Bookworm Beat 10/5/2018 — the “Leftists don’t speak for this woman” edition

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The Kavanaugh hearings have served a useful purpose in that they revealed the Leftists’ vicious and unbridled lust for power to all Normal Americans.

Bookworm Beat Benghazi LeftistsI’m delighted that it looks as if the Republicans, with help from Manchin and no help from Murkowski, will be able to drag Kavanaugh across the finish line. However, while Kavanaugh’s place on the Supreme Court will enhance that Court’s reverence for the Constitution as written, not just as Leftists desire it, the fissures in America have deepened, which the articles and videos below highlight.

The only bright spot is that, while the fissures are deeper, those on the Leftist side may find themselves more marginalized as those people whom Kurt Schlichter calls “Normals” are increasingly disgusted by the self-styled elites excess and hostility to both Normals and constitutional norms. And with that, some things for you to enjoy:

A reminder why Normals recoiled from the unfounded charges against Kavanaugh. This video is from a Catholic Women’s organization, but I think it readily applies to all women who don’t hate men:

I know that, since the day my son was born, I realized that boys, in their own way, are just as vulnerable as girls. I also realized that today’s social norms are incredibly hostile to men, tearing them down instead of cultivating their manly virtues.

A PragerU video reminds us that feminism is also bad for women. Not only is today’s Third Wave man-hating feminism bad for boys, it’s bad for girls too:

I don’t think we can make enough of the point Klavan advances that Third Wave feminism, instead of cultivating women’s virtues as things that contribute profoundly to the good of society, insists that women must be weaker versions of men. This has resulted in women who drink more, sleep around more, and insist on getting in the way on the battlefield, all while downplaying the one thing that they’re uniquely suited to do: nurturing. It’s ironic really that I say this, because I hate nurturing. But I’m good at it. It’s hardwired, whether I like it or not.

I was actually primed for Klavan’s message because years ago I read an excellent book called Female chauvinist pigs: Women and the rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy, a very depressing book that first exposed me to a world in which young women try desperately, and in a soul-killing way, to compete with men when it comes to sexual excess and debauchery. Men used to think this was a good idea. Sex! Sex! More sex! However, when you look at the horribly damaged women this creates (see the Steve Crowder video, below, and what I have to say about it), men have to be having second thoughts.

The Kavanaugh defamation is a terrorist tactic leading to real violence. So far today, three people have sent me a link to James Simpsons’ article The Kavanaugh Allegations Are Psychological Terrorism, And It’s Time They End. The article is long, but well worth reading because it talks about the way the Left uses these tactics both to drive good people out of the public square and to incite the masses to actual violence:

The charges do not need to be true, or even credible. People do not recoil because of the charges themselves (although, as we see, the left spares no effort to dream up the worst accusations they can think of). People recoil out of fear.

This tactic relies on the human herding instinct. People naturally shy away from anyone so vilified, whether the charges are credible or not, simply out of fear of being smeared with the same brush. They don’t want to be ostracized by the group.

Such excommunication has real consequences on reputations, jobs, relationships, even survival. The real goal is to threaten the rest of us into silence. How many people, for example, never used Donald Trump yard signs or bumper stickers out of fear of ostracism, or even property destruction?

The hypocrisy goes deeper than I realized. A friend of mine, a well-respected lawyer, wrote an interesting post about the breakdown of the Supreme Court nomination process. In it, he remembers something I’d forgotten, which is that the same people savaging Kavanaugh for being emotional savaged Bork for not being emotional:

Many observers trace the breakdown of civility in the confirmation process back to the hearings on Judge Robert Bork in 1987. When asked why he wanted to sit on the Supreme Court, Judge Bork answered that he had spent his professional career “in the intellectual pursuits of the law,” and that sitting as a Supreme Court Justice “would be an intellectual feast.”

For this, Judge Bork was roundly criticized by Democrats, who argued that such unemotional intellectualism demonstrated a lack of judicial temperament.

For example, former federal judge Shirley Hufstedler testified against him, calling his “quest for certitudes” a way to avoid “having to confront the grief and untidiness of the human condition.” She said that Judge Bork’s testimony showed “a lack of appreciation of what happens to real human beings.” A liberal columnist pointed out the absence of any reference by Judge Bork to “the concrete human realities” of the cases he would be judging. The columnist bemoaned the Judge’s apparent lack of interest in “the range of human experience.”

Judge Kavanaugh displayed the untidiness and range of the human condition in spades.

Democrats — or Republicans for that matter, when positions are reversed — can’t have it both ways. Do we want Supreme Court nominees to be dispassionate Dr. Spock’s, or do we want them to be all too human creatures who, like Judge Kavanaugh, cry out in pain and anger when they and their loved are attacked? We need to come to some sort of consensus on the meaning of judicial temperament, and then to apply it to nominees with consistency.

