Viewing the Kavanaugh Game Film

1

I knew that the Left had been guilty of a gross overreach late last week, prior to the final confirmation vote on Kavanaugh. I was en route to an early morning 6 am meeting, and stopped at a convenience store for some coffee. The other customer in there was a salt-of-the-earth type, the kind of blue collar worker who stops at convenience stores at 5 o’ something in the morning. He was ahead of me in line and then, apropos of nothing in particular, he went off like a geyser. The substance of his observations had to do with the raw deal Kavanaugh was getting. He then exited the store, only to stick his head back in with a general and fairly loud observation that liberals were so open-minded their brains had fallen out. Thereupon he departed. I came up to the counter, and the clerk started in on the raw deal that Kavanaugh was getting. Now I will cheerfully grant that this is an unscientific poll, and so I cite it, not as an example of the kind of thing people are thinking, but rather as the kind of thing they are now willing to say, no matter who might hear it. For all these gents knew, I was a Marxist English prof at the University of Idaho.

2

Talleyrand, or somebody like him, once made this observation about some unnecessary execution ordered by Napoleon. “It is worse than a crime; it is a blunder.”

3

“They have prepared a net for my steps; My soul is bowed down: They have digged a pit before me, into the midst whereof they are fallen themselves. Selah” (Psalm 57:6). 

“So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then was the king’s wrath pacified” (Esther 7:10).

This is the kind of story that unfolds inexorably. At this point nobody can reach in and twiddle any knobs to make it go differently. The whole thing is screamingly obvious. Haman’s wife could read it (Est. 6:13).

4

Nancy Pelosi has been speaking about the prospect of impeaching Kavanaugh if the Democrats take the House in the mid-terms. You keep talking that way, hon. Make sure the cameras are rolling. I am willing to bet that extended footage of such comments will show up in hundreds of Republican campaign commercials. If this is the unhinged way it is going to be, then perhaps we ought to see to it that the Democrats don’t get anywhere close to taking the House.

5

The reason the Democrats can’t reel it in is that they have moved left past the tipping point. The commies are in complete control of the party now, and even if they wanted to move back to the center, for the sake of winning elections, the center is not there anymore.

6

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the political script that God is writing for us is about as subtle in naming the characters as Bunyan was. You know, with names like Talkative, and Faithful, and Giant Despair. In recent years God has given us Rep. Weiner, and now Sen. Flake. So when will the country come to the conclusion that there is some kind of celestial funny business going on with a President Trump?

7

What Flake thought he was doing with his flake, and what actually happened as a result of his flake, were two entirely different things. That extra week was a windfall for the pro-Kavanaugh forces. It was just enough extra to ensure that everybody in the country got a full dose of what the Left has in mind for us all.

8

The list of Supreme nominees that President Trump is choosing from is a good list. Kavanaugh wasn’t the best one on there, but he was a solid-enough pick. I am glad he is on the Court now. So here is the question. I can see a nominee that good having been put forward by any one of the other Republican contenders for the presidency in the primaries. What I cannot envision is the prospect of them standing by their nominee when he started to get this (inevitable) treatment. The fact that the Republicans hung together in this brawl (except for one Alaskan stray) is in my mind a near miracle. This in no small measure was due to the fact that the president stayed strong behind Kavanaugh. For whatever reason, our current president is one upon whom all the old tricks don’t work. This may be the result of some deep character deficiency on his part, but the political fact remains that the old tricks don’t work. Can you imagine a Republican without those character deficiencies upon whom all the old tricks would work? Yeah, I can imagine a boatload of them.

9

At the same time, I think Michael Avenatti really needs to dial it back a few ticks. He is starting to seem like some kind of super-genius false flag operation. He has been just too good to be true. Forget whether the president paid off Stormy Daniels. Maybe somebody should check whether the president is paying off Stormy’s attorney;

10

I am currently reading a couple of books that might help you all, oh readers of Mablog, to understand our current climate. The first is Militant Normals by Kurt Schlichter, and will help explain the peculiar nature of the populist pushback we are seeing. The second is The Demon in Democracy by Ryszard Legutko, and it addresses the totalitarian tendencies that can be displayed by liberal democracies, which have been very much front and center in the antics of the Left during the course of this nomination and confirmation. These protesters are not protesters—they are agitators, disrupters, revolutionaries, totalitarians, and thugs, and in an item of more than passing interest, they were on the Astroturf Inc. Payroll.

