Character meets The Furies

Furies

In Greek and Roman mythology, the Furies were female spirits of justice and vengeance. They were also called the Erinyes (angry ones). Known especially for pursuing people who had murdered family members, the Furies punished their victims by driving them mad. When not punishing wrongdoers on earth, they lived in the underworld and tortured the damned.

According to some stories, the Furies were sisters born from the blood of Uranus, the primaeval god of the sky, when he was wounded by his son Cronus*. In other stories, they were the children of Nyx(night). In either case, their primaeval origin set them apart from the other deities of the Greek and Roman pantheons.

Most tales mention three Furies: Allecto (endless), Tisiphone (punishment), and Megaera(jealous rage). Usually imagined as monstrous, foul-smelling hags, the sisters had bats’ wings, coal-black skin, and hair entwined with serpents. They carried torches, whips, and cups of venom with which to torment wrongdoers. The Furies could also appear as storm clouds or swarms of insects. http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Fi-Go/Furies.html#ixzz5TDlXW176

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My American friends have gone through a couple of weeks in which scurrilous accusations threatened to ruin a man. Today that man was sworn in as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The Furies have been defeated.

I have no idea what sort of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh will be. Based on his record on the bench, I suspect he will be a bit less conservative than the liberals make him out to be. His Establishment credentials are impeccable and he is a good long way from the googly-eyed right.

For the Democrats, this rather staid man had to be the Devil himself. Apparently, the best way to rally the troops and the “Handmaidens” was to allege all manner of sexual impropriety. The evidence didn’t matter, the objective was smear and a smear which would motivate the democratic base. So, well, sex. Sexual assault. Frat bro behaviour. Drinking and such like.

It didn’t work.

Why it didn’t work is interesting because it came down to character. The character of Justice Kavanaugh and the character of President Donald Trump.

Kavanaugh was willing to stand up for himself, get angry, name names, and call out the Democratic smear. He showed the fight and the courage and the willingness to demand justice be done that I would hope any aspirant to the Supreme Court would have shown in the face of baseless allegations. He was willing to attack those baseless allegations and refute them as best he could.

Which showed real character and real grit. After all, Kavanaugh could have made it all go away by withdrawing his candidacy. Or he could have pretended to accept some or all of the allegations and provided an explanation. Instead, he stared down his Senatorial accusers and left them naked with their shabby accusations. He won his seat on the Court by refusing to play the scummy Democratic Party game.

However, the real show of character came from President Trump himself when he refused to withdraw Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Court. Trump thought he’d picked the right guy and he stuck by him. He didn’t have to. He could have withdrawn the nomination and moved on to the next person on the list.

Not how Trump plays. Trump plays to win. Trump plays to crush his opposition and, because he does, Trump never plays by the patty cake rules of the Washington Establishment. Trump was roundly criticized for imitating and mocking Dr Ford. Not “how the game” is played and so on.

Trump’s great gift is that he doesn’t give a rat’s ass how “the game is played”. He’ll make fun of people he thinks are lying, of people who are hypocrites (yes, Sen. Blumenthal, you get mocked for your non-service) and people who pull political stunts like Sen. Feinstein. He is not “Presidential” in any of the accepted senses of that term. My American friends elected a street fighter and Trump knows it.

Coming up to the mid-terms Trump is doing 3-4 MAGA rallies a week in states where the Republicans can win or hold Senate and House seats. No President has ever done that. 10,000 people in the room, 10-15,000 outside. Day after day, week after week.

In themselves, Trump’s rallies would probably hold the Senate and might, at a stretch, keep the House. But with the Kavanaugh win, the momentum has shifted. With the crazed anti-Kavanaugh harpies shouting down the Senate, Trump has his theme. “Elect them, you get this.”

Most fundamentally, Trump is underscoring a very serious point about American politics. Stand up guys can win. Simply by demonstrating their character, their resilience, their willingness to be truthful and forceful on their own behalf, stand up guys can win.

The “Resistance” is crumbling. Its Furies have been unleashed, its flying monkeys unchained, and they just bounced off.

I suspect Trump will be exploding more bombs over the next month. The October Surprises will all be coming from the White House. Trump’s character demands a denouement. A reckoning with what he is referring to as the “radical Democrats”. The looney women who were screaming in the Senate galleries, the deceitful Democratic Senators, the increasingly crazed mainstream media are all feeding into the season finale of Year 2 of the Trump Show. How will the viewers respond? Who will get voted off the island?