Read the whole thing.

Speaking of which, the hard Left ABA has announced that it’s going to re-evaluate Kavanaugh’s rating because of that “temperament” thing. The only reason I wish I still had an ABA membership is so that I could cancel that membership all over again.

Also speaking of which, I thought Christopher Caldwell summarized nicely the Kafka-esque cruelty of the Left’s attack on Kavanaugh’s temperament:

The question is not “whether he’s innocent or guilty,” said Cory Booker. “I am emphatically not saying that Kavanaugh did what Ford says he did,” says Wittes. “The evidence is not within 100 yards of adequate to convict him. But whether he did it is not the question at hand.”

What is that supposed to mean? This amounted to saying that Brett Kavanaugh lacks a “judicial temperament” because he objected to being summarily executed following a show trial. If you permit the criteria of culpability to shift, then you have the circular logic typical of totalitarian regimes. Just as there are people famous-for-being-famous, now there are people guilty-of-being-accused.

The quoted language also reminds us what an execrable weasel Corey Booker is, as if the events of the past few weeks haven’t already made that fact evidence.

You’d think Ford would want her evidence out there. Lest you have any lingering doubt that Blowsy-Ford is an unprincipled liar, please remember that she refuses to turn over the documents she repeatedly reminds us proves she’s telling the truth:

Chuck Grassley has again asked Dr. Ford and her lawyers to “turn over the therapy notes, polygraph materials, and communications with the Washington Post that Dr. Ford has relied upon as evidence.” And he is right to do so. For an accuser to rely upon evidence that is not made available to the accused is extraordinary. For that accuser to refuse to comply with a request from the person in charge of a process that she herself initiated is even more so.

I figured out early on that Blowsy was a liar. The fact that her only corroborating evidence was statements she allegedly made to a therapist decades after an alleged incident was a giveaway. That kind of allegation it wouldn’t stand in a court of law, which has owned over centuries of Anglo-Saxon and American jurisprudence what constitutes credible evidence. If it can’t pass muster under time-trusted methods for winnowing out the trust, I’m suspicious.

And then the lies started piling up: The front door remodel that definitely happened years before she claimed it had and that seemed to be for the purpose of building an illegal office; the alleged witnesses who disavowed her story; the lies about flying and closed spaces; the probable lie about polygraph knowledge; and on and on. Add to that the bizarre little girl voice and demeanor, and for me it all spelled sociopath, not victim.

Because I didn’t believe Blowsy from day one, I found irksome her being called a “survivor.” As Stephanie Gutmann asked, “What if Ford is not truly a ‘survivor’? Don’t we have to establish whether she’s a survivor first?”

Whither (or wither) the University of Texas? The University of Texas at Austin is one of my alma maters. When I was there, it was a fairly conservative place, so much so that I really stood out as a California Democrat, even though I was a moderate. That historic UT no longer exists. Instead, UT is just another hard Left university that uses public dollars to turn out screeching, criminal mobsters:

A leftist group released the personal information of a group of pro-Kavanaugh protesters at the University of Texas at Austin.

A far left group called the Autonomous Student Network (ASN), which was first reported on by Campus Reform, published the private personal information of a group of pro-Kavanaugh protesters at the University of Texas at Austin. The information included personal phone numbers, emails, and employer phone numbers.

“Yesterday, members of the Young Conservatives of Texas tabled with pro-Kavanaugh & anti-#MeToo signs on West Mall. They were swiftly confronted by a growing crowd of students, who made signs in protest, destroyed YCT signs, and chanted slogans like ‘we believe survivors!’” the far-left ASN group wrote in a blog post. “With women of color taking the initiative, the protests grew increasingly militant and also confronted the administration and the police enabling the YCT rally. Within two hours, the YCT had fled in the face of the massive backlash.”

In the post, the group encouraged readers to use the information provided in the blog post to ensure that the protesters face repercussions for defending Kavanaugh.

“We encourage people to use these to wage campaigns and ensure there are repercussions for the actions they took yesterday. Demonstrating in defense of rapists and making campus hostile to survivors should not go unanswered. At the same time, students should prepare for backlash,” the blog post reads. “Already, one student is facing harassment and threats because of a video circulating from yesterday. Students should expect to organize solidarity campaigns against targeted harassment, and begin securing their own information to avoid harassment.”

The Left’s thuggish habit of chasing people down is becoming epidemic. It was, after all, an elevator attack on Flake that caused him temporarily to derail the entire confirmation process.

Just today, protesters again chased Lindsey Graham. While he fought back with his extraordinary newfound élan, the fact remains that allowing this mob behavior to continue unchecked is a dangerous precedent. In a civilized democracy, with voters having a say in governance through their elected representatives, for the losing party to try to run those same representatives to ground like harried foxes is a societal breakdown that needs to be stopped very fast and hard.

