Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Moli̬re РCompagnie Michel B) THEATRE ESPACE MARAIS (2)
Claire Berlinski was writing a book about Foreign Affairs (I forget the detail), and I guess it has not been going well, because apparently poor Claire has had to find another job. She’s auditioned to perform in the French theatre.
Every French schoolkid can recite scenes from Molière and Racine. Come time for the annual baccalaureate exams, French Twitter lights up with hashtags like #niqueracine. Classic theater performs, for the French, the role of the King James Bible in English: Anglophones go to Church to expose themselves to the range and grandeur of their native language. The French go to the theatre.
I was telling myself all of this as I tried to work up the enthusiasm to walk out my apartment, turn left, and just knock on goddamned door of that verkakte theater. It will be so good for you. You will understand France, French, and the French so much more intimately. I opened the window and sniffed: Something about the atmospheric conditions felt wrong. I saw droplets of rain and high clouds. I sat down again.
What got me off my ass was checking my bank balance. It was horrifying. The anxiety that prompted vastly exceeded my stage fright. I had no choice but to march myself over there right then and there and cough up a story about becoming an actress.
Bill McGurn, in the WSJ, explains why the democrats are determined at any cost to destroy this man.
As malignant as were the campaigns against Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, even they didn’t face accusations as vile and unrelenting as the unsubstantiated charges against Brett Kavanaugh. Adding to the injustice is that the frenzy surrounding his nomination isn’t really about him.
It’s about Roe v. Wade. The 1973 Supreme Court decision upended the laws of all 50 states on behalf of a constitutional right to abortion the Constitution somehow neglects to mention. Since then, the advocates of a living Constitution posit that while our Founding document is infinitely malleable, this one ruling is fixed and sacred.
Judge Kavanaugh’s great misfortune is to have been nominated at a moment when the party in opposition frets this fixed and sacred ruling could be overturned.
Never mind that Chief Justice John Roberts is unlikely to acquiesce to a move that would bring down the furies on his court. Or that it’s not clear Judge Kavanaugh would be any different, having assured senators that he regards Roe as “settled†and “an important precedent†whose central holding had been reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). Or that overturning Roe still wouldn’t make abortion illegal.
The problem is that even Roe’s most ardent champions know it is devoid of legal and constitutional substance. So they know it is vulnerable to a closer look by any serious jurist, including those who are themselves pro-choice. No wonder Sen. Dianne Feinstein tweeted, “It’s not enough for Brett Kavanaugh to say that Roe v. Wade is ‘settled law.’ â€
Let me translate: Nothing personal, judge. But if you won’t declare that a decision laid down by seven unelected men in robes is untouchable, we have no choice but to do whatever it takes to keep you off the high court. This is what Democrats do when they see a possible fifth vote against Roe in play.
It’s what they did in 1987 when they transformed “Bork†into a verb. It’s what they are now doing to Judge Kavanaugh. They do it with the eager help of a press that has abandoned even the pretense of objectivity, and institutions such as the American Bar Association and American Civil Liberties Union, which have betrayed their own principles in the effort to bring this man down.
In this cause, there is no room for fairness and decency. When CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Sen. Mazie Hirono if Judge Kavanaugh deserved “the same presumption of innocence as anyone else†about the sexual-assault accusations against him, the Hawaii Democrat gave the game away.
“I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases,†she replied, noting he “very much is against women’s reproductive choice.â€
Mr. Tapper understood instantly. “It sounds to me like you’re saying, because you don’t trust him on policy and because you don’t believe him when he says, for instance, that he does not have an opinion on Roe v. Wade, you don’t believe him about this allegation about what happened at this party in 1982†he asked.
Victor Davis Hanson sees the old American norms transformed in the Kavanaugh process, and he sees all this as a major milestone on the road of American decline.
The Kavanaugh confirmation hearings and their endless sequelae have ended up as an epitaph for a spent culture for which its remedies are felt to be worse than its diseases. Think 338 B.C., A.D. 476, 1453, or 1939.
The coordinated effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court required the systematic refutation of the entire notion of Western jurisprudence by senators and much of the American legal establishment. And there was no hesitation in doing just that on the part of Senate Democrats, the #MeToo movement, and the press. And I write this at a moment in which conservatives and Republicans still control the majority of governorships, state legislatures, the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court and the presidency—a reminder that culture so often is far more powerful than politics.
So, here we were to be left with a new legal and cultural standard in adjudicating future disagreements and disputes, an utterly anti-Western standard quite befitting for our new relativist age:
The veracity of accusations will hinge on the particular identity, emotions, and ideology of the accuser;
Evidence, or lack of it, will be tangential, given the supposed unimpeachable motives of the ideologically correct accuser;
The burden of proof and evidence will rest with the accused to disprove the preordained assumption of guilt;
Hearsay will be a valuable narrative and constitute legitimate evidence;
Truth is not universal, but individualized. Ford’s “truth†is as valid as the “Truth,†given that competing narratives are adjudicated only by access to power. Ford is a victim, therefore her truth trumps “their†truth based on evidence and testimony.
