As the Supreme Court Turns

There was nothing on Thursday’s daytime soap operas remotely so compelling as the Senate judiciary committee’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing, which of course was what everyone was talking about.

In the unlikely event you weren’t watching on any of the various news channels, or haven’t already heard about it from multiple sources, California university professor Christine Blasey Ford gave a convincing account of how current Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape her when they were both high school students in the early ’80s, Kavanaugh gave a convincing denial of the charges, and pretty much everyone decided whom to believe based on their partisan prejudgments. Elsewhere in the news there are three other women accusing Kavanaugh of serious youthful sexual misbehavior, and some serious reasons the news media are very cautiously reporting their yet un-sworn testimony, along with plenty of circumstantial evidence that at the very least Kavanaugh wasn’t quite the straight-arrow high schooler he claimed to be on a unprecedented and ill-advised Fox News interview, and some witnesses on both sides that probably won’t be called to testify, but all that will also be probably judged according to partisan prejudgment.

These days we find ourselves on the political sidelines, with no real rooting interest in either party, so our best guess about the matter is based on more personal experience.

We’re as wary as ever of those damn Democrats, and especially their aversion to the originalist theory of constitutional interpretation that has always been the obvious primary reason they oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination. On the other hand we’re just as wary these days of the putatively Republican and legally embattled President Donald Trump who nominated Kavanaugh against his party’s advice, and we can’t shake a healthy suspicion he was nominated ahead of other impeccably originalist candidates because of some his previous writings in White House memory and law journal articles that a sitting president cannot be indicted or subpoenaed or even investigated. We’d still like the think that the Republicans could come up with a highly qualified and stridently originalist Supreme Court nominee who doesn’t face such credible charges of teenaged sexual assaults, as they did the last time around, perhaps with one of the several more-easily confirmable female candidates, but this is the hand America has been dealt.

None of that much matters in the current he-said and she-said context, though, and we’re left with the desultory task of choosing whom to believe. At one point in the proceedings Kavanaugh spoke movingly about his mother, who was one of Maryland’s first women prosecutors and judges, and how her “trademark line” was “Use your common sense. What rings true? What rings false?,” and that’s how we’ve always tried to decide these darned complicated matters. Unfortunately for the trailblazing Mrs. Kavanaugh’s undeniably accomplished son, that Ford woman’s testimony rings discordantly true to our ears.

Most of our lives have been more happily spent on apolitical pursuits, but that has included some intimate relationships with women who have convincingly and heartbreakingly told of us the sexual abuse they have suffered from more powerful men, and we didn’t doubt them at all, and Ford’s accounts seems to ring true in the same detailed way. Over the many years we went to high school and college and worked in offices we witnessed countless men behaving badly, ranging from geeky awkwardness to credible accusations of rape, and we’re hard-pressed to see why a California psychology professor with a little-known but well-regarded reputation and a nice quiet family life would invite death threats and the condemnation of a major political to tell a lie about something she claims happened decades ago.

Women do either misremember or lie about these things sometimes, of course. The left will well remember the case of the “Scottsboro Boys,” the nine black American men accused of raping two white women on a train rolling through Dixie in 1939, whose innocence was eventually conclusively proved by the undeniably Communist-linked Lawyers Guild. The right is as quick to recall the more case of the Duke lacrosse team, all privileged white boys at an elite college who were accused of gang rape by much of the faculty and indicted by a Democratic district attorney running for reelection in a mostly black district, but eventually exonerated by the traditional conservative press and some up-to-date DNA tests. One never knows about these things, no matter your partisan prejudgments, and the very lawyerly Kavanaugh undeniably made some compelling arguments during his star turn on the news channels.

Still, our long and desultory experience of these matters suggests that rapes and attempted rapes and lesser degrees of sexual misbehavior are committed by far more numerous than the false accusations of such crimes alleged by women, and we’d like to see the Republican majority on the Senate judiciary call some more witnesses and let the Federal Bureau of Investigation do some more investigating before the country reaches any conclusions.

— Bud Norman

Wow, What a Press Conference

To his immense credit President Donald Trump frequently fields questions from the press, usually when he’s obliged to do so during a visit with a foreign head of state, or when the noise of the Marine One helicopter allows him to pretend not to hear the questions he’d rather not answer, but he rarely endures a solo press conference in front of the assembled television cameras and microphones. He gave one on Wednesday, however, and it was a nearly 90-minute-long doozy.

