RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/10/15/kirsten-gillibrands-calculated-convictions/

Friend of Bill yesterday, ‘Me Too’ stalwart today

In the Senate, you’re either a work­horse or a show horse. Kirsten Gillibrand, despite the dynamism with which she pushed into law such blockbuster legislation as the Merchant Marine Academy Improvement Act of 2017 and her noble fight for the Quiet Communities Act of 2018 (which stands a 5 percent chance of passing, according to Skopos Labs), doesn’t seem much like a workhorse. It used to be said among New York newspaper reporters that the most dangerous place to be was between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera. Now Schumer is the shy one in the New York senatorial delegation.

Gillibrand’s publicity-seeking engine is forever running, and the sound it makes is Notice me notice me notice me. She even voted against James Mattis as secretary of defense: Leave the Pentagon rudderless to own Trump? Sure, whatever. She cast the only vote in opposition to Mattis. As of early this year, she’d voted against Trump more than twice as often as Schumer had. Though she denied (this was a year and a half ago) that she is running for president in 2020, a Washington Post headline on a piece tracking her behavior this year read, “It sure looks as if Kirsten Gillibrand is running for president.”

At least that’s the way it looks to you and me. The way it looks to Mr. and Mrs. U.S. Voter is: Who the heck is Kirsten Gillibrand? An August Politico poll found that should she be the Democratic nominee against Donald Trump, he would win only 29 percent of the vote. Um . . . yay? Except Gillibrand received 24 percent in the same poll. Forty-seven percent were undecided. Michael Avenatti managed to get 20 percent, and no one had even heard of him until about six months ago. Hence Gillibrand’s nonstop effort to get in front of the cameras: Notice me notice me notice me.

Gillibrand is always up for a quote, no matter how half-thought or appalling. When lawyers for Christine Blasey Ford spent two days arguing that their client couldn’t possibly come and testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee until a nice leisurely FBI investigation had concluded — before dumping that excuse and moving on to others — Gillibrand made a beeline for the news crews. Though Ford did not allege a federal crime, which made the demand for FBI involvement look like an obvious slow­down tactic, Gillibrand said the dispute obviously indicated that Ford was telling the truth and Judge Kavanaugh was lying. “Someone who is lying does not ask the FBI to investigate their claims,” she said. “Who is not asking the FBI to investigate these claims? The White House. Judge Kavanaugh has not asked to have the FBI review these claims. Is that the reaction of an innocent person? It is not.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-anonymous-allegation-amid-bungled-process/

Grassley could have told committee Democrats that, having abused the process, they had waived the right to present more evidence.

My main concerns all along about the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing have been (1) abuse of the process and (2) relatedly, the more delay you permit, the more delay you will have — which matters when one side’s objective is, precisely, delay.

Following Wednesday’s Avenatti circus, ably chronicled in our editorial, there has now been a fourth allegation lodged against Judge Kavanaugh. This one is wholly anonymous, coming into the office of Senator Cory Gardner (R., Colo.) with no attribution and no contact information. According to NBC News, the letter alleges that in 1998, an inebriated Kavanaugh, then 33 years old and a partner at a prominent D.C. law firm, got rough with an unidentified woman outside a Washington bar.

The woman making the accusation is not the woman who was allegedly assaulted; nor did she even see the alleged assault. She claims, instead, that she is the mother of a friend of the victim. The friend is said to have witnessed the incident — in which the victim was “shoved . . . up against the wall very aggressively and sexually,” whatever that means.

The complainant maintains that there were at least four witnesses, including her daughter, all of whom were drinking. None of them, nor the victim (described as “still traumatized” after 20 years), has come forward or identified anyone involved.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/27/the-truths-

Are there any guiding principles that can make sense of the sensational news that now overwhelms the senses seemingly every hour?

What is common to blaring headlines about the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings, an anti-Trump “resistance” buried deep in the permanent bureaucracy and the improper behavior by top officials of the Obama administration, FBI, and Department of Justice?

There are a few subtexts to all these spectacles, scandals, and melodramas.

First, those in power had never imagined that Donald Trump either could or should win the 2016 election.

That reality emboldened federal employees to take risks and step over the line in efforts to ensure that Trump would be humiliated at the polls. Officials assumed that incoming President Hillary Clinton would either overlook or reward their zealotry.

FBI kingpins such as James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok either broke the law or made a mockery of the FBI’s ethical guidelines. They acted as if Clinton would win, or should have won, the election.

Had Clinton won the presidency, we would have absolutely no knowledge of any prior misconduct at the FBI, the Department of Justice, the National Security Agency or the CIA under the Obama administration. Trump prompted all that hysteria by winning.

Second, both the Democratic and Republican establishments, as well as the proverbial “deep state” bureaucracy, agreed that President Trump was so crude and uncouth that he must not continue in office.

The idea that any means necessary were justified by the noble ends of destroying Trump explains everything from the anonymous op-ed in the New York Times detailing formal White House resistance to Trump’s governance, to Bob Woodward’s latest unsourced expose of purported Trump chaos, to Robert Mueller’s investigation that was mandated to find “Russian collusion” and has ended up desperate to find any crimes that might prove Trump guilty of something.

Third, had Trump simply failed, as predicted, there would be far less frenzy. His Democratic opponents and many in his own party would have quietly found ways to remove him.

But instead, the economy is booming in a way previously unseen in the 21st century, with near-record-low unemployment and stock market highs. The economy is growing faster than it has in years. Domestic energy production is also hitting record highs.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271441/avenattis-freak-show-matthew-vadum

On the eve of a historic Supreme Court confirmation hearing, two more women have materialized out of thin air to accuse President Trump’s high court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual improprieties – bringing the total number of accusers to four.

Even more eleventh-hour character-assassination attempts may be coming given the enraged Left’s determination to prevent the judge’s ascent to the Supreme Court at all costs. Whether the claims are true is irrelevant to these people. Only the seriousness and luridness of the charges matter as they get aired over and over again in the 24-hour news cycle. They don’t care about the victims they create. Only the headlines.

The new allegations surfaced yesterday as the Senate Judiciary Committee battens down the hatches for a hearing today to receive oral evidence from the first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, 51, who claims Kavanaugh, 53, tried to rape her decades ago when he was a high school student.

The third accuser is Julie Swetnick, a 55-year-old certified systems engineer, who on Wednesday claimed that in the early 1980s Kavanaugh and others spiked the drinks of young women at high school parties with intoxicants to clear the way for them to be gang-raped.