Character and crucible: Thomas and Kavanaugh

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I put up a short clip of Clarence Thomas excoriating the Senate Democrats at his 1991 hearing. I want to highlight it now:

Thomas speaks with great eloquence, but it’s his affect that is especially arresting. You can feel his outraged dignity in every word and every glint of his eye. It is all the more powerful for being under control.

You know that this is a man who’s been through the fire before. And if you know Thomas’ personal history, you know that he had a great many early struggles with poverty and discrimination, and triumphed over them all by dint of hard work and determination.

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.

Clarence Thomas’ speech had special force because of the element of race it contained. His listeners knew it, too. When Thomas said he was facing “a high-tech lynching,” the word “lynching” had a very specific meaning which he emphasized by following it up with this:

…it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas. And it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you: you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured, by a committee of the US Senate rather than hung from a tree.

What Thomas is doing there, among other things, is taking the Democrats’ cloak of “we are the party of civil rights” rectitude and ripping it away, exposing the corollary “only if you toe our party line; otherwise we will destroy you with every trick in our nasty book.” Now that nearly thirty years have passed since that hearing, we’ve seen that play out time and again. It is open season on conservative blacks, not just Clarence Thomas (who has continued to be disrespected and excoriated by the left) but on all blacks who “think for themselves, do for themselves, have different ideas.” It’s true for women, too; Republican women aren’t real women, as someone like Sarah Palin learned all too well, and as the rest of us observed.

Fast forward to the Kavanuagh situation, in which Kavanaugh is also being lynched. Jimmy Kimmel’s light little joke last night (Kimmel’s “’compromise’ to the battle of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination is to chop off the judge’s ‘pesky penis,’ should he be confirmed”) was not really funny and was in obvious bad taste, but what Kimmel may or may not have realized is that it harks back to some exceptionally vile body desecrations that sometimes occurred during lynchings.

Even so, of course, Kavanaugh doesn’t have the option of saying he’s an uppity black being lynched. Clearly, he’s not. Au contraire. He’s a “privileged white guy” who went to the finest schools and according to all previous reports has played by all the rules. But for that reason, it is possible that (although he’s been a federal judge) this is the first real crucible that he’s been through.

If that is in fact the case, it would certainly not be his fault. Fortunately for most of us, most of us have never experienced anything remotely like the terrible public pressure he’s under. But at this point it would help if he had, if not 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.

I don’t know that much about Kavanaugh’s life. Perhaps he has endured tests of his own that will stand him in good stead throughout this terrible ordeal. I hope that something will sustain him. Perhaps his faith, which apparently is strong, and his family.

Being associated with President Trump isn’t for the faint of heart. Ask Paul Manafort, for example; whatever he has done or hasn’t done, guilty or not, does anyone think he’d stand convicted now had he not had his little fling with the Trump campaign? Of course not. And ask Michael Flynn or Carter Page or Michael Cohen or any number of other people whose lives would probably be going quite smoothly right now were it not for the fact that they worked for Donald Trump and the left decided to try to destroy them.

If Kavanaugh is confirmed and the Democrats win the House in November, the new House may try to impeach him. If he’s not confirmed and the Democrats win the House in November, the new House may try to impeach him from the judgeship he now holds. If they have the votes, they can do it, too. I don’t know how far they will go with this. But they have conjured up forces of rage and destruction that they may have to placate by sacrificing Brett Kavanaugh further, and putting him through a few more crucibles.

What motives drive false accusers?

The New Neo Posted on by

The answer might seem obvious, but I think it’s more complicated than most people might think.

Let’s leave out accusers who are telling the truth. I’m interested in the ones who are not. They can have multiple motives, too. This list is not all-inclusive, but here are the major ones:

(1) Revenge. The person actually has hurt you in some way—estranged spouses are notorious for this motivation—but you’re making up a story with an accusation that can hurt them even more than the truth would, and you justify it by telling yourself they deserve it.

(2) You’re a sociopath who enjoys lying and gets off on seeing people squirm. Makes you feel superior to all those stupid normals.

(3) Someone has paid you money to lie.

(4) You want your 15 minutes of fame.