Despite the fingernails-on-a-chalkboard quality Trump’s rhetoric has to our sensitive ears, and the unpleasant effect his oleaginous appearance has on our sore eyes, we couldn’t stop watching and listening the press conference’s end. Trump was in true Trumpian form throughout, with the expected insult comic shtick about the “the failing New York Times” and the rest of the “fake news,” as well as the “low-lifes” and “big, fat con jobs” among his other critics, and the requisite amount of wildly exaggerated boasting. As usual, much of what he said was not only provably but quite obviously  untrue.

Trump talked up a major expansion of the American steel industry that isn’t happening. He claimed credit for the construction of that “big, beautiful” border wall he promised Mexico would pay for, even though the Mexican’s aren’t paying up, and he’s recently signed a spending resolution that will avert a pre-mid-term-election government shutdown but doesn’t include any money for any kind of wall, and it also  isn’t happening any time soon. He explained that all those international camera’s footage of the United Nations audience he’d addressed the day laughing at him was fake news, because of course they were appreciatively laughing with him when he opened his speech with the usual braggadocio. Once again he bragged about winning 52 percent of women’s votes in the presidential election, even though he only won 52 percent of the white women’s votes, and lost the overall women’s vote by a landslide, not to mention that Trump garnered only 48.2 percent of the overall popular vote and thus would would have lost all the men’s ballots to Democratic nominee “Crooked” Hillary Clinton by a landslide if that oft-repeated bast were actually true.

He also reiterated an earlier unsubstantiated claim that China is interfering in the mid-term elections to get Democrats elected because they’re so fearful of his trade war, and failed to answer a question about why he also claimed once again to be such good friends with China’s dictator.

Maybe it was because he had a rare open 90 minutes on his busy schedule, but our best guess is that Trump granted the rare press conference yesterday because he knew that today’s news will be mostly devoted to the testimony of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate’s judiciary committee, and the testimony before the same committee California psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford, who alleges Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they both students at elite sexually-segregated prep schools in Maryland back in the early ’80s. The nationally-televised-on-several-channels testimony of what he said and she said will surely generate boffo ratings even by the Trump reality show’s standards — to put it in Trumpian terms, that much we can tell you, believe us, OK? — and by now we’ve noticed that Trump likes to get ahead of the next day’s stories.

By now this subplot of the Trump reality show is pretty darned complicated, though, and even for such a wily reality show star as Trump it’s a damned hard story to get in front of. By now another couple of women have come forward by name to accuse Kavanaugh of far-worse-than-boyish sexual behavior during late teens and early 20s, male and female classmates of Kavanaugh’s are telling the press that he wasn’t the choirboy he claimed during an unusual and ill-advised interview on Fox News, the Republicans on the legislative committee are reluctant to call Kavanaugh’s prep school friend Mark Judge, an alleged eyewitness to and participant in the sexual assault, who has since penned a roman a clef titled “Wasted: Tales of a a GenX Drunk,” which featured a drunken friend named “Bart O’Kavanaugh,” and the “fake news” has found some admittedly circumstantial but undeniably evidence in Kavanaugh’s prep school yearbook that the Supreme Court nominee was once upon a time a rather party-hearty kind of dude.

The two latest accusers are both being treated with more skepticism by most of the “fake news,” on the other hand, and the third comes courtesy of the same media-savvy lawyer who represents pornographic video performer and best-selling author Stormy Daniels, and it’s worth noting the “failing New York Times” declined an offer to report the third accuser’s accusations. Kavanaugh has an unchallenged record of sexual propriety since his early college days, and plenty of well-educated and well-respected former classmates who vouch for high moral character, and that’s also well worth taking into account.

Kavanaugh also has the whole-hearted backing of Trump, but it remains to be seen if that proves helpful. Trump has been accused of adult sexual misbehavior by more than a dozen women, and of course Trump was asked about that during the news conference, and he eventually conceded that as a result of his experience he tends to not believe women accusing men of sexual misbehavior. He misstated some key facts about a couple of his accusers, ignored the fact that another one of them has civil suit for slander still pending in the courts, didn’t bother to deny that his voice boasting about grabbing women by the pussy, and generally came across as the sexist pig that all the polls show even most white women regard him. Short of that Mark Judge fellow the Republicans won’t call testify, Trump is probably the least convincing character witness you’d want on your side if accused of sexual misbehavior.

