PLAYER SAFETY MUST COME DOWN HARD ON WILSON, DELIVER DOUBLE-DIGIT SUSPENSION

By Ken Campbell

https://thehockeynews.com/news/article/player-safety-must-come-down-hard-on-wilson-deliver-double-digit-suspension

October 1, 2018

Tom Wilson is escorted off the ice after an illegal check on St. Louis center Oskar Sundqvist during Sunday's preseason game at Capital One Arena.

When the Washington Capitals open their season against the Boston Bruins and raise their Stanley Cup banner Wednesday night, Tom Wilson will be watching both events in street clothes. And for the second straight season, he will miss the beginning of the campaign with a suspension from the pre-season. And he will lose a substantial amount of money. That much is absolutely certain.

What we don’t know after Wilson’s predatory attack on Oskar Sundqvist of the St. Louis Blues Sunday afternoon is exactly when his first game will be played. A pretty good guess would be, if Wilson’s lucky, it will be Nov. 1 when the Capitals visit the Montreal Canadiens for their 11th game of the season. But who knows? If the Department of Player Safety really wants to send him a message, maybe it will be Nov. 21 when the Capitals host the Chicago Blackhawks in their 21st game of the season.

Back in the summer, I sat with Tom Wilson in the upper seats of the St. Michael’s College Arena for piece I wrote on him for our Season Preview. I found him to be charming, funny, engaging and excessively accommodating. We talked about his reputation for headhunting and he went out of his way to stress that he has met with DOPS a number of times and was dedicated to playing a physical game within the boundaries of the rulebook.

“I’m not a guy who’s trying to hurt people,” Wilson told me that summer morning. “I try to play the game hard. I’m trying to learn the hits that are acceptable and the ones that aren’t. I’m trying to grow with the department and make sure that I’m on the ice and not in the stands. I don’t want to be in the stands. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I want to be playing hockey, the game that everyone loves.”

And you know what? I believed him. And if he stood in front of me and said exactly the same thing, in spite of his near decapitation of Sundqvist, I’d believe him again. I believe Wilson desperately wants to be a clean, but tough player, but he clearly has no idea how to go about it. His hit on Sundqvist in the second period of a pre-season game is a crystal-clear indication this is the case. A nothing game with zero on the line, no messages needing to be sent, no points at stake. And he goes out and recklessly drills a guy in that circumstance? Even if Wilson didn’t mean to hit Sundqvist in the head, what on Earth could he have possibly been thinking?

Enough is enough.

This is a guy who has been in the NHL for five years and as much as he’s tried, he simply hasn’t been able to grasp the difference between being a clean hitter and a head-hunting predator. So now it’s time to dispense with the carrot and employ the stick. It’s very easy, really. If DOPS wants to end this kind of behavior and be taken seriously, it must hand Wilson a double-digit suspension. The baseline here is 10 games and you start working from there.

See, here’s the thing. Wilson is making DOPS look stupid at the moment, much the same way Brad Marchand has done this. To their credit, the guys in that department also want to see Wilson on the ice and not in the press box. Like most people who love hockey, they want players to be physical and hard-hitting. And on a number of occasions in the past couple of years, they’ve sat him down, showed him lots of tape and made it very clear to him what is acceptable and what is not. And Wilson has responded by either (a) not listening to them, or (b) not being able to grasp the message they are trying to deliver to him loud and clear. So it’s clearly time for another method to be used.

With two suspensions to his credit in the past year, including a three-game ban in the second round for blowing up Zach Aston-Reese of the Pittsburgh Penguins and almost derailing the Capitals’ season in the process, Wilson is a repeat offender. And this is very important. Let’s say for the sake of argument, he gets a 10-game ban. Because he’s a repeat offender, his fine will be based on the number of games he receives divided by 82, which is the number of games each team plays. That would put his suspension at $630,081.22 based on the contract he signed this past summer that pays him an average of almost $5.2 million a year. If he were a first-time offender getting 10 games, the fine would be based on the number of games divided by 186, which is the number of days in the regular season. That would have put the fine at $277.777.74.

Wilson has been offered an in-person hearing, which means his suspension will almost certainly be a minimum of six games. To give Wilson anything fewer than 10 games would represent a gold-plated invitation for him to change nothing and be an opportunity missed by the league to seize an incredibly valuable teachable moment, for Wilson and other young players. To take Wilson’s privilege of playing hockey for between 11 and 20 games would send an indelible message. You can only hope that Wilson receives and heeds it this time.

It’s time. Hit him hard, then let the NHL Players’ Association appeal the sentence and be put in a position to defend the indefensible. And let those who think a player skating with his head down for a split second through the middle of the ice deserves to be decapitated espouse their views from their vantage point in the 20th century.

TAGS: SUSPENSIONS, WASHINGTON CAPITALS

Is this the best biography of Winston Churchill ever written?

By Simon Heffer
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/churchill-andrew-roberts-reviewis-best-biography-winston-churchill/
27 September 2018



It is brave of Andrew Roberts, before embarking on this 1,000-page biography of the man routinely described as the greatest ever Briton, to point out that there have already been 1,000 biographies of him. It invites the question: why another? Roberts’s answer comes in a thoughtful summing-up at the end of his book, where he indicates how many useful sources have become available only in recent years. These include the private papers of Churchill’s children, verbatim reports of meetings of the War Cabinet, the diaries of Ivan Maisky, Stalin’s envoy to London, and the pooterish jottings of George VI. The result is the best single-volume life imaginable of a man whose life it would seem technically impossible to get into a single volume.

