Columnist: Treat Kavanaugh As If Convicted 
USA Today's Erik Brady symptomatic of larger disease

(From USA Today page)

UPDATE, 9/30 4:37 AM: After considerable backlash, USA Today editors scissored-out of Erik Brady's rancid essay the character-destroying smear against Judge Kavanaugh. Among critics who'd condemned the column, its author, and the paper's editors were Laura Ingraham. Breitbart, The Gateway Pundit, American Thinker, and this blog. (I also posted the below writing at Medium.com.) I am proud to have been in their company. 

And do not be too quick to forgive the USA Today editors. They'd revealed their genuine attitudes toward fairness and journalistic propriety by running and Twitter-advertising Brady's garbage in the first place.

USA Today columnist Erik Brady isn't among the better-known slurrers of Judge Brett Kavanaugh. But he is one of the more contemptible.

"Is Brett Kavanaugh right that he can no longer coach girls basketball?" Brady asked in a Sept. 28 essay. That no one ever, anywhere, in any medium now existing or yet to be invented, accused the judge of pedophilia is of no matter whatsoever to USA Today's odoriferous muck-man. 

Getting immediately to his foul point, Brady insisted in paragraph two that Judge Kavanaugh be officially barred from coaching girls basketball until the conclusion of some investigation or other. (And, as recent days have taught, the end of one formal inquiry only brings demands for others.)

The underhanded columnist never explicitly said "pedophilia." To do so would be crude, and perhaps even make his dirty work more legally actionable than it may already be. Instead, he stealthily implied that unnatural nastiness. Surely, no reader missed his between-the-lines message. 

Brady cited the US Center for SafeSport. He wrote that though it doesn't cover Catholic Youth Organization teams (which the judge has coached and is still approved to do), "it's policies are nevertheless instructive." 

By that, he presumably meant items he saluted in the column: investigative processes not bound to actual legal charges, a lower burden of proof standard, and no statutes of limitation. 

Those last acknowledge that memories fade and other evidence may not be available into perpetuity. (And then there is the Sixth Amendment's "speedy trial" guarantee.)

The policies Brady advocated are by design less protective of the accused. Sound familiar? Think of campus kangaroo courts ejecting male students accused of improprieties with no innocence presumed, no defense cross-examining of accusers allowed, and no fairness of any sort provided in the rigged process.

How many times of late have Judge Kavanaugh's opponents curled their lips disdainfully when the presumption of innocence principle is cited?

This is about power. Liberals look to the Supreme Court to advance authoritarian propositions voters reject, like prohibiting free expression; social engineering schemes blueprinted in Washington; governmental regulation of private businesses; erasing national borders; and throwing open voting booths to anyone and everyone who requests a ballot. No questions asked. 

They see the option of exploiting courts to force terrible fancies on the entire country slipping from their clutches. And they are more than willing to subvert any claimed ideal and sell out any legitimate citizen interest to keep hold of it.

We just saw that on TV.

Erik Brady's stomach-turning column is of a part with something much larger: A fascistic inclination that despises individualism, democracy, liberty, and ideological diversity. 

The new 'guilty until proven innocent' standard he and others endorse meshes with multinational banks denying accounts for reasons of political philosophy; the Big Tech barons of Silicon Valley enforcing speech suppression; masked Antifa terrorists physically stifling speakers, assaulting passersby, and destroying property; and raggedy wretches thronging down night streets chanting 'Not my president' like pathetic robots incapable of living harmoniously in a democratic society, or even of reasoning autonomously.

Free and strong America has withstood past challenges. And it will survive contemporary seditious calls. In the meantime, we can all ask: What the hell were Erik Brady's USA Today editors thinking?

The White Knight rides

During the president's 9/25 UN press conference, Jim Acosta of Fake News CNN asked if Trump could call on a woman reporter: 
"If you don't mind, after I'm finished...if you could call on one of our female colleagues, that'd be great."

My immediate thought was that had Acosta been sincere in his advocacy of discrimination, he would have given his own turn to a woman reporter.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/09/26/acosta-trump-press-conference-female-reporters-tsr-sot-vpx.cnn

Fake News alert: Bloomberg's Kartikay Mehrotra spreads anti-Trump falsehood

From Twitter page

In September 25 Bloomberg News article "Judge Asks If 'America First' Is Code for Racial Hostility," writer Kartikay Mehrotra refers matter-of-factly to a "Trump January Twitter rant in which the president dubbed the African continent and Haiti 'shithole countries.'"

