It’s Wednesday, September 19th, 2018…but before we begin, courtesy of Wink Martindale, here’s another truly “late” breaking story whose provenance is as questionable as that of Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser:

Now, here’s The Gouge!

We lead off the Wednesday edition with two thoughts on the latest Kavanaugh kerfuffle: first, this forward from G. Trevor succinctly summarizes the utter hypocrisy of The Left’s selective sexual assault outrage:

The disbelief with which they greeted the claims of Keith Ellison’s accuser is only the latest in a long list of examples where The Left ignored inconveniently irrefutable allegations of rape and sexual assault/abuse committed by members of the Liberal elite.

Second, with all due respect to David French’s assertion to the contrary, NO, not EVERY accuser deserves to be heard.  Particularly when, by their own admission, they consumed alcohol the night in question and can’t recall: (i) where they were or whose home they were in; (ii) how they got there or got home; (iii) exactly when it happened; or, (iv) how many people were involved.  While the only things they can remember are the identities of the two (or was it four?!?) individuals they now claim assaulted them, one of whom has been nominated to the SCOTUS, and both of whom vehemently deny the charges.  Not to mention the sponsor of the spurious charges can’t confirm their accuracy.

Sorry, but such claims require, at the VERY LEAST, either (1) a corroborative witness; (2) accurate recollections of the facts; or, (3) or timely notification of law enforcement or other responsible authorities/parties; and preferably all three.

Otherwise, any yahoo with a grudge or a political axe to grind could COME OUT AT THE LAST MINUTE and make outrageous and baseless claims to have been harassed by an eminently-qualified right-wing jurist who supposedly placed a pubic hair on her Coke can.

Particularly when the lawyer for the accuser is a known anti-Kavanaugh operative and has in the past dismissed far more compelling claims of sexual abuse against Slick Willy and the least-funny comedian on the planet. 

In a related item, though there are any number of Conservative commentaries available on the subject, we thought the following from Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt  best highlighted…

The On-Again, Off-Again Skepticism about High-Profile Sexual-Misconduct Accusations

“…False, or unprovable, accusations of rape and sexual assault occur. The 2014 Rolling Stone article. The 2006 accusations against the Duke Lacrosse team. Columbia University’s “Mattress Girl.” Those high-profile examples don’t mean one should instinctively refuse to believe every accusation, any more than the cases of Bill Cosby, Roman Polanski, or Mike Tyson mean one should instinctively believe every accusation.

But right now, many Kavanaugh foes are eager to implement a new standard that they would never agree to live under themselves — that the accusation itself is sufficient evidence of guilt. Some are surprisingly explicit about it, such as Matthew Dowd, the chief political analyst of ABC News:

Enough with the “he said, she said” storyline. If this is he said, she said, then let’s believe the she in these scenarios. She has nothing to gain, and everything to lose. For 250 years we have believed the he in these scenarios. Enough is enough. (Until Matthew Dowd’s the accused!!!)

Senate Democrats want the FBI to investigate the claims, but a Department of Justice spokesman has already pointed out that Christine Blasey Ford’s account does not describe a federal crime.

It is fair to ask just what an investigation at this date would involve. The accuser does not remember the date of the alleged crime; she can only narrow it down to “near the end of her sophomore year.” She cannot remember the location of the scene of the crime. After 36 years, there are no forensic tests to run, and there is no physical evidence to collect or analyze. She names one witness, Mark Judge, who denies her accusation.

In 2012, 30 years after the alleged events, the accuser either told her therapist that there were four boys involved, or the therapist misunderstood and miswrote that she said four boys were involved.

No one at the school remembers hearing about any allegation along these lines involving Kavanaugh during his time there. Two of Kavanaugh’s ex-girlfriends from around that time period have come forward to publicly declare they never witnessed or experienced any behavior similar to what the accuser describes. And of course, Kavanaugh has categorically denied the accusation.

But if the foes of Kavanaugh are determined to implement a new standard — that the accusation itself is sufficient evidence of guilt — then that new standard will be implemented for figures in both parties, whether they realize it or not. (An assumption with which we disagree.)

