RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/04/dems-give-in-to-our

As Democrats indulge in another high-tech lynching of a Supreme Court nominee, it’s worth noting that the fight over Brett Kavanaugh isn’t really about who’s qualified to serve on the nation’s highest court. The controversy is the latest manifestation of the Left’s effort to reshape or destroy American institutions. Now rapidly morphing into a leftist party reminiscent of those in Europe and Latin America, the Democrats and their activist supporters are not following a policy agenda focused on a specific issue or candidate so much as a grand strategy to discredit and redefine the institutions that make civic American life possible.

To beat the Left, the GOP not only must understand this reality, it must refuse to play by rules for which Democrats have no respect nor interest in maintaining. Not only that, conservatives and classical liberals should embolden themselves and re-engage the American cultural spheres long dominated by the Left. Fretting on the sidelines simply won’t do.

Designed for character assassination, the manufactured scandal Democrats arrayed against Brett Kavanaugh followed a simple formula based upon past leftist successes in politics and culture. Unable to find legitimate arguments over prior rulings or procedure to block Kavanaugh’s appointment, the Democrats accused him of a crime and capitalized on our culture’s moral panic du jour embodied in the #MeToo movement. The Democrats would have us pay no mind to the fact that the way someone was in high school, thankfully, does not often translate into the way a person will be throughout life. Nor would the Democrats remind us that the #MeToo movement only was made possible by the predatory behavior by powerful men in Hollywood, one of the most profitable of the Left’s occupied territories.

Fact is, the Democrats placed Kavanaugh in a position of having to prove he did not commit a crime. The only way definitively to prove innocence is to prove someone else committed the crime in question; otherwise, all that can be done is to cast doubt upon the notion of guilt. As with Hollywood, the Left controls academia and has done so for decades. If the Left comprises the erudite class that it so often claims for itself, however, its spokesmen would know that a nonevent couldn’t effectively be disproven. Was Kavanaugh at a party with Christine Blasey Ford or not? She says one thing, he says something else. There is no evidence either way—and so there is nothing an investigation might find to say he wasn’t there.

In the president, one big bully stands up to others.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/opinion/trump-kavanaugh-ford-allegations.html

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, especially since the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford in his ugly and gratuitous way at a rally on Tuesday. Perhaps it’s worth unpacking this admission for those who might be equally astonished to read 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.

A few moments have crystallized my view over the past few days.

The first moment was a remark by a friend. “I’d rather be accused of murder,” he said, “than of sexual assault.” I feel the same way. One can think of excuses for killing a man; none for assaulting a woman. But if that’s true, so is this: Falsely accusing a person of sexual assault is nearly as despicable as sexual assault itself. It inflicts psychic, familial, reputational and professional harms that can last a lifetime. This is nothing to sneer at.

The second moment, connected to the first: “Boo hoo hoo. Brett Kavanaugh is not a victim.” That’s the title of a column in the Los Angeles Times, which suggests that the possibility of Kavanaugh’s innocence is “infinitesimal.” Yet false allegations of rape, while relatively rare, are at least five times as common as false accusations of other types of crime, according to academic literature.

http://politicalmavens.com/

During a fight at the Horizon Juvenile Center in the Bronx, twenty correction officers were injured by 16 and 17 year old boys who had been moved from Rikers Island due to a state law requiring that they be treated differently from adults in courts and jails. (”Officers Hurt at Youth Center, WSJ 10/4) Despite the fact that these young men were gang members, City Council members are concerned that staffing the Juvenile Center with correction officers and juvenile counselors is too similar to replicating the jail experience. In other words, 16 and 17 year old hoodlums are still just boys.

I wonder whether Chuck Schumer, Diane Feinstein, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, to name a very few vociferous democrats, would be abashed to discover that they are dealing with the purported behavior of a boy the same age as these youngsters, and insisting that if the allegations against him were true, the 53 year old man he had become must be held responsible for acts performed 36 years ago. His punishment would be his unsuitability for the lofty job he has held for the past twelve years to unanimous acclaim and his certain removal from consideration for the higher post to which he had a presidential nomination. The Administration for Children’s Services which runs the Horizon Juvenile Center claims that none of the 20 officers was seriously injured, so despite that large number and the background of these boys, the spokeswoman argued for greater understanding of their issues and less concern for the safety of those who must control them.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-never-conservatives-1538608630

Donald Trump didn’t help Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation with his crude mockery of Christine Blasey Ford on Tuesday night in Tennessee, but then this Supreme Court moshpit isn’t about this President. The left’s all-out assault on the judge is clarifying because it shows that the “resistance” is really about anything and everything conservative in America. Mr. Trump is its foil to regain power.

