Roger Kimball

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.

What’s the single most moronic pop song? I know that the competition for that title is stiff. Different judges will have different worthy candidates. High up in my pantheon of awfulness is John Lennon’s emetic 1971 effusion “Imagine.” Everything about the song is repulsive, starting with its dangerously faux-naive politics (do you have your air-sickness bag handy?): Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion, too Imagine all the people living life in peace To which I respond with Rudyard Kipling’s “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”: They promised perpetual peace. They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.

While the Anti-Trump Mandarins of the Commentariat (ATMC, for short) are busy untwisting their knickers after the President’s historic summit meeting with the Tubby Tyrant of North Korea, I have an important real-estate tip to pass along: beach-front property in North Korea. Keep your eye on it. As Trump said yesterday in his wide-ranging press conference following his meeting with Kim Jong-un, that stretch of land between China and South Korea would be an ideal spot for luxury hotels and condos, if only Kim would stop shooting off cannons there. “If only.” Bear that in mind, as Donald Trump assuredly will, as you chuckle over the incongruity of “beach-front property” in close proximity to the words “North Korea.

I am pretty sure it is not intended to be an exercise in comedy, but there are a few amusing passages in my friend Ron Radosh’s latest anti-Trump effusion. Writing about the scandal that President Trump and others have denominated “Spygate,” Ron writes that:  . . . it is becoming apparent that the FBI source (since exposed as academic Stefan Halper) was not put into Trump’s campaign for political purposes but was part of a legitimate counterintelligence operation investigating Russia’s election interference in the U.S. elections and involved three of his campaign aides, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis, whom Halper interviewed.

The only time I met Donald Trump was at a small event for politically mature journalists at the White House last April. After milling about with my fellow scribes in the press room—it’s a lot smaller and shabbier than it looks on TV, like Jim Acosta—we were ushered into the Roosevelt Room near the Oval Office. The President, secretary of commerce Wilbur Ross, and a few aides (Steve Bannon, Michael Anton, Reince Priebus: wot larks!) soon joined us. After a brief presentation, the President took questions. Mine was about Iran.   During the campaign, I noted, the President had regularly decried the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, i.e, the 2015 Obama Iran deal in which the U.S.

Pop quiz: how many branches of government are there in the United States? If you said “Four,” go to the head of the class. As of May 17, 2017, the traditional three branches of  Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary, are joined by the Office of Robert S. Mueller III, Special Counsel in charge of destroying the president. It’s been a fun year. It’s not everyone, after all, who so thoroughly commands the police power of the state that he can order a predawn, guns-drawn raid on people he doesn’t like. Usually, that drama is reserved for dangerous criminals—terrorists, murders, major drug dealers. But Paul Manafort, a businessman, was close to Donald Trump, so he and his wife got the SWAT-team treatment on suspicion of a white-collar crime.