The problem with Churchill, for two reasons, is his legend. First, because of that legend, everyone who met him, from long before he directed our affairs in the darkest hour, felt it important to record every aspect and impression of him, which is why there are not just those thousand biographies, but books on what he ate, drank, wore, and so on. He was a Technicolor personality in an increasingly monochrome age, and there was plenty to record – his jokes (though Roberts doubts he lacked the gallantry to tell Bessie Braddock, who accused him of being drunk, that while he would be sober in the morning, she would still be hideously ugly); his florid orations in antique English; his apophthegms; and, of course, his awesome misjudgments. For Roberts to have ensured that virtually all Winston’s greatest hits are in this book is not the least of his achievements.

Second, the legend invites historians, and people who write about the past, to challenge it, which few dare to do. Roberts is to be commended for his courage in pointing out when Churchill was wrong (the Gold Standard, India, the Abdication), when he was reckless (showing off at Sidney Street, the Dardanelles, Narvik), when he misrepresented or exaggerated fact in order to make political points (frequently) or when he was tasteless (such as in his almost infantile joy at the outbreak of the Great War, in which he at least had the courage, for a few months before he craved a return to Westminister, to fight).

Indeed it is Churchill’s courage, and his loyalty to his friends and family, that redeems him. Roberts recounts numerous occasions when he cheated death, not least when German shells passed through his dugout on the Western Front, and when he stuck by people whom everyone else detested. Nor does he stint on the difficult relationship with his son Randolph, of whom Evelyn Waugh famously said, when Randolph had had a harmless tumour removed, how ironic it was that the medical profession had cut out the only part of him that was benign.

Churchill’s legend has not just been immortalised in print. It has spawned films, drama series, plays and documentaries in such numbers that there could be a Churchill channel – and doubtless, somewhere in America, there is. This presents another problem for a biographer, for many of Roberts’s readers will already have their conceptions of Churchill as a person, and some of what they have seen on film is, unlike in this reliable biography, sheer garbage, such as the preposterous scene in Darkest Hour where Churchill holds court in a Tube train. Roberts sticks to the sources. For that reason, new readers should definitely start here.

That does not spare him the task of dealing with much that is familiar, even to those who have never read a book on Churchill. There is the neglect by his parents, not least his self-obsessed father who may (or, Robert thinks, may not) have died of syphilis; and their consignment of this unruly boy to a perverted, flagellomaniac prep school master called Sneyd-Kynnersley. Harrow was little better, though Churchill was not entirely the dunce that he liked to pretend to be. He under-achieved at Sandhurst, and failed to get into the sort of smart regiment his parents had hoped, but used his time as a subaltern in India and Africa to educate himself, and develop a relationship with the English language that helped make him money as a writer throughout his life. He also developed the art of seeing everything through the prism of history.

Roberts then takes readers through Churchill’s political career before 1940. He followed his father into the Tory party but in 1904 crossed the floor over the threat the Balfour government posed to free trade. He “re-ratted” in 1924 by standing as a Tory after the collapse of the Liberals, and was made, to his surprise, Chancellor of the Exchequer. In the intervening period he had been the youngest cabinet minister in living memory, serving at the Board of Trade (where his development of labour exchanges deserves more recognition for its significance), the Home Office, the Admiralty, the Duchy of Lancaster, Munitions, the War Office, the Air Ministry and the Colonial Office. 

It is a rare flaw in this book that Roberts seems to underestimate Churchill’s contribution to the slump of the Thirties through not just the decision to go back on the Gold Standard (which he himself admitted had been a mistake) but also through the general thrust of his economic policy, which did too little to stimulate growth.

One of the few things Churchill was categorically right about – the Nazi menace – was perhaps the most important thing for any statesman in British history to have grasped. MacDonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain in different degrees failed to do so, and patronised Churchill for his trouble. Roberts, rightly, believes in Churchill’s greatness, and his readers will be in no doubt over why: Churchill’s ability to articulate the defiance of the British nation; his careful husbandry of relations with the United States so that, even before America came into the war after Pearl Harbor, it had set up lend-lease and was giving Britain the wherewithal to take the fight to Adolf Hitler.

Yet even in war there were mistakes. Roberts, with some understatement, describes Yalta as “not Churchill’s finest hour”, not least for its consequences in shaping the map of Eastern Europe. But then, to be fair to Churchill, the dying Roosevelt effectively stitched him up, and Churchill could have done nothing about it, short of ordering British forces, after the surrender of the Germans, to carry on and fight the Russians. On a more minor point, Roberts quotes the letter from Mrs Churchill to her husband telling him to stop being so rude to his staff. He was under enormous pressure, but so were they, and they lacked the constant intake of Pol Roger, cognac and cigars that maintained his equilibrium.

Having given such weight to the war years, there is a sense towards the end of the book that Roberts is cantering to the finish. He reports, but does not entirely satisfactorily explain, Churchill’s unpopularity before the 1945 election, even before his foolish “Gestapo” remarks about the effect of a Labour government; and the inadequacy of the Churchill government of 1951-55, when the stroke Churchill suffered after the coronation should have put him into retirement.

This is not a biography of Anthony Eden, but one does wonder how much better a prime minister Eden would have been had he become leader of the Tory party in 1945. Churchill’s greatest error was staying too long, and by the Fifties was relying on amphetamines to keep him going. One senses Roberts’s publisher, fearing that this work would require a second volume (and it should have), driving him to compress these last, significant years.

The author’s conclusion that “the battles he won saved Liberty” takes us back to 1940, and cannot but be true: had Britain fallen, God knows what would have happened to the world. Yet Roberts shows us Churchill’s complexities, faults and rough edges as a biographer should. The obsessives, of whom there are many, can gorge on the eight-volume official Life, written by Randolph Churchill (who finished only two volumes before he drank himself to death) and Sir Martin Gilbert (who wrote much of those first two, and all of the other six), in all its turgid, hagiographical and exhaustive earnestness, if they wish. For most of us, seeking a more concise, authoritative view, Roberts will be enough.

