Hearing the Women, Then and Now

By Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/8870/hearing-the-women-then-and-now

September 25, 2018

Yesterday I wrote:

One day in the very near future a Republican who has taken the precaution of never having any sexual contact with anyone ever will nevertheless find that's no obstacle to being America's most notorious serial rapist.

I didn't realize the "very near future" would be that evening. Arriving for my appearance with Tucker Carlson, I watched, on the preceding show, Brett Kavanaugh tell Martha MacCallum that he hadn't had sexual intercourse "or anything close to it" in high school or in college. So, just to be precise, Martha made him confirm that he'd been a virgin in high school, and at Yale, and for all I know on the DC Court of Appeals.

And he's still the sex beast that raped America.

A couple of hours later Jimmy Kimmel told late-night viewers that he wouldn't object to Kavanaugh being confirmed for the Supreme Court as long as his penis was cut off in public. One assumes, charitably, that this is a joke, although, upon examination, it doesn't actually have the form of a joke, does it? One might almost think it was designed simply to get a cheer from those who actually would like to chop his penis off.

Also today Bill Cosby was sentenced to three-to-ten years in prison. I note again the difference in treatment extended to his fellow Bill, credibly accused rapist William Jefferson Clinton. No matter who else gets ensnared, #MeToo never extends to him too.

So on Thursday the Senate will hear evidence of what allegedly happened in an upstairs room at an unknown house somewhere near Columbia Country Club, Maryland sometime in the early Eighties. Presumably Judge Kavanaugh will be cross-examined on how close "anything close to it" actually got. This is the pitiful state to which the United States Senate has reduced its "advise and consent" role.

It was different nineteen years ago, when I had the misfortune, briefly, to be living in Washington, DC - just for a few weeks while covering the Clinton impeachment trial. I stayed at the Mayflower Hotel, which my editors kicked up a fuss about until Monica checked in a few doors down the corridor from me and I was the only guy on the inside. Anyway, I wanted to check my recollections of that period, so I looked up the moldering pile of clippings from London's Daily Telegraph, Canada's National Post and the other papers that carried my daily trial diary. Just to set the scene: obviously, nailing Clinton is a lot trickier than Clinton nailing you. The general flavor of the times is caught in this January 22nd 1999 column:

No wonder the Senators have stopped taking notes. For, in this case, words make no sense. Consulting my own notes, I find Clinton attorney Greg Craig's defiant evisceration of the perjury charge: The President "did not deny he had misled his aides"; he said, in fact, he had misled his aides. 

So the President wasn't lying about telling the truth; he was telling the truth about lying. If, instead of telling the truth about not telling the truth, he'd lied about lying, then he wouldn't have been telling the truth. 

But, just as he'd got that cleared up, Greg complicated things: "He never said that he told them only true things." So the President hadn't lied when he said he'd told the truth because, although he lied, he hadn't exclusively lied, so therefore he was telling the truth about telling the truth, although he'd also have been telling the truth if he'd said he'd lied, and, although he'd have been lying if he said he hadn't lied, he'd have been lying if he said he hadn't told the truth.

The House impeachment managers (including current senator Lindsey Graham) did their best to struggle through all this. But what's surprising two decades on is the Democrats' more or less open contempt for the women - the "survivors" (as Senator Blumenthal calls Christine Ford). In 1999, it began with all but one of the Senate Dems moving to end the trial without testimony from Clinton's victims. No, no, no: To hear from these women, to admit them to the precinct of the Senate, would insult the dignity of the world's greatest deliberative body, and we can't have that, can we? From my February 1st trial diary:

Those various Clinton lady friends who testified anonymously in the Paula Jones depositions will not be permitted in the well of the chamber. It'll be a cold day in hell before you hear "Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, meet Jane Doe Number 5" on the Senate floor.

Even Monica could not be admitted:

In public, the Democrats' position is that Monica won't reveal anything new; in private, they worry that, even if she reads out the phone book, just her squealy, girly, giggly girl voice will make the president's conduct way too vivid for public consumption. Of course, his offence pale beside Monica's: Were she to testify, she would threaten the dignity and gravity of this august body.

A week into the trial, Dem senators could barely conceal their boredom. January 23rd.

"We're all sick of this," sneered Minority Whip Harry Reid. "This was jammed down our throats by the House"- a peculiarly vivid image.

So instead Democrats demanded and got strict limitations on the trial. January 30th:

We've always understood that the Framers of the US Constitution created very precise mechanisms that automatically come into play. Instead, they're making it up as they go along: you can have three witnesses, no African-American women, no sex questions, video only, and just for three hours. What clause did that come from? That's not the Framers; that's a frame-up.

By February 1st senators had further shrunk the parameters:

For House impeachment managers, the next three days are a last chance to come up with something new ...but they have to find the "something new" among all the old stuff, as the Senate has forbidden them from introducing anything new in and of itself. So any smoking gun will have to be found among all the previously discharged firearms the Democrats say are only firing blanks.

"It's too late now to get into Kathleen Willey," snaps Republican moderate John Chafee. Doubtless, in moments of rueful reflection late in the evening, the president feels the same way.

Even with a mere three video witnesses to sit through, Senate Democrats could barely stay awake:

"I went to the movies this afternoon," said Louisiana Democrat John Breaux, staggering out of the Senates deposition-video screening room. "Got my box of popcorn and then all I did was watch Monica, Monica, Monica! And I thought, 'you know what? I've seen that movie before.'" 

You wouldn't want to be holed up for the Siege of Leningrad with Mr. Breaux. In American public schools, when a fidgety six-year-old finds it hard to concentrate, they diagnose ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and pump him full of Ritalin. But ADD has nothing on ADD (Attention Deficit Democrats): You could douse the Capitol in Ritalin and you wouldn't keep these boys awake. 

Perjury, obstruction, witness-tampering, trashing Monica's reputation...Let's face it, it doesn't have the gripping qualities of a Senate appropriations bill with $200 million in funding for the John Breaux Institute of Trial Procedure Studies in Baton Rouge. Blasé is the order of the day, and, as the trial drifts on, Senator Breaux and his fellow Breauxmides are honing their ennui.