Most people will judge today’s he said and she said testimony according to their political prejudices, but in the end we don’t think it will help the Republican party much with the upcoming mid-term women’s vote. We’ve seen polling that a slight majority of Republicans support Kavanaugh’s nomination even if the appalling allegations are proved true, and the Senate majority leader has pledged to “plow” Kavanaugh’s nomination through no matter what is revealed today, and we can’t blame any woman voter we know for resenting that.

— Bud Norman

A Laugh Line at the United Nations

President Donald Trump opened his address to the United Nations on Tuesday with a boast that in less than two years he has already accomplished more than “almost any administration” in American history, and his audience of international diplomats responded with a hearty and clearly audible laugh. which was even louder than the laugh he got when told a Republican debate audience that “”no one has more respect for women than I do, believe me.” T rump then went off the teleprompter and ad-libbed that he “Didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s okay,” which elicited a smaller but seemingly more sympathetic laugh.

Later in the day Trump assured the American press that of course he’d meant the obviously exaggerated boast as a self-effacing laugh line, much like Pee-Wee Herman insisting that “I meant to do that” after falling off his bike, but he was clearly stung by the reaction. Back during his quixotic but somehow winning presidential campaign Trump used to rev up the rally crowds by telling them the entire world was laughing at America, but would cease to do so as he asserted his alpha maleness took office, and he’s obviously not all the sort to take ridicule lightly. He also seemed to realize how ridiculous his “I meant to do that” defense sounded to most of the world.

Trump’s typically Trump-ian boasts about his accomplishments are still standing-ovation applause lines to the big crowds of die-hard supporters who continue to show up at his ongoing campaign rallies, and we’re pretty sure he expected the same response from a gathering of global diplomats, but this time he was facing a far tougher audience. The rest of Trump’s speech pretty much reiterated his long stated intentions to withdraw America from the international order of diplomatic and trade and military alliances that have kept a relative global peace and resulted in unprecedented global prosperity since the last world war, and except for some polite applause at the end it got an icy reaction from a global audience of both diplomatic friends and foes. There was some righteous tough talk about our undeniable adversaries in Iraq and Syria and elsewhere, but Trump also managed to claim our British and European Union and North American and South American and southeastern Asian allies have laughingly taken advantage of us as well. He made some good points about the necessity of national sovereignty, but it was widely noted by both friends and foes that neglected to mention Russia’s brazen violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty. By the end of the speech he had taken a forthright stand against an estimated 90 percent of the world’s population.

Which is probably fine by Trump, as he plainly intended the address to be heard by that potentially winning plurality of American voters at his raucous campaign rallies. He knows that they relish the enmity not only of of our undeniable adversaries, but also those effete Euro-weenies and wily southeast Asians and crafty Cannucks and rapacious Meskins who claim to be our friends, and they trust that overpowering his alpha-maleness will eventually vanquish them all.

We have our doubts about that, though, and are more inclined to trust in the international order of trade and diplomatic and military alliances that have kept a relative global peace and brought unprecedented global prosperity since the last world war. It’s been up-and-down ever since then, to be sure, but over the long haul the trajectory has been upwards, and we don’t much credit Trump for its recent success, while Trump’s claims that he can easily prevail over 90 percent of the world’s economy and diplomacy and military seem more far-fetched.

At the the risk of offending fellow Republican friends and family members, we’ll come right out and say in these blunt-spoken times that both Trump and his America -First-verusus-the -rest-of-the-world foreign policy policy  laughable. All the late night comics and their audiences are laughing at Trump’s braggadocio, and most of the world’s diplomats are now  joining in,and according to all the polls and foreign late comics are also doing so,  and that’s undeniably a problem that Trump’s alpha male and downright Nietzscheaan will to power will have to overcome..

— Bud Norman

Kavanaugh’s Confirmation is Further Complicated

Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was already in jeopardy after a woman came forward by name to accuse him of a sexual assault when he was a high schooler, and might be in further jeopardy yet now that another woman has come forward by name to accuse of him of indecent exposure while he was a college student. It’s all very complicated, though, and Kavanaugh might well be confirmed despite it all, but doubts will likely linger now matter how it all turns out.