Here are just three recent emblematic examples of the violently aroused Left’s thinking . . . except that “thinking” is the wrong word, because the first tweet, from someone with 167,000 followers, explicitly tells Lefties not to think, but just to feel:

The second tweet probably deserves a visit from the Secret Service:

The third tweet, which is explicitly from a communist “Democrat Socialist,” might also merit a little Secret Service visit:

Please note how many likes and retweets the above sentiments earned, especially the first two. Also, please keep in mind that this is precisely the type of behavior that Maxine Waters has actively encouraged:

To date, state and local governments have done little to stop these Leftist intimidation tactics. Sure, the police arrest protesters, but Leftists consider those arrests a badge of honor. Moreover, they congregate in industries with employers who also see these arrests as badges of honor, whether they’re working for universities, coffee shops, news outlets, movie studios, or even political offices.

Once arrested, these thugs are invariably released, sometimes without even a slap on the wrist. That needs to stop. These domestic terrorists (because that’s what they are) need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Given that they are snowflakes, spending some hard time in prison might help rejigger their world view.

Texas kids ain’t what they used to be. I mentioned UT-Austin in the above snippet. The rot goes far beyond that. If you haven’t already seen it, you have to watch one . . . I was going to say “young woman” but that’s too kind . . . one shrieking savage at Texas Christian University fall apart when Steve Crowder challenges her about the “rape culture” narrative. It’s not just her lack of logic that should disturb anyone who watches the video. It’s also her abandonment of all civilized behavior that makes it so disturbing (her hysteria begins at 16:00):

This gal’s disgraceful, embarrassing, animalistic behavior is a loss of control that, rather than increasing my sympathy, actually makes me suspect that her “rape” was a drunken hook-up which, after the fact, made her feel like a pathetic sleaze. When you watch Yazidi women, whose families were murdered and who were turned into sex slaves for filthy, disgusting, abusive ISIS fighters, they don’t behave that way.

Even worse, though, than this mindless, repulsive, and definitely not credible hysteria, is the craven response from TCU’s administration:

“Today, Steven Crowder chose to challenge our students on a public sidewalk in front of the university. While the Constitution gives him the right to express his views, the sentiments he expressed do not align with TCU’s values,” the university said in a tweet. “His views adversely affected many members of our campus community. The health and safety of the Horned Frog Family is of utmost importance and we encourage individuals to contact campus resources for support.”

I don’t know if TCU gets federal funds, but I’ll say again that every college and university in America should lose all federal funding. Every one. If these institutions can survive in the marketplace, great. If they can’t, their buildings should be razed and the ground sown with salt to make sure that these grotesque excrescences never again emerge to destroy America’s youth.

Media hacks encourage silencing the opposition. Matthew Dowd, one of ABC’s resident hacks, may call himself a conservative, but he has some really weird ideas about what conservativism entails:

Again, please note the vast number of people who approve when a media figure says, “You Normals can’t handle the truth . . . unless I spoon-feed it to you through my personal media filter.”

Kimberly Strassel was having none of this:

Sadly, Strassel’s tweet has had a much smaller reach than Dowd’s profoundly anti-free speech little temper tantrum.

Mark Judge on gay predator priests. Before Mark Judge came to national prominence as a proto-rapist in Blowsy-Ford’s fevered and partisan imagination, he was someone speaking out about gay priests who deliberately got themselves teaching positions in schools with hordes of adolescent boys. In that context, you won’t be surprised to learn that the media ignored him as hard as it could, both by being lazy and by being biased:

On August 17, Washington Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein tweeted the following: “the 2018 Catholic clergy sex abuse crisis for some U.S. Catholics is the opening of civil war over homosexuality and Vatican II. The unanswered question is how many Catholics.”

In fact, the Catholic civil war over homosexuality has been going on since at least 2006. That’s when Boorstein herself ignored a tip I gave her about homosexuality and its connection to sexual abuse at a Catholic school I had attended from 1979-1983.

[snip]

When Fr. Orr was first accused of sexual abuse in 2003, Boorstein called me, a former Prep student, for comment. I told her there was a much larger story at Prep and in the larger Catholic Church. That story was the mass infiltration in the priesthood of gay men. It made an all-boys school like Prep an interesting and sometimes harrowing place to be.

I was especially appalled that one of my teachers had been Bernie Ward. Ward is a former socialist radio talk show host who is now serving a prison term for trafficking in child pornography. Ward had studied to be a priest. He then taught sex education at Georgetown Prep in the early 1980s, before decamping to San Francisco where he became a socialist version of Rush Limbaugh. As early as 1978, Ward had been accused of sexual misconduct around students. In 2007, he was convicted of distributing child pornography. He served a sentence of seven years.