Thirty days from now we will know; but right now we know that Trump has given Republican Senators backbones, the Supreme Court an eminently qualified Justice and assorted celebrities, blue check media and whackadoo feminists, aneurysms.

It’s a good thing.

Inside FBI HQ

The Director: OK, McMullian. I know you are fairly new but, son, we’ve got a hot one for you.

McMullian: Yes Sir!

The Director: 35 or 36 years ago a seventeen-year-old boy is alleged to have grabbed a 15-year-old girl and thrown her on a bed. He is alleged to have tried to make out with her and he is alleged to have sexually assaulted her.

McMullian: Do we have the police report, Sir?

The Director: No.

McMullian: Witnesses?

The Director: Four, or maybe five. Not sure on that Agent.

McMullian: They were in the room?

The Director: Well she says one of them was and he “jumped on them” which let her escape.

McMullian: And where did this happen?

The Director: We don’t know.

McMullian: No problem…When?

The Director: We don’t know.

McMullian: Were the witnesses under oath?

The Director: Yup.

McMullian: So they remembered what happened?

The Director: Not exactly. They don’t remember any party at all.

McMullian: OK, so I’m to investigate a sexual assault which might have happened thirty-five or six years ago at an unknown location on an unknown date.

The Director: That’s right. And I need your report on my desk in 72 hours.

McMullian: Yes Sir.

The Director: And while you are at it McMullian, there is also an open case on a report of an incidence of unicorn farting in Maryland at roughly the same time. See what you can pick up.

McMullian: I’m on it, Sir.

The Director: POTUS want’s updates on the investigation. This could make your career.

McMullian: Does POTUS know there are no such things as unicorns?

The Director: I doubt it. But get’er done. Your country is depending on you.

McMullian: Yes Sir.

 

Dealing with Tantrums

As any parent will tell you a three year old can make an awful lot of noise when he does not get what he wants. Parenting is about what to do when the three year old goes ballistic.

One thing which sometimes works is speaking calmly and rationally to the kid. That can take a while though and is often of little effect in the supermarket. You can go the other route and become angry and hope shock and awe will put out the tantrum. That sometimes works but, honestly, it probably does more harm than good. You can, of course, simply pick up your child – to the relief of bystanders and change venue.

Or you can actually hear what the child is screaming about and see if there is a way to fix the problem.

The Democrats are in the midst of a tantrum royale about Kavanaugh. The fact this is a problem of their own making is not something they are capable of hearing. Nor are they willing to look at the facts presented to date if only because there are so very few actual facts that scrutiny will collapse their narrative. Screaming “Rapist, FBI, #metoo, believe women” is the closest the Dems have come to an argument.

The trouble is that the Democrats have climbed a very long way up the tree of crazy, so far that it is now actually dangerous for them to climb down. Which is a problem for the Republicans and for Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Much as I despise Senator Flake, his decision to vote the nomination out of committee but threaten to withhold his vote unless there is a short FBI investigation is a stroke of parenting genius. An FBI investigation does not reach conclusions – as Kavanaugh pointed out yesterday. Rather it looks for evidence and reports back on that evidence. There is no reason an investigation into Dr. Ford’s allegations needs to take very long. Five interviews. One with Ford and four with the people (they are not “witnesses” because they are saying there was nothing to see) who have all given sworn testimony that what Ford said occurred didn’t occur.

Now, were I Grassley I would want to secure Democratic buy in on the FBI probe – time limit and the single allegation. I suspect the Dems will hold out for the Ramirez allegation to be looked into as well. That would mean another dozen interviews. But the FBI is a big, sometimes efficient, organization and that is not beyond their capacity.

Will the FBI investigation resolve the allegations? No, because it will simply report the evidence and that evidence will be very much like the evidence we currently have. But the mere fact of an FBI investigation might just be enough to let the saner Democrats begin to carefully climb down the tree.

The objective here is not to prove or disprove the allegations against Kavanaugh – 35 years on, that is essentially impossible – the objective is to end the tantrum.

Politics and Process

I watched a bit of Dr Ford’s testimony before the Senate Committee and I watched a bit of Judge Kavanaugh. I also have been paying attention to the various statements of the people said by Ford to have been at the party – they all denied ever having been there or that there was even a party – and heard the increasingly crazy other accusers. I am quite sure that Ford thinks something happened and I am equally sure there is no uncontradicted evidence that it did. Personally, I think you need more than an uncolaborated thirty five year old recollection to make an accusation like that stick.