After 37 years there’s no definitive corroborating evidence for California psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that Kavanaugh held a hand over her mouth and nose as he pinned her against a bed and attempted to forcibly undress her during an drunken teenaged party near his elite prep school, but neither can he cite any definitive exculpatory evidence. He’s got plenty of credible character witnesses that vouch for his excellent character, but she’s got a similar number of friends who can’t believe that she’d sacrifice a quiet life in a picturesque college town and her own fine reputation and start getting death threats and talk radio vilification just to tell such a lie. After much news and difficult negotiations she’s scheduled to tell her story under oath to the Senate judiciary committee on Thursday, which will probably get bigger television ratings than the last episode of “M*A*S*H,” and he’ll give his account afterwards, and we expect most viewers will judge whom to believe to based entirely on their prejudgements.

The newer allegation by a Colorado resident named Deborah Ramirez that Kavanaugh exposed his penis and forced her to touch it during a drunken college party near Yale University will likely be similarly prejudged by the general public. Ramirez makes the allegation in an article in The New Yorker penned by Ronan Farrow, whose meticulous reporting on sexual misconduct stories has lately earned him a national reputation and brought down several famous entertainment and political figures, but she’s already being doubted by such equally respectable publications as The Washington Post. She freely admits she was quite drunk when the incident allegedly occurred, and that she only came forward at the urging of various reporters, and the Post’s sex-crime prosecutor sources cite other problems. On the other hand, that Farrow fellow claims to have supporting sources and has been libel-proof so far, and it is yet another woman coming forward by name to allege that Kavanaugh was less than a perfect gentleman in his youth and is lying about it in his maturity.

Kavanaugh’s confirmation was plenty complicated even before any of this popped up, given that he was nominated by the very divisive President Donald Trump, and has a record of law review articles stating that a sitting president cannot be indicted or subpoenaed or even investigated, and is reasonably suspected of being the potential decisive vote to overturn Roe v Wade and other Supreme Court precedents dear to liberal hearts.

We don’t care much about Roe v Wade, as we figure most of the state legislatures will eventually wind up retaining the status quo after yet another prolonged and acrimonious debate about abortion, and we generally agree with Kavanaugh’s originalist philosophy of interpreting the constitution, but we do worry about his views regarding what presidents should be able to get away with, and we haven’t yet reached any judgment about his behavior as a high school and college student and what he’s saying about it today. We’ll give him a fair hearing, as we know that women do sometimes make false accusations against men, but we’ll give his accusers the same fair hearing, as we know that it’s far more common for men to misbehave than it is for women to lie about it.

The decision about whether to confirm Kavanaugh’s nomination will probably come down to a couple of women Republican Senators who are pro-choice, along with a couple of male Republican Senators who have been known to buck the Trumpian line, and maybe a couple of red state Democratic Senators who are probably thinking they can now get away with a “no” vote on Kavanaugh. At this point we’ll let them decide the matter, and figure that no matter how it turns out doubts will linger.

— Bud Norman

Politics and Other Family Matters

Politics has always been a topic best avoided at family gatherings, but we’ve lately noted that’s especially true these days. The subject of President Donald Trump and the current state of the Republican party and conservatism in general is especially fraught for our conservative and Republican yet Never-Trump selves in our dealings with certain members of our conservative yet more loyally Republican family, but we’re pleased to say it’s not so acrimonious as it seems to be for Arizona’s Republican Rep. Paul Gosar and at least six of his siblings.

Gosar is up for reelection in Arizona’s reliably Republican fourth congressional district, where his brothers Tim and Gaston and David and his sisters Jennifer and Joan and Grace are all currently starring in a widely-aired campaign television ad for Democratic challenger David Brill.

We’ve not paid enough attention to Arizona’s fourth congressional district race to have any idea who the hell this Brill fellow is, and for all we know he’s one of those far-left Democrats we’ve always opposed. Gosar says that his siblings are “six angry Democrats,” and that “These disgruntled Hillary supporters are related to me by blood, but like lefties everywhere they put political ideology before family,” adding the “hashtag” of “#MAGA 2018,” and for all we know that explains the family dynamics. Even so, everything we know of Gosar suggests he’s one of those far-right Republicans we look askance at in these Trumpian times.

