Roger Kimball

Andrew McCarthy, writing in National Review Online a couple of days ago, was certainly correct that it would have been outrageous and irresponsible to have suggested, at that early juncture of this still-unfolding episode, that the pipe ‘bombs’ were hoaxes devised by leftist activists to make it appear that nebulous right wing activists are targeting famous critics of Donald Trump, from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, all the way down the food chain to Senator ‘Spartacus’ Booker and Mad Maxine Waters. But the fact that McCarthy’s column is titled ‘Why No One Trusts the Media’ tells you that his prudent restraint is redolent of that device rhetoricians denominate apophasis or praeteritio.

I am a little surprised that the English essayist Walter Bagehot is not a more conspicuous part of our intellectual furniture. His was a gently disabused, quietly penetrating sensibility, at once sophisticated and manly. How much wisdom is packed into his warning that ‘History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.’ Then there was his observation, drawn from the same basket of anthropological canniness, that ‘Civilised ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in barbarous ages, and that nature is, in many respects, not at all suited to civilised circumstances.

I can't actually believe that Democratic ‘It Girl’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a Republican mole, any more than I really believe that Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael What’s-his-name is. But is the idea really so far fetched? Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court seemed to be foundering, buffeted as it was by a tsunami of groundless charges reaching back into his high school days. None was ‘credible,’ pace the talking points of Senators Feinstein, Spartacus, et al. But what sent that narrative into a tail spin was the Julie Swetnick Show, brought to you by the latest casualty of the memory hole, Creepy Porn Lawyer Something Avenatti.

Teachers Scotch used to run an amusing ad that read ‘In life, experience is the great teacher. In Scotch, Teachers is the great experience.’ Droll, what? But is it true? Or was T. S. Eliot’s mournful observation that ‘we had the experience but missed the meaning’ more pertinent to our situation? What happens in the aftermath of Judge — as of a few minutes ago, make that ‘Justice’ — Brett Kavanaugh’s bizarre confirmation process will tell us a lot about whether we have learned anything from the horrible experience of the last weeks. When the Senate voted 50 to 48 to confirm Kavanaugh, they drew a line under a battle that was not just bitter but insane.

A few weeks ago in these virtual pages, I wrote that ‘In years to come, no one is going to talk about ‘kavanaughing’ a candidate.’ Boy did I get that wrong. The word deployed may not be the mouthful ‘kavanaughed.’ Maybe it will, à la Lindsey Graham, be pleonastically expressed: ‘the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics’ about fits the case. I am writing on Friday morning. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote this afternoon. Punditry is not prophecy, but I am nevertheless going to predict that Brett Kavanaugh gets an up vote from the committee and that Chuck Grassley will have learned his lesson and bring the matter to a floor vote tomorrow, Saturday, as he said he would.

Thirty five years ago, Ronan Farrow got drunk at college, went to a party, and cosied up to a woman he wasn’t married to. How do I know? A woman at the same party thinks she might remember the party, isn’t sure Farrow was there, can’t quite remember what he did (or didn’t) do, but, on the advice of her lawyer and the yellow press, she understands that accusing him now might 1) advance her career and 2) might damage Farrow, whose views she doesn’t like. In the light of this accusation from someone he never met, Farrow was relieved from his beat poring over other people’s sex lives at The New Yorker, the literary sewer that used to be a magazine.

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.

A couple of observations about Paul Manafort’s plea bargain deal today. First, the nitty gritty: Manafort was convicted last month of failing to report some $16 million in income from consulting work in the Ukraine in the early 2000s. That conviction will earn the 69-year-old Manafort (who has been in jail since June because of accusations of witness tampering) a sentence of eight to ten years in the slammer. Today, he agreed to plead guilty to two additional criminal charges, forfeit four of his multimillion dollar homes as well as funds in several bank accounts. In exchange, he will avoid a second trial in which he was to face a long list of charges revolving around money laundering and obstruction of justice.

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].