(5) An actual psychological contagion effect, a kind of mass hysteria in which people start thinking they remember something that is really just a reflection of what they’re hearing from others. Obviously, for this motive to be operating there must be other accusers and a lot of attention given to them, which is often true for a public figure. I believe that this was at least part of the motive for the girls doing the accusing in the Salem witch trials, for example. Do not underestimate the power of the strangeness of the human mind.

(6) (This one is related to #5, but somewhat different.) Some time ago, something happened to you that was bad, but your memory is foggy on some details. When you really think about it [added for clarification: or are coaxed to do so, perhaps by a therapist], you become convinced that it happened a certain way at a certain person’s hands. And yet this is actually a manufactured memory detail superimposed on a much hazier basic memory that is real. People who are undergoing numbers 5 or 6 can make very convincing witnesses indeed, because they have convinced themselves of the absolute truth of their memories and can therefore speak with the power of tremendous conviction.

(7) You believe this is a noble lie you are telling because the cause is noble. This is the mentality of some spies, or people working for the real Resistance during a war, in which that person can easily justify lying, making false documents, perhaps even assassination, for the sake of the greater good. Right now, for example, if a person believes, truly truly believes, that the right is waging a War on Women, let’s say, and that women’s very liberty is at stake if the evil Kavanaugh gets on the Court, that person could easily justify lying in order to take him down. I think that mentality is quite rampant these days.

(8) You once had something similar happen to you at the hands of someone else, and that person shares a lot of traits with the person being accused. Let’s say, for example, that the person who hurt you went to a Catholic prep school and wore his hair like Kavanaugh did in his high school yearbook, maybe even talked a bit like him, and became a lawyer or a judge. That person did something very upsetting to you, and never apologized or looked back, and then went on to great glory and fame and achievement in life. You want justice and never got it. For some people in that circumstance it is easy to tell themselves that all Catholic prep grads who look something like that or talk something like that are the same sort of scumbag. So what’s wrong with telling a little white lie to expose what a scumbag that person must be? You may be lying, but you’re telling A Greater Truth.

Kavanaugh, the virgin rapist

The New Neo Posted on by

Too much information, Brett!

But perhaps helpful and necessary information. The left picked quite a target for their sexual misconduct charges:

Or course, the left will mock him for this. They will also say that’s why he had to rape people when in his cups—he was so terribly repressed and out of the mainstream.

And no doubt this gives them the opportunity to drag forth a stream of Yale coeds (is that still the term?) who were there at the right time to swear that they slept with Brett Kavanaugh, that Casanova. Soon there will be a line of them as long as the members of my tiresome generation who claim to have been at Woodstock.

For the record, I wasn’t at Woodstock, and Brett Kavanaugh never raped me or even had sex with me.

ADDENDUM: Comment found at Althouse’s:

they’ve tried witch hunts, and that didnt work out.

Now they’re going to sacrifice a virgin

And speaking of Google and the algorithms it uses…

The New Neo Posted on by

Just now I read that Brett Kavanaugh had issued a statement about the new accusations and the fact that he plans to fight them. I wanted to look at his exact words, so I Googled “Brett Kavanaugh statement” and then the filter that said to limit the selection to only the last hour.

The first page that came up was divided between Christine Blasey Ford’s statement that she will not let fear intimidate her into not testifying, and a petition signed by 900 Yale graduates saying they believe Christine. Not a thing about Kavanaugh’s statement.

So I went to page 2, and in the ten links there I found a single one to Kavanaugh’s letter. The link was to a Fox News story. But it contained only a few quotes.

I finally got to the full text of the letter by Googling one of the exact quotes from the Fox story. That made it much much easier, and there were several sources from which to choose. Here’s one, and this is a portion of it:

There is now a frenzy to come up with something—anything—that will block this process and a vote on my confirmation from occurring.

These are smears, pure and simple. And they debase our public discourse. But they are also a threat to any man or woman who wishes to serve our country. Such grotesque and obvious character assassination—if allowed to succeed—will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions from service.

As I told the Committee during my hearing, a federal judge must be independent, not swayed by public or political pressure. That is the kind of judge I will always be. I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process. The coordinated effort to destroy my good name will not drive me out. The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out. The last-minute character assassination will not succeed.