Churchill: Walking with Destiny is published by Penguin on October 4 at £35. To order your copy for £30, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the online Telegraph Bookshop

Book Review: 'Churchill: Walking with Destiny' by Andrew Roberts — the best biography of Winston ever written

By Dominic Sandbrook

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/review-churchill-walking-with-destiny-by-andrew-roberts-the-best-biography-of-winston-ever-written-fh35d7982#_=_

30 September 2018

On May 28, 1940, with France crumbling beneath the Nazi onslaught, Britain’s new prime minister, Winston Churchill, called an informal meeting of his cabinet. Among his ministers was Hugh Dalton, the minister for economic warfare, firmly on the Labour left and a long-standing opponent of almost everything Churchill stood for. Now Dalton listened as Churchill announced that, despite the terrible military situation, he would never negotiate with Hitler.

“I am convinced,” Churchill said gruffly, “that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender. If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”

Grandiloquent, nationalistic and bloodthirsty, it was classic Churchill. He meant every word: in private, he told his aides that if invasion came, he would end his broadcast: “The hour has come; kill the Hun.”

It was the kind of talk that, in peacetime, Dalton would have abhorred. But when Churchill finished, he rose with his colleagues to applaud, shaking their chief’s hand and slapping him on the back. “He was quite magnificent,” Dalton wrote afterwards. ‘The man, and the only man we have, for this hour.”

Voted the greatest Briton of all time by the public in 2002, Churchill is such a towering figure in our national imagination that it is tempting to find some way of cutting him down to size. Even the historian Andrew Roberts, whose new biography casts him as a hero of almost legendary stature, lists a long series of flaws and blunders, from the Dardanelles operation in 1915 to his opposition to Indian self-government two decades later. But I defy anybody to finish this terrific book, which bursts with character, humour and incident on almost every page, without sharing Dalton’s view. Magnificent is indeed the word.

There are, of course, countless biographies of Churchill already. Roberts builds his around the theme of destiny, a reference to Churchill’s famous claim that upon becoming prime minister, he believed he was “walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial”.

From anybody else this would sound deranged, but Churchill undoubtedly believed it. Talking to a friend at Harrow in 1891, when he was 17, he claimed that he could see into the future, when “London will be in danger and … it will fall to me to save the capital and save the Empire.”

His sense of predestination never left him. Even decades later, after narrowly escaping a German shell in the trenches, he felt “the strong sensation that a hand had been stretched out to move me in the nick of time from a fatal spot”.

Where did all this come from? Roberts sees it as a kind of compensation, the bravado of a lonely boy who was starved of love and effectively abandoned by his parents. Like much in this book, this is a familiar story, but he tells it superbly. Almost as soon as little Winston was born to the Tory politician Lord Randolph Churchill and his American wife Jennie, they treated him as an annoyance. Between 1885 and 1892 the unhappy Winston, who was often beaten at boarding school until his bottom bled, sent his parents 76 letters. They wrote back only six times. “My darling Mummy!” he would write. “Oh my Mummy! … I am more unhappy than I can possibly say.” Sometimes she did not even bother to read them.

Yet instead of being crushed by what we would now consider neglect verging on cruelty, Churchill used it as a spur to greatness. It was as though, even as prime minister, he rose every day determined to prove his parents wrong and win their love. That took guts, of course, but even as a boy he had showed immense spirit. When Harrow’s headmaster said, “Churchill, I have very grave reason to be displeased with you”, it required real courage, as well as humour, to reply, “And I, sir, have very grave reason to be displeased with you!”

Churchill was a tremendous autodidact: as a bored subaltern in India, he read Gibbon, Plato, Malthus and Darwin. When a friend teased him for having never read Keats, he learnt all the odes by heart. And although he was pampered all his life (he never learnt to boil an egg, and didn’t dial a telephone number for himself until he was in his seventies), he was a man of instinctive generosity, even donating the skin from his arm as an impromptu graft to staunch a fellow officer’s wound during the war in the Sudan in 1898. When, during the Second World War, Churchill heard that his former rival Stanley Baldwin was being abused by people blaming him for appeasement, he publicly invited him to lunch in Downing Street. That was a measure of the man.

Roberts tells this story with enormous confidence, drawing on a vast range of sources to present what is undoubtedly the best single-volume life of Churchill ever written. He makes no secret of his admiration for his subject, but he recognises Churchill’s frailties and misjudgments, such as his contempt for Mohandas Gandhi or his belligerence during the general strike of 1926. His verdict is suitably sweeping. By standing firm against Hitler in 1940, he believes, Churchill fulfilled his destiny, saved his country and preserved liberty from extinction.

Yet Roberts never loses sight of that sad little figure at boarding school. In late November 1947, Churchill’s daughter Sarah pointed at an empty chair and asked: “If you could sit anyone there, whom would it be?” She expected him to say Marlborough or Napoleon. “Oh, my father, of course,” Churchill said.

A few weeks later, inspired by their conversation, he wrote a strange short story, The Dream, intended only for his family. In it, the 73-year-old Churchill meets his father’s ghost and tells him about everything that has happened since his death (votes for women, the Labour Party, world wars, the Holocaust), but without mentioning his own part in events. His father is as scornful as ever: “I was not going to talk politics with a boy like you ever. Bottom of the class! Never passed any examinations, except into the Cavalry!”

Then he lights a cigarette, the match flares and the vision is gone. Churchill was 73, the most famous man in the world, the hero who had saved his country. But beneath all the talk of destiny and the bluster about the empire, he was still that lonely little boy, desperate to the end for his father’s love.