That phrase  was not originally claimed to be contained in a Twitter posting And Mehrotra didn't mention that President Trump had denied making the remark.

Mehrotra linked to a January 18, 2015 Bloomberg article, presumably for evidentiary support. (Many readers might not follow links, but assume their presence to indicate foundation.)

That particular one, though, did not validate Mehrotra's Twitter claim. Written by Erik Larsen, it dealt with an NAACP court filing re equal protection and US international funding.

Larsen characterized the supposed "shithole countries" remark as among ones "Trump is said to have made in private meetings that were leaked to the media." And, unlike Mehrotra, Larsen told readers President Trump had denied making the claimed remark.

The Larsen article, in turn, links to another Bloomberg piece. That one was credited to Jennifer Epstein, Erik Wasson, and Arit John, and detailed the origin of the alleged remark: Illinois Democrat Senator Dick Durbin claimed to reporters he'd heard the president refer to "shithole countries" during a closed-door meeting.

In a subsequent Twitter post, the president flatly denied Durbin's unsupported and scurrilous accusation. The authors quoted the president's message which read, in part: "The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used."

So, Mehrotra's "Twitter rant" claim was false. Why did he make it? There are at least two possible reasons: He may have misrepresented the matter with malice aforethought, or he may have heard and read so many falsehoods about Trump that he came to accept them without critical investigation, and passed vicious fiction along in his own writing because of professional injudiciousness.

Whichever is the case, Kartikay Mehrotra surely needn't worry about Bloomberg reader complaints or professional repercussions. A select market is accepting of Fake News that diminishes President Trump, and media executives seem to delight in it.

Mainstream journalism is no longer about accuracy or realities. It's now about manipulation of news to advocate ideology, and catering to audiences' political bigotry.

Whether those goals are realized honestly or dishonestly is entirely beside the point. The end justifies the means.

Forget not fairness

Scurrilous allegations of a scarlet nature were leveraged in the 11th hour against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. They've since been relentlessly foghorned by an odiferous mongrel behemoth comprising underhanded politicos, terminally biased media, anonymous Deep State bureaucratic bottom-dwellers, and "creepy porn lawyer" Michael Avenatti, whose deviant predilections would earn opprobrium from even Harvey Weinstein.

It is not at all a heartfelt crusade on behalf of the wronged and ignored, as patrons would have us all believe. Pay no heed to that profoundly insincere posture. This is a cold and cruel blood quest, launched by an entrenched Deep State that doesn't give a damn about anything but maintaining authority. It certainly does not care about justice or democracy.

We all want systemic fairness. But compassion for victims, appropriately punishing criminals, and safeguarding the interests of accused persons are hardly adversarial ambitions. Each is a component of the criminal justice system. All must be equally honored for the whole to enjoy integrity and meaningful purpose.

The below essay from my last book, Ideas Afoot, has new relevance.


Anger and principle coexistent

Though it occurred decades ago, it infuriates me, still.

Someone with whom I was close had suffered sexual harassment at her workplace. The perpetrator was a co-owner of a small business, and a social and political climber. 

His family was relatively affluent. Various of its members had long been active in local Democrat political and church-related activities. 

They were thought redoubtable pillars of the community. But these promoters of liberal, feminist messages enabled through shielding a family member who perpetrated horrific and unnatural assaults on vulnerable, lower class female employees. 

My friend begged me to not confront the assaulter, insisting that formal remedies alone be pursued. I respected her wish. Sexual harassers, on the other hand,  do not respect victims' autonomy. 

I well remember her personal torment, sessions with assault survivors' counselors, and the obscurant court settlement. 

Through his legal team, the predatory perpetrator demanded a confidentiality agreement. His disgusting crimes would forever be concealed.

No newspaper carried an account. Nor do exhaustive trial records exist. Of course, that doesn't mean it didn't happen. I know that it did, just as surely as I know that computer keys lay before me as I recall this wickedness.

But I understand my personal knowledge of it and assertion that it certainly occurred are not conclusive for general observers. No man should suffer punishment until guilt has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. 