11

If you are genuinely concerned about foreign interference in our political processes, and the thought of collusion makes you distressed, then I propose you follow the money on this one.

12

You may have noticed a pattern in all of this. The Left wants to delegitimize anything that crosses them. We are about to move from “not my president” to “not my Supreme Court.” They oppose Kavanaugh because, they say, he poses a threat to our established institutions and way of life, and then because they were defeated in the Kavanaugh battle, they are prepared to jettison the states being represented by the Senate, the Electoral College, the authority of the Court, etc. What they actually want is power, and the only instruments they care about are the instruments that look like they might bring them power. And the last thing on earth that any of these people should have is power.

13

If the Left had been willing to behave like civilized human beings throughout the course of this process, I believe they would have defeated Kavanaugh. But they just couldn’t restrain themselves—largely because contemporary leftism is the political manifestation of a host of personal problems.

14

Not a day goes by but that the realization that Hillary is not the president brings a spring into the step, a gleam to the eye, and an ebullience of spirit that cannot be dampened by anything the president might tweet.

15

The vitriol was scalding hot, and all of Middle America saw it on full display. The conclusion that has been drawn by Middle America is running along these lines: “Those people hate me. They hate everything about me. They hate my suburban lawn, and they hate my minivan, and my barbecue pit. Why on earth should I want to be governed by people who hate me?”

16

The conventional wisdom says that the party in control of the White House loses seats in the midterms. This is the conventional wisdom that has the Republicans possibly losing control of the House. But here is a small grab-bag of reasons why, in this case, the conventional wisdom might not be all that. First, nothing about this current political season is conventional. Why would the normal thing happen in these, our abnormal times? Second, the reason this usually happens is that the incumbent appears to the public be in too strong a position, the opposition is highly motivated, and the party in power has rapidly become too complacent. But while Trump is the incumbent president, he has not been accepted by official Washington at all, and so still seems like an outsider to the country at large. He is getting things done as though he were an incumbent, but is not getting any of the perks of being seen as an incumbent, which means that he is getting one large perk—that of not really seeming like someone who needs to be “balanced out” with a House controlled by the opposition. The fact that the official opposition went barking mad on this confirmation battle has helped with this perception considerably. Then third, Trump has been campaigning with large rallies the entire time he has been president—the end-run strategy he employed earlier, and successfully. Fourth, we should take special note of the fact that it would be hard to imagine any spectacle that could motivate Republican voters to get to the polls more than the spectacle we have just witnessed. If this was a massive effort by the Left to get every last registered Republican to the polls, I think it worked. And last, it’s the economy, stupid. Going into the midterms, after eight years of the Most Impressive Lethargic Economy on Earth, look at the current jobless numbers, the economic growth, the regulatory cuts, the tax cuts, etc. All of this is to say that the highly touted and much predicted blue wave may not happen at all. And if it doesn’t happen, does anyone want to lay any bets about whether the Democrats will respond to yet another loss like responsible adults? No, we are talking about full meltdown.

17

Compared to the coming battle over the Ginsberg replacement, this Kavanaugh thing was a minor scuffle. This was a little pushing and shoving outside your local Target on Black Friday. But if the Ginsberg seat opens, it will be a do-over of the battle of Stalingrad, if that battle had been augmented with giant alien beetles with lasers.

18

This may seem like I just take any opportunity to hawk a book, like I was the son of a colporteur or something, which I am, but the spectacle we have just witnessed in Washington means that we absolutely must turn back to the Scriptures for our definition of justice. To the law and the testimony. The Left hates justice in one way, and we are now seeing signs of a backlash against that. But backlashes have a way of veering into injustice also. We have heard a lot about due process lately, and the book below will help provide you (and your kids) with a foundational understanding of the biblical basis for due process, and all her cousins.