Allen Lane £35 pp1,105

● Andrew Roberts is at The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival on October 5 at 3pm, cheltenhamfestivals.com

With the Kavanaugh Fight, Political Warfare Escalates

By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/01/with-the-kavanaugh-fight-political-warfare-escalates/

October 1, 2018

Scorched earth. That’s the tactic the Democrats and their enablers in the media and George Soros-funded hit squads are employing against Brett Kavanaugh. We all know it. We all experienced that sharp intake of breath when it was first reported that Dianne Feinstein had a letter from some anonymous female accusing Kavanaugh of having engaged in sexual misconduct with her when he was in high school. Depending on your estimate of Judge Kavanaugh’s character, you focused either on “sexual misconduct” (“Now we’ve got ’em matey!”) or on “high school” (“Really? You’re going after a guy with a sterling record because he may have hit on a girl at a party in high school?”)

I belong firmly in the latter camp. But of course that was just the beginning of an extraordinary, and orchestrated (I want to emphasize that) effort to destroy a man of exceptional ability and exceptional integrity.

Eventually, we learned the name of his accuser: Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Almost three weeks after she went public, we still don’t know much about her. Before her accusation became public, she took great care to scrub her activities from social media and the internet. But have no fear. Even as I write, many people, outraged at her totally unsupported allegations, are piecing together a portrait of a rambunctious party girl who grew up to be an anti-Trump activist. I look forward to inspecting the portrait when it is finished.

Initially, the curious thing was how the letter—sent, Feinstein insisted, in confidence—was leaked. I believe I am correct in saying that only three sets of people had it: Ford’s lawyers (why did she engage left-wing anti-Trump lawyers just before this became public? Who is paying for them?), her local congresswoman, and Senator Feinstein’s office. I am glad that President Trump has asked the FBI to look into who leaked the letter. I’d like to know.

At first, I inclined to the idea that this obviously damaged person (I say that after having sat through her artfully incoherent, wounded-little-girl testimony) was just collateral damage in the Democrats’ effort to destroy Donald Trump’s nominee. She really did, I thought, want anonymity and was terrified at testifying before all those big meanies in the Senate.

Of course, she was treated with fawning obsequiousness. Every Democrat began his panegyric with praise of her “bravery” and “courage” in coming forward to retail her “credible” accusations.

Let me pause here to note that “credible” means “believable.” Would you find it believable if I said that your best friend got drunk at a party 35 or 36 years ago (I can’t remember quite when it was) and jumped on a girl and tried to take off her bathing suit? Unfortunately, I can’t remember where this happened. I can tell you about four people who were there, but, unfortunately, none of the four remembers the event either. The two who I said were most involved strenuously deny that anything like that ever happened. Is my claim credible? Take your time.

The Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, brave souls that they are, declined even to question Dr. Ford (I love the “Dr.”) themselves. They thought that the optics of men asking questions of a women who has brought a career-ending accusation against someone nominated to the Supreme Court would seem mean—isn’t modern feminism wonderful?—so they foisted the job off to a female prosecutor who was only allowed to pose her ever-so-gentle questions in five-minute increments.

Christine Ford did present a pathetic spectacle and, as I say, I at first thought she was someone the Democrats were happy to use and discard to stop Judge Kavanaugh. I now suspect that she was in on the plot, if not from the beginning, then from well before her letter was leaked to the press.

Of course, the Ford theater turned out to be only the opening act. Just a week ago, Ronan Farrow, The New Yorker’s resident sex officer, published a breathless story about one Deborah Ramirez, a classmate of Brett Kavanaugh’s at Yale. Ramirez claims that Kavanaugh once exposed himself to her at a drunken party. It was so poorly sourced that not even the New York Times, which of course would just love to broadcast dirt about Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, refused to publish the allegation.

Then we’ve had creepy porn lawyer Michael Avenatti (I love it that Tucker Carlson ran that epithet in a chyron when he spoke to this lowlife on his show) whose latest client, Julie Swetnick, claims that Brett Kavanaugh was part of a ring that arranged for girls to be drugged and gang raped. How’s that for credible?

If it were possible to step back from this disgusting effort at wholesale character assassination to savor some of unintended comedy that has been part of this immoral kafkaesque charade, then I think Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) deserves some sort of special commendation. His absurd burlesque parsing of an entry from Brett Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook—his high school yearbook, for God’s sake!—from the floor of the Senate really was something special. Except for the fact that he was endeavoring to destroy the reputation and career of a man who has served in the White House and on the bench with distinction for more than two decades, Whitehouse’s ham-handed, obtuse effort to look like Perry Mason would have been laugh-out-loud funny. What a putz. (Don’t miss Julie Kelly’s evisceration of this pompous and malignant clown.)

There have been many efforts to rationalize or explain what it is that the Democrats have been doing with their search-and-destroy occupation of what Judge Kavanaugh aptly describes as “the Twilight Zone.” Yes, it is certainly true that the Democrats do not want Brett Kavanaugh, an ardent constitutionalist, to take Anthony Kennedy’s seat. That would rob the court of Kennedy’s impish interventions on many social issues, especially those issue emanating from the girdle of human experience: abortion, and sexuality in all its florid, increasingly polymorphous manifestations.

It is understandable that leftists—having gotten used to the idea that the court can be weaponized as an instrument of progressive social engineering when Congress, still subject to that pesky voice of the people, is recalcitrant to push ahead to utopia—should be unhappy about that prospect. But, hey, that’s how we run things in this democratic republic. We have elections, elections have consequences (as a gloating pol once observed), and we abide by the processes that have grown up in our institutions and that are the expression of the rule of law.

Besides, Brett Kavanaugh is not a fire-breathing reactionary. On the contrary, although personally conservative, he is a thoughtful, deliberate jurist, the hallmarks of whose practice have been impartiality and a concern to follow the law. The Democrats might—and God willing, eventually will—find the court populated with justices far more doctrinaire in their originalism. Kavanaugh, when he is confirmed (and I continue to believe he will be) will endeavor to uphold the Constitution, not twist it for ideological ends.