Questionable and inconsistent testimony are proof of trauma and therefore exactitude; recalling an accusation to someone is proof that the action in the accusation took place.
Statutes of limitations do not exist; any allegation of decades prior is as valid as any in the present. All of us are subject at any moment to unsubstantiated accusations from decades past that will destroy lives.
Assertion of an alleged crime is unimpeachable proof. Recall of where, when, why, and how it took place is irrelevant.
Individual accusations will always be subservient to cosmic causes; individuals are irrelevant if they do not serve ideological aims. All accusations fit universal stereotypes whose rules of finding guilt or innocence trump those of individual cases.
The accuser establishes the conditions under which charges are investigated; the accused nods assent.
Our cultural traditions are being insidiously rewritten in this new Dark Age. We know now that Euripides’s Phaedra should have been believed, as a female accuser of rape. Perhaps university presses can either reissue properly corrected editions or ban the Hippolytus entirely. No doubt we will ban Racine’s Phèdre as well. Harper Lee’s Tom Robinson deserved his fate because his female accuser should have been believed—and perhaps To Kill a Mockingbird should be rewritten as well. In our time, we have finally and only now belatedly realized that Tawana Brawley’s voice was stifled.
Jonah Goldberg tries to figure out why Brett Kavanaugh has caused the Left to pull out all the stops.
I want to be open-minded. So I will concede that the allegation is not theoretically impossible, given the depths of depravity that humans in every generation and every civilization and at all strata of class and privilege are capable of.
But it would be highly unlikely, to say the least. I say this having some insight, however imperfect, into the social milieu from which Kavanaugh hails. I didn’t grow up in Washington, but I did technically go to a prep school.
(My school was not as prestigious as Georgetown Prep. There was always a raging debate about my alma mater: Was it the best school on the B-List or the worst school of the A-list? But it was a prep school.)
I knew kids at various schools like Kavanaugh’s. They could be, to borrow a term from social science, dicks. I’m not saying he was. But even if he was, that doesn’t mean he was a rapist. Though, to listen to various liberals, you’d think stereotypes about sex, race, and class are always true so long as you’re talking about white preppy Christians.
Still, I will confess I have my own biases. I never took high school too seriously, so I had a certain amount of resentment towards those who did. The kids who constantly worried about their permanent record; the kids who did everything they could to please teachers or gussy-up their college applications; the kids who seemingly without much effort checked boxes as both jocks and academic grinds; the kids who were always worried about getting in trouble for fear of having to go to a state school: These were kids that I didn’t gravitate towards precisely because I couldn’t be one of them. But I will grant them this: They seemed really unlikely to organize rape gangs if for no other reason than that such things look really bad on your application to Yale.
Again, I don’t mean to be unfair to Brett Kavanaugh. I have no doubt that a regular churchgoing kid had other reasons not to do the logistical heavy-lifting of drugging and raping teenage girls on a regular basis. I’m just assuming the worst while still employing Occam’s Razor. And I just have a hard time believing that the Rapey McRapeFace who Avenatti and his fans describe is the real Brett Kavanaugh.
1LT Waverly Wray was born in 1919 and raised in the wooded hills around Batesville, Mississippi, perhaps a forty-five minute drive from where I sit typing these words. An expert woodsman steeped in fieldcraft from his youth, Wray was described by his commander, LTC Ben Vandervoort, thusly, “As experienced and skilled as an Infantry soldier can get and still be alive.†At 250 pounds Wray was an intimidating specimen, yet he was also a committed Christian man of character. He fastidiously eschewed profanity and sent half of his Army paycheck home each month to help build a church in his hometown.
Immediately after jumping into Normandy with the 82d Airborne, 1LT Wray set out on a one-man reconnaissance at the behest of his Battalion Commander. Wray’s mission was to assess the state of German forces planning a counterattack against the weakly held American positions outside Ste.-Mere-Eglise. Wray struck out armed with his M1 rifle, a Colt 1911A1 .45, half a dozen grenades, and a silver-plated .38 revolver tucked into his jump boot. Hearing German voices on the other side of a French hedgerow, Wray burst through the brush and shouted, “Hande Hoch!†Confronting him were eight German officers huddled around a radio.
For a pregnant moment, nobody moved. Then seven pairs of hands went up. The eighth German officer reached for his sidearm. 1LT Wray shot the man between the eyes with his M1.
A pair of German soldiers about 100 meters away opened up on Wray with MP40 submachine guns. 9mm bullets cut through his combat jacket and shot away one of his earlobes. All the while Wray methodically engaged each of the seven remaining Germans as they struggled to escape, reloading his M1 when it ran dry. Once he had killed all eight German officers he dropped into a nearby ditch, took careful aim, and killed the two distant Wehrmacht soldiers with the MP40’s.