Gosar’s six dissenting siblings might well be a bunch of Hillary-supporting angry Democrats, for all we know, and we truly share his distaste for that type, but for all we know they might also well be old-fashioned Republicans such as ourselves who will carry party loyalty only so far. If so, and if that Brill fellow turns out to be one of those more-or-less reasonable Democrats, we’d probably take their side at what will surely be an acrimonious family Thanksgiving dinner

Back here in Kansas’s fourth congressional district we’re faced with a tough choice between a Trumpian Republican and the sort of left-of-center Democrat we’ve always voted against, and we’re seriously considering voting for the centrist Democrats in the state’s gubernatorial and our neighborhood’s county commission races, and we’re planning to talk mostly about the University of Oklahoma’s Sooner football team next Thanksgiving. The family is all conservative and Republican, which leads to all sorts of fraught conversations these days, but at least we’re all on board with the Sooners. The Sooners are undefeated and firmly ensconced in the top-ten ratings and still very much in the running for a national championship this season, but the last couple of wins have been hard-fought against mediocre competition, and there’s no telling what we might be all giving thanks for on that hopefully friendly family Thanksgiving..

— Bud Norman

A Hip-Hop Heave-Ho to “Suge” Knight

As caucasian and conservative Kansans of a certain age, our musical tastes tend  more to Peggy Lee and Hank Williams and the Duke Ellington Orchestra and Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys and Chuck Berry and The Ramones than the latest cacophony, but we’re familiar enough with the “gangsta’ rap” genre that we took note “Suge” Knight has pleaded guilty to a manslaughter charge which might result in what amounts to a life sentence.

If you’re not familiar with the oeuvre of Knight’s Death Row Records label we envy you, but you should know that over the past few decades it has exerted an undeniable influence on America’s popular culture. Back in the early hip-hop days that the youngsters now call “back in the day,” Death Row Records records made a ton of money peddling the most violent and misogynistic and generally nihilistic “gangsta’ rap” available on the open market. The shockingly violent lyrics were always delivered with a machine-gun staccato over a scary bass line, and they eerily echoed what we were reading in the local crime stories, and judging by the thudding music we’d hear every time we were stopped at a red light in certain parts of town it was a very lucrative trade.

At the time we covering the music beat for the local newspaper, and had interviewed Ice-T after his “Cop Killa'” peaked on the charts and one of the “Niggaz With Attitude” when they were the hottest thing going with equally anti-law enforcement sentiments, and even though  we witnessed the violence at their concerts we couldn’t argue with their rationalization that they were only expressing their reality. Even so, we argued with both that surely something more hopeful was going on in the ‘hood, and that things might better in the ‘hood if they stressed the best of it rather than glorifying the worst of it, and worried that “gangsta’ rap” might be both a cause and effect of the worst of it.

Back in the day, as the youngsters fondly call it, “gangsta’ rappers” used to shoot one another with alarming regularity. Death Row Records’ “artists” were often among both the victims and perpetrators, and Knight himself wound up facing various felony charges following various shoot-outs, but his record business was all the more brisk. Young black men of lesser renown were also gunning one another down at an alarming rate, here and everywhere else, and Death Row Records provided much of the soundtrack.

Since then things seem have calmed down a bit. Death Row Records is no long a major player on the music scene, and the few music critics we still occasionally read tell us that hip-hop is now about black empowerment and spirituality and other upbeat things. Ice-T has spent the last few decades playing cops on network television dramas, and that surprisingly friendly guy from “Niggaz With Attitude” has been playing the Dad character in some charmingly family-friendly blaxploitation flicks, and so far as we can tell from our red light stops in certain parts of town the latest hip-hop is less heavy on drive-by shootings and slapping  women and around and  generally defying law-enforcement and social norms. Except for a few mostly Democratic-run outlier big cities the black-on-black crime and the crime rate in general has been steadily declining since the heyday of “gangsta’ rap,” and we suspect both trends are both cause as well as effect.

It makes us feel suddenly aged to see that that this newfangled rap stuff is now so old that Knight is a rpideed 53 years old. Back in the day he’d have earned some valuable street cred by copping to a 28-year sentence, which would have been a mere 22 years if it weren’t his third felony strike, but these days he’s a hip-hop has-been who will go to prison for what might be the rest of his life with little notice.

C’est la vie, Suge. We well remember a better age of black music when Aretha and Sly and Otis and the Staple Singers were laying down far more musical tracks promising a new age of peace and brotherhood and equality, not to mention the likes of the great Duke Ellington Orchestra and Chuck Berry, and we hope it will long outlive the legacy of Death Row Records.