Which brings me to process. Both Ford and Kavanaugh were abused by a process which, itself, was corrupted by the worst sort of partisan politics.

Senator Feinstein is a political animal. As the ranking Democrat on the Justice Committee, she was the person Ford’s initial letter went to. Something on the order of eight weeks ago. Sen. Feinstein had a very basic obligation to ensure that this serious and potentially disqualifying allegation was investigated. She has been in Washington long enough to know how that could happen and she undoubtedly has FBI Director Wray’s number.

Had she behaved properly, once she had verified the authenticity of the letter, she would have told her Committee Chair, in confidence about the letter and they would have jointly submitted it for investigation to the FBI. With eight weeks in hand, the FBI would have done its investigation and collected evidence one way or another. This would have gone into the background report. Sen. Feinstein and the Chair would also have alerted the White House to this issue.

Had the allegation been substantiated, the White House would have had the option of withdrawing the nomination. Or it could have decided that the events of 35 years ago fell short of disqualifying and proceeded. Everyone would have had the FBI’s evidence and that could have formed the basis of part of the hearings into Judge Kavanaugh.

If the allegation could not be substantiated the FBI would still have submitted its report to the White House and the Committee and chances are nothing more would have been said.

This would not, of course, have been a criminal investigation but rather part of the significant background vetting the FBI performs on all manner of Presidential appointments.

This, apparently, didn’t have enough political torque for Sen. Feinstein. So she sat on the letter, found Ford legal representation, leaked – or had someone leak – the letter to friendly members of the press and then demanded delays and FBI investigations and the automatic disqualification of the evil attempted rapist. The media bayed in unison with the Wicked Witch of San Francisco and all of a sudden we were asked to “believe the woman” because #metoo. Assorted loons came out of the woodwork yelling #metoo “I think but I was too drunk to really know”, and “as a twenty one year old college girl there was nothing I liked better than going to high school rape parties until I was forced to pull the train”.

All because a partisan old harridain was willing to ignore process and abandon honour for the potential partisan advantage defeating or delaying a Supreme Court nominee could bring.

She was, of course, aided and abetted by her own Party.

I was delighted when Kavanaugh called her out and named names. It speaks well of his temperament. A Supreme Court Justice has to have a sense of Justice and be willing to fight for that Justice. He needs to be genuinely outraged by sleezy, underhand practices and be willing to make his outrage crystal clear.

Senator Lindsey Graham understood just how well Kavanaugh qualified himself for appointment against such scumball partisan tactics, “This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics!”

And it’s Coach Kavy for three points

Judge Brett Kavanaugh is a long way from the socon’s dreams of kicking Roe to the curb. He has a gold-plated resume, is judicially conservative in the best sense of that term, was in the Whitehouse on 9/11 and will be tough to defeat in the Senate. American legal beagles will have fun with some of his decisions and they are welcome to it. What I am interested in is how Trump has evolved.

Kavanaugh is a savvy pick. He’ll have all the Republicans – even the lovely lady Senators worried about Roe – and including the RINOs because of his Bush connections. He has fairly limited exposure in terms of red flags to the dwindling minority of Democrats who take Supreme Court nominations seriously. (He is, of course, Hitler to the loonies, but so would anyone Trump picked.)

Which means that, unless there is a tape of his grabbing someone’s nether parts, he’ll be confirmed and Trump will take the easy win. This is smart.

The difference between a professional and an amateur is in what they do when it is fourth down, six yards to go, on the thirty-five yard line with a 14 point lead going into halftime. Sure, you could run the touchdown play and rack up the points. But a pro will kick the field goal. It is the percentage move.

Trump has four months to the mid-terms. Winning the Senate should be fairly easy, but the House of Representatives is a bit more of a struggle. Being able to point to a string of victories – Gorsuch was a win, Korea was the beginning of a win, the unemployment rate and the worker shortage are wins, the black and Latino unemployment rates are big wins, a few days of summitry may turn up some wins – with which to build momentum. And a pro will anticipate losses – Mueller, even without an actual crime, is hurting, so are unneeded trade wars and the price of gas seems to be going up – and will understand that he has to take the hits.

But going into the locker room at halftime with a 17 point lead is way better than being ahead by a couple of touchdowns. Apparently, Trump gets that.

Winning the game means being re-elected in 2020. Being able to point to solid, confirmed, SCOTUS appointments will be a big part of that re-election campaign.