[snip]

Boorstein said she would call me back.

“Listen,” she said a couple of days later. “I talked to Georgetown Prep. They say Bernie Ward never taught there. So that won’t be part of the story.”

I still remember standing there, dumbfounded. I had just tipped off a reporter for the Washington Post — the Pentagon Papers, Woodward and Bernstein, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post — that a former priest who had been indicted for child pornography had once taught sex education at the same school where another man had been caught making “inappropriate contact” with a student. Boorstein was taking the school’s word for it.

Finding out the truth was as simple as opening an old yearbook. Boorstein later confessed that she and her Post colleague felt I had “a gay problem.”

There’s more at the link. After you’ve read it, ask yourself whether it’s a coincidence that, when Ford and her friends concocted their little story, they added Mark Judge to the mix. Knowing how the Left operates, I wouldn’t be surprised if Lefties, once they realized that Kavanaugh and Judge were friends, saw Ford’s story as a way to kill two birds with one stone.

Jennifer Rubin and the political rectification of names. What I know about Confucius qualifies as one of the world’s shortest books. However, I have been exposed to his idea about the “rectification of names.” When someone asked Confucius what he would do if he were governor, he said he would “rectify the names” to make words align with reality:

A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.

One of the current starting points for the rectification of names is found in a request from multiple conservatives that the WaPo stop calling Jennifer Rubin its “conservative” columnist. The woman is anything but conservative. No one has outlined better than Charles C.W. Cooke the ways in which Rubin has abandoned conservativism. It’s not just that she hates Trump; it’s that she hates all the values she once championed:

If Trump is indeed a tyrant, he is a tyrant of the mind. And how potent is the control he exerts over Rubin’s. So sharp and so sudden are her reversals as to make effective parody impossible. When President Obama agreed to the Paris Climate Accord, Rubin left her readers under no illusions as to the scale of her disapproval. The deal, she proposed, was ‘ephemeral,’ ‘a piece of paper,’ ‘a group wish,’ a ‘nonsense’ that would achieve ‘nothing.’ That the U.S. had been made a party to a covenant so ‘devoid of substance,’ she added, illustrated the ‘fantasy world’ in which the Obama administration lived, and was reflective of Obama’s preference for ‘phony accomplishments,’ his tendency to distract, and his base’s craven willingness to eat up any ‘bill of goods’ they were served. At least it did until President Trump took America out of it, at which point adhering to the position she had theretofore held became a ‘senseless act,’ a ‘political act,’ ‘a dog whistle to the far right,’ and ‘a snub to ‘elites’’ that had been calibrated to please the ‘climate-change denial, right-wing base that revels in scientific illiteracy’ (a base that presumably enjoyed Rubin’s blog until January 20th, 2017). To abandon the ‘ephemeral’ ‘piece of paper,’ Rubin submitted, would ‘materially damage our credibility and our persuasiveness’ and represent conduct unbecoming of ‘the leader of the free world.’ One is left wondering how, exactly, any president is supposed to please her.

When Rubin wrote for Commentary, she was an intelligent, insightful, and intellectual consistent moderate conservative. When I look at her anger and her un-grounded, un-explained intellectual U-turn, I keep wondering if she has an organic problem. Her behavior is consistent with people who have brain tumors or other physical problems. Time will tell….

Fake news was born when Muhammad al-Durah didn’t die. Back in 2003, the Palestinian cause got a shot in the arm with footage purporting to show a 12-year-old boy named Muhammad al Durah shot to death by Israeli troops. Except that’s not what happened. Other footage almost certainly proves that this was all a propaganda hoax. al Durah is probably a young man now hurling grenades at Israeli soldiers or sending incendiary devices into Israel to burn crops.

Richard Landes, who was instrumental in exposing the hoax, has written an article revisiting this crime. One of the important points he makes is that, even then, Western journalists knew that they were reporting fake news, but they did it anyway because of “the narrative.” Before “fake but accurate” was a CBS catchphrase, the media was happily living the lie:

I already knew that Palestinians faked footage, but what I now understood was that the mainstream news media, whose first imperative was to filter out such blatant propaganda, had accepted it as a normal practice, and used the fakes to tell the “real” story. Professional standards for journalists in the West can make even staging B-roll problematic. But apparently, in the Middle East, Western journalists have few problems with staged A-roll as long as they can cut it into believable site-bytes of Israeli aggression and Palestinian victimhood.  Veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon would later describe Netzarim Junction as the focal point of the new Arab-Israeli war, one in which “more than 30 were killed and hundreds injured.”

I could go on because I have endless material, but I can’t go on because of time constraints. The above, though, should keep people busy for a while.

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