RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.steynonline.com/8781/odd-couples-of-the-obituaries-page

~John McCain exasperated conservatives, but he had his moments. I recounted one such during the 2008 campaign, when Hillary called for public funding for the Woodstock museum:

If you’re under 70 and have no idea what “Woodstock” is or why it would require its own museum, ask your grandpa. But McCain began by saying he was sure Mrs. Clinton was right and that it was a major “cultural and pharmaceutical event.”

Which is a cute line. And McCain wasn’t done yet: “I wasn’t there,” he said of the 1969 music festival. “I was tied up at the time.”

And the crowd roared its approval. It’s not just a joke, though it’s a pretty good one. It’s not merely a way of reminding folks you’ve stood up to torture and you can shrug it off with almost 007-cool insouciance. But it also tells Republican voters that, when Sen. Clinton offers up some cobwebbed boomer piety, you know a piñata when you see one, and you’re gonna clobber it.

And that’s the music a lot of Republican voters want to hear. For a certain percentage of voters, McCain is tonally a conservative, and that trumps the fact that a lot of his policies are profoundly unconservative. He won New Hampshire because if you stuck him in plaid he’d be a passable Beltway impersonation of the crusty, cranky, ornery Granite Stater. The facts are secondary that, on campaign finance, illegal immigration, Big Pharma and global warming, the notorious “maverick’s” mavericity (maverickiness? maverectomy?) always boils down to something indistinguishable from the Democrat position.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271272/elizabeth-warren-calls-trump-coup-daniel-greenfield

“Great Spirit Bless the Deep State, it is your humble daughter, Elizabeth of Harvard and the Pow Wow Chow Cookbook who speaks.”

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, seizing on an explosive op-ed from an anonymous administration official, said Thursday that it’s time to use constitutional powers to remove President Donald Trump office if top officials don’t think he can do the job.

“If senior administration officials think the President of the United States is not able to do his job, then they should invoke the 25th Amendment,” Warren told CNN. “The Constitution provides for a procedure whenever the Vice President and senior officials think the President can’t do his job. It does not provide that senior officials go around the President — take documents off his desk, write anonymous op-eds … Everyone of these officials have sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States. It’s time for them to do their job.”

That’s actually the opposite of how the Constitution works. It does not provide a mechanism for removing a president if some officials don’t like him. That’s not what the 25th Amendment is for. It provides a clear process for when a president is incapacitated, say after a shooting, and was an artifact of the JFK assassination.

What Warren is proposing is a coup.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/zina-bash-hand-signal-lef-wing-theory-stupid/

How does the Zina Bash hand-signal theory make any sense at all?

It’s not easy to set a new standard for stupid in 2018, but a few left-wingers on Twitter managed it during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings.

They claimed to have seen one of Judge Kavanaugh’s former law clerks, Zina Bash, making a white-power symbol while sitting behind him at the opening session of the hearings.

Less discerning viewers wouldn’t have noticed the alleged signal at all, or if they had, would have easily mistaken it for Bash’s hand at rest in something like a gesture of OK.

It was declared “a national outrage” by a #resistance tweeter who has 200,000 followers, and the activist and author Amy Siskind said the supposed gesture alone should disqualify Kavanaugh (she deleted the tweet but still suspected that Bash’s hand represented something nefarious).

It’s not clear how the hand-signal theory was supposed to make sense. Why, if Judge Kavanaugh is a stealth white-power candidate, would someone on his side go out of her way to advertise that fact on national TV?

On the other hand, if Judge Kavanaugh is a brazen white-power candidate, why does a supporter have to rely on such a subtle gesture to signal his true colors?

Who was the audience for the gesture? A racist underground initiated in a series of secret symbols and handshakes that would be activated to lend its full support for Kavanaugh?

Who knows, and who cares? For an element of the Left, the Trump era has been an open invitation to lose their minds, one they have gladly accepted for fun and profit, since there are few things said about the president that can be too extreme or irrational to find an audience.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-character-assassination-by-democrats/

There are honorable ways to oppose a nominee with whom you disagree. Kavanaugh’s Democratic critics have chosen to go the dishonorable route, instead.

There is certainly an honorable way to oppose the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. It’s simple. A progressive senator can simply declare that he or she does not agree with Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy, explain why, and vote against him. There is no constitutional rule that declares a senator must vote for every qualified Supreme Court nominee.

There’s also an honorable way to investigate Kavanaugh’s fitness for the bench, regardless of his judicial philosophy. A judge at any level — much less the Supreme Court — should exhibit a basic and enduring commitment to honesty and integrity. So, yes, scrutinize his record. Diligently investigate his background. If a serious character issue emerges, expose it.

But it’s low and dishonorable to skip the principled opposition and simply smear a good man, engaging in cheap character assassination as Judge Kavanaugh’s Democratic opponents have this week.

For those keeping score at home, millions of Americans have now been exposed to false and ridiculous claims that Kavanaugh is a slippery perjurer who surrounds himself with racists and a cold, dark soul who deliberately snubbed a murdered child’s father.

The latter two claims date back to the first day of his hearing, when the online Left erupted with claims that former Kavanaugh clerk Zina Bash had flashed a white-power symbol during the hearing. It turns out that Bash is a Mexican-American immigrant with a Jewish father, a descendant of Holocaust survivors. So, no, she’s not a white nationalist.

The same day, activists claimed that Kavanaugh actively refused to shake Fred Guttenberg’s hand. Guttenberg is the father of a student murdered in February’s Parkland, Fla. school shooting, and he approached Kavanaugh in the scrum following a break in the hearing. Just as Guttenberg, a complete stranger to Kavanaugh, stuck out his hand, security arrived and ushered Kavanaugh away. This was then cravenly spun into an outrage by the progressive Internet.