A man's liberty, reputation, and ability to earn should not fall owing to unsubstantiated allegations. Detesting criminality does not necessitate uncritical acceptance of each allegation voiced. 

The accused's rights are not obviated by the egregiousness of an alleged offense, nor by the number of accusers lodging complaints. 

I once sat for jury selection. The defense attorney put this question to prospective members: Who among them would say of a pre-trial defendant: 'I don't know whether he's guilty or innocent. I have to consider the evidence, first?'

Several raised their hands.

You are wrong, the attorney said. Every person is to be presumed fully innocent until it is established otherwise.

All who allege victimization deserve to be heard, to have their stories investigated. But they do not warrant immediate and unquestioning credence. A claim might seem credible. It might be in accord with established incidents. But plausibility is not actuality.

An argument some proffer is that the 'presumption of innocence' standard derived from the Constitution's 14th Amendment guarantee of equality under the law is applicable exclusively in courtrooms and need not be observed beyond them. 

I would assert that standard's spirit should inform casual social opinions, as well. Those straining against it are essentially declaring preference for a less rigorous rule that indulges disinclination toward fairness.

It is better that ten guilty men escape than that one innocent man suffer. 

Many historians attribute that phrase to Blackstone. But the principle that innocents shouldn't suffer that a greater good be advanced was previously enunciated in Genesis 18: 23-32:

Abraham drew near and said: 'Will you consume the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous within the city? Will you consume and not spare the place for the fifty righteous who are in it?...What if ten are found there?' He [the Lord] said: 'I will not destroy it for the ten's sake.'

The fate of Sodom was their subject of discussion. The Bible records that Sodom was ultimately destroyed, though only after God had rescued most of Lot's family.

Clause 39 of the 1215 edition of the Magna Carta states: 

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

The Founding Fathers included that wisdom in the 14th Amendment: 

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

And the standard was later advocated in the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 11: Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.

The sentiment that the presumption of innocence standard be got rid of, that supposed progress be enabled, is not new.  

To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. 

- Che Guevara, as quoted in The Cuban Revolution: Years of Promise (2005), by Teo A. Babun and Victor Andres Triay (Source: En.Wikiquote.org)

The revulsion one properly feels at the concept of criminality inspires laudable instincts to exact retribution and extend comfort to victims. And citizens are right to expect a civilized society to stand against harms.

But true righteousness provides accommodation for both anger at those whose guilt has been established and due respect for those free from such bench conclusion. 

Rolling Stone calls for political beatings
"Punch away!" giggles RS writer

                       Lilly Dancyger, Twitter page photo

It is wrong to suppose Rolling Stone is the home only of PR for creatively flabby pop personages, cloying Obama fantasies, glossy corporate advertisements, and lurid rape-hoax reportage.

In her Rolling Stone article ("Charlottesville Jury Fines Man $1 For Punching White Nationalist: The Virginia jury might have just settled an age-old question"), Lilly Dancyger explicitly recommended physical assaults as a legitimate means of political expression.

Really. 

Dancyger noted that a jury had fined Jeffrey Winder a token dollar for punching Jason Kessler at a press conference the latter had convened following the Charlottesville tragedy. She noted that as Winder struck Kessler, others booed the speaker and otherwise sought to drown out his Constitutionally protected speech.

She cited left-wing journal Mother Jones' own endorsement of political violence and closed her overly lengthy writing by chirping that "it seems this Charlottesville jury made an official ruling: Yes, punch away!"

Even odious messages like Kessler's (and Richard Spencer's) enjoy legal protection. And violence and other message-obfuscating tactics are devices found in the fascist tool kit. But those elementary truths are apparently beyond the grasp of wet-eared, simplistic skimmers of whatever Michael Moore is publishing, these days. 

(Note: I submit we true opponents of the detestable Kesslers, and of racism in general, are persons who advocate robust debate and other democratic freedoms. We do not use fascists' historic means: speech-quashing, property destruction, and politically motivated violence. Dancyger and her comrades cannot make our fine assertion of unvarying principle.) 

Dancyger's strangely cheerful Rolling Stone advocacy of political thuggishness was not her first call for law-breaking in the name of ideology. In an article she wrote for the August 18. 2017 Glamour, Dancyger called for the dropping of charges entered against the destroyers of a federal Charlottesville monument. 