— Bud Norman

Our Very Reluctant Reflections on a Current Presidential Topic

Once upon a more polite time in American politics we would never have considered writing a word about a president’s penis, but in the age of President Donald Trump it’s yet another one of those many unprecedented topics one can’t quite avoid. Trump’s appendage first made its debut in the political conversation during the ’16 Republican primaries, when he assured his supporters that “I guarantee you there’s no problem, I guarantee,” and now it’s back in the news with a pornographic video performer and director’s far less flattering assessment.

The best-selling non-fiction book in America at the moment is journalism legend Bob Woodward’s “Fear: Trump in the White House,” which depicts an administration full of people worried that the chief executive is dangerously unfit for office, but we expect that next week’s chart-topper will be by a pornographic video performer and director called Stormy Daniels. Recently released by the courts from a $130,000 non-disclosure contract to not talk about an alleged tryst with Trump back when his youngest son by his third wife was 4-months-old, Daniels has a “tell-all” book coming out that will surely be far more lucrative, and the most salacious parts have already leaked out, and what she says will probably offend Trump more than anything in that Woodward book.

Ever since the editor of the once-fashonable and still-well-remembered but long-defunct Spy Magazine in New York City wrote that then local celebrity Trump was a “short-fingered vulgarian” the current president has been famously touchy about the size of his hands, which is why his penis came up in the news in the first place. Late in the death throes of his ill-fated presidential candidacy Florida Sen. Marco Rubio decided to give Trump’s undeniably successful insult comic shtick a try, and poked at that button he knew Trump had about his hand size, and very subtly suggested that Trump had other insecurities as well. Rubio was widely denounced in most corners for getting down to Trump’s gutter level, however, and Trump’s guarantees on a Republican presidential debate stage that there was no problem down there brought roars of approval from his mostly male die-hard supporters.

At the time we thought it more even embarrassing than the era of President Bill Clinton and its unavoidable fellatio jokes about a naive intern, but the latest developments are worse yet. We suppose there’s an chance that Trump didn’t cheat on third wife a few months after the birth of his fifth child with a pornographic video performer and a Playboy centerfold model, and paid them both six-figure amounts not to say so because he’s just that kind of stand-up guy who wants to protect his wife, but other tawdry scenarios seem more likely. Which makes the porn star’s assessment of Trump’s penis more plausible, which Trump will surely find more infuriating than anything that Pulitzer Prize-winning Wood might claim.

Given that this is the age of President Donald Trump, after all, we’ll just go ahead and write out that a porn star called Stormy Daniels is now alleging that the presidential penis is “smaller than average” but “not freakishly small,” and resembles a certain mushroom-shaped character in a popular video game, along with other details which have since gone viral. This is all on the public record where you’re bound to run into it sooner or later, but we apologize if you saw it here first.

To be fair to Trump, we concede that Daniels is a pornographic video performer, and thus probably has an unrealistic idea of what constitutes an average penis size, and that perhaps she’s lying about what she calls the “least impressive sex I’ve ever had,” and that in fact Trump is the most well-endowed and selfless lover he’s ever experienced/.” At this point we’re inclined to believe she’s been in a position to know, however, and with great anxiety we await Trump’s reassurances about the presidential package.

Worst yet, all of this tawdry nonsense seems dangerously tied up with the rest of it. On issues ranging from international trade to longstanding military alliances to the currently swelling national deficit Trump has promised that only his uniquely endowed alpha maleness can rescue the country from his the nefarious plots of critics, but at this point we’re more inclined to believe a pornographic video performer and director that Trump isn’t all he claims to be. If Daniel’s descriptions of the presidential junk are at all accurate they might also exacerbate the current frostiness between the president and his First Lady, which is another one of those unavoidable stories these days.

In the meantime Trump’s Supreme Court nomination is stalled by credible charges of attempted rape, the “Russia thing” racks up ever-closer-to-Trump guilty pleas and cooperating witnesses, the president keeps feuding with his Attorney General, yet the economy seems to keep humming along. We don’t expect that in the end the president’s penis will have much to do with it one way or the other, but in this weird day and age it will likely play some part. For now all those snarky late-night television comics are having great fun with it, however, and we can’t say we  blame them.

