It’s Wednesday, September 26th, 2018…but before we begin, G. Trevor just cracked the Kavanaugh case wide open:

By the way, if you haven’t seen it, George Snuffleupagus just set a new low for Progressive hypocrisy:

That was now; this was then:

As Conservative Chris Barron was quick to note…

“Stephanopoulos is also flat wrong. President Trump has been a high-profile defender of women like Juanita Broaddrick who were victimized by President Clinton and demonized by the main stream media.“

Here’s the juice: Kavanaugh’s been accused, unfairly and without the faintest shred of evidence, with mere groping…, i.e., trying to get to second…as a teenager.

Stephanopoulos, on the other hand, defended a man who sexually assaulted Paula Jones while governor of Arkansas (why else would Bill have reached a settlement with her?!?), undeniably lied under oath and to the American people about his repeated Oval Office oral sex experiences with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky as President of the United States (and whose first sexual encounter with Clinton kicked off in Stephanopoulos’ office!), and, if the level of proof with which Dimocrats have established Kavanaugh’s guilt is any guide, undoubtedly raped Juanita Broaddrick at the time he served as Arkansas’ attorney general.

Please, George: tell us again who’s got the character problem.  More on this to follow.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, writing at the WSJ, Shelby Steele explains…

Why the Left Is Consumed With Hate

Lacking worthy menaces to fight, it is driven to find a replacement for racism. Failing this, what is left?

“…For many on the left a hateful anti-Americanism has become a self-congratulatory lifestyle. “America was never that great,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently said. For radical groups like Black Lives Matter, hatred of America is a theme of identity, a display of racial pride.

For other leftists, hate is a license. Conservative speakers can be shouted down, even assaulted, on university campuses. Republican officials can be harassed in restaurants, in the street, in front of their homes. Certain leaders of the left—Rep. Maxine Waters comes to mind—are self-appointed practitioners of hate, urging their followers to think of hatred as power itself.

How did the American left—conceived to bring more compassion and justice to the world—become so given to hate? It began in the 1960s, when America finally accepted that slavery and segregation were profound moral failings. (Considering from April 1861-April 1865, over 300,000 Americans gave their lives to end slavery, and by 1960 most of America was integrated, we’d say Shelby’s overlooking a significant part of America had long recognized said moral failings.) That acceptance changed America forever. It imposed a new moral imperative: America would have to show itself redeemed of these immoralities in order to stand as a legitimate democracy.

…It is undeniable that America has achieved since the ’60s one of the greatest moral evolutions ever. (While at the same time sinking deeper and deeper into other forms of immorality.) That is a profound problem for the left, whose existence is threatened by the diminishment of racial oppression. The left’s unspoken terror is that racism is no longer menacing enough to support its own power. The great crisis for the left today—the source of its angst and hatefulness—is its own encroaching obsolescence. Today the left looks to be slowly dying from lack of racial menace.

A single white-on-black shooting in Ferguson, Mo., four years ago resulted in a prolonged media blitz and the involvement of the president of the United States. In that same four-year period, thousands of black-on-black shootings took place in Chicago, hometown of the then-president, yet they inspired very little media coverage and no serious presidential commentary.

White-on-black shootings evoke America’s history of racism and so carry an iconic payload of menace. Black-on-black shootings carry no such payload, although they are truly menacing to the black community. They evoke only despair. And the left gets power from fighting white evil, not black despair.

Today’s left lacks worthy menaces to fight. It is driven to find a replacement for racism, some sweeping historical wrongdoing that morally empowers those who oppose it. (Climate change?) Failing this, only hatred is left.

Hatred is a transformative power. It can make the innocuous into the menacing. So it has become a weapon of choice. The left has used hate to transform President Trump into a symbol of the new racism, not a flawed president but a systemic evil. And he must be opposed as one opposes racism, with a scorched-earth absolutism.

For Martin Luther King Jr., hatred was not necessary as a means to power. The actual details of oppression were enough. Power came to him because he rejected hate as a method of resisting menace. He called on blacks not to be defined by what menaced them. Today, because menace provides moral empowerment, blacks and their ostensible allies indulge in it. The menace of black victimization becomes the unarguable truth of the black identity. And here we are again, forever victims.

Yet the left is still stalked by obsolescence. There is simply not enough menace to service its demands for power. The voices that speak for the left have never been less convincing. It is hard for people to see the menace that drives millionaire football players to kneel before the flag. And then there is the failure of virtually every program the left has ever espoused—welfare, public housing, school busing, affirmative action, diversity programs, and so on.

For the American left today, the indulgence in hate is a death rattle.“

Like the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles, our only question is…

Next up, courtesy of his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty urges caution…

When the Debate Shifts from Specific Individuals to ‘Culture’…

In an argument about a highly charged topic such as the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, be wary whenever someone tries to shift the discussion away from the specific allegations and known facts and over toward the broader and discarnate issues of culture.

