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The Playbook, the Press, the Plan, and the Patsies

Who really can be surprised by the Democrats’ latest antics surrounding Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court? As the sands of the hourglass pour over what once seemed like their inevitable ideological triumph, and leftists across America and around the world realize that their Glorious Revolution will not be completed in their lifetimes, the agitators, true believers, and committed cultural Marxists have grown increasingly desperate as they try to stave off their imminent discomfiture and defeat.

Still, the tactics they’re now employing against Kavanaugh, while extreme, are nothing new for them. They’ve always shot from the hip and aimed for the heart, hoping to sway public opinion by means of passion rather than reason. The more convinced they are of the righteousness of their cause—call it their “higher loyalty” to the arc of history—the more antic they get, like chimps in the zoo at feeding time, moving from whingeing servility to outright viciousness the hungrier they get. Left unchecked, even the cuddliest Cheetah eventually will rip off your face.

By now, the outlines of their playbook are well known. Since winning isn’t just everything, it’s the only thing, “by any means necessary” is their working ethos. It matters not whether any part of their argument contradicts their own long-held beliefs and principles (although if you don’t like those, they have others), or that their prescriptions are inconsistently applied, and that rarely if ever are they willing to live under the same strictures they wish to force upon others. If they weren’t so malevolent, you might mistake them not for Karl Marx, but for Groucho:

But malicious they are, with a madness to their method. First, they posit a counterfactual—say, “diversity is our strength”—and then they argue it as if it were prima facie true. Should you object, they bombard you with insults and imprecations, calling your intelligence and, even more, your moral fiber into question. And once you’ve accepted their unexamined premises, if only out of politeness and conflict avoidance, they beat you to death with them.

So it is with the Kavanaugh confirmation. Does anyone not born yesterday truly think this entire shameful stunt just happened? Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, who as he ages more and more resembles an interrogator from 1984, promised total war right from the start, on the grounds that the Republicans might well do unto the Democrats as Democrats always do unto Republicans, and therefore they need to be stopped:

Note how Schumer contemptuously avoids addressing the feigned concerns proffered by the CBS hosts. Instead, he demonizes Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society as if he and they were representative of some red-diaper baby cell operation skulking around in the darkness, instead of a prominent conservative legal think tank. In other words, Schumer and his fellow travelers extend not a shred of good will to their political antagonists, instead ascribing to them only the basest possible motives—in other words, motives exactly like their own.

The same applies to the Kavanaugh circus. The Democrats threw the book at him during the confirmation hearings—“show trials” would be a better description of the proceedings—then pilloried him in the press. When all else failed, the increasingly despicable Dianne Feinstein (a woman I once admired from my journalist days in San Francisco, when she guided the city past the murders of Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk) dragooned Kavanaugh into the Democrats’ Smear Star Chamber, producing an eleventh-hour, anonymous allegation of groping at some time and at some place in the past and offering that as proof of his unfitness to serve.

Since Feinstein has had the letter since earlier in the summer, it’s obvious this stunt was scripted all along. Even when the woman “came forward,” as the current parlance has it, and when her unsubstantiated story was immediately denied and refuted not only by Kavanaugh but a host of others, it didn’t matter to the Left: the judge had been smeared, the damage was done, and the purpose served. Whether she “testifies” to something she can’t prove on Monday matters not, and Democrat calls for an investigation into possible booze-fueled high-school fumbling by the crack Federal Bureau of Investigation, which these days seems only able to bring coercive charges against citizens for… lying to the FBI… is just more monkeyshines. And her demand that her claims be federally investigated before she will deign to testify before Congress is chutzpah of the highest order.

David Axelrod, the Jake Lingle of the modern Democratic Party, gave the game away in a tweet:

That’s their real goal: political obstruction. The Democrats today no longer believe in the very system in which they serve. As Andrew McCarthy points out, the purported crime is long past the statute of limitations: “there is not a police organization in America that would entertain her allegation, in light of the lapse of time and the long-ago exhaustion of the statute of limitations.” To which the Democrats reply: so what?

But our two-party system can only work if both sides are of good will, in common agreement on fundamental principles, and profess fidelity to the country as founded. In their lust for power and the “fundamental transformation” of the Republic into a leftist tyranny, the Democrats can no longer function within such a framework—just as they couldn’t in 1860-61, declaring war first on Lincoln and then on the United States of America itself. It took four long and bloody years for Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman to show them the error of their ways. And even then, a Democrat murdered the president.

Today’s Republicans are, in the main, made of lesser stuff. More patsies than potentates, they roll over at the first hint of trouble; indeed, the late John McCain (R-Ariz.) made a fetish of what he called “comity,” which in his definition meant surrendering to the Left and poking his finger in the eye of the Right. His love children, Senators Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), would dearly love to inherit his mantle, but alas for the both of them, they’re self-retired short timers, and nobody cares what they think.

But Democrat memories, while long—they stretch back to Aaron Burr, Jefferson’s vice president, who shot Alexander Hamilton and founded Tammany Hall—are selective. They, like Iago, see themselves as victims, frustrated by the evil Federalists/Whigs/Republicans/conservatives from realizing their political program: free pie (in the sky) for all, but all power to themselves. It never occurs to them that, like Michael Douglas in “Falling Down,” they’re the bad guys.

Which is why they’re fighting so fiercely but ignobly against Kavanaugh. He does indeed shift the balance of ideology on the court away from Anthony Kennedy’s whimsy toward a grounded, conservative respect for the law. And when the next liberal justice shuffles off, and Trump appoints yet another originalist justice, their slim hopes of goose-stuffing social change down the throats of the American people via judicial fiat will be gone for a very long time. And so will their self-image of being on the “right side of history.”

This week will be crucial to putting the Democrats back in their boxes. Let’s see if the GOP will take it. As I noted on Twitter the other day:

Call their bluff. Call the vote.

Photo Credit: Felix Mittermeier/Unsplash

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About Michael Walsh

Michael Walsh is a journalist, author, and screenwriter. He was for 16 years the music critic and foreign correspondent for Time Magazine, for which he covered the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. His works include the novels As Time Goes By, And All the Saints (winner, 2004 American Book Award for fiction), and the bestselling “Devlin” series of NSA thrillers; as well as the recent nonfiction bestseller, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace. A sequel, The Fiery Angel, was published by Encounter in May 2018. Follow him on Twitter at @dkahanerules (Photo credit: Peter Duke Photo)