— Bud Norman

The Story That Drowned in the Flood

If the easternmost cities and towns of North Carolina weren’t underwater, and a Supreme Court nomination wasn’t facing equally stormy weather, the big story on Tuesday probably would have been President Donald Trump declassifying several documents related to the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation into the “Russia thing.”

Trump has “tweeted” that “Very bad things were happening, but now they are being exposed. Big stuff!” His critics have countered that it’s yet another out-in-the-open obstruction of justice based on yet another unconvincing conspiracy theory, and threatens to expose the Justice Department’s sources and methods and thus pose a threat to national security. In either case, we figure it would be a very big deal in a slower news cycle.

The documents include a very top-secret filing for a warrant from the very top-secret court established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, some internal e-mails sent by several DOJ and Federal Bureau of Investigations suspected of a “deep state” conspiracy to overthrow Trump’s presidency, and various other “big stuff.” If you haven’t been keeping up with the whole “Russia thing,” the FBI and all the intelligence agencies and even the Trump appointees who now run them agree that the Russians meddled in America’s past presidential election on Trump’s behalf, but Trump and all of his talk radio apologists agree that it was actually Democratic nominee “Crooked” Hillary Clinton who colluded in the effort.

Although that Clinton woman was indeed pretty damned crooked we have to admit she’s at least shrewd enough that this conspiracy theory makes no sense to us, but these days nothing does, so we can’t rule out the possibility that the declassified documents will definitively prove that Trump is the blameless victim of a “deep state” coup. We’ll not be wagering any of our meager amount of money on that outcome, though, and those damned Democrats’ sudden and opportunistic fussiness about sources and methods and national security seems a surer bet.

As horrible as it’s been the storm in the Carolinas will eventually dissipate, and one way or another a conservative jurist will eventually take a seat on the Supreme Court, but one way or another this “Russia thing” isn’t going away anytime soon.

— Bud Norman

Manafort’s Deal and the Rest of It

The news is quite jam-packed these days, what with the catastrophic flooding in the Carolinas and that unexpected plot twist temporarily tying up a Supreme Court nomination, but the latest development in the ongoing “Russia thing” is still worth noting. A former campaign chairman for President Donald Trump’s improbable yet winning candidacy has lately pleaded guilty to some serious charges involving his shady dealings with Russians, and in exchange for a lighter sentence on those charges and some other serious financial crimes he was recently convicted of in another trial he’s now offering cooperation with a special counsel investigation into the ongoing “Russia thing.”

This might or might not yet prove the development that brings down Trump’s presidency, but it in almost any case we can’t imagine it’s good news for Trump. Even in his pre-felon days former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was boastfully a lobbyist for the Russia-friendly Ukrainian government that was overthrown in a pro-freedom coup, the stereotypically cruel and corrupt African warlord Jonas Savimbi, and various other authoritarian strongmen around the world. One of his partners in the lobbying firm was Roger Stone, one of the self-described “Rat Fucker” dirty tricksters in President Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era campaign, who has freely admitted to several newspapers and various cable news networks that he’s clearly “Person A” in previous indictments and the next one to be charged with various crimes. Another named partner in that notorious lobbying firm was Rick Gates, who long ago pleaded guilty to various serious charges and has since provided evidence against Manafort in that recent trial which ended so unfortunately for Manafort.

It remains to be seen what the former campaign chairman might testify about the next-higher-up in the campaign hierarchy, but at this point it’s unlikely to redound to the benefit of Trump. Manafort guided the campaign through a slightly reluctant Republican party nominating convention, which suspiciously changed its platform about arming the Ukrainian nationalists resisting Russian occupation, and he was in on the Trump Tower meeting with some shady Russians who had clearly indicated in an undisputed e-mail chain released by Donald Trump Jr. that they were offering campaign assistance on behalf of the Russian government, and we guess he potentially has all sorts of other tales to tell.

Trump had “tweeted” his profound respect for Manafort’s character back when his friend was still holding out against extreme prosecutorial pressure to “flip,” but we notice that since Manafort’s apparent “flipping” Trump’s “twitter” feed has been conspicuously silent on the subject. Trump has plenty else to “tweet” about these days, given the catastrophic flooding in the Carolinas and the unnecessarily renewed controversy about the horrific death toll in last year’s hurricane in Puerto Rico, not to mention that complicated situation with the Supreme Court nominee, and we can well understand why he’d rather not we were thinking about that ongoing “Russia thing.”