You don't have to find the US Senate as risibly self-regarding as I do to think this is a rather odd way to treat a wide range of women - young, old, short, tall, svelte, zaftig - with credible stories of physical assault by the most powerful man in America. Yet in the Clinton era not one of them could catch the Senate's eye. Take the solon of solemnity himself, Dem Klansman Robert C Byrd:

"Sir, it was an honour to be in your presence," Larry King told him a couple of nights back. "Coming up we'll be talking to two of your peers, though a man such as yourself doesn't really have any peers..." Come off it, Larry! Who do you think he is..? Robert Byrd isn't the dean of dignity, he's West Virginia's prince of pork. And a man who votes against hearing Monica testify live on the grounds that it would damage the dignity of the Senate really shouldn't turn up wearing a red bow tie and matching vest. He looked like a busboy at Denny's.

One of the few honest men of the left in Washington that February was Christopher Hitchens. So naturally he wasn't permitted to testify either. From my February 10th column:

I never thought the trial of the President of the United States would dwindle down to... Christopher Hitchens. But, amazingly, it has: Yesterday, in the last few moments before the Senate retired behind closed doors, Republican Arlen Specter introduced a doomed motion to subpoena Mr. Hitchens, Mrs. Hitchens, and any other journalists that White House flack Sidney Blumenthal had peddled his Monica-the-sex-crazed-stalker story to.

That's quite a long list. Through 1998 and early 1999 Clinton and his aides relentlessly trashed Monica and all the rest. On the day of acquittal, I tipped my hat to a few of them:

Hail to the Perp! And farewell, sweet Monica: In the annals of interns, you will stalk forever with all the other "crazy people, uh, troubled people" (Sid Blumenthal.) 

Au revoir, Kathleen Willey, you too-merry widow –"Are you saying she came on to you, Mr. President?" "Well, she was always very friendly..." 

Thank you and good night, Dolly Kyle Browning - prototype Clinton mistress and "an absolute nut" (presidential aide Marsha Scott.) 

And good luck to all those broads savvy enough to keep out of the way because "they've got a lot to lose...and what we do is work on getting material on them to try to induce them not to compromise the president" (Clinton loyalist Betsey Wright). 

All the above quotes come from testimony to a grand jury comprised mainly of African-Americans, but none of it matters because Ken Starr is (altogether now) "out of control" and we don't want a "sex policeman" prying into people's bedrooms, even though Mr. Starr never went anywhere near Mr. Clinton's bedroom, presumably on the grounds that it's the one room in the White House where you can guarantee there's absolutely no sex to pry into.

To be sure, much has changed in the last two decades. But some things don't: Women who accuse Republicans have to be heard and believed because they're "survivors"; women who accuse Democrats are nuts and stalkers who need never be heard.

~Mark will be back on Wednesday evening for a triple-threat midweek:

*First, for Mark Steyn Club members, he'll be reading Part Thirteen of our latest Tale for Our Time - John Buchan's cracking Greenmantle;

*Then he'll be making a rare Wednesday appearance with Tucker Carlson live at 8pm Eastern;

*And immediately after that Mark will be joining Tucker for an hour-long live-streamed book-signing to launch his splendid new bestseller-in-waiting Ship of Fools. That's at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific, and you'll be able to ask questions about the book that Mark will put to Tucker. You can watch this one-hour special live right here.

If you're not yet a member of The Mark Steyn Club, we'd love to have you. You can find more details here. Alas, our inaugural Steyn Club Cruise with Mark's special guests has completely sold out - but we'll soon be announcing next year's.

Mark Steyn on Hillary's flip-flop on illegal immigration

"Tommy this, an' Tommy that ...an' Tommy go away"

By Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/8675/tommy-this-an-tommy-that-an-tommy-go-away

May 28, 2018

Tommy Robinson being arrested in Leeds last Friday.

On Sunday morning I had the pleasure of appearing with Rowan Dean and Ross Cameron on their Sky Australia show, "Outsiders", to talk mainly about the Obama Administration's attempt to subvert the Trump campaign in the 2016 US election, and in particular the remarkable Anglo-Australian contribution to that effort. (You can view our exchange here - and/or listen to it here, starting about 17 minutes in).

But, just before I came on (about 15 minutes in), Rowan and Ross addressed recent events in the United Kingdom and in particular the fate of, er, someone whose name they weren't permitted to mention but who, um, had been gaoled for, er, something or other... This was somewhat astonishing to me, as I'd assumed empire-wide D-notices had lapsed with the passage of the Statute of Westminster. But mein hosts circled back, cautiously, to the topic toward the end of my interview - and I observed, as I have before, how in almost the entirety of the western world, whenever anyone draws attention to some of the more problematic aspects of Islam, the state cracks down not on the problematic aspects, but on the guy who draws attention thereto. In Britain and Europe, we are an incident or two away from literally "shooting the messenger".

Rowan, Ross and I all knew we were referring to a gentleman by the name of Tommy Robinson. I expect many of you know that, too. But I doubt most Australian viewers had much of a clue about it, and I'm pretty certain the overwhelming majority of his fellow Englishmen are unaware of his fate. As readers may recall, I have met Mr Robinson just once, at an event at the European Parliament in Brussels. He is an engaging, charismatic fellow, albeit a bit rough-hewn for the refined sensibilities of the metropolitan media - although I thought he had the better of a rather somnolent Jeremy Paxman in this BBC interview.

On Friday, Robinson was livestreaming (from his telephone) outside Leeds Crown Court where last week's Grooming Gang of the Week were on trial for "grooming" - the useless euphemism for industrial-scale child gang rape and sex slavery by large numbers of Muslim men with the active connivance (as I pointed out to the Sky guys) of every organ of the state: social workers, police, politicians. Oh, and also the media. Me last year, on my time in a certain municipality about thirty miles south of Leeds:

Tracking down the victims of Rotherham required a bit of elementary detective work on my part, but it's not that difficult. What struck me, as my time in town proceeded, was how few members of the British media had been sufficiently interested to make the effort: The young ladies were unstoppably garrulous in part because, with a few honorable exceptions, so few of their countrymen have ever sought them out to hear their stories.