If you believe that Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Keith Ellison, Al Franken, and Bobby Scott are all falsely accused, while Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Donald Trump, Blake Fahrenthold, Roy Moore, and Eric Greitens are all guilty as sin — or vice versa! — you’re part of the problem.“

Meanwhile, the Progressive plant plays the old “I’ll testify when I’m good and ready…and the FBI’s had time to investigate a purported crime over which they have no jurisdiction and the applicable statute of limitations has long expired” ploy:

Ford wants FBI investigation before testifying

This from the leading purveyor of Fake News who brought you…

Yes, that’s Anderson Cooper doing his best imitation of…

…Mike Seidel.

Tell you what: we’ll support the FBI investigating Ford’s fantasy as soon as they open a unbiased investigation into Hillary’s private email server.

Meanwhile, as NRO‘s Jay Cost suggests, the kangaroo court afforded Brett Kavanaugh confirms…

The Senate and the Supreme Court Have Been Granted Too Much Power

The Founders envisioned a federal government that handled only certain, enumerated tasks, but that schema got inverted after the Great Depression.

“…In the context of 1787, the design of the Senate made a great deal of sense. Yes, it was a parochial, state-based institution, but it was to legislate for a government that handled only certain, enumerated tasks.

Yet following the Great Depression, the constitutional schema was largely inverted. Whereas once the national government really claimed power only to do what was explicitly allowed under the Constitution, it subsequently began acting as though it was allowed to do anything that was not explicitly forbidden.

Despite this massive increase in federal power, the institutions tasked with wielding this power have remained more or less the same. While the Framers created a sensible balance between structure and power, subsequent generations have vastly expanded the latter while leaving the former the same.

No wonder our system seems so dysfunctional! What we have done since the Great Depression is analogous to trying to build a 50-story skyscraper atop a foundation meant for a two-story home. That would make no sense for an architect of buildings, so why should we expect it to work for an architect of governments?

…In the case of recent progressive bellyaching about the Senate, the immediate context is the Supreme Court, which serves as an excellent example of how expansive federal power makes little sense with the limited institutions we have retained. The real battle is over Roe v. Wade, a decision in which the Supreme Court applied a constitutionally unmentioned right to privacy to states and localities, which under the Tenth Amendment are supposed to be free to manage their affairs in all matters in which the Constitution does not explicitly grant the national government power.

That was a power grab, pure and simple. We can agree with it or disagree with it, but the plain fact is that the people never signed off on such a right to privacy, diminution of state authority, or sweeping Court jurisdiction — either at the original ratifying conventions or in any subsequent debates over amendments. Rather, the Court saw a chance to expand its power, and it took it. This has happened across all three branches time and again, especially over the last 80 years, which has seen the creation of the massive federal leviathan we now live under…”

Which brings us to where we are today, as evidenced by Speed Mach’s forward of the latest must-read commentary at American Greatness, as Victor Davis Hanson details…

The Circus of Resistance

“…Contrary to popular opinion, there was nothing “newsworthy” about the recent anonymous op-ed, written by an unnamed “senior official” about the supposed pathologies of President Trump.

Or rather to the extent the op-ed was significant, it confirmed what heretofore had been written off as a “right-wing” conspiracy theory of a “deep state.” The anonymous author confessed to being part of a group that is trying to use subterranean methods to thwart an elected president, not because his record is wanting (indeed, the author admits it is often impressive) but because he finds Trump unorthodox and antithetical to the establishment norms of governance and comportment.

To cut to the quick, the op-ed was published to coincide with the latest Bob Woodward “according-to-an-unnamed-source” exposé, Fear. The intent of anonymous and the New York Times was to create a force multiplying effect of a collapsing presidency—in need of the Times’ sober and judicious handlers, NeverTrump professionals, and “bipartisan” Democrats of the sort we saw during the Kavanaugh hearing to “step in” and apparently stage an intervention to save the country.