But increasingly I have come to believe that the satanic circus the Democrats have let loose around this confirmation hearing is only incidentally about Brett Kavanaugh. They would, no doubt, be only too happy to destroy a man whose entire above-board, God-fearing, fair-dealing career stands in such sharp contrast to their own grubby compromises and squamous, power-seeking behavior. (Did the phrase “God-fearing” bring you up short? Think about that for a moment.) Compassing the humiliation of such a respectable man would be a collateral benefit for such sweaty lilliputian men and women as Sheldon Whitehouse, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris (to say nothing of the ancient matriarch of this party, Dianne Feinstein),

But the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the battle over Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation pertains to something much larger than this seat on the Supreme Court, important though that assuredly is.

In August, pondering the seemingly interminable investigation being conducted by Robert Mueller into anything and everything having to do with Donald Trump, his friends, and associates, I puzzled over the exact nature of the investigation in a column called “Crime and Punishment.” Usually, when you have a criminal investigation, you start with a definite crime. At least, that’s the way we try to do things in this country. Elsewhere—in Stalin’s Soviet Union, for example—one might just as easily start with the desired victim. A crime could always be ginned up later.

There are some cynical folks who have suggested that what we have seen in the deep state’s behavior toward the president and his associates and initiatives has the hallmarks of a Lavrentiy-Beria-like brutality. “Show me the man,” said Stalin’s head of secret police, “and I’ll show you the crime.”

But I think we are seeing something different in this case. There was a precedent crime, after all, but it wasn’t one that appears in the statute book. Rather, as in some common law traditions, it is simply part of the agreed upon and customary narrative of our polity—or at least the people who govern our polity. What is it? In short, the crime was Donald Trump’s election. More precisely, the crime was the fact that Donald Trump was elected without the permission, indeed, over the strenuous objections of that entitled cohort whose members believe it to be part of the natural order of things that they govern.

The implications of this conviction—that the primal crime of Trump’s administration was his election, compounded by his infuriating habit of meeting any attack with a potent counterattack—are huge.

Among other things, it follows that Donald Trump’s tenure is, for these people, existentially illegitimate. And from that conviction it follows that a policy of resistance, obstruction, and illegality is (in the minds of these people) sanctioned. It is OK, for example, for a Justice Department official to boast that he is conducting a guerrilla war of “resistance” behind the scenes. It is OK to stalk Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and his wife to their favorite restaurant and scream at them until they are forced to leave. Why? Because Cruz supports Kavanaugh. And so on. (Wouldn’t you like to know what Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said to the spineless GOP Senator Jeff Flake the other day just before Flake announced that he would allow Kavanaugh’s confirmation to proceed to the Senate floor only if there were another FBI investigation authorized into his behavior in high school?)

Here is my thought. The scurrilous attempt at character assassination directed at Brett Kavanaugh is part of a larger war: the war to demonstrate that Donald Trump, though duly elected in a free, open, and democratic process, is fundamentally illegitimate.

The essentially Maoist techniques deployed by the Left—fabricating accusations, denying the accused due process, sabotaging the machinery of government—is all part of that larger aim. Hence the breathtaking viciousness of these so-called confirmation hearings. (Really, they are just show trials.) John Hinderaker got it exactly right in an essay at Powerline called “Why the Brett Kavanaugh Smear?” The Left has descended to tactics hitherto untested, at least in this country, partly as a warning, partly as an earnest representation of their by-any-means-necessary mentality. Noting that Brett Kavanaugh enjoys (or, rather, enjoyed) “one of the most spotless reputations of anyone in American public life,” Hinderaker argues that “[b]y smearing the ultimate Boy Scout, the Democrats signal that they are determined to go lower than anyone has ever gone in American history.” Indeed. But why?

Because “They intend to deter normal people from serving in Republican administrations, or accepting appointments from Republican presidents, or, ultimately, from identifying themselves with the Republican party.” It’s all part of the larger goal of delegitimizing the 2016 election. Given that goal, Hinderaker observes “the fact that they are smearing a man of obviously sterling character on absurdly flimsy grounds is not a bug, it is a feature. The fact that the Democrats’ smears are so patently false is ultimately their main point.”

I think this is correct. I also think that Hinderaker’s concluding two points are correct. First, “If this can happen to Brett Kavanaugh, it can happen to anyone,” and second, the end to which all these histrionics have tended: “You’d better go quietly and cede power to us.”

In the normal course of events, I’d say the situation of the Republicans was nearly hopeless. They are not used to fighting back. Many (most?) of them seem to feel, deep down, that the Democrats are right that only they truly have the right to exercise power, that, at the end of the day, Republicans are really just conservative window-dressing for the real business of government, which is pursuing the transnational progressive agenda. (Not to mention how many Republicans are really just Democratic deep-state actors with an “R” after their name.)

The silver lining in all this is the fact that these are not normal times. Donald Trump won, elections have consequences, and we are seeing the consequences all around us, not just in the astonishing success of the Trump agenda but also in the new energy Trump’s example has imparted to some (not you, Jeff Flake, not you) of the Republican brethren.

Has Lindsey Graham ever given a more impressive performance than he did at the Senate hearing the other day, castigating the despicable behavior of his colleagues for exactly what it was? I see that the Senate Judiciary Committee has begun to pursue people who emerged from the swamp to hurl unfounded accusations at Brett Kavanaugh: lying to a federal officer is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Those whom the FBI is now contacting as part of their “supplemental” background check into Brett Kavanaugh ought to keep that in mind. So, I’d reckon, should Christine Ford, supposing the FBI ever gets around to questioning her. The Democrats wanted all-out war. All-out war is exactly what Donald Trump is going to give them.