You can say a lot of things about Tommy Robinson, but he's one of the embarrassingly small number of Britons who recognizes the horror inflicted on those young and vulnerable girls on the receiving end of "diversity" and seeks to do something about it.

So on Friday he was outside the Crown Court in Leeds. He was not demonstrating, or accosting or chanting, or even speaking. He was just pointing his mobile phone upon the scene from a distance. Within minutes, seven coppers showed up in whatever they use instead of a Black Maria these days, tossed him inside it and drove off. In other words, these were not "investigating officers" called to the scene: They showed up with the intent to take him away. Within hours, he was tried, convicted and gaoled - at HM Prison Hull, a Category B chokey, or one level below maximum security. The judge in the case, one Geoffrey Marson, spent all of four minutes on trying, convicting and sentencing Robinson. It is not clear whether that leisurely tribunal included his order expressly forbidding "any report on these proceedings" (the case is Regina vs Yaxley-Lennon because that's Robinson's real name).

Which is why, all the way over in Sydney, Messrs Dean and Cameron were being so vague and cautious. In Britain itself, early online reports at The Mirror, the Scottish Daily Record, The Birmingham Mail and elsewhere vanished instantly, and silence has been maintained, especially on radio and TV, ever since.

The justification for this is Robinson's previous conviction in a previous Grooming Gang of the Week case at Canterbury Crown Court. On that occasion, the judge sentenced him to three months' imprisonment suspended for eighteen months. That was almost exactly a year ago - so, suspension-wise, he came up six months short when the plods collared him on Friday. That doesn't explain why Judge Marson in Leeds added an additional ten months (ie, he quadrupled his sentence) and disregarded a point that Judge Norton last year took into account - that the British state insists on banging up Robinson in gaols full of Muslim blokes who violently assault him. In Canterbury, Her Honor was sympathetic - up to a point:

I accept what Mr. Kovalevsky [Robinson's barrister] tells me about the dangers that you might face were you to be sent into immediate custody. I have to say it is on a knife edge so far as I am concerned because a very large part of me thinks so what? you could be put into protective custody.

Given that Judge Marson devoted a full four minutes to his drive-thru trial on Friday, I seriously doubt whether 25 seconds of that was devoted to any consideration of "protective custody". Indeed, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the British state would quite like it if Robinson were to be offed in HMP Hull. Yesterday UKIP Euro-MP Gerard Batten Tweeted:

UKIP Peer Malcolm Lord Pearson has written to Home Secretary Sajid Javid today saying : if Tommy is murdered or injured in prison he and others will mount a private prosecution against Mr Javid as an accessory, or for misconduct in public office.

Two and a half years ago, when I appeared at the Danish Parliament to mark the tenth anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons, there was some brief discussion of Tommy Robinson. My friend Douglas Murray noted that in 2014 Robinson had been gaoled for ...go on, guess: Islamophobia? Hate crimes? Yanking off some Muslima's hijab on the streets of Luton?

No. The British state sentenced Mr Robinson to eighteen months in jail for misrepresentation on a mortgage application. At HMP Woodhill he was savagely attacked by the Muslim gangs who operate with impunity in many UK prisons. As Douglas remarked, many people make "misrepresentations" on mortgage applications, but the vigor with which the constabulary hunt down this particular mortgage-misrepresenter is unique. In one of the few mainstream publications to risk comment on Friday's events (read it while you can), Rod Liddle underlines the point:

I'm not remotely a fan of Robinson. But I do not like the idea that simply being Robinson is enough to get you arrested.

Just so. With respect to this particular citizen among sixty million, the police function as the Old Bill of attainder: Get Robinson - on anything.

Supposedly Judge Marson ordered a media blackout because news reports would "prejudice" the trial of the groomers. Surely the opposite is true - that widespread reporting of the arrest of Robinson would lead to fewer citizens attempting to "prejudice" the trials of groomers. At the very least, when a man loses his liberty and is gaoled immediately without due process on an instantly quadrupled sentence, it would be nice to think that a free press would be free enough to mull the pros and cons of such an action. But Geoffrey Marson seems to have been minded to teach a more basic lesson - that in England, as in Argentina under the junta, you can be disappeared by the state, and it won't even make the papers.

And the lesson is not lost on those few who question the cozy bipartisan multiculti consensus: Best to fall into line - or at least pipe down.

Rod Liddle notes another aspect - the contrast between the urgency of the flatfeet when it comes to Tommy Robinson and their utter lethargic indifference when it comes to the young women I spoke to in Rotherham and the thousands of others like them in Leeds, Telford, Oxford, [Your Town Here]... West Yorkshire Police in Leeds are not to be confused with South Yorkshire Police in Rotherham. The latter are institutionally corrupt and depraved. As I told Mark Steyn Club members last year of my meeting with the victims of Rotherham:

To Mad Ash and his fellow 'Asians', the likes of Jessica and Katie are 'white slags'. To Her Majesty's Constabulary, they're mere 'Paki-shaggers', and thus unworthy of valuable police resources. The girls recall the night Mad Ash's brother Bannaras was in his car having sex with a twelve-year-old. A 'jam sandwich' - a police cruiser - pulled up alongside, and the officer rolled down the window. 'She's just sucking my c**k, mate,' said Bannaras Hussain. 

The cops drove away... 

Jessica kept a detailed diary of what had happened to her. She took it to the cops. It 'disappeared'. There was one kindly officer, but the others told him to back off, and, when he didn't, he died in an accident. Katie puts the word 'accident' in air quotes. Rotherham is a land of coincidence. 'Some of these things can happen, but not all of them, not in one town.' 

