and for which there is no evidence at all except either exculpatory evidence (the calendar, for example) or the testimony of an accuser who has given vague and contradictory statements.
My hope is that Flake et al are just looking for cover for a “yes” vote, so that they can say they bent over backwards to investigate and there was no there there. But I don’t trust any of them as far as I can throw them.
Three days ago I wrote a post about the Kavanaugh fight called “Character and crucible.” Here’s an excerpt in which I define the word “crucible”:
Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch trials is called “The Crucible,” and the meaning of that word is this:
1 : a vessel of a very refractory material (such as porcelain) used for melting and calcining a substance that requires a high degree of heat
2 : a severe test
3 : a place or situation in which concentrated forces interact to cause or influence change or development
So we have a crisis that functions not only as a test, but as a formative experience enhancing character. Some pass it, some melt…
…I]t is possible that (although he’s been a federal judge) this is the first real crucible that [Kavanaugh’s] been through.
…at this point it would help if he had, if not [Clarence] Thomas’ history, at least the gravitas and fire that Thomas brought to his hearings because of his previous experiences that had helped to forge (that’s an appropriate word, too, in terms of the crucible metaphor) his steely character.
Prior to yesterday’s testimony by Kavanaugh, I had no idea if he would be able meet the test. I had my doubts. But I felt that if he failed to meet it the results could be disastrous, and I sensed that passing it might require a very different emotional presentation from that of the sober, calm judge that had been his previous public face.
Kavanaugh’s earlier interview on Fox News hadn’t been encouraging. It gave no hint of the kind of “gravitas and fire” I was hoping to see. He was Mr. Nice Guy. But when Kavanaugh came out yesterday to speak at the hearing, it quickly became clear that, although his style would be quite different from that of Clarence Thomas during his hearing, Brett Kavanaugh was coming through his own crucible with a steely determination and blazing with appropriate righteous anger.
Kavanaugh was criticized for that anger by the left, who not only had elicited it by their scurrilous charges but also would have criticized him just as much or more had he failed to demonstrate much emotion. But the left was not the important audience here. The important audience was the middle and the right. It’s the middle—particularly the small number of possible swing GOP and Democratic senators—who are the ones who can be swayed, and the middle who (like most of America) understands that sometimes anger is the only proper response for an innocent person falsely accused. The other important audience was the right, a right that has often been in despair about the lack of fighting spirit in the GOP, and who were fully expecting some sort of capitulating wimpiness yesterday.
That’s not what they saw, although it looked that way at first. But not only was Kavanaugh breathing fire, so was Lindsey Graham. I wrote about Graham last night, but after reading around the blogosphere today and seeing the praise heaped on him by conservatives who had previously despised him, I’ve come to think that, as inspiring and heartening as Brett Kavanaugh’s performance was, Lindsay Graham’s managed to upstage him.
But it was actually the one-two punch of these mild-mannered Clark-Kents-turned-Supermen that caused so much shock and sheer delight on the right. When the hearing seemed on the ropes, the GOP sitting in the corner in an apparent stupor, who should come out swinging but the two guys who had previously seemed the least pugnacious of all. The satisfaction was all the more sweet for that.
In other words, just as “only Nixon could have gone to China,” only Lindsey Graham could have given the foot-dragging RINOs a tongue-lashing that might genuinely shame and motivate some of them to confirm Kavanaugh.
Let us fervently hope, anyway.
[NOTE: So far today there have been some technical issues on the blog, resulting in a lot of people receiving “error” messages. My apologies. The host is working on it and I hope it will be resolved soon.]
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[NOTE: I’ll be bumping this up periodically for about a week.]