Had the Woodward book not been in the news, neither would be the anonymous op-ed. And of course, the Times, in times before 2017, would never have published a insurrectionary letter from an unnamed worried Obama aide that the president was detached and listless—playing spades during the Bin Laden raid, outsourcing to Eric Holder the electronic surveillance of Associated Press journalists, letting Lois Lerner weaponize the IRS, and allowing his FBI, CIA, and Justice Department to conspire to destroy Hillary Clinton’s 2016 opponent…”

Wake up and smell the REAL collusion, America!

Moving on, also courtesy of NRO, Kyle Smith records how Dimocrats are rapidly becoming…

“The Democrats’ winning midterm campaign message would seem simple enough: Trump is bad and must be opposed. Yet at the moment the party risks being associated with a somewhat less attractive message: The American flag is bad and must be opposed.

Last week, left-wing Democrat Ayanna Pressley ousted long-term incumbent Michael Capuano from the John F. Kennedy/Tip O’Neill House seat in the Democratic primary while praising the NFL anti-flag protests, which her opponent called “wrong.” Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke says — in Texas! — that there is “nothing more American” than kneeling for the national anthem. The judicious center-left New York Times columnist David Leonhardt notes in his daily newsletter that “the anthem is a trap for Democrats.”

That Nike rolled out Colin Kaepernick as its new spokesman not only knocked a couple of billion dollars off the value of the company, it also amounts to an in-kind campaign contribution to the Republican party. The Left and its base of activists, pundits, and (increasingly) woke capitalists simply can’t let this issue go, much less acknowledge that its flag-dissing is conceptually flawed. Demonizing a huge population based on stereotypes derived from the actions of a few of its members is exactly the kind of anti-American impulse that liberals once stood so valiantly against.

The Kaepernick-led anthem protests were wrong-headed to begin with. Try to follow this logic: The misbehavior of a few police officers means the police in general should be reviled. And if we revile the police the entire American project is to be rebuked by protesting the anthem. (Gee, where have we heard that sophomoric bullsh*t…

…before?!?) Martin Luther King Jr., by contrast, said his stirring vision was “deeply rooted in the American dream.” He called upon us to live up to American ideals. That isn’t Kaepernick’s message.

Now the protests have gone meta: They’re not about policing, they’re about Kaepernick. They are protests about a protester. A mediocre quarterback turned accomplished flag-troller is a hero to the extreme left, and because the extreme left wields gargantuan cultural power his story receives fawning treatment that, to a swing voter in Missouri or Indiana or Montana, seems out of touch or absurd or even enraging. Leonhardt cites an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that shows voters find the flag protests to be inappropriate by an eleven-point margin, which almost surely understates the gravity of the problem for Democrats. For one thing, the poll’s question was phrased to nudge respondents toward sympathy for the protesters. For another, you can be sure that the unemployed quarterback, like the similarly jobless Hillary Clinton, rolled up huge margins of support in population centers like New York City and Philadelphia and Chicago, which means he lost big in the areas that are politically contested.

Nike’s net approval rating plunged an astonishing 34 points last week, the kind of polling shift you wouldn’t expect to see unless Air Jordans were proven to cause ankle cancer. Keeping Kaepernick front and center in the national discourse is a bad move for a sneaker company, a bad move for the pundits and activists who cheered it, and a bad move for any Democratic office-seeker. If voters get it into their heads that this November 6 is about whether you should kneel or stand for the national anthem, it won’t work out well for Democrats in the short or long term.

President Trump is a political genius in much the same way that Wile E. Coyote is a mechanical genius, but he has proven that he has some lizard-brain, WWE-tinged sense of how to push the public’s buttons. (Or at least a significant segment thereof!) And Republican strategists are saying that this is as good a shot as any they have of changing the subject from the bedlam in the White House. It may not be long before Trump starts literally wrapping himself in the flag while wearing flag shorts, à la Rocky IV…”

And a majority of Americans will LOVE IT!!!

Finally, on The Lighter Side:

Magoo