A couple of years after taking them her diary, Jessica went back to see the police. This time the detective told her none of the officers who'd witnessed her abuse would support her story because if they gave evidence at trial they'd wind up 'getting in the shit'. She left the room having taken the precaution of covertly recording the conversation. And thus the cover-up began to unravel...

It is striking to read Judge Norton's sentencing remarks from last year (Judge Marson's do not appear to be available: he rules in darkness). Her Honor huffs and puffs about Mr Robinson referring to "Muslim paedophiles" and "Muslim child rapists". I can appreciate that that might be vaguely annoying if one were a non-paedophile Muslim - although evidently not so annoying that spokespersons for the wider Muslim community ever rouse themselves to object to all the industrial-scale sex slavery. But it is a fact that in 21st-century England - in Yorkshire, in Shropshire, in Lancashire, in Oxfordshire, in the Home Counties - child-rape gangs are Muslim. It is a phenomenon, one that has never existed previously in the British Isles and one which will continue and metastasize until there is honest debate about it.

And, while Judge Norton is evidently outraged by Tommy Robinson's ill manners in referring to Muslims who rape children as "Muslim child rapists", one notices that neither she nor anybody else display any such outrage about the ruined lives of thousands of victims of men who get away with their evil for years ...because officialdom has chosen to prioritize "Islamophobia" over real crimes.

One more thought from my trip to Rotherham:

The cops drove away. It must have been an abiding image for Jessica, for Katie, for Bannaras Hussain's twelve-year-old, for the girl who would later testify that all three brothers pissed on her like 'a pack of animals', for a thousand and more 'Paki-shaggers' and 'white slags' all over Rotherham, year in year out, for decades: The police driving away ...and leaving them.

...and heading off to arrest one man with a cellphone, over and over and over.

~We had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with a Tales for Our Timesampler for those who've yet to hear any of our audio adventures, with yours truly introducing and reading Conan Doyle, H G Wells, Conrad, Kipling, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson and more. On Saturday morning we presented the results of our "Oh Happy Day" competition: It wasn't exactly a D-notice, but we were under considerable legal pressure from a vexatious litigant. Our Saturday movie date offered contrasting movie treatments of an ingenious stage thriller: Dial RM for Remake. And for Memorial Day we offered a song for the season, some thoughts onwar and sacrifice, and a word from the real talent in the family. If you were busy with your own Memorial Day observances, we hope you'll want to check out one or two of the foregoing as this brand new week begins. We shall have a Tales for Our Time birthday bonus to launch the start of our second year later this week.

In June I'll be back in my hometown of Toronto next month to celebrate the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms and to accept the signal honour of the very firstGeorge Jonas Freedom Award. Hope to see you there.

Thank you so much for all the Mark Steyn Club subscription renewals this past month - and for all the new memberships, too. Tomorrow, Tuesday, we will be presenting another of our Clubland Q&As live around the planet at 4pm North American Eastern - and we may return to the subject of Tommy Robinson and related matters. For more information on the Steyn Club, see here - and don't forget our limited-time Gift Membership.

Film Review: 'Chappaquiddick'

By Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/8574/chappaquiddick

April 14, 2018

Jason Clarke as Edward Kennedy

As I wrote a few days ago, I had minimal expectations of Chappaquiddick The Movie, which opened last week despite the best efforts of the Kennedy family and their various retainers and enablers. I have always been revolted by the fact that Ted, after killing Mary Jo Kopechne, did not have the decency to do a John Profumo and retire from public life for the rest of his days - and I was even more revolted by the way Massachusetts voters did not have the decency to impose that choice upon him.

But utter contempt for your protagonist doesn't make for very interesting drama. So it is to the film's benefit that its director, writers and Jason Clarke in the lead role manage to locate enough humanity in the empty waddling husk of Teddy to make a compelling story. Mr Clarke is Australian, his director John Curran is American but has spent much of his career Down Under, and the screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan are two first-timers born a decade after Chappaquiddick and who'd apparently never heard the word until 2008. That combination of outsiders and neophytes may be one reason why this film is considerably more gripping and potent than a cookie-cutter limousine-liberal yawnfest like The Post.

In the shorthand of history, Chappaquiddick is a stand-alone event, but it occurred, in fact, on the July weekend in 1969 that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon - and it arose from a reunion of the "Boiler Room Girls", the devoted young ladies who'd worked on Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign of the previous year. So Teddy, the youngest Senate Majority Whip in history, is nevertheless staggering in the shadow of both his dazzling brother's recent assassination and the fulfillment of his other assassinated brother's most audacious challenge. He is there, ostensibly, to compete in the Edgartown Yacht Club's annual regatta, in the family sailboat Victura, which his other dead brother, Joe Jr, killed in the war, first sailed over thirty years earlier. One feels entirely confident that, if the Kennedy patriarch - old Joe, stroke-afflicted but still running the show - had expressed a preference over which of his four sons would be the only one to survive, Teddy would have been last on the list. We meet him early on, in his room at the Shiretown Inn, climbing into his swim trunks and checking himself in the mirror before heading for the beach and the girls. Pushing forty, he still seems to have his puppy fat, a soft and doughy middle-aged child.

There is, as it happens, another brother - or "brother": Kennedy cousin Joe Gargan, who lost his parents at a young age and was raised by Teddy's parents as (almost) one of their own. As played by Ed Helms, Joe is the conscience of the picture: he doesn't exactly do the right thing, but he's broadly in favor of others doing the right thing, which, in the moral universe of the Kennedys, gives him a sporting chance of winding up a couple of circles of hell further out from where the rest of them are headed. He's officially Ted's lawyer but more importantly his fixer. So we see him in the payphone outside the Shiretown Inn, on the line to the Senator in Washington, reassuring him that the bedroom for "the girl" has been taken care of.