Meanwhile the unemployment rate is down and the stock markets are still up, and despite Trump’s stupid trade wars and the swelling national deficit the economy seems swell enough, but it’s hard for even all that to crowd out the rest of a jam-packed news cycle. The past and present hurricanes and a Supreme Court nominee credibly accused of sexual assault and everything we already now about the “Russia thing” make for a perform storm, even without all the hush-money payments to porn stars and Playboy playmates and all the rest of it, so we predict a few more unfavorable news cycles leading up to the mid-term elections. After that, we’ll not be at all surprised by anything that might happen.

— Bud Norman

An Anonymous Accuser Comes Forward, and Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings to Come to a Sudden Halt

When federal Judge Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump we figured the confirmation by the Senate was pretty much a done deal, and that was all right by us. Over the weekend Kavanaugh’s promotion became less certain, though, and by now that’s also all right by us.

Kavanaugh’s requisite testimony before the majority Republican Senate judiciary committee was a predictably partisan affair, with the Democrats trotting out all their usual alarmist about what might happen if the Supreme Court starts deciding things according to what the Constitution plainly says and its ratifiers plainly understood. Even so, the Democrats also had some admittedly more compelling complaints about all the documents that Kavanaugh had withheld until the last moment and some potentially perjruous statements he made during the hearings and especially the quite expansive view of executive privilege that he’d described in some undeniable documents that had been obtained, which is will well worth noting given all the Trump-related cases that might eventually wind up in the Supreme Court.

Our admittedly amateur opinion is that the Democrats are on less firm constitutional ground as they worry that Kavanaugh might be the fifth vote need to overturn the abortion rights declared in Roe v. Wade, but our more expert political is that they’ve got a winning electoral issue if it does come to pass, so of course they made a bit deal of that.

None of that was likely to prevent Kavanaugh’s nomination, however, and none of it kept us from being more or less all right with that. Even when that oh-so-California-Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein spoke at the end of the week of an anonymous source who alleged that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her way back in his prep school days, Kavanaugh seemed a safe pick. He had a long list of character witnesses, including the girls’ basketball teams he’d coached and his fellow prep school carpoolers and their children, and that was to be weighed against an anonymous accuser’s accusations vaguely described by an undeniably partisan Democrat.

Over the weekend, however, a 51-year-old-professor of research psychology with appointments at both Palo Alto University and Stanford Univerity named Christine Blasey Ford went on the record as Kavanaugh’s accuser, and even after so many years she seems to have some corroborating evidence for an account that is quite unpleasantly specific. She claims that during a teenaged party in the early ’80s at a house in the tony little town in Maryland’s Montgomery County, two drunken boys from a nearby elite prep school cornered in her a room, and proceed to grope and rub themselves against as one held a hand over her mouth. She now names the two boys as Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and bus fellow classmate Mark Judge, a filmmaker and author who has written for publications ranging from The Washington Post to the Weekly Standard. Both have plenty of character witnesses, but so does Ford, and sh’e released a family therapist’s record that show she’s been telling the same story long before anyone ever heard of Kavanaugh, and she can no longer be accused of hiding her reputation behind anonymous charges.

Judge was also the author of a roman a clef titled “Wasted: Tales of a Gen-x Drunk,” which mentions a classmate named “Bart O’Kavanaugh” puking in cars and passing out on the way home from parties. That’s by no means conclusive proof of anything more nefarious than the usual teenaged obnoxiousness, of course, but given everything else it suggests that there might something to the tale a well-credentialed professor by the name of Christine Blasey Ford is staking her reputation on. At the very least, it should tie up the confirmation process for a few more news cycles.

Given everything else, it might even wind up preventing Kavanaugh’s confirmation. All that talk about Roe v. Wade already had two abortion rights-favoring women Republican Senators from quirkily Republic states wavering on Kavanaugh’s nomination, which is decisive given the Republican’s razor thing margin in the upper chamber, and credible accusations of sexual assault will also further scare off those Democrats running for re-election in the states won by Trump. Not to mention the concerns about Trump packing the Supreme Court for his inevitable cases there.

If we were betting types and had any money to wager, we’d still be inclined to bet a few measly bucks on Kavanaugh’s confirmation, but at this point we’d insist on better odds than we did before, and we’ll hold out some hope that one way or the other the truth will prevail.

— Bud Norman