When his turn came to talk, had Brett Kavanaugh walked out to his desk, sat his notes down, then walked around the table and walked up to Dick Durbin and popped him square on the nose, he couldn’t have made his case more masterful.
He took off the gloves, which in the Republican world of Washington, no one ever considered an option anymore.
It’s Thursday, October 4. and the shock of the way Brett Kavanaugh made his case on Thursday, September 28, has still not worn off.
By Sunday, the Democrats were clearly no longer on offense. Kavanaugh was no longer an attempted rapist, a serious felony offender justifying many years in prison, (I’ve defended just such cases) but now a drunk…including some talk of being a bar brawler. Without using a shillelagh (stick) or driving a car recklessly, we’re now only talking about a misdemeanor, where jail time is rare indeed. Certainly no more punishment than Code Pink or Soros Kiddie Korps gets for breaking up a congressional hearing.
Yes, though Kavanaugh has dropped from a felony rapist to a college kid who got loaded every weekend…but who always seemed to still get straight A’s anyway for seven straight years…and not those crip courses over in the Sociology Department either…the Democrats are still trying to keep the alleged violence of that original assault claim by portraying him as a violent drinker.
Without a single bloody nose to show for it. From anyone.
It isn’t working.
Rush Limbaugh has rushed to the podium to say the entire Kavanaugh family has been destroyed. Well not yet, Rush, which is why I’m writing this before the final vote. You see, while Democrats are failing to even keep their base enraged over this shift from attempted rape to misdemeanor “intemperate” drinking, Republicans, who’ve been bitch-slapped more in the past 20 years than Russian hookers who try to hold back on their pimps, seem to be saying, “That’s all I can stands, cause I cant stands no more.”
We’re at a time when a little fist-pounding and finger pointing, including a few expletives-deleted are called for, as it is exactly what the GOP base has been calling for since at least 2010.
And from the looks on the faces of Jeff Flake and Susan Collins, I’d say the Dems target may indeed be Republicans, especially younger conservatives, who may have no personal memory of just what a haymaker looks or feels like.
Yes, there will be a vote on Kavanaugh soon, and a mid-term election in about a month. But despite the dour “who farted-looks” on Flake and Collins, there is the possibility that the “temper of the Party” may well change because of Brett Kavanaugh’s counter-attack last week, and Sen Lindsey Graham’s timely exclamation mark he attached to Kavanaugh’s defense.
Graham “J’accuse’d” in the most forceful way I’ve seen in years, and voters out here on the hustings want to see more of that. Much more.
But, as we are already seeing, some of the more aristocratic of Members and conservative writers are not gong along with what they see as clearly a de classe debasement of discourse. Heretofore their ripostes had always been 1500 words of beard-stroking, impersonal outrage, a type of response the Left has relied on for over 20 years, for it never upset the false decorum that had controlled Washington discourse since FDR.
You see, the Marxist left, because it was always a movement of intellectuals, had a great aversion to face to face combat. Even in the 19th Century they feared being publicly called liars…because they were liars. And knew it. They had a deep fear of physical combat. If there were heads to be knocked, they would hire it done. Just like today. And Joan Baez has sung a folk song to just about everyone of them. It’s for sure Barack Obama never threw a fist, much less a rock or bottle, at anyone.
But somewhere along the line the well-creased slacks replaced bruised knuckles in the rites of passage our male children had to pass through.
So I only want to make the case here for the virtue of raised, angry, menacing voices in reply to “lies and damned lies” (Mark Twain) for it is clearly what the American voters want to hear more.
I was surprised to learn that Brett Kavanaugh and his generation, in suburban Maryland for God’s sake, actually knew a little bit about standing one’s ground and even spittin’ in another fellow’s eye, it circumstances dictated it.
Brett Kavanaugh is about five years older than my eldest son, and only this week did he tell me about his college drinking culture in the late 80s. He was a scholarship athlete at an upscale Midwestern university, and confirmed that drinking and bar-fights (mostly in the parking lot) in his day was about the same as it was in mine. Wow!
I quoted Popeye, above, who came to film in the 30’s during the Depression. But you might want to know why both Hollywood and the federal government were using Popeye to encourage kids to eat spinach then, and that was so they could fight back against bullies rather than run home crying. Go figure.
A bloody nose was considered a legitimate deterrent among school kids through the 60s.
I don’t know if Donald Trump had fights, but he did attend a military academy. (We’re the same age.) But he does have an allure, and probably a natural one, for men who recall how things once were.
Interestingly, Lindsey Graham, and who I never liked very much, was a military lawyer like me, and would have had a different perspective about these sorts of drinking-fighting hijinks than the general population, for they are more common in the military culture. I’m betting Graham would have been a prosecutor if he did trial work, whereas I did defense, but he would have known about Nature’s Law when man’s law doesn’t dot all the “i’s”. The UCMJ has it’s definition of “assault & battery” and the Marines, the Army, Navy and Air Force would have their own, based on what the common culture of the individual service understood it to be. In other words, 75% of the broken noses and lost teeth probably never showed up on any MP blotter. Lindsey and I would never have even seen them.
So Senator Graham knows “justified wrath” and he recognized it in the behavior of Brett Kavanaugh. Defense of one’s good name is always at the top of the list.
I spoke about this in my “Justified Bloody Nose” essay, stating how it’s based on Natural Law and why and when people will resort to it when all else fails, as they watch, time after time Democrats, strutting with an air of immunity, getting away scot-free with things from trespass, to common assault, to the most egregious forms of defamatory lying.
I also wrote about Mick Hensley breaking my nose…twice…to illustrate how important it is that there be continuity in this natural law remaining viable, and how sad I was that it had apparently skipped the law school classes. I was gratified to see that not to be case with Brett Kavanaugh’s education.
For the Illuminati of the conservative media, remember, Bill Buckley once threatened to mash Gore Vidal’s “goddam face” on live TV in the 1960s because Vidal had called him a Crypto-Nazi.
Tell me, did WFB learn that on the playing field of Eton or the saloons of New Haven?
Are you listening “National Review”?
Knocking blocks off should still be considered a part of conservatism’s quiver when all else fails, and in polite argument, all else seems to have failed in the case of Brett Kavanaugh.
Brett Kavanaugh captured that moment, from his own training, and, with Lindsey Graham’s help, has opened a door for a wave of rhetorical mash-mouth to explode upon these moral cowards. It may be our last opportunity to drive them back into their holes with words alone.
All you have to do is let Dems know they are no longer your friend, or even colleague, because you now know you were never truly theirs.
Never be afraid of losing a friend you never had.
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Amen to all you say here! Great article!