Phone booths are a kind of motif of the picture and its milieu: 1969 is the pre-cellular age, and too many nosy desk clerks like to listen in on the room lines. Ted isn't good at a lot of things (he flubs the sailboat race after steering the Victura into a buoy) but he knows where the payphones are, and he knows how to work them. The Senator is married, of course, but it's understood by all that Joan Kennedy never comes to regatta weekend. When her husband gets into trouble, she's prevailed upon to show up, because it's part of the deal. But she's a prop, and in this film almost a non-speaking part: She has just one line, three words delivered to Ted when he climbs into the car and thanks her for coming. She responds by suggesting he, er, do to himself what he's done to her and almost every other woman he's used and discarded over the years.

Jason Clarke's is not exactly a sympathetic portrait, but it is rounded: his Teddy is self-absorbed and self-loathing, both aware of his weakness and cowardice, and yet unable to overcome the Kennedy family's sense of its own indispensability. You get a sense of the peculiarly isolating quality of American politics at its upper echelons, so different from the unglamorous parliamentary life of other countries. This Ted is a lonely man who's never alone, buffed and polished by a round-the-clock retinue. He's a brand, assumed to be a shoo-in for the '72 presidential nomination, though he himself seems to have no particular enthusiasm for it, and, by comparison to their love for Bobby, even the girls' encouragement seems pro forma and dutiful. His wheelchair-bound speech-afflicted father, in a gothic performance by Bruce Dern, manages to loose off one complete sentence in the picture, albeit a word longer than Joan Kennedy's: "You'll. Never. Be. Great." Forced through his slack, hanging lips to his last son, there must surely be, for a Kennedy scion, no more damning indictment.

But what if Ted doesn't want to be great? What if he'd just like twenty minutes away from it all sitting on the hood of his Olds parked on the edge of a deserted beach with a girl who seems to feel a connection to him.

Ah, but even then the talk is only of politics and destiny...

What happened is well known: The party to thank the Boiler Room Girls of his late brother's campaign is well lubricated. He leaves with a blonde, and then, instead of turning left for the ferry to Edgartown, he swings right onto a dirt road leading to a deserted beach. At a wooden bridge with no guard rails Teddy makes his own personal moon shot: the car sails through the air and lands upside down in a dark tidal pond. The guy gets out and makes it to the surface. He leaves the girl down there. All this has been the subject of innumerable books and magazine articles and newspaper columns, but it is shocking to see it, in prosaic, unsparing, heartless detail. The sodden Senator walks all the way back to the party, past houses with lights burning, full of people who could have called for help, who themselves could have helped. Instead, he totters on to his fixers, and tells them, self-pityingly, "I'm never going to be president."

Mary Jo Kopechne is something of a cipher in her own story: She led a short, varied life, but, as played by Kate Mara, she's mainly there to look the part, "the girl". John Curran, directing with unflashy efficiency, nevertheless conjures the horror of her final hours: We see Mary Jo in the car at the bottom of the pond, then Ted back in the inn soaking in the tub; Mary Jo pressed up against the shrinking air pocket, Ted adjusting his tie and combing his hair; Mary Jo sobbing and gasping out her last "Hail, Mary" at the hour of her death, Ted heading down to breakfast with supporters in the hotel dining room - until he's interrupted by Joe Gargan, aghast to discover it's the morning after and that Kennedy still hasn't reported the accident. And yet Joe too slips reflexively into damage-control mode.

The normal reaction is that of the Chappaquiddick fisherman and his son rounding the bend. The kid is first to spot the upturned Oldsmobile: "Dad!" And the guy tells him to run, run to the nearest house, and the boy pounds the dusty road as fast as he can. But that's why he's a fisherman, not a fixer man. Even before the body's brought up, Mary Jo is fading from the drama: She's no longer a flesh-and-blood human being, no longer "the girl"; she's just a problem, to be fixed - permanently. Ted returns to Hyannis Port for what he assumes will be a spot of afternoon tea with his dad, but, when the nurse motions him into the sitting room, he discovers a vast army of Camelot courtiers lined up behind the chintz sofa - Ted Sorensen, Sargent Shriver, and pre-eminently Bob McNamara, irresistibly conjured by Clancy Brown and smoothly transferring his talents from the Bay of Pigs to a bay with only one pig. Joe Kennedy's called in the heavyweights, A-list fixers who despise Ted's fixers as Z-list fixers.

This is a more sophisticated and blackly comic view of the nature of politics than, say, George Clooney's Ides of March. The acidic glamour of power corrodes even Mary Jo's fellow Boiler Room Girls. No sooner are they informed that their friend is dead than one of them steps forward to volunteer: "What can we do to help the Senator?" The ladies themselves, having kept their silence for half-a-century, are said to deny this version of events, and the words themselves are put in the mouth of a fictional Boiler Roomer created for the movie: "Rachel" (Olivia Thirlby). But, whatever their motivations, the actions of almost everyone in this tale facilitate the replacement of one victim by another: Edward M Kennedy.

Chappaquiddick is an excellent film that deserves to find an audience. John Curran tells his tale in a matter-of-fact semi-procedural style, punctuated by moments when Teddy seems to be, so to speak, floating dreamily through his own drama: At the height of the crisis, the camera alights on him flying a kite, blank-eyed and beaming and far away from dad's schemes of greatness. The film's visual language subtly underlines the journey he's on: the Edgartown scenes are bright and airy, all sun-dappled porches and spacious vistas, innocent and optimistic. Back at Hyannis Port, the sitting room is literally smoke-filled, the airless, darkened corridors and landings have turned their faces from the world, the better to construct an alternative reality and impose it on the actual facts. In Jason Clarke's performance, Teddy's self-doubt is his most (only?) human quality. But the aim of Joe's fixers is to get the last son to the point where he stops feeling conflicted and unsure, and understands that he's a Kennedy and that that trumps all. As I wrote way back when:

Ted's the star, and there's no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

'Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.' 

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than 'betrayed' him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let's face it, he doesn't have Ted's tremendous legislative legacy, does he?