I have devoted my career to serving the public and the cause of justice, and particularly to promoting the equality and dignity of women. Women from every phase of my life have come forward to attest to my character. I am grateful to them. I owe it to them, and to my family, to defend my integrity and my name.

He owes it to all of us.

ADDENDUM: And I think it’s very important to look back at this piece of history from twenty-seven years ago. It is very powerful:

The New Yorker’s Ramirez story and the art of defamation

The New Neo Posted on by

Needless to say, the New Yorker was extremely eager to pin another accusation on Kavanaugh. So their motives to publish the Ramirez story are obvious. Farrow and Mayer have also carved out a sort of niche of accusative journalism involving sexual abuse or harrassment allegations against public figures, and have achieved no small fame for it.

So why would they want to compromise that reputation by publishing such an iffy story? As I said, the motive to get Kavanaugh is strong, but that’s not the only reason they felt empowered to do this. Their probable defense is that they never say that Kavanaugh is guilty, they merely report what Ramirez said, and they even report that there are gaps in her memory and that the other named supposed-witnesses deny ever being privy to such a scene.

So Farrow and Mayer can say that they were reporting unverified rumors but they actually presented them as such, upfront, and therefore are protected because they didn’t publish them with “reckless disregard for the truth.”

I think it’s hogwash, for the simple reason that they know that in the current climate these unverified rumors have enormous force, and publishing them at all without strong evidence that they are true is to publish them with malice aforethought. But I’m not a judge and I’m not a jury.

This journalistic technique is not new. One previous instance that comes to mind was the attempt by the NY Times to smear John McCain during the 2008 election, in which the Times carefully calibrated its smears against McCain by reporting them this way:

The uproar was over an assertion in the second paragraph that during McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, some of his top advisers became “convinced” he was having a “romantic” relationship with a female lobbyist and intervened to protect the candidate from himself. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, denied they had an affair, and at a press conference after the article was published, McCain denied that anyone ever confronted him about their relationship. He described her as a friend.

The article had repercussions for both McCain and The Times. He may benefit, at least in the short run, from a conservative backlash against the “liberal” New York Times. The newspaper found itself in the uncomfortable position of being the story as much as publishing the story, in large part because, although it raised one of the most toxic subjects in politics — sex — it offered readers no proof that McCain and Iseman had a romance.

In a follow-up article on Friday, the newspaper even seemed to play down its role in the sex angle. It described the previous day’s article as talking about McCain’s “ties” to Iseman and his “association” with her. The only mention of romance came in quoting a question to McCain at his press conference.

That was ten years ago, and the MSM was more careful back then. But it’s the same modus operandi as that used by Farrow and Mayer now. Now the charges are much bolder, although the sourcing is probably even weaker, if such a thing be possible. But events in the last ten years—the Cosby trial, the Herman Cain accusations, the Moore debacle, the Steele dossier, and of course #MeToo—have created a climate in which this sort of thing will become more and more common and more and more outrageous and unfair.

Let’s take a look at Bill Cosby again, shall we?

The New Neo Posted on by

Distasteful though that process may be.

I wrote a lot about the Cosby charges and the Cosby trial. It’s easy to take a look, here.

The gist of the situation regarding Cosby was and is as follows:

I happen to think Cosby is guilty. I also think he has a scummy sexual history: cheating on his wife, and kinky stuff involving drugged women. But when I say that I think he’s guilty, I don’t mean that he’s guilty of having a scummy sexual history of cheating and drugging, although those things are apparently true. I mean I think he’s guilty of at times having sex with women (or at least one woman) without their consent, having given them drugs. Those were the acts for which he was tried, and it came down to the issue of consent.

If you look at just about all of those posts I wrote about the Cosby accusations and trial, I’m actually defending him because I thought he did not get a fair trial. And that is despite the fact that I think he most likely is guilty. But I think the rules of evidence were misapplied in his case, as I wrote here.

Now, perhaps you may not care if Cosby was unfairly treated by the court because you think he’s a scumbag. I do care, though, because I care more about the fairness of the legal system—and the protection of the rights of the innocent, which is everyone till proven guilty—than I care about putting Bill Cosby in jail.