"This willingness to show up and take a public stand for the right thing even if what's right is considered vandalism is part of how we can stop the current wave of hatred in this country," she claimed.

In her view, laws against violence, civil rights abridgment, and destruction of public property are not objective products of the democratic process, but mere options to be heeded or disregarded, however suits the subjective desires of the moment.

The interests of legality, democracy, and justice are imperiled by those who would ignore their mandates. Some sport pointed hoods. 
Others, Rolling Stone bylines.

I am part of the America First movement that elected Donald Trump             

The New York Times recently published an anonymous op-ed, "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration." Its author claimed to be working in the Trump White House.

At this writing, the author's true identity and nature of employment have not been established. Dinesh D'Souza has guessed the writer is actually a masked Times wordsmith, a sort of key-pounding Antifa bomb-chucker still furious over 2016 election results and the shift of power back into the rightful control of the citizenry.

But for the sake of considering a larger point, let's assume the Times op-ed writer is whom he claims, Someone within the White House has publicly bragged of acting surreptitiously to frustrate popular desire as expressed through the democratic process. 

It makes vivid that we citizens who would control our own government through electoral machinery made available to us by the Constitution are faced by an existential peril: A would-be permanent ruling class that is not only indifferent to our legitimate wishes but contemptuous of us for presuming to engineer our country's progress.

'Elections and administrations can come and go,' the Deep State effectively laughs. 'But nothing will transpire unless it serves our unelected ambitions. To Hell with the common man!'

The Washington Post followed the Times' lead, running a headline that boasted of woke "cells" in the U.S. government.

Deep States and underground subversive cells who daily endeavor to stifle the peoples' expressed will believe themselves to be superior to the common man. By pursuing paths rejected by voters, they seem to feel their subterfuge to be of noble nature. Any contrary perspectives 'the rabble' might harbor are insignificant to the supposed higher calling.

I voted for President Trump because I refuse to surrender my country, the one my forbears fought and died for, the nation that shines as an inspiration for men the world over, to people I never voted for and who are uninterested in its welfare.

I believe in America's promise of liberty. I want it to again be a successful, strong, safe nation with its own culture, laws, and borders. 

I continue to support President Trump and intend to vote for his 2020 re-election for host of splendid reasons: 

- He has inspired a return to patriotic spirit that nearly bursts open the chest. 

- The economy is reaching new heights, seemingly daily.  

- Employment is shattering old ceilings. 

- 'America First' has again taken its proper, top-most place in matters of international trade and diplomacy, and military strategizing. 

- His campaign pledge to safeguard Social Security and Medicare from the dollar-lusting predations of shifty-eyed legislators endures without pale. 

- And President Trump's opposition to sovereignty-strangling globalism is whole-hearted. His assertions of American exceptionalism and our country's singular authority and capacity swell the hearts of all but the most inconsequential.

Hold up; there's more.

- He has nominated to the land's most influential and august court jurists for whom the framers' original intent provides rock-solid guide. This guarantees that for future generations, the rights and liberties explicitly promised in the Constitution will remain safe from momentary whims and fanciful imaginings.
.
- America today enjoys new and great respect from foreign leaders. They've realized, doubtless to their grave disappointment, that there's a new sheriff in town, one who must be taken seriously. No more midnight flights of pallets bearing millions in U.S. tax-payer cash. No more pacts that sell out American interests. No more apologies or weakness.

- President Trump wisely took America's signature off of the Paris Climate Accord which elevated foreign nations' interests and disserved our own. He has ripped up NAFTA, and is renegotiating with trading partners.

- Illegal border crossings have plummeted. Law enforcement knows this president has its back. Consumer confidence has soared. Bill after legislative bill has passed through the congress and received his signature. America recorded a budget surplus. The counterproductive over regulation that had for so many years strangled American small business was been slashed.

- And he has correctly identified "Fake news" as the enemy of the American people. Not journalism in toto, but only its scuzzy bastard variety. American journalism has a long and estimable record of challenging elected leaders in the interest of a trusting public. To best chart the course of a nation, citizens need full and unbiased presentation of essential information. "Fake news," on the other hand, does not serve that legitimate end. Given its potential for misleading voters and harming our nation, it truly is an enemy to be reviled.

The New York Times doesn't support America, its people, or President Trump. But we already knew that. And anyway, when were that paper's prejudices ever of practical consequence?