As I mentioned the other day, that bit turns up in the new movie. Joan Vennochi's words are put in Ted's mouth: He says defensively that all men are flawed - "Moses had a temper, Peter betrayed Jesus." And my cheap riposte - "Moses didn't leave a girl at the bottom of the Red Sea" - is given to the outraged Joe Gargan, already on his way out, supplanted by better, colder, harder fixers. When the guy gets out and leaves the girl at the bottom of the sea, it offends the natural order: Joe is telling him he's not a man.

And Ted barely reacts: The angry words fall off him like water off a Chappaquiddick duck's back. Because human feeling is for humans. And he doesn't have to be a man; he's a Kennedy.

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The State Submits

By Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/

February 21, 2018

Arif Qawi, the chairman of governors at St Stephen’s in Newham, east London, has resigned

I've written many times over the last decade and a half about that rare bird the "moderate Muslim". Surely one reason for his scarceness is that, whenever he pops his head above the parapet, he's hung out to dry by craven infidel politicians and bureaucrats, who on the whole find the admirably straightforward demands of your average firebreathing imam more congenial. Hence the pandering to returning Isis warriors: Mods vs Raqqa's - it's no contest.

The latest examples are the headmistress and chairman of the board of governors of St Stephen's Primary School in Newham, East London. St Stephen, you'll recall, was the first Christian martyr, but observant Christians are thinner on the ground in today's Newham than they were in first-century Jerusalem. So St Stephen's School today is mostly Muslim. Nevertheless:

In June last year, [headmistress Neena] Lall removed the hijab from the school uniform for girls aged seven and under and tried to curb young children from fasting at school in case they became unwell.

Good for her. Hijabs for under-sevens? If you're in most Muslim countries, you notice that the gals don't disappear under the veil until puberty: Covered kindergartners is largely a western phenomenon.

So there would appear to be no reason for a "moderate" or any other kind of Muslim to object to what Mrs Lall was proposing. Alas:

St. Stephen's School in East London recently imposed a ban on hijabs (Islamic headscarves), but reversed its decision after administrators received hundreds of threats from enraged Muslims. 

Among the targeted officials from the primary school was the head of governors, Arif Qawi, who had supported the ban on the grounds that the girls wearing hijabs were less likely to integrate socially with their peers. As a result of the outcry, Qawi submitted his resignation, saying that members of the staff were afraid to come to the school. 

Head teacher Neena Lall, whose educational philosophy has turned St. Stephen's into one of the best secular primary schools in Britain's capital -- in spite of its being in Newham, a poor neighborhood where English is spoken predominantly as a second language -- was bombarded with e-mails calling her a "pedophile" who "deserved what she had coming." Lall, of Punjabi origin, was even compared to Hitler in a video uploaded to YouTube.

Mr Qawi's resignation is unfortunate. But sometimes you can speak a little too clearly:

In November Qawi said: "I am on a personal crusade to severely limit the Islamisation process, and turn these beautiful children into modern British citizens, able to achieve the very best in life, without any restrictions and boundaries."

Yeah, well, stick a fork in him, he's done, he's gone, he's toast, etc. Ofsted, the government regulator, has issued some tepid criticism of the local council for failing to support the school, and the Parliamentary Under-Secretary has pledged that next time a school institutes a hijab ban the Government will be far more supportive. Sure, whatever.

But serious persons understand the score here: the ban on hijabs has been reversed, and the "moderate Muslim" has gone - and physical intimidation, nudged and winked at by prominent community leaders and politicians, has been rewarded.

I've written previously how odd it is to stroll around, say, Newham and see a harder, fiercer Islam than one would encounter in Amman or Cairo - like hijab-clad grade-schoolers. But the reasoning lies in Mr Qawi's wish to "turn these beautiful children into modern British citizens". If that is the last thing you want these children to become, then the best way to do it is by segregating them from modern Britain. Which is why primary-school hijabs are necessary in London but not in Tripoli. If you leave it till twelve or thirteen, your daughters may have formed friendships with indifidel girls and be reluctant to climb into their body bags. Better to mandate the shroud in kindergarten - so the friendships never form. Once the transition is complete and Britain is a fully-fledged member of the dar al-Islam, then we can lighten up and let the middle-schoolers enjoy a little sunshine on their faces. But, as long as "moderates" are peddling dangerous talk about "modern British citizens", then the logical answer is to be even more hardcore. Are they wearing hijabs in the maternity ward yet?

~By middle school, anyway, a nice young Muslima should be on her way to children of her own. Thirty-two-year-old Ahmad married his first wife, Lina, when she was thirteen. He married his third, Betool, when she was fourteen. That would have been statutory rape not so long ago, but instead Ahmad gets to live with both wives and his six children in a two-story house in Schleswig-Holstein paid for, like everything else in the illiterate unskilled unemployed refugee's life, by German taxpayers.

If you're wondering what happened to the remaining wife - the one who came in between Lina and Betool - she's still in Syria:

Für eine dritte Ehefrau müsste das Haus größer werden, sagt Ahmad lachend.

"For a third wife, the house would have to grow larger," says Ahmad, laughing - as well he might: Childless Germans pay for the polygamous Muslims that will supplant them - because Mutti Merkel says they're the software designers Daimler and Mercedes urgently need. I think I'll take my chance on Toyotas built by Japanese sexbots.

No advanced nation needs mass unskilled immigration. Unless your politicians are willing to say that, they're consigning you and your family to the status of Ahmad's wives.

~Mark is still feeling under the weather but hopes to keep his Thursday date with Tucker Carlson, live coast to coast across America at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific. We hope you'll tune in.

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Un-Candid in Camera

By Mark Steyn

https://www.steynonline.com/

February 3, 2018

FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates are sworn during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, July 8, 2015 in Washington, DC. The committee was hearing testimony on encryption technology and the balance between public safety and privacy.

(Mark Wilson/Getty Images North America) 

Well, the memo was released. You can read it in full here, and I recommend you do so because, on the evidence of much of Friday's TV and radio coverage, most commentators only want to talk about it in the most shallow political terms. Whereas the questions it raises about state corruption in an age of round-the-clock technological surveillance are far more profound.