It’s entirely probable that someone at a Maryland suburban prep school did something terrible in the early 1980s. Or it’s entirely probable that someone at Yale University or Yale Law School did something creepy at a party with heavy drinking during that time period. But the probability or evidence of those types of actions doesn’t tell us whether Kavanaugh did something like that. Muggings occur in New York City, but that doesn’t tell us whether any particular person in the city mugged someone.

Nonetheless, we’re probably going to hear a lot of talk in the coming days about an allegedly toxic culture in the places Kavanaugh spent his younger years — even, strange as it may seem, at Yale Law School.

In a courtyard just off the main hallway, students have hung signs criticizing the law school’s institutional culture, as rumors swirl about how much a deputy law school dean knew about allegations of sexual harassment against appellate court judge Alex Kozinski, who resigned last year after multiple allegations by former female staffers and clerks and for whom Kavanaugh clerked in the early 1990s. “Sex Sells @ YLS,” one sign reads. “Is there nothing more important to YLS than its proximity to power and prestige?” another asks.

I don’t know who put up that sign, but I’d love to ask…isn’t the proximity to power and prestige a big reason why you applied, and why people want to go to the Ivy League schools? What, you think everybody wants to attend because of the winter weather in New Haven or Cambridge?

Before we scoff at the image of Yale Law School being a hotbed of bacchanalian excess and venal corruption, keep in mind…Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton went there.

The term “ruling class” gets thrown around wildly and usually stupidly, but if there is a ruling class in this country, it consists largely of Yale (and Harvard) Law School alumni: Sonia Sotomayor, Jerry Brown, David Boies, Cory Booker, Richard Blumenthal, Chris Coons, Robert Reich, FBI director Christopher Wray, Gary Hart, Joe Lieberman…(all proof of the questionable value of an Ivy League education!)

You know who else went to Yale Law School? A huge chunk of the conservative legal establishment: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, John Bolton, John Yoo, Michael Mukasey…

The Atlantic article linked above quotes a student who asks, “Where does [the allegations against Kavanaugh] fit into the larger story of the law school?”

If, in an effort to get Kavanaugh, the left wants to retroactively declare that Yale University and its law school are and always were some sort of teeming cesspool of abuse and exploitation and elitist unaccountability…go ahead, fellas. Of course, a declaration like that spurs some questions about what the likes of Booker and Blumenthal saw and did when they were there. If this “institutional culture” of harassment and protecting the powerful was so deeply ingrained and so pervasive in the school for so long, how could those men somehow emerge with clear consciences? How could they themselves remain silent about it for so long?

There are a lot of Yale Law School graduates in the highest ranks of the progressive legal world — no doubt all of them should face the same suspicions. Were they complicit in continuing or even promoting and strengthening an exploitational culture?

If the aftermath of this whole angry mess is that Yale Law School has a permanent cloud over it, and everyone who went there is regarded with newfound suspicion…which side of the political divide do you think is going to pay the higher price?

When you try to indict a man by indicting the culture around him, you end up indicting a lot of other people in the process. If Yale graduates feel like their school and formative years are being rewritten and smeared, they probably ought to speak up about it now.

Given the benefit the Ivy League now lends America…

Since we’re on the subject of things…and people…we’d like to set afire, NRO‘s Andy McCarthy highlights…

Rod Rosenstein’s Resistance

Weasel words, weasel moves from an emotionally overwrought deputy AG eager to ingratiate himself with Democrats

“Rod Rosenstein is even a weasel when repudiating his weasel moves. Here (with my italics) is the deputy attorney general’s non-denial denial of a New York Times report Friday that he brainstormed about ousting President Trump in May 2017:

The New York Times’s story is inaccurate and factually incorrect…I will not further comment on a story based on anonymous sources who are obviously biased against the department and are advancing their own personal agenda. But let me be clear about this: Based on my personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment.

Let’s parse this.

• The Times story “is inaccurate and factually incorrect.” Rosenstein won’t say exactly what is wrong in the report. He is careful not to say that the gist of the report is wrong — he just hopes that, if he sounds indignant enough, you will hear it that way. The Times may have gotten a few details wrong, but you can bet the story is essentially true.
• You can’t trust “anonymous sources”: this from the guy who, in approving a FISA warrant application to spy on an American political campaign, relied on anonymous sources — some of them Russian operatives — who were channeling information through a foreign spy from whom the Justice Department continued to take information even after telling a federal court that the spy had been cut out of the investigation for leaking to the media.
• And my favorite: Rosenstein knows “there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment” against President Trump. Of course, that does not respond to what the Times report actually says, which is that back in May 2017, when he was an emotional wreck because Democrats were being mean to him, Rosenstein urged that there might at that time be a basis to remove the president under the 25th Amendment (specifically, Section 4) if he could get enough top officials to agree that Trump was unfit to discharge his duties.