If that makes me a bleeding heart, so be it. I don’t think it does, though. I think it makes me very skeptical of the honesty and decency of people in power, particularly when they think that right is on their side in addition to might. All tyrannies, or at least a great many of them, begin with people who think they have good intentions.

A lot of people think that Cosby was a scumbag, that he used drugs to sleep with women who were practically unconscious, and so it’s obvious that the women didn’t consent and that they’re telling the truth in their accusations. Such people sometimes don’t care what the prosecutors did to Cosby because they want him in the slammer and they don’t care if prosecutors have to cut a few corners to do it.

I disagree, which may put me in the minority at this point. But it also puts me in league with the Founding Fathers, who were very concerned about such issues. Their deep concern and the protections they built into the Constitution have protected us for a long time, but I fear that concern has virtually evaporated in the face of MeToo. And actually, it’s been evaporating for quite some time.

To turn to that other court, the court of public opinion—a lot of people have pointed out that cases like that of Roy Moore and Harvey Weinstein have accustomed us to think that the accusations of one person are stronger if there are other, similar accusations. Now, we reap the dubious “benefits” of that with Kavanaugh, where even the most suspect accusations are strengthened (in the eyes of some people, anyway) when there’s more than one accuser. But weak, suspect accusations are weak and suspect no matter how many there are. What makes accusations especially weak or suspect? Sketchy memory, a long previous silence, a political and/or financial motive for making the claim, and reading about other claims from other women giving the new accuser ideas for a similar set of charges. It’s not hard to do for anyone who may have had any prior encounter with the accused, and who has the motivation.

Is Rosenstein toast?

The New Neo Posted on by

The news is coming from all angles today. There’s a report that Rod Rosenstein is on the way out:

Axios has reported that “Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has verbally resigned to Chief of Staff John Kelly in anticipation of being fired by President Trump, according to a source with direct knowledge.”

Other reports indicate that Rosenstein is headed to the White House and “expecting to be fired” and he will not resign.

Last week, The New York Times wrote using anonymous resources that Rosenstein offered to wear a wire to tape Trump and try to rally Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment.

That’s about it so far. An anonymous source tells us Rosenstein and/or Trump is doing this, and the leavetaking is apparently is based on last week’s Times story (based on an anonymous source) that Rosenstein had offered to spy on Trump for the Resistance.

I will update when more is known.

I do wonder, though, why the Times published the story about the wire offer. I would have thought they wanted to protect Rosenstein. There’s an angle here I must not be seeing. Perhaps it’s that they wanted to provoke Trump into firing Rosenstein, and then have Trump attacked for it?

The anti-Kavanaugh plan of attack

The New Neo Posted on by

This evening I wrote a post about the second Kavanaugh accuser. I want to add a few more thoughts, but I decided to use a separate post.

Not only was it inevitable that the left would find someone else to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, however vague the accusation and however deeply they had to dig—but it is also fairly obvious that they’ve known about this second person for some time (it took a while to interview her and write the story). I think it’s highly likely that all those negotiations with the Senate over the first accuser’s testimony had one basic goal: to postpone the vote till this second story could be published.

Even a story as thin as this second one gives ammunition to the anti-Kavanaugh forces. No matter how suspect the accusations, sheer numbers tend to convince people. I don’t see the logic in it—twenty hazy, ancient, vague, uncorroborated recollections about a person that one political party wants to destroy are no better than one. But precedent made it clear to the left that it can work.

A little over a week ago I wrote a post that ended like this:

…beware!! It’s scorched earth, and we [the left] will use every method we can think of to destroy you.

And this is the truth.

Another point that occurs to me is that, not only was the campaign to delay the confirmation vote and let Ford testify before the Senate based on the knowledge that this New Yorker article was in the hopper, and the delay was precisely timed to make sure it was published shortly beforehand, but now Ford really doesn’t have to testify at all. Maybe she will, but maybe she won’t. But the negotiations and delay to get to this second accuser were the point. And if Ramirez wants to testify—or temporarily claims she does—the idea would be to effect another delay until, if possible, the rollout of another accuser.

In fact, the article about the third accuser is probably already being written. There is no question that other accusers are being sought, encouraged, and/or solicited [see *NOTE below].

And still another point of it all is to peel off people like Flake and Collins and Murkowski and have them vote “nay.” They will find it harder and harder to hang tough in the face of multiple accusers.