Jeff Flake’s Spineless Betrayal

By Michael Thau

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/01/jeff-flakes-spineless-betrayal/

October 1, 2018

Jeff Flake on September 28, 2018 (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Watching the Senate Judiciary Committee’s final vote on Friday, it was hard not to feel sorry for Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). The shrieking and obstreperous women of Hillary Clinton’s “resistance,” bussed in by Democratic Party front organizations for the express purpose of physically confronting and intimidating him, appear to have done their job admirably. Flake was left with the dazed and frightened look of a man expecting a beating from his wife after coming home early and unexpectedly interrupting her romantic rendezvous with the pool boy.

But as hard as it is to resist feeling compassion for a man unnerved in such a pathetic and unmanly manner, we are obliged to make the effort. When there are no children involved, the cuckold hurts only himself; but Jeff Flake’s cowardly and obsequious deference to the delusional mob does serious damage to another man, that man’s wife and children, and our nation.

The main thing is not to let the familiarity induced by the endless repetition of the phrase “All allegations deserve to be heard” by Flake and his GOP colleagues wear away the statement’s manifest stupidity. No matter how many times it gets repeated, there are obviously plenty of allegations that have no place in a public Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. And, indeed, Christine Blasey Ford’s charges against Brett Kavanaugh are a textbook example for demonstrating the idiocy of the mantra that Flake and so many of his colleagues were cowed into mindlessly reciting.

It’s a sorry indication of just how far we’ve regressed towards mob rule that this even needs to be said, but the only allegations that unquestionably deserve to be raised publicly in a senate committee hearing are those that are credible, serious, and made in good faith. And Blasey Ford’s allegations failed on all three counts.

Concerning his accuser’s credibility, as Judge Kavanaugh took pains to repeat to the apparently deaf ears of the committee, every single one of Ford’s own four witnesses deny that anything like the events she described occurred; and if the committee’s GOP members needed a mantra to recite, that’s the one they should have chosen.

Her four witnesses who witnessed nothing include the accuser’s life-long friend, Leland Ingham Keyser, a classmate from the all-girls school Holton-Arms. Keyser denies having any “recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where [Kavanaugh] was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford,” or even knowing him at all. Moreover, if Keyser has any bias, it’s definitely not toward the honorable Judge. She is, after all, former Democratic political operative and liberal pundit Bob Beckel’s ex-wife and the current executive producer of his podcast. And her only political donation, according to OpenSecrets.org, was to former U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.).

On Thursday, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who once infamously and despicably lied about serving in Vietnam, gave philosophers a new version of the liar’s paradox by somehow managing to mutter, through a face so tightened by anaplasty, that one would have scarcely thought speech possible, the Latin for: false in one thing, false in all. If we didn’t know what a revolting specimen of unscrupulousness Blumenthal is, it would be puzzling why he directed his pompous remark to the accused rather than the accuser, since only Ford had been caught in any lies. The globe-trotting professor initially tried to avoid testifying before the committee by risibly pleading a fear of flying, and we can only be thankful that she didn’t blame Kavanaugh for this strange phobia, which didn’t preclude frequent flights to academic conferences and vacations to sundry tropical paradises. Besides undermining her credibility, the impossibility of maintaining such a lie in the internet age also reveals how confident the Democrats are that the corporate press will cover for Ford by making sure the passive zombies who their advertisers view as easy marks never hear about even her most obvious lies.

When the accuser’s own witnesses disconfirm her claims and she’s been caught lying about obvious matters of fact, not only do the allegations fail to have enough credibility to warrant a hearing, they don’t have any credibility whatsoever. Even without Ford’s well-known inconsistencies concerning the number of people present and her initial vagueness as to time and location, that should have been enough for committee chairman Chuck Grassley and his GOP colleagues to tell the Democratic committee members to pound sand when they demanded a hearing.

But, even were Ford’s allegations at all credible, it’s preposterous to suppose that they were serious enough to drag Judge Kavanaugh’s name through the mud at a public hearing. The Republican senators who consented to this circus ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Stripped of her Teflon histrionics and clairvoyant claims about Kavanaugh’s intentions, supposing the events she described did occur, what do we have? She was pawed by Kavanaugh 36 years ago at a teenage drinking party from which she scarcely would have escaped if the two football players, who on her own account made no attempt to pursue her whatsoever, were really out to do her harm. But, even were her charges substantially more serious as well as having more than zero credibility, the fact that the alleged events happened in high school when Kavanaugh wasn’t even 18, together with the series of spotless FBI investigations he’s undergone in his long and very public career and the testimony of hundreds of women to his impeccable character over the intervening period make it reprehensible to publicly reveal these charges and put Kavanaugh through a politically motivated show trial, in which pages from his high school yearbook are blown up as if they were evidence from a rape victim’s forensic exam.

Equally reprehensible was how the GOP’s weak-kneed capitulation kept out of bounds Ford Blasey’s high school yearbook ; which straightforwardly rather than in some secret code that only creepy porn lawyers and Democratic senators can crack, portrays her as a promiscuous drunkard hiring male strippers and preying on younger boys.

Ford’s accusations had zero credibility and weren’t serious enough to justify putting Kavanaugh, his family, and our nation through this monstrous charade. But they were also made in such bad faith that I’d be insulting my audience’s intelligence if I belabored the obvious political motivation behind them. Suffice to say that the Democrats sat on these allegations for months before releasing them to the press at the last minute in an obvious attempt to delay the vote in the hopes that November’s election will yield enough of a shift in the Senate’s balance of power to deny President Trump a pick for the Supreme Court.

Thanks to Lindsey Graham’s outrage at Kavanaugh’s reprehensible treatment and his recognition that things weren’t going well due to the GOP’s cowardly decision to hire prosecutor Rachel Mitchell to do their job—which was political, not legal—the Democrats horrendous bad faith was at least finally mentioned. Even here, though, one wishes Graham’s colleagues had followed his lead and been less mealy-mouthed about the dishonorable behavior of their Democratic colleagues. But, what’s worse is that they didn’t follow his lead on Ford.