Wray fought his way back to his company area to report what he had found, blood soaking his ventilated jump jacket. His first question was to ask where he could replenish his supply of grenades. When American forces eventually took the field where Wray had waged his one-man war against the leadership of the 1st Battalion, 158th Grenadier Regiment, they found all ten German soldiers dead with a single round each to the head. Wray had completely decapitated the enemy battalion’s leadership singlehandedly. Wray stopped what he was doing and saw to it that all ten German soldiers were properly buried. He had killed these men, and he felt a responsibility to bury them properly.
Waverly Wray survived the savage fighting in Normandy only to give his life for his country at Nijmegen, Holland, during Operation Market Garden later in the year. He has a granite marker in Shiloh Cemetery in Batesville, Mississippi, near the church he helped build. 1LT Wray was, by all accounts, an exceptionally good man who died six days before his twenty-fifth birthday.
One question I have pondered over the last few weeks is, why are the Democrats so determined to block Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court? Realistically, he is the most moderate nominee they are likely to see from the Trump administration. If his nomination fails, the president will most likely appoint Amy Barrett, who is secure against #MeToo allegations and is both more conservative and younger than Kavanaugh. So what is the point?
To some extent, the Democrats’ bizarre smear campaign against Kavanaugh is explicable on short-term political grounds. The Democrats’ crazed base demands that they #Resist, so resist they will, whether it does any good or not. But I think there is something deeper and more sinister at work.
Brett Kavanaugh enjoys one of the most spotless reputations of anyone in American public life. He has been enthusiastically endorsed by those who have known him all his life–by girls he knew in high school and college, by judges he has served with, by professors and students and Harvard and Yale law schools, by judges who have worked with him, by his judicial clerks–most of whom have been women–by the American Bar Association, by sitting Supreme Court justices. In short, everyone who has ever known or dealt with Brett Kavanaugh endorses him.
I think that Judge Kavanaugh’s pristine reputation is one reason why the Democrats have unleashed against him a smear campaign unparalleled in American history. This is the message they are trying to send: If we can do this to the Boy Scout Brett Kavanaugh, we can do it to anyone. Are you thinking of serving in a Republican administration? Or accepting an appointment to the federal judiciary from a Republican president? Think twice, and then think again.
Lance Morrow found the Kavanaugh Confirmation hearing Thursday reminding him of some classic cinema
The story of the Kavanaugh affair had the elements of a black-and-white movie from long ago: “Advise & Consent†retold as “Rashomon,†a masterpiece of tabloid civics in the old Washington style. When the day was over, everyone was depressed about the country; some said this was a new low. And yet everyone had been richly entertained. Only Frank Capra, returned from the dead, could have done the day justice. …
After Ms. Ford finished her testimony, the audience voted, informally, and the verdict was all but unanimous. “Kavanaugh is toast,†a friend emailed from London. On Fox News Channel, Chris Wallace said the same. Blood drained from faces in the West Wing.
The #MeToo movement sensed victory and vindication. You can imagine what Capra would have done with the moment: a fast montage of jubilant American women’s faces, energized.
But then came a ferocious turning of the plot, a great reversal—the sort of thing they teach in courses called How to Write a Brilliant Hollywood Script.
Judge Kavanaugh—previously all judicial temperament, all gravitas and family man—came hot into the committee room, now almost weeping, now insulting the Democrats (who recoiled a little), his distinctively Murland accent (that’s Maryland) harsh and a little reckless, his figurative middle finger extended toward the Democrats, whom he acknowledged now to be his bitter enemies—a menace to his home, his family.
And on the other plane, we were deeply back in adolescence, in underage beer drinking, football practice and swimming at the country club, back in the time of intense studies and intense friendships, of class rankings, all-nighters and idiotic, salacious entries in the yearbook.
The F. Scott Fitzgerald challenge came into play. Judge Kavanaugh—passionate, indignant, his voice breaking, eyes tearing—denied everything Ms. Ford had said, at least the parts involving himself. He, too, was entirely credible. …
Part of the sympathy accorded him now emerged from what we knew of his ordeal in recent days—the sudden onslaught of sexual allegations, three of them now, the second being quite incredible and the third being unprecedentedly scurrilous and filthy. Judge Kavanaugh gained sympathy from his evident suffering and that of his family. His wife sat behind him in the hearing room wearing an expression of unutterable disgust.
Ultimately, there developed an interesting dialogue between two phrases—“her truth†and “the truth.†New Jersey’s sea-green incorruptible, Sen. Cory Booker, made much of Ms. Ford’s having “told her truth.†He meant that if she told “her truth,†it was enough. Except it was not enough. The question was whether her truth was the truth—or whether his truth was the truth. It wasn’t possible that the two truths, his and hers, could square with one another.
The country will take its pick in November. In a way, American politics, even its idea of reality, has sifted down to a choice between Brett’s truth and Christine’s.