The GOP had better come up with a strategy against this, or it will destroy the party. It may even destroy the country. Maybe it already has.

Or maybe, just maybe, the mendacity, the transparent plotting by the left, the leading of the witnesses, the danger posed by false and uncorroborated defamation, will finally touch enough people that they’ll realize what’s going on here and reject it.

Maybe. That’s my hope, anyway.

[ *NOTE: Coaching the witness:

First, Ramirez says she was completely inebriated when the misconduct supposedly occurred.

Second, she told the New Yorker she wasn’t certain what happened until “after six days of talking with her attorney” a former elected Democrat. According to Farrow and Mayer, “in her initial conversations with The New Yorker, [Ramirez] was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty.” But one can do plenty of brain washing in six days.

We’ve all heard of the “MeToo” movement. Now we have the “MeToo, My Democrat Attorney Thinks” movement.

I have no doubt this happens quite often.

And then after the goal is reached and the accused candidate is defeated, we never hear from the accuser again.]

[ADDENDUM: It occurs to me that the entire country has become one big Title IX hearing, in which due process is waived, a woman is always presumed to be telling the truth, and all men are scum. The only difference here is that only Republican men are scum; for Democrats, the accusations bounce right off.]

A second accuser, of course

The New Neo Posted on by

Everyone has been expecting this. And there may be a third and a fourth, but they will be revealed one by one, in single file, with timing exquisitely calibrated in order to drag the entire thing out.

There will be however many of them that it takes, no matter how trivial the stories, no matter how ancient, no matter how tenuous the identification, no matter that no one who was supposedly there corroborates the tale.

It doesn’t take much to concoct a story of this sort, and for those who must believe this (or pretend to believe it) for their own purposes, it is enough:

…the New Yorker has released a story by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer detailing an accusation from Kavanaugh’s Yale days.

The story…introduces a woman who claims Kavanaugh exposed himself and put his penis right in front of her face. It’s a very serious allegation… and one that is so flimsy that the accuser herself doesn’t appear too confident in her own allegations, and virtually every other source the New Yorker spoke to refutes the claim.

This is from the New Yorker article:

A third male student then exposed himself to her. “I remember a penis being in front of my face,” she said. “I knew that’s not what I wanted, even in that state of mind.” She recalled remarking, “That’s not a real penis,” and the other students laughing at her confusion and taunting her, one encouraging her to “kiss it.”…She remembers Kavanaugh standing to her right and laughing, pulling up his pants. “Brett was laughing,” she said. “I can still see his face, and his hips coming forward, like when you pull up your pants.” She recalled another male student shouting about the incident. “Somebody yelled down the hall, ‘Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie’s face,’ ” she said. “It was his full name. I don’t think it was just ‘Brett.’…

…after several days of considering the matter carefully, she said, “I’m confident about the pants coming up, and I’m confident about Brett being there.”…

One of the male classmates who Ramirez said egged on Kavanaugh denied any memory of the party. “I don’t think Brett would flash himself to Debbie, or anyone, for that matter,” he said. Asked why he thought Ramirez was making the allegation, he responded, “I have no idea.” The other male classmate who Ramirez said was involved in the incident commented, “I have zero recollection.”

In a statement, two of those male classmates who Ramirez alleged were involved in the incident, the wife of a third male student she said was involved, and three other classmates, Dino Ewing, Louisa Garry, and Dan Murphy, disputed Ramirez’s account of events: “We were the people closest to Brett Kavanaugh during his first year at Yale. He was a roommate to some of us, and we spent a great deal of time with him, including in the dorm where this incident allegedly took place. Some of us were also friends with Debbie Ramirez during and after her time at Yale. We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it—and we did not. The behavior she describes would be completely out of character for Brett. In addition, some of us knew Debbie long after Yale, and she never described this incident until Brett’s Supreme Court nomination was pending. Editors from the New Yorker contacted some of us because we are the people who would know the truth, and we told them that we never saw or heard about this.”

I think maybe a full trial is in order for Kavanaugh, don’t you think? We can have Christine and Debbie testify (after some memory-refreshing by a bunch of lawyers), and we can put out a call for other accusers among every woman (or man; hey, let’s not limit it, maybe he abused men sexually, too, and dogs) who ever knew Brett Kavanaugh.