Graham paid minimal lip-service to her honesty and suffering, and one could tell that his heart wasn’t really in it. But, rather than using his less than enthusiastic encomiums to her virtuous suffering as a bridge to begin to bring her evident complicity in the Democrats’ repulsive scheme to light, they instead backtracked, with most of them feeling obliged to assert a banal, sickening, and patently absurd moral equivalence between the professor and the judge. Adults really shouldn’t need to be told that, given that he denied what she asserted and its gravity, one of them is a despicable liar and that, given what her own witnesses say, it’s obviously Ford.

I doubt even her fellow members of Hillary Clinton’s resistance would claim that Ford would have come forward if Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy aligned with her neoliberal worldview. And, if any were not so shameless, the names of Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Keith Ellison, and Corey Booker, who’s admitted to exactly what Kavanaugh’s been unjustifiably accused of, ought to shut them up.

Christine Blasey Ford, who will soon gain close to $1 million from online funding campaigns run in her name, is the key perpetrator without whom the Democrat’s heinous scheme couldn’t even get off the ground. She is in no way Judge Kavanaugh’s fellow victim, and it was revolting to see her portrayed as such by those who were supposed to be on his side. If they couldn’t summon up the courage to set the record straight, they ought at least to have avoided reinforcing its crookedness.

The Democrats decided to use the same disgraceful plot against Brett Kavanaugh that they tried against Clarence Thomas with the hopes that the reboot would end differently. Unbelievably, the lesson the GOP appears to have learned from Thomas’s ordeal is that successfully stopping the slanderous lies against him from depriving him a place on the Supreme Court wasn’t worth being called mean by the Democrats and their media allies. As a result, they allowed the reputation of an honorable man to be dragged through the mud and it remains to be seen whether Feinstein will manage to make up for the Democrats’ failure to destroy Clarence Thomas. In doing so, the Republican committee members not only betrayed Kavanaugh, they betrayed their voters, their country, and their president.

The Democrats may be unprincipled cretins, but you have to respect them for not lacking courage. Something, sadly, that can’t be said for many of their colleagues from the other side of the aisle.

Michael Thau is a contributor to American Greatness. He's currently working on a book about the Russia collusion narrative. He also blogs at A Clearer Picture.

Everyone Lost at the Ford-Kavanaugh Hearings

By Andrew Sullivan
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/09/kavanaugh-ford-hearings-everyone-lost-andrew-sullivan.html
September 28, 2018

Yesterday was a spectacle I hope we do not have to experience again. We watched two human beings, Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh, exposed in the rawest possible fashion to the entire world, over the gravest of accusations, with no definitive evidence apart from personal testimony to draw on, 36 years after an alleged crime took place. It was a grotesque political drama, in which everyone lost.

Both Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh have been traumatized and ill-served by the process. At the all-day Senate hearing, there was no real sifting of evidence about her allegation that he sexually assaulted her, because nothing but memories were on the table. (We still don’t even know when or where the alleged attack happened.) Other witnesses were not called to testify, which they obviously should have been, if only to say (as they all have) that they had no memory of the event. So we were left to judge the credibility of two individuals, who both said they were 100 percent certain.

Christine Blasey Ford was not just credible, her account of her assault and trauma was deeply affecting. She was understandably anxious in such a setting, but kept her shit together, made her case poignantly and calmly — her moments of humor, her need for caffeine, her hair framing her glasses like wisteria were all thoroughly human. In her dignity and restraint and precision, she helped me and I’m sure many others better understand what sexual trauma is.

I do not believe she was making anything up. She has no reason to; she tried to avoid this; she wanted to keep this private; but she wanted, as a civic duty, to pass this along to the relevant authorities. I still don’t understand why Senator Feinstein didn’t immediately forward her letter to the FBI, whose job it is to do a background check on Kavanaugh, while keeping strict confidentiality in the process. Such a referral need not have outed Ford. It could have allowed for a proper investigation, and an airing of all this in a private session. I understand Republican suspicions of the way this turned out.

But once this all had happened, it should still have been perfectly reasonable to have a full FBI investigation, followed by a private hearing for senators to assess the facts of her allegation. The Republicans have no answer to why they won’t do that, and neither did Kavanaugh. That’s a huge mark against them, it seems to me. Just a week is all we would need. And if Kavanaugh is as innocent as he claims, an FBI inquiry would surely help him clear his name. Besides, there’s no rush, no mandatory deadline. The current Senate will be the same through next January. I’m not sure we would learn anything new from an FBI process that we don’t know already, but more scrutiny is never a bad thing. Maybe something would turn up.

Which brings me to Kavanaugh’s testimony, which was spellbinding in a different way. He behaved, it seemed to me, exactly as an innocent man would behave if accused of a crime in his teenage years — especially a crime that was unveiled by his political opponents at the very last moment. It was one that he could not possibly refute (no one can prove a negative) and it catalyzed a media frenzy — multiple gang rapes! — that continues to get more extreme every day. There’s a reason we have statutes of limitation. When alleged crimes happened decades ago, proof is very hard, and allegations much easier. And when the alleged perpetrator was also a minor, we’re in a very weird and difficult place.

As the afternoon went on, I found my mood swinging back to Kavanaugh’s defense. At first, I was shocked by what seemed to me to be his shouting and belligerence. But then he drew me in. Of course he was angry. Wouldn’t you be if you were innocent or had no idea where this allegation suddenly came from? He wasn’t being accused of sexual harassment, or sexual abuse as an adult in a way he could have refuted or challenged. His long-lost teenage years as a hard-drinking jock were now under the microscope. Even his yearbook was being dissected. Stupid cruelties and brags from teenage boys were now being used to define his character, dismiss his record as a judge, his sterling references, his respected scholarship, his devoted family, his relationship with women in every capacity. He had to fend off new accusations, ever more grave and ever more vague.