Brett Kavanaugh isn’t part of Mr. Trump’s New York menagerie, or some Steve Bannon insurgent. The judge is the epitome of the GOP legal establishment, a Supreme Court nominee from central casting. He went to the best schools and served his apprenticeship among legal elites including a clerkship with former Justice Anthony Kennedy.

He has spent 26 years in public service instead of cashing in as a Beltway lawyer. He served at the highest levels of George W. Bush’s White House staff in positions of great trust. On the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for 12 years, he has written more than 300 opinions and had at least 10 adopted by the Supreme Court. He has taught at Harvard Law School at the invitation of then dean, and now Justice, Elena Kagan.

With these credentials Judge Kavanaugh would have been on any Republican’s short list for the Supreme Court. He could have been Jeb Bush’s nominee, or John Kasich’s, though Mr. Kasich in the ambitious ebb of his career now tilts with the anti-conservative left against Mr. Kavanaugh. In 2012 the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin wrote that Mr. Kavanaugh would have been Mitt Romney’s “most likely first nominee” for the High Court. Mr. Toobin, who loathes conservatives, meant it as a warning.

***

Mr. Trump’s nomination of Mr. Kavanaugh is a credit to the process he established to win the election and govern with conservative support. He sought the help of legal elites on the right, led by the Federalist Society, who compiled an impressive list of potential nominees. This isn’t a rogue judicial operation to choose presidential cronies. It is the gold standard for legal talent that believes in the original meaning of the Constitution. It’s hard to see how any GOP President would have done better, and others have done much worse.

https://www.city-journal.org/cognitive-and-psychological-testing-of-politicians-16209.html

Congress continues to rank dead-last in the most recent Gallup poll of public confidence in institutions. It’s no surprise: when representatives and senators aren’t squabbling, posturing, and at one another’s throats, such as during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, they’re saying and doing things that strain credulity. It’s no coincidence that insulting the intelligence of members of Congress is such a staple of American folk wisdom. “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself,” quipped Mark Twain. “When Congress makes a joke it’s a law, and when they make a law, it’s a joke,” said Will Rogers.

Too often, though, the joke is on us. A friend of mine was seated at a banquet table with the family of a then-congressman from Kansas. Family members expressed relief at the congressman’s career in politics because none of them thought that he was smart enough to enter the family business—processing scrap metal. “When I was debating what became the 2008 Farm Bill,” said Colorado congressman John Salazar, “I had a member of the Agriculture Committee actually ask me if chocolate milk really comes from brown cows. I asked if he was joking and he assured me he wasn’t.” That’s in the same category as the concern of Representative Hank Johnson that stationing 8,000 U.S. military personnel on Guam would cause the island to “become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.”

Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas once proclaimed that the U.S. Constitution was 400 years old. And as a member of the House Science Committee, Lee, during a visit to the Mars Pathfinder Operations Center, asked a NASA scientist whether the Pathfinder probe had photographed the flag that astronaut Neil Armstrong left behind in 1969. Armstrong had, of course, left the flag on the moon. In 2010, Lee proclaimed on the House floor that “victory had been achieved” by the United States in the Vietnam War and that “today, we have two Vietnams: side-by-side, north and south, exchanging and working.” Lee was a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee when she made that statement.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/tolerance_not_really_a_thing_in_islam.html

One of the most salient passages in the Quran is 2:106, which shows us the basis for the doctrine of abrogation: “We do not abrogate a verse or cause it to be forgotten except when we bring forth one better than earlier verse or similar to it. Do you not know that Allah is over all things competent?”

Abrogation has an impact on the arguments about the true nature of Islam. At endless interfaith dialogues, the early tolerant verses are quoted to show the nature of Islam as peaceful. When both verses are quoted and then abrogation is applied, we see that the later verse trumps the earlier tolerant one. Jihad abrogates tolerance. In general, the Medina Quran abrogates the Meccan Quran. There are several verses of tolerance that are abrogated by jihad against Christians.

But the earlier verse is still acceptable and in use. Abrogation does not negate the early verse. Indeed, the earlier “peaceful” verse that is abrogated is the one most apt to be used in public discourse.

This creates a logical problem, since if two things contradict each other, at least one of them must be false. This is a fundamental element of Western unitary logic. In Quranic logic, two statements can contradict each other, and both are true. This is dualistic logic.

To put it simply, Allah changes revelations as he pleases, and the latter revelations supersede the earlier ones. There are deviations among Muslim theologians as to which verses have been abrogated and replaced, but the overall idea has been clear. When Muslims are weak and in a minority position, they should behave peacefully according to the Meccan passages (which reflect the early time, when Muhammad was vulnerable and building his power base), and when strong, they are obligated to wage war according to the later Medina passages.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/10/gender-quotas-merit-faux-equality/

To reflect the world as it is, let’s put the ratio of women who pursue careers with the uninterrupted vigour that mostly characterises men at, say, four to one. To insist, therefore, on equal representation at each level of management amounts to a demand that women be not equal but privileged.