A look back:

The girls [in Salem] delivered up their own reports with difficulty, falling into testimony-stopping trances, yelping that Burroughs [the accused] bit them. They displayed their wounds for court officials, who inspected the minister’s mouth. The imprints matched perfectly. Choking and thrashing stalled the proceedings; the court could do nothing but wait for the girls to recover. During one delay, Chief Justice Stoughton appealed to the defendant. What, he asked, did Burroughs think throttled them? The minister replied that he assumed it was the Devil. “How comes the devil then to be so loath to have any testimony born against you?” Stoughton challenged. A brainteaser of a question, it left Burroughs without an answer.

He was equally bewildered when ghosts began to flit about the overcrowded room. Some observers who were not bewitched saw them too. Directly before Burroughs, a girl recoiled from a horrible sight: she explained that she stared into the blood-red faces of his dead wives. The ghosts demanded justice…

At one point, a former brother-in-law testified, Burroughs had vanished in the midst of a strawberry-picking expedition. His companions hollered for him in vain. They rode home to find that he had preceded them, on foot and with a full basket of berries. He had divined as well what was said about him in his absence. The Devil could not know as much, the brother-in-law protested…

Out of excuses, Burroughs extracted a paper from his pocket. He seemed to believe it a deal-clincher. He did not contest the validity of spectral evidence, as had others who came before the court, who did not care to be convicted for crimes they committed in someone else’s imagination. Instead, Burroughs, reading from the paper, asserted that “there neither are, nor ever were witches, that having made a compact with the Devil can send a Devil to torment other people at a distance.” It was the most objectionable thing he could have suggested. If diabolical compacts did not exist, if the Devil could not subcontract out his work to witches, the Court of Oyer and Terminer had sent six innocents to their deaths…

Early on the morning of August 19th, the largest throng to date turned out to inspect the first men whom Massachusetts was to execute for witchcraft. Martha Carrier joined them on the trip to the gallows. As the cart creaked up the hill, George Burroughs, George Jacobs, John Proctor, and John Willard insisted that they had been falsely accused. They hoped that the real witches would soon be revealed. They “declared their wish,” a bystander reported, “that their blood might be the last innocent blood shed upon that account.” They remained “sincere, upright, and sensible of their circumstances, on all accounts.” They forgave their accusers, the justices, the jury; they prayed they might be pardoned for their actual sins. Cotton Mather journeyed to Salem for the execution. Some of the condemned appealed to him in heartrending terms. Would he help them to prepare spiritually for the journey ahead? It is unclear if he did so or if he held the same hard line as the Salem town minister, who did not pray with witches.

Burroughs appears to have climbed the ladder first. With composure, he paused midway to offer what many expected to be a long-delayed confession. A wisp of his former self after fourteen weeks in a dungeon, he remained a contrarian. Perched above a crowd that included his former in-laws and parishioners, a noose around his neck, he delivered an impassioned speech. With his last breaths, Burroughs entrusted himself to the Almighty. Tears rolled down cheeks all around before he concluded with some disquieting lines. “Our Father, who art in Heaven,” Burroughs began, continuing, from the ladder, with a blunder-free recitation of the Lord’s Prayer—an impossible feat for a wizard, one that any number of other suspects had not managed. For a few moments, it seemed as if the crowd would obstruct the execution.

Minutes later, the minister dangled from a roughly finished beam.

More “Midnight Run”

The New Neo Posted on by

While we’re at it—and to get some relief from all the angst right now—an earlier post today where I added a clip from “Midnight Run” reminded me of how much I love that movie.

Love love love that movie.

And so, just for fun, here’s another clip:

And this, one of the most touching scenes in any movie, ever:

Lucy (aka Christine Blasey Ford) holds the football for Charlie Brown (aka the GOP in the Senate) once again

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the latest:

Note the same old passive-aggressive snark that I pointed out in this post.

(For those of you unaware of the Peanuts reference in the title of this post, please see this.)

Apparently there’s also an issue about flyiing—Ford claims she needs the extra time because of fear of flying (a fear occasioned by the supposed attack when she was 15, the genesis of every subsequent problem in her entire life).