And there were times, it seems to me, that he simply couldn’t win. If he hadn’t hired and mentored many women, it would be proof he was a misogynist and rapist. But the fact that he did hire and mentor many of them was also proof he was a misogynist and a rapist, who only picked the pretty ones. If he hadn’t shown anger, he would have been obviously inhuman. When he did express rage … well, that was a disqualifying temperament for a judge. It didn’t help that the Democrats made no pretense of having an open mind, or that any glimpse at mainstream media — let alone media Twitter — revealed that it had already picked a side. This was, for the major papers, especially the New York Times, a righteous battle against another white straight male, and the smug, snarky virtue-signaling on Twitter was in overdrive. Even Kavanaugh’s choking-up was mocked — just another contemptible “bro-crier.”

And so when Lindsey Graham suddenly unloaded on the Democrats, I felt a wave of euphoria. “Yes,” I said to myself. “Go get ’em, Butters!” When Senator Blumenthal got all self-righteous about a single lie destroying someone’s credibility, I actually LOL-ed. Then I remembered all those op-eds and essays that decided to judge one moment in one man’s teens as somehow deeply revealing about … white privilege, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, toxic homosociality, bro culture, alcoholism, patriarchy … you name it, Kavanaugh was suddenly its foul epitome. He was an instant symbol of all the groups of people the left now hates, by virtue of their race or gender or orientation. And maybe he is. But did any of that necessarily make him guilty of anything, except by association?

At lunchtime, I thought he should withdraw. Ford was unforgettable, dispositive. But then the afternoon had me drifting back toward the Republicans. I doubt I am alone in this, just as I doubt my liberal friends understand how deeply they’ve alienated so many with their reflexive prejudices. By dinnertime, I felt like I’d vote for him, if I were a senator — because I found the Democrats so nauseatingly priggish. Then I remembered I was against the Kavanaugh nomination for other reasons entirely: especially because of his deference to presidential power when we face a president who would dearly like to blow a giant hole in the rule of law. And since I couldn’t in good faith choose between Ford and Kavanaugh about something that happened 36 years ago, I simply decided to put this accusation in a box. I’ll make a judgment on what I can know, not on what I cannot possibly judge.

But I will say this.

To the extent that the hearing went beyond the specifics of Ford’s allegations and sought to humiliate and discredit Kavanaugh for who he was as a teenager nearly four decades ago (a dynamic that was quite pronounced in some Democratic questioning of the nominee), it was deeply concerning. When public life means the ransacking of people’s private lives even when they were in high school, we are circling a deeply illiberal drain. A civilized society observes a distinction between public and private, and this distinction is integral to individual freedom. Such a distinction was anathema in old-school monarchies when the king could arbitrarily arrest, jail, or execute you at will, for private behavior or thoughts. These lines are also blurred in authoritarian regimes, where the power of the government knows few limits in monitoring a person’s home or private affairs or correspondence or tax returns or texts. These boundaries definitionally can’t exist in theocracies, where the state is interested as much in punishing and exposing sin, as in preventing crime. The Iranian and Saudi governments — like the early modern monarchies — seek not only to control your body, but also to look into your soul. They know that everyone has a dark side, and this dark side can be exposed in order to destroy people. All you need is an accusation.

The Founders were obsessed with this. They realized how precious privacy is, how it protects you not just from the government but from your neighbors and your peers. They carved out a private space that was sacrosanct and a public space which insisted on a strict presumption of innocence, until a speedy and fair trial. Whether you were a good husband or son or wife or daughter, whether you had a temper, or could be cruel, or had various sexual fantasies, whether you were a believer, or a sinner: this kind of thing was rendered off-limits in the public world. The family, the home, and the bedroom were, yes, safe places. If everything were fair game in public life, the logic ran, none of us would survive.

And it is the distinguishing mark of specifically totalitarian societies that this safety is eradicated altogether by design. There, the private is always emphatically public, everything is political, and ideology trumps love, family, friendship or any refuge from the glare of the party and its public. Spies are everywhere, monitoring the slightest of offenses. Friends betray you, as do lovers. Family members denounce their own mothers and fathers and siblings and sons and daughters. The cause, which is usually a permanently revolutionary one, always matters more than any individual’s possible innocence. You are, in fact, always guilty before being proven innocent. You always have to prove a negative. And no offense at any point in your life is ever forgotten or off the table.

Perhaps gay people are particularly sensitive to this danger, because our private lives have long been the target of moral absolutists, and we have learned to be vigilant about moral or sex panics. For much of history, a mere accusation could destroy a gay person’s life or career, and this power to expose private behavior for political purposes is immense.

I’m not equating an accusation of attempted rape in the distant past with sodomy. I am noting a more general accusatory dynamic that surrounded Ford’s specific allegation. This is particularly dangerous when there are no editors or gatekeepers in the media to prevent any accusation about someone’s private life being aired, when economic incentives online favor outrageous charges, and when journalists have begun to see themselves as vanguards of a cultural revolution, rather than skeptics of everything.

And for what it’s worth, I’m not sure we have any idea how the politics of this will play out. Both political parties may be pursuing pyrrhic victories. If the GOP manages to muscle Kavanaugh onto the court, it may galvanize the Democratic base to such an extent it will create a blue tsunami in November. It could poison the Republican brand for women even more than it is already.

But if this nomination falters, Kavanaugh will be a clarion call for Republicans to turn out. It could help them in November. And if Trump nominates Amy Coney Barrett as a replacement in the lame duck session of the Senate, another attempt at character assassination will be a very risky option for the Democrats, as would be attacks on Barrett’s religious faith.

So on the substance of the Court’s future, it seems to me that the Democrats have ensured this past week that if Kavanaugh is confirmed, they will have created an embittered foe in the Thomas mold. And if they end up with Barrett, they will have have someone on the Court more certain to strike down Roe than Kavanaugh.

See you next Friday.