Let's start with something I wrote back in October:

It seems a reasonable inference, to put it as blandly as possible, that the [Christopher Steele] dossier was used to justify the opening of what the Feds call an "FI" (Full Investigation), which in turn was used to justify a FISA order permitting the FBI to put Trump's associates under surveillance. Indeed, it seems a reasonable inference that the dossier was created and supplied to friendly forces within the bureau in order to provide a pretext for an FI, without which surveillance of the Trump campaign would not be possible.

So my view has always been that the dossier is not "evidence" but a mere simulacrum of evidence - a stage prop to lay before the FISA court judge to get him to sign off on Trump surveillance. Because a judge has to be given something before he'll cough up a warrant, even if what it is is no more real than the "secret papers" in a spy thriller. Nevertheless, for a group of highly placed FBI and Department of Justice officials, it was a very crude calculation: No dossier, no surveillance.

That much the memo appears to confirm:

Deputy [FBI] Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 thatno surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information.

So Robert Mueller's entire "Russia investigation" springs from this dossier: a huge sprawling multi-branch tree of a rotten poisonous fruit.

In order to pull that off, the fact that the dossier is garbage from a paid partisan could not be disclosed to the judge. Granted that the FISA court is a racket, the government is still bound before the bench by the most basic of lawyerly duties - candor toward the tribunal:

In an ex parte proceeding, a lawyer shall inform the tribunal of all material facts known to the lawyer that will enable the tribunal to make an informed decision,whether or not the facts are adverse.

In the "national security" sphere, the entire system is ex parte. Carter Page, the peripheral Trump campaign volunteer who was the target of the surveillance, was not represented in court. In fact, he did not even know he was on "trial". A year and a half after he attracted the attentions of Deputy Director McCabe and his chums, Mr Page has not been charged with a single crime, never mind (to be old-fashioned about these things) convicted of one. Indeed, the only reason he is even aware that he is/was under 24/7 surveillance by the panopticon state is because McCabe's FBI found it politic to leak that fact to the newspapers - via the coy disclosure that he briefly came under FISA surveillance as "Male-1" five years earlier.

Mr Page has committed no crime and been charged with none, but is routinely spoken of in the press as if he has been. In it is interesting to contrast his treatment with, say, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whom the Department of Justice designated as "unindicted co-conspirators" in a major terrorism-funding case, but which designation is apparently no obstacle to their continued respectability in the media, their invitations to speak at small-town libraries, churches and schools (for example, a CAIR operative will be spreading the word at Firelands College in Huron, Ohio next month), and even their influence upon Robert Mueller's FBI.

But the FBI didn't care what it did to Carter Page - because he was necessary to get them to Trump.

The first request [UPDATE: See Jeffrey Gilbert's important clarification below] for a surveillance warrant was made on October 21st 2016 - less than three weeks before the presidential election. Did the Department of Justice and the FBI inform the tribunal of "all material facts" relating to the dossier. Did they disclose inter alia..?

a) that it was the work of a former foreign spy now hawking his Rolodex for fun and profit;

b) with a passionate, indeed obsessive anti-Trump bias;

c) who was being handsomely paid for his work;

d) by Trump's political opponents at the DNC and the Clinton campaign;

e) and was collaborating on anti-Trump oppo research for Hillary with the wife of the self-same Associate Deputy Attorney General heavily involved in the warrant application.

Did they disclose, to boil it down, that this "evidence" was, in fact, the work of a paid Hillary campaign operative (at two removes) whose private business would be greatly enriched were he to take out the GOP candidate?

Or did they pass it off as either routine FBI work-product or intelligence from a respectable source that had been independently verified by the FBI?

The memo makes plain all the answers to the above. The DoJ/FBI did not "inform the tribunal of all material facts" but misled the judge, seriously, on fundamental matters necessary to "enable the tribunal to make an informed decision". They misled him/her as to the nature of the document, its provenance, its credibility, the motivations of its author, and his financial ties to the Clinton camp.

They did, however, argue that the dossier had been independently "corroborated" by a September 2016 story in Yahoo News - even though that Yahoo story came from the same guy who authored the dossier: in effect, the Government got its surveillance warrant by arguing that its fake-news dossier from Christopher Steele had been independently corroborated by a fake-news story from Christopher Steele. Either the FBI is exceedingly stupid, which would be disturbing, given their lavish budget. Or the same tight group of FBI/DoJ officials knew very well what they were doing in presenting such drivel to the FISA court.

They're really the two choices here: either "the world's premier law enforcement agency" was manipulated by one freaky Brit spook, or "the world's premier law enforcement agency" conspired with the freaky Brit spook to manipulate the judge.

Me again from months ago:

There was enough of a pseudo-dossier, by the debased standards of the bloated US 'intelligence community', to be used as a pretext to get the rubber-stamp FISA court to approve 24/7 surveillance of everyone around Trump - and maybe that would turn up something to destroy him.

But, again, it didn't. Every sentient creature knows that - because everyone understands that if they'd found anything they'd have leaked it.

I get some pushback when I use expressions like "rubber-stamp FISA court". Shepard Smith was arguing on Fox yesterday that a FISA court judge is almost like a Supreme Court justice - I was laughing so much I nearly drove off the road. A judge can only judge what's laid before him. In this case, almost every material fact about the "evidence" was withheld, or coyly skirted. For example, Christopher Steele was said to be in the employ of a "US person", but not Fusion GPS or Glenn Simpson, who were being funded by Perkins Coie, who were being paid by the DNC - all of whom are cutouts, as the spooks say, for Hillary.

A FISA application has to be signed off on by the highest figures at both Justice and the Bureau - in this case Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and FBI Director James Comey. Given the sensitive nature of the case, it is difficult to believe that they did not know the answers to all the questions above: they were demanding surveillance of a major-party presidential campaign in a two-party system on the basis entirely of uncorroborated rumors provided by the other party's operative. Yet Yates and Comey saw nothing wrong in denying the judge "all material facts".