Now, I certainly respect people with a bona fide fear of flying. But her claim almost inevitably conjures up this scene from one of my favorite movies, “Midnight Run.” Here Robert De Niro works for a bail bondsman trying to bring fugitive embezzler Charles Grodin back to face the music, and Grodin—determined to escape or at least to delay so that De Niro misses his deadline—pretends to be afraid of flying, although we later learn it’s all a ruse and he’s actually a pilot:

The face of justice: accuser and accused

The New Neo Posted on by

This post isn’t really about Kavanaugh and Ford, although obviously that’s the jumping-off spot. It’s about the larger issues that the controversy reflects, which have to do with the nature of justice.

Robert Frost (yes, that Robert Frost) had this to say on the subject (from a talk he gave at Bread Loaf in 1960):

Naturally there’s a constant natural conflict between justice and mercy. The big joke is that somebody on earth ought to balance them up. Probably God does. It could be assumed. That is the most Godlike thing: to balance them—mercy for justice or a just mercy. But there’s something there that’s almost too hard for a mortal man to get.

When I was a child I was very taken with these questions. That may sound unusual, but I don’t really think it is. Children (many children, at least) naturally want the world to be a just place. They want the guilty punished and the innocent rewarded. They want it to be easy to tell the difference. And they don’t want to wait decades to see it happen.

In fact, many children are so into the idea of justice that if bad things happen to them they imagine they must indeed be bad people. But that’s another topic for another time.

But justice and mercy are not usually easily balanced for most people, even children. Most people either fall into what I would call the prosecutor mentality, bent on punishing the perps, or the defense attorney mentality, bent on making sure the accused has the benefit of the doubt and is not railroaded into jail.

I was much more the victim in my life as a child. I was small, young, and a girl, surrounded by adults who were not necessarily all that kind, and older boys who were intent on teasing me and even hitting me quite often, and I was not strong enough to defend myself successfully although I constantly tried—really, on a daily basis. Now, that’s not the worst thing a child ever faced, but believe me it wasn’t an easy situation either.

Based on my situation, one would think I would grow up with the prosecutor mentality. But for some reason I grew up with the defense attorney mentality. I had a horror of false accusations—an absolute horror. In fact, one of my early heroes was Clarence Darrow (I wrote about him in this lengthy post), and when I went off to law school years later it was with the idea of becoming a defense attorney. Although Criminal Law and Evidence were indeed two of my favorite courses, I realized early on that I didn’t have the temperament (read: cojones) to become a defense attorney or even a trial attorney of any sort.

But I’ve never lost my outrage when people rush to judgment on the face of flimsy evidence. I think I am quite consistent as well, not just favoring those whose politics match mine but applying the same rules to all.

The Kavanaugh hearings have been another terrible manifestation of the fact that so many people are only too happy to rush to the attack of someone whose politics they don’t like, and to defend a person whose politics they do like, and to mouth pious and yet pernicious stupidities like “believe the women” or “believe the victims.” That way lies the end of our system of justice, which though flawed is one of the best if not the best ever developed by humankind.

In that same 1960 speech, Frost also said this:

The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are having quite a time about it right now. They both want to sound merciful enough, and they both want to sound just enough. They’re going to outdo each other in getting that right. The nice way is to choose the Democrats for being too merciful. Somebody calculated that the mercies that they promised the world were going to cost us about fifty billion dollars a year—if they did all they had in their program. The Republicans have got to sort of match that somewhere if they don’t get broke.

Frost correctly predicted that, in the effort to seem “nice” and counter the Democrats’ seeming niceness, the GOP would move to the left and end its own fiscal austerity. That’s indeed what happened.

Frost also says there that both parties were attempting to sound both merciful and just. That was probably true then, but it’s not true anymore—or rather, I observe that the Democrats have completely abandoned the “mercy” part of the equation where their political opponents are concerned. Or you might say that they’ve redefined “just” and “mercy” as being whatever they see as benefiting one of their protected classes/groups of people: women, minorities, everyone but white men.

Needless to say, that’s not justice. But it’s the new kind of “justice”—so-called “social justice.” See, they’ve even co-opted the word “justice.”