Where Does the US Go From Here? John Hinderaker muses on the current political landscape.
The validation of violence for political ends. This didn’t start with the Kavanaugh nomination. It has been brewing for a while. Barack Obama famously said, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Antifa has been taking Obama at his word for some years.
What we are seeing today is mob action by Democratic Party activists: harassing Republicans when they go out to dinner or walk through airports; busing activists to Republicans’ homes to harass them and frighten their children; invading Republican Congressional offices with threatening mobs; and, in some cases, shooting or violently assaulting Republican office-holders. …
Why are Democrats confident that political violence is a one-way street? Conservatives are, on average, better armed than liberals and — I think it is safe to say — more personally formidable. Yet liberals clearly have no fear that conservatives will respond to their violence and mob intimidation in kind. I think that is because they assume we are better than they are. We care about our country, we value its institutions, and we try to maintain the basic presumption of good faith that underlies our democratic system.
The Democrats are right to think that we are better than they are, but conservatives’ patience is not infinite. The potential for significant political violence is higher today than it has been at any time since the Great Depression, and perhaps since the Civil War. The Democrats are sowing the wind, and they may reap the whirlwind.
The final discrediting of the liberal media. This is nothing new, of course. But the manner in which the liberal press jumped on board with the absurd allegations against Judge Kavanaugh exposed reporters and editors, perhaps to an unprecedented degree, as nothing more than Democratic Party activists. The press publicized the most absurd fabrications about Kavanaugh as though they were news: He organized gang rapes when he was in high school!
And they solemnly declared Christine Ford to be “credible,” when the facts showed that she had massively changed (i.e., fabricated) her story in collaboration with Democratic Judiciary Committee staffers, and when every witness identified by her repudiated her account. The press elevated a transparent liar to the status of a heroine, for political purposes. …
The yawning chasm between our institutions and our people. Not just the press, but America’s institutions in general disgraced themselves by endorsing the Democratic Party’s absurd smear campaign. …
Kavanaugh has been teaching for some years at Harvard Law School at the invitation of former law school dean and now Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. This is because Kavanaugh is universally acknowledged to be a brilliant legal scholar. But 40 Harvard Law professors signed a letter opposing their colleague’s confirmation to the Court, and the law school has announced that Kavanaugh will not be returning as a teacher.
Meanwhile, polls show that most Americans want Kavanaugh to be confirmed. Most people know little about the legal issues that Supreme Court justices address, but they have a basic sense of fairness. It wasn’t hard to see that the Democrats behaved in an outrageous manner, or that Kavanaugh is a brilliant and decent man.
In that context, Donald Trump is the man of the hour. The incoherent Democrats are reduced to street violence, the press is discredited, our institutions are mostly pathetic. Who benefits? President Donald J. Trump.
Trump truly is the man of the hour. Trump has been on to the “fake news” press from the beginning. And if there ever was any fake news, it is Christine Ford’s Democrat-engineered lie.
Trump represents normal Americans who didn’t go to Harvard or Yale but have a modicum of common sense, which many professors at those institutions obviously don’t. …
Welcome aboard:
I didn’t see this coming two years ago, but President Trump is now the standard-bearer for normal Americans who resist the encroachments of the far Left, which now owns the Democratic Party.