Senate hearings over the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court begin tomorrow at 9:30. They will be over by Friday. Although the malodorous cloud of the disgusting treatment meted out to to Judge Robert Bork in 1987 has hung over every subsequent Republican nominee to the Court, I am confident that Judge Kavanaugh will escape anything like Teddy Kennedy’s mendacious ‘in Robert Bork’s America’ attacks. Yes, the Committee includes Cory Booker, Democratic Senator from New Jersey, who once said that supporters of Brett Kavanaugh were ‘complicit in evil.’ And there’s also Kamala Harris, Democratic Senator from California, who can be counted on to be antagonistic.

I am not going to comment directly on the passing of Senator John McCain. Although I voted for him in 2008, I thought him a deeply flawed candidate. His behaviour subsequently, especially after Donald Trump became the Republican nominee and then President, was in my judgment petty, self-aggrandising, and harmful to the country. What interests me now, however, are the hallelujahs of praise and commendation that surrounded his passing. He has always been a hero to the neo-conservative faithful. But here we have The New York Times running a fawning obituary with the title ‘War Hero, Senator, Presidential Contender.’ It was the full lion-of-the-Senate treatment: ‘proud naval aviator . . .

A few take-aways from yesterday’s prosecutorial frenzy. 1. Paul Manafort is in deep trouble. Absent a presidential pardon, he is likely to spend the rest of his life behind bars. 2. The crimes of which Manafort was convicted — eight counts of tax evasion and bank fraud — not only predated his brief relationship with Donald Trump but had nothing to do with main focus of Robert Mueller’s original writ, namely, to investigate ‘any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump.’ That was the nub of Mueller’s marching orders. But note that Rod Rosenstein also authorised him to pursue ‘any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.

What does it mean to be “presidential”? Literalists might say: “It’s whatever behaviour and affect a President exhibits.” But most of us will have something more rigorous in mind. To be “presidential” means to be dignified but masterly, simultaneously courteous yet decorous, friendly in a self-contained sort of way. The problem with this view is that so many presidents throughout history have violated it, from Andrew Jackson and his smash-up-the-china parties at the White House to Bill Clinton's novel deployment of cigars with Monica Lewinsky. Donald Trump recently mocked the traditional idea of being presidential, explaining that behaving in that way is “a lot easier than what I do.

Meanwhile, back at the DNC...With the world mesmerized by the insane ravings of John Brennan, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Barack Obama, our inner heartstrings are tugged with compassion with the obvious suffering of another human being.  In the case of Brennan, one’s mind turns not to Hamlet (“O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!”) but rather "Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." There may be a dollop of animal cunning behind Brennan’s humiliating anti-Trump outbursts. He may be hoping against hope that his own role in the effort to delegitimize and reverse the results of a free, open, and democratic presidential election will be swept under the rug and he will emerge unscathed.

As a giant balloon caricature of the President of the United States as a baby swaddled in a nappy takes flight in London, protesters took to the streets to denounce the President’s “insulting,” “rude,” “humiliating,” “repulsive” behavior. “Trump is a racist and disrespects our nation. Why does he get to meet our Queen?” tweeted the MP for Redcar. Argh!! The baby blimp, the protests, and the hysterical rhetoric were already in play when the President’s tabasco interview with The Sun appeared, just hours after he met with Prime Minister Theresa May for a swish, red-carpet affair at Blenheim Castle, birthplace of Winston Churchill.

OK, I had never heard of Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s latest nominee for the Supreme Court, before last week either. But it doesn’t take long to discover that he is possessed of a razor-sharp legal mind and a very traditionalist judicial philosophy. By “traditionalist,” I mean that he believes that the judiciary’s role is to interpret the laws of the United States as written, not to use the law to further his personal policy preferences. Until at least the mid-1950s, this was the dominant sentiment on the Supreme Court. It was cast aside in succeeding years as Justices found “emanations and penumbras” (William O. Douglas’s words) in the Constitution to justify social policies that they favoured.