Politics

I believe that Christine Blasey Ford is telling the truth when she claims that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a house party in the early 1980s, when she was 15 and he was 17. I believe her husband, Russell Ford, who has told the Washington Post that in 2012 his wife had recounted her experience during a couples’ therapy session, and named Kavanaugh. And I believe the story that Kavanaugh’s friend Amy Chua advised her female students that if they wanted to win a clerkship with him, they should dress like a model. All of which this leads me to conclude that Kavanaugh is not right for a seat on the Supreme Court. As Roger has written, the Democrats are doing everything they can to exploit Ford’s accusation for political ends.

This week in Washington, the big political stories centered on sex — one with an unfortunate lack of specificity, the other offering all too many details. After days of rumours that Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s pick for the open Supreme Court seat, was facing an allegation somehow related to sexual assault, his accuser came forward and told her story to the Washington Post. Christine Blasey Ford shed her anonymity and said Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her when they were high school students. She remembered how the event occurred, she said, but not exactly when or where. These details are important, but it seems we’ll never know what exactly happened at a suburban Washington house party sometime in the summer of 1982.

Is Christine Blasey Ford stealing a page from Trump? She’s just pulled the kind of power move that Trump himself likes to make in dealing with the Senate Judiciary Committee. Told that she must respond by 10 a.m. Friday about whether or not she will show up, Blasey has now declared that she can’t appear to testify on Monday but would like to later in the week. A letter from her attorney to the committee states, ‘As you are aware, she’s been receiving death threats which have been reported to the FBI and she and her family have been forced out of their home. She wishes to testify, provided that we can agree on terms that are fair and which ensure her safety.

Donald Trump is not an overly bookish kind of guy, but he keeps getting slammed by ambitious authors, ranging from Michael Wolff to Bob Woodward. The latest entrant in this crowded field is Full Disclosure by Stormy Daniels, a ribald tell-all of her frolics with Trump. In it, she lodges the accusation that she enjoyed the ‘least impressive sex I ever had’ with him. Daniels’s book suggests, among other things, that Sen. Marco Rubio was onto something when he mocked Trump for his small hands. Daniels corroborates Rubio’s suspicions with what the New York Post calls a below-the belt blow.

The difficulty in trying to assess the behaviour of Democrats these days is thinking sufficiently low.  When I wrote about Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in these virtual pages a couple of weeks ago, I predicted grandstanding from Cory ‘Spartacus’ Booker and Kamala Harris. I did not think low enough to suspect that the Democrats would help orchestrate a series of embarrassing outbursts from the NeverKavanaugh Left, but so it happened. Nor did I expect the Democrats to orchestrate a last-minute allegation of sexual abuse dating from 35 years ago when Kavanaugh was 17 and in high school.  As all the world now knows, that happened too.

Ron Unz is a curious man, both in the sense of being curious about things and in the sense of inspiring curiosity. Born in California into a Jewish family, Unz studied at Cambridge and Stanford before making millions through a financial-software firm. Some of us would have retired at that point to enjoy life with no more arduous pursuits than the occasional swim but not Unz. He began to involve himself with politics. In the 1990s, Unz was best known for the humble cause of promoting California Proposition 227, which attempted to promote monolingual education in Californian schools to advance immigrant assimilation. A somewhat bewildered CNN profile made note of his resourcefulness, intelligence and ambition — or, as they characterised it, his hubris.

It was a saturnine Manafort who appeared in court, but prosecutor Andrew Weissmann says that Manafort is already cooperating with the Mueller investigation, or, to use President Trump’s terminology, flipping. The likelihood is that Trump himself will flip out over this news. After all, he recently observed to Fox News, ‘It’s called flipping and it almost ought to be illegal.’ Now his decision to hire Manafort is becoming a case of the perils of Pauline for Trump. So much for hiring only the ‘best people.’ A week ago Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani proclaimed, ‘There’s no fear that Paul Manafort would cooperate against the president because there’s nothing to cooperate about and we long ago evaluated him as an honourable man.’ Yeah, right.

The Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh has been nasty. From protests and last minute document dumps to the raised voices and clamour to land the perfect ‘gotcha’ question, the highly partisan hearings have turned into a Democratic contest over who can hit Judge Kavanaugh the hardest. Consensus has formed that the junior senators from California and New Jersey, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, have done their respective name recognition among the Democratic faithful no harm should either of them seek the Democrat Party nomination in 2020. Which they both will.It’s not just Kavanaugh who has faced this Democratic barrage.

Andrew Cuomo has spent the better part of his tenure in New York engulfed by corruption and governance failure. As he lurches toward a third term of quasi-imperial gubernatorial rule, he has chosen to follow what has become the standard playbook for blemished Democrats needing self-absolution: just attack Trump. Even when Trump has nothing especially to do with the issues at hand, just attack him and hope it suffices for a plurality of the electorate. And so that’s what Cuomo has been doing at the few begrudging campaign stops he’s made in recent days, with actor Cynthia Nixon forcing him to at least give the appearance of seeking popular approval.

One rule of identity politics is that you get to choose your identity: ‘I identify as trans Latinx’. Another rule is that your identity is fated: ‘I was born trans Latinx’. The assumption of choice applies the logic of the market in a society of cheap credit and easy bankruptcy. The invoking of biological destiny is the crude mechanics of Victorian race theory. This is a pastiche of the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate. The purpose, though, isn’t the ‘identity’ part, solving the mystery of how we are made and become ourselves, but the ‘politics’ part. As in evolution, choice and heredity are complementary strategies, deployed for competitive advantage.

A couple of days ago, The New York Times took what it called the ‘rare step’ of publishing an anonymous op-ed column supposedly by a ‘senior official’ in the Trump administration. The column, which might have been written by Bill Kristol and then run through Pete Wehner’s patented Hand-Wringing Moralising Machine, is the perfect epitome of that emetic, holier-than-thou species of Never-Trump rhetoric practiced by newly irrelevant, nominally conservative pundits. ‘The root of the problem,’ writes this latter-day Mr Podsnap, ‘is the president’s amorality [unlike Hillary Clinton’s, I guess, who was the most corrupt candidate ever to run for the presidency].

It’s hard to avoid the impression that Donald Trump is being stalked by Anonymous, or anomious, as he mispronounced it twice at his rally last night in Billings, Montana (prompting another round of speculation about why he is slurring words). The proof came right as he was denouncing the Democrats for being nothing more than a bunch of lowdown, rotten ‘haters.’ Behind him stood an anonymous young man in a plaid shirt with a three-day stubble who became a sensation on Twitter as he made a bunch of animated facial expressions indicating a degree of skepticism and surprise in response to Trump’s complaints about everything from Bob Woodward’s character assassination to the assault by an op-ed writer in the New York Times.