…To summarize, when he thought it would be popular, Rod Rosenstein was all in on removing FBI director Comey, eagerly volunteering to write the coup de grâce memo. When Comey’s firing ignited bitter protest and recriminations, a distraught Rosenstein blamed Trump for using him. The deputy AG ostentatiously sidled up to the bureaucracy’s “Trump is unfit” faction, expressing openness to wiretapping the president in an effort to force his removal under the 25th Amendment. Indeed, just days after his memo excoriating Comey, Rosenstein confided in FBI officials that he wished Comey were back at the helm and that he hoped to get Comey’s advice on the appointment of a special counsel.

When Democratic pressure to appoint a special counsel reached fever pitch with the Times’ publication of its report, based on a Comey leak, that Trump had pushed for the FBI to drop the Flynn investigation, Rosenstein decided to appoint a special counsel without specifying any crime against Trump. As he brainstormed about the possibility of ousting Trump under the 25th Amendment, Rosenstein flirted with the idea of appointing Obama’s deputy AG, James Cole, as special counsel. Ultimately, he appointed Mueller, the former Obama and Bush FBI director — Comey’s predecessor at the Bureau and colleague in the Bush Justice Department. Mueller staffed his investigation with top officials from the Obama Justice Department, which had green-lighted an investigation of Trump’s campaign.

Immediately after announcing Mueller’s appointment, Rosenstein further assuaged Senate Democrats, promising that Mueller would have no limits. Rosenstein then approved a FISA warrant application that alleged, apparently based on the Clinton-campaign-generated Steele dossier, that the FBI believed Trump campaign officials were complicit in Russia’s hacking conspiracy against the 2016 election. Subsequently, Rosenstein memorialized his authorization to Mueller to investigate “allegations” of collusion — apparently without spelling out any collusion evidence and very likely relying on the Steele dossier.

In Chicago last month, Rod Rosenstein was the featured speaker at annual meeting of the notoriously anti-Trump American Bar Association. Upon his introduction, his speech was delayed by a raucous standing ovation. The beaming deputy attorney general seemed to have gotten over his anguish.“

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: when it comes to Rod Rodent-stein, we’re with Tommy DeVito:

Rat…weasel…what’s the difference?!?

Moving on, again courtesy of NRO, Victor Davis Hanson offers a compelling, must-read argument…

We Are Living Nineteen Eighty-Four

Truth, due process, evidence, rights of the accused: All are swept aside in pursuit of the progressive agenda.

“George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is no longer fiction. We are living it right now.

Google techies planned to massage Internet searches to emphasize correct thinking. A member of the so-called deep state, in an anonymous op-ed, brags that its “resistance” is undermining an elected president. The FBI, CIA, DOJ, and NSC were all weaponized in 2016 to ensure that the proper president would be elected — the choice adjudicated by properly progressive ideology. Wearing a wire is now redefined as simply flipping on an iPhone and recording your boss, boy- or girlfriend, or co-workers.

But never has the reality that we are living in a surreal age been clearer than during the strange cycles of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

In Orwell’s world of 1984 Oceania, there is no longer a sense of due process, free inquiry, rules of evidence and cross examination, much less a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Instead, regimented ideology — the supremacy of state power to control all aspects of one’s life to enforce a fossilized idea of mandated quality — warps everything from the use of language to private life.

…When a second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, followed Ford seven days later to allege another sexual incident with the teenage Kavanaugh, at Yale 35 years ago, it was no surprise that she followed the now normal Orwellian boilerplate: None of those whom she named as witnesses could either confirm her charges or even remember the alleged event. She had altered her narrative after consultations with lawyers and handlers. She too confesses to underage drinking during the alleged event. She too is currently a social and progressive political activist. (Is it any wonder Ramirez has reportedly refused to testify under oath before the Senate?!?) The only difference from Ford’s narrative is that Ramirez’s accusation was deemed not credible enough to be reported even by the New York Times, which recently retracted false stories about witness Mark Judge in the Ford case, and which falsely reported that U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley had charged the government for $50,000 office drapes. 

As in 1984, “truths” in these sorts of allegations do not exist unless they align with the larger “Truth” of the progressive project. In our case, the overarching Truth mandates that, in a supposedly misogynist society, women must always be believed in all their accusations and should be exempt from all counter-examinations.

...According to some polls, about half the country believes that Brett Kavanaugh is now guilty of a crime committed 36 years ago at the age of 17 (and absent even a shred of supporting evidence). And that reality reminds us that we are no longer in America. We are already living well into the socialist totalitarian Hell that Orwell warned us about long ago.“

It’s as Kurt Schlichter noted back in March of 2017: you can tell what Leftists are undertaking by what they accuse Conservatives of doing.

Which brings us, in this case inappropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s these two truisms forwarded from The Penguin:

Finally, we’ll call it a day with two previews of potential 2020 presidential candidates:

Magoo