Since the outbreak of #metoo hashtagging in the federal parliamentary Liberal Party, Peta Credlin (among others) has been promoting targets for Liberal women in Parliament. Simultaneously, she decries quotas as endorsed by, for example, the Labor Party. Women, she says, don’t want a handicapping system for men; women want to win entirely on their own merits. More than that, women don’t want to walk into the party room aware that there were better candidates whose shoes they are not quite filling. Women who are like Ms Credlin only want to get into Parliament by their own honest and honourable efforts.

What’s the difference between a quota and a target? A target has a handbrake. That’s it. The rationale of each is identical. It starts with the unchallengeable premise: the country must have equal numbers of women in the Federal Parliament (and just about everywhere else, to boot.) A target is designed to achieve the same result, but more slowly, and with a little bit of wiggle room.

If the aim is the same, what’s the logic of claiming that targets are better? Your guess is as good as this one of mine. A quota forces the pace, and the women who are injected into Parliament suffer all of the detriments to self-esteem that Ms Credlin has sketched (although they seem to manage it bravely.) A target, on the other hand, can be accompanied by a development program, which will bolster the skills, the confidence, and the network of the participating women. By the time the target dates roll around, they won’t be needed, because the women will be competing on an equal footing with the men.

I don’t know whether the thinking about targets actually ascends to the level of some such theory – any such theory – but looming behind this theory is an out-of-focus vision of the restored state of nature, with the elimination of all the handicaps that have been clamped onto women like so many electronic ankle bracelets to confine them to house arrest. In that wonderful day to come, women will realise their full potential and compete, unimpeded and uninhibited, with men. And if restored womanhood finds that its natural level is to have greater representation than men, well, let the lines fall in such pleasant places. It’s Rousseau in a pantsuit.

Even hardened leftists occasionally stumble on a truth: Jonathan Saul Freedland is a leftist British journalist, who writes a weekly column for The Guardian and the New York Review of Books. His latest column bashes Kavanaugh and “the insidious force in global politics: toxic masculinity.”

On this he is right:

On the left, black people are usually allowed to define what ‘s racism; women can define sexism (and harassment); Muslims are trusted to define Islamophobia. But when Jews call out something anti-Semitic, leftist non-Jews feel curiously entitled to tell Jews they’re wrong, that they are exaggerating or lying or using it as a decoy tactic-and to treat them to a long lecture on what anti-Jewish racism really is.

Jonathan Freeland (The Guardian- April 29th, 2016)

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/30

The Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and their endless sequelae have ended up as an epitaph for a spent culture for which its remedies are felt to be worse than its diseases. Think 338 B.C., A.D. 476, 1453, or 1939.

The coordinated effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court required the systematic refutation of the entire notion of Western jurisprudence by senators and much of the American legal establishment. And there was no hesitation in doing just that on the part of Senate Democrats, the #MeToo movement, and the press. And I write this at a moment in which conservatives and Republicans still control the majority of governorships, state legislatures, the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court and the presidency—a reminder that culture so often is far more powerful than politics.

So, here we were to be left with a new legal and cultural standard in adjudicating future disagreements and disputes, an utterly anti-Western standard quite befitting for our new relativist age:

The veracity of accusations will hinge on the particular identity, emotions, and ideology of the accuser;
Evidence, or lack of it, will be tangential, given the supposed unimpeachable motives of the ideologically correct accuser;
The burden of proof and evidence will rest with the accused to disprove the preordained assumption of guilt;
Hearsay will be a valuable narrative and constitute legitimate evidence;
Truth is not universal, but individualized. Ford’s “truth” is as valid as the “Truth,” given that competing narratives are adjudicated only by access to power. Ford is a victim, therefore her truth trumps “their” truth based on evidence and testimony.
Questionable and inconsistent testimony are proof of trauma and therefore exactitude; recalling an accusation to someone is proof that the action in the accusation took place.
Statutes of limitations do not exist; any allegation of decades prior is as valid as any in the present. All of us are subject at any moment to unsubstantiated accusations from decades past that will destroy lives.
Assertion of an alleged crime is unimpeachable proof. Recall of where, when, why, and how it took place is irrelevant.
Individual accusations will always be subservient to cosmic causes; individuals are irrelevant if they do not serve ideological aims. All accusations fit universal stereotypes whose rules of finding guilt or innocence trump those of individual cases.
The accuser establishes the conditions under which charges are investigated; the accused nods assent.