A surveillance warrant against a US person also has to be renewed every 90 days - which this one was, thrice: That would presumably be just before the inauguration in January, and again in April and July. By the time of the first renewal, signatories Yates and Comey were aware that Steele had been fired as an FBI informant for blabbing to the press about being an FBI informant. In addition, an internal FBI investigation had found his dossier "minimally corroborated". Yet evidently the diminished value of both the dossier and its author were not disclosed to the judge - in January or subsequent renewals. Indeed, one can be fairly confident that Deputy AG Rosenstein and the FBI would have been happy to apply for a fourth renewal, were it not for the fact that the general crappiness of Steele's dossier was by then all over the papers and even a judge kept in the dark by the feds for a year might have begun to notice it.

In the middle of all this is an American citizen who was put under 24/7 surveillance by the panopticon state because it enabled the ruling party to eavesdrop on its political opponent. As much as Steele's dossier, Carter Page was a mere pretext: The dossier was the pretext to get to Page, and Page was the pretext to get to Trump.

Here are the only references Christopher Steele makes to Mr Page in his garbage dossier. First:

Speaking in confidence to a compatriot in late July 2016, Source E, an ethnic Russian close associate of Republican US presidential candidate Donald TRUMP, admitted that there was a well-developed conspiracy of co-operation between them and the Russian leadership. This was managed on the TRUMP side by the Republican candidate's campaign manager, Paul MANAFORT, who was using foreign policy advisor, Carter PAGE, and others as intermediaries. The two sides had a mutual interest in defeating Democratic presidential candidate Hillary CLINTON, whom President PUTIN apparently both hated and feared.

Evidently not as much as Christopher Steele "both hated and feared" Donald Trump. Whoops, sorry, my mistake: Donald TRUMP. We want it to look all official and dossier-like, don't we? Christopher STEELE said that he was "desperate that Donald Trump not get elected". He told this to Bruce OHR, the now demoted Associate Deputy Attorney General - the one who failed to disclose that his wife was one of a mere seven employees of Fusion-GPS and the one charged with working on Trump oppo research for the aforementioned Hillary CLINTON.

But put that aside. The above paragraph would not be admissible in your county courthouse - because it's several degrees of hearsay. What it means is that a) Christopher STEELE was told by b) an unnamed Russian that c) an unnamed "ethnic Russian close associate" of Donald TRUMP passed on to him that d) Paul MANAFORT was using e) Carter PAGE to "co-operate" with "the Russian leadership". In a functioning justice system it would have as much value as you standing up in court and saying that Smith was told by Jones that Bloggs assures him that Christopher STEELE has sex with goats.

But we're in "national security" court here, where due process is honored institutionally in the breach. To be able to reach a judgment on what value to place upon that paragraph the judge has to know something about the document, where it came from, and the man who wrote it.

You can get a sense of the circularity of the argument here from Carter PAGE's remaining appearances in the dossier - a "secret meeting" in Russia, followed by somebody else holding a "secret meeting" to "clean up the mess" left by the press disclosure of Carter PAGE's "secret meeting" - which was almost certainly disclosed by Christopher STEELE, who was briefing gullible journalists all the time. So the author of the dossier leaks hints of a "secret meeting" to drive other people to hold other "secret meetings" to discuss the press stories about the previous "secret meeting".

"Secret meeting" in this case means a meeting to which Christopher STEELE was not invited. For example, if I call you on the telephone and don't issue a press release, that's a "secret conversation". As it happens, Carter PAGE was in Moscow for a non-secret meeting - a public speaking engagement at the Higher Economic School. I shall be in Colorado Springs for a public engagement next weekend, but that's just elaborate cover for the "secret meetings" I'll be having afterwards. Anyway, at Carter PAGE's "secret meeting", the Russian supposedly (via the usual degrees of hearsay) reveals that the Kremlin has in its possession two dossiers. So now we have a dossier about other dossiers - or, in evidentiary terms, dossier hearsay about other dossiers:

Their agenda had included DIVEYKIN raising a dossier of 'kompromat' the Kremlin possessed on TRUMP's Democratic presidential rival, Hillary CLINTON, and its possible release to the Republican's campaign team.

However, the Kremlin official close to S IVANOV added that s/he believed DIVEYKIN also had hinted (or indicated more strongly) that the Russian leadership also had 'kompromat' on TRUMP which the latter should bear in mind in his dealings with them.

Do the Kremlin dossiers also capitalize surnames? Or is that just a Christopher STEELE thing? But note the salient fact here:

A source so far removed from the US Government that Christopher STEELE does not even know his/her sex says that the Kremlin has "kompromat" on both CLINTON and TRUMP. Yet, oddly, only the "kompromat" on TRUMP has been released: the "golden showers" rubbish that James COMEY's FBI leaked to the press after COMEY met with TRUMP to "brief" him on the "kompromat" - a presidential briefing which COMEY only held in order to be able to leak to the media afterwards that he'd briefed TRUMP on his golden showers.

So the Kremlin has "kompromat" on TRUMP and CLINTON, but only the TRUMP "kompromat" gets leaked ...by STEELE and the FBI. Gee, I wonder why STEELE doesn't leak the CLINTON "kompromat". Could that interesting difference in treatment be because he's on the payroll of the CLINTON team? Oh, and wouldn't you like to know exactly what the "kompromat" the Kremlin has on Hillary is? What a shame that seems to be locked in a far more secure vault than the TRUMP "kompromat"...

As I said to Tucker the other night, there's no evidence of Russian government interference with the 2016 election, but there's plenty of evidence of US government interference with the 2016 election. The latter ought to be far more disturbing. All foreign governments can be expected to pursue their national interests as they see fit. That the most powerful forces within your own government decide to subvert the election result is far more bizarre, and far graver.

The surveillance of Carter Page was a cover for the surveillance of Trump. The creation of the Steele dossier was a cover for the "Full Investigation" of the Trump campaign. The rumors of Kremlin "kompromat" are a cover for the widespread dissemination of Democrat "kompromat". And "foreign interference" in the US election is cover for domestic interference in the US election.

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