George Rebane
By the slimmest margin, this morning the Senate voted cloture – to restrict remaining debate on the confirmation of Judge Kavanaugh before the vote to confirm scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. Odds are that by this time tomorrow Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed as the newest Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.
Here and elsewhere the road to the confirmation vote has led us through some of the smelliest sewers of our federal government while unambiguously revealing the journalistic corruption of our vaunted Fourth Estate. For all intents and purposes, what in these pages I have labeled the ‘lamestream media’, the overwhelming membership of that estate has today successfully morphed into the Ministry of Information (aka propaganda arm) of the Democratic Party.
It is turning out that the real collusion in this confirmation drama occurred in the Democrats’ management of the hearing’s witnesses. The most recent FBI investigation revealed that there was a concerted, coordinated, albeit unsuccessful effort to get Dr Ford to perjure herself on her (lack of) recollection of the facts related to her allegations against Judge Kavanaugh. The larger dimensions of this sordid side of the sewer has yet to play itself out – stay tuned.
But cutting through all the hashed and rehashed details, what can we take away from the confirmation process when the dust settles after tomorrow’s Senate vote? According to my lights, over the last several weeks we have seen incontrovertible evidence that Americans belong to at least two irreconcilable camps anchored by ideological factions with diametrically opposite directions in which they want to take the country. We now speak at each other without the hope of communicating anything – it is all just rehashed testimony to comfort the true believers on both sides, and perhaps to snag the sentiments of someone still puzzling about their own perch.
Any progress seen in this process is just more and more of the undecided and recently awakened making commitments to join this side or that. This morning’s Senate floor statements by its majority and minority leaders erased any remaining doubts that Republicans and Democrats have participated in the same constitutional advice and consent process for the benefit of a common nation. Instead, both sides were hunkered down behind their own barricades, now separated by a no-man’s-land that no argument, were any still to be found, launched at the other could breach.
Since November 2016 the Left has been on the losing side, refusing to believe what the election mandated under a Constitution that long ago lost its common meanings and undisputed role in resolving our political differences. What they warned America that the Right would do after their queen was crowned, they themselves have done ten times over. In every sector where they have ideological primacy, they have doubled down in their characterization of those on the Right as deplorably evil people determined to subjugate America and set up a dictatorship of the corporate elites.
A voice growing louder with such a message is the new Progressive Party USA. These people claim that their supporters comprise over half the American population, and a healthy number of the nation’s legislative leaders. Their party platform reads like a siren song for the cognitively stunted, very similar to the one that Chavez and Maduro successfully sold to the back-country farmers of Venezuela. It is definitely worth a read to see a blueprint for bringing a prosperous nation to its knees. My own assessment is that the PPUSA people are most likely more right than wrong in what they see as the beliefs of a large segment of Americans. Two plus generations of us have now graduated from strongly pro-socialist, anti-capitalist schools. Along with the delivery of STEM education, our citizens’ ability to think critically has atrophied beyond what many of us thought possible just a decade or two ago.
Besides its educational deficits, the progressive brain has been shown to use different neural structures for critical thought. What is reasonable to them in matters of governance and public policy, is more often than not completely unreasonable to us. And because of these seminal difference between us, neither side can present reasonable arguments to the other when attempting to bolster their case. So today we are existentially two nations sharing few mores and values, still attempting to (forced to?) live cheek-by-jowl within common borders. As we have confirmed with the Kavanaugh congressional catastrophe, it is becoming more and more difficult to civilly conduct communal business in the halls of our common government.
I close these thoughts with an intimate local example. Today Mr Don Rogers, publisher of our county’s newspaper – wrote ‘Low road to high court’, a scathing summary of the Kavanaugh confirmation. Mr Rogers, a self-declared Republican who has demonstrated precious few Republican sentiments during his tenure at The Union, agrees that both sides of the confirmation process spent their energies talking past one another. However, he sees perfidy in the process coming only from Judge Kavanaugh and his Republican supporters. No recognition, let alone understanding, of the ‘guilty as alleged’ show put on by the Democrats, not a word of the now emerging Team Ford collusions. Our publisher concludes his j’accuse by being astounded as to why Judge Kavanaugh was even chosen, “a guy who finally showed the nation he was such a partisan punk?”; and then finishes with, “Wait, does this make me a liberal?” Mr Rogers, you have said it most convincingly.
[6oct18 update] Judge Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed by the Senate this afternoon to become Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. This most sacrosanct function of our Senate – ‘the greatest deliberative body in the world’ – was completed after Minority Leader Schumer delivered his swansong contribution to the debate by opposing the confirmation with a litany of lies about Kavanaugh and the confirmation process, a litany that was not even punctuated by any obvious truths. He was followed by the placed (and paid?) screaming leftwingers in the Senate gallery in their attempt to disrupt the proceedings as they were removed by the Capitol Police. They thus perpetuated the century-long leftists prerogative of militating by mob to overturn established due processes in which they cannot prevail, and which they then seek to overturn by all means available. Such actions in the public forum have been and continue to be the only recourse of collectivists, actions that underwrite the bankruptcy of their ideas.
[7oct18 update] A new litmus test may have emerged for separating conservatives from progressives. Conservatives continue to believe in the due process in which the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty; progressives hold that narrative supporting beliefs sans evidence is sufficient to prove the accused guilty. This Sunday’s after-action talk shows more than corroborated that discriminant between the two sides – everyone from talking heads, to party activists, to Congress critters reliably and uniformly divided on that litmus test.
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