Blumenthal And The New Morality

“There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one” ― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

Morality through the ages has always been an OK-Not-OK proposition. Some things were just not to be suffered gladly and, before the ascendancy of the new morality, it generally had been agreed that society had a moral obligation to impose sanctions on persistent cultural deviants. This proposition was heartily rejected by the sons and daughters of the Woodstock Generation, some of whose adherents are now pontificating from the hallowed halls of the U.S. Congress.

In connection with the presumed manifold sins of prospective U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one longs for a voice rising above clamorous moral maenads in the Democrat Party – saints Schumer, Blumenthal and Feinstein, U.S. Senators all – “Let he  ( and, to be fair, she) who is without sin cast the first stone.” It is impossible at this point to tell whether any of Kavanagh’s accusers are “without sin,” chiefly because New Yorker magazine reporter Ronan Farrell has not yet searched the backgrounds – going back more than 30 years – of Kavanaugh’s accusers.
  

What are the sins of Kavanaugh, other than his adherence to an originalist doctrinal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution? They are, if we are to believe his accusers, schoolboy sins of the flesh, a claim vigorously denied under penalty of perjury by Kavanaugh and other witnesses named by his accusers.

It is alleged by the accuser – whose name is here withheld from an abundance of delicacy -- that Kavanaugh did, when he was a high school student, drag her from a hallway into a bedroom and fondle her, making “a clumsy attempt to disrobe her.”

According to the accuser’s account, Kavanaugh  was joined by his friend who piled on top of Kavanaugh, who was piled on top of the accuser. She was wearing a bathing suit at the time. Kavanaugh and the school friend of his who supposedly participated in the sexual roughhouse were, the accuser disclosed to the New York Post, drunk at the time. We do not know whether the accuser was also drunk or why she was wearing a bathing suit. At least one Sherlock Holmes thought the bathing suit may have been important because it suggested the unidentified house at which the event may or may not have occurred may or may not have had a pool, a datum that might help to place the event at a specific location.

There were four people present in the house at the time, three of whom, including Kavanaugh, have denied the charge under penalty of perjury. Although the charge against Kavanaugh has been widely advertised in the media and accepted as true by many, we do not know where the sexual assault took place, or what year, month and day it had occurred. Nor do we know as yet whether any convincing, unimpeachable evidence will be brought forward to show that the event occurred as represented by his accuser. The accuser did not report the molestation when it was alleged to have occurred to the police or anyone close to her, including her parents. The Judiciary Committee investigating Kavanaugh will be questioning her sometime soon -- maybe.

The mere accusation was convincing enough for the more saintly of the stone throwers. After examining the blurred outlines of the accusation, Blumenthal, Connecticut’s Attorney General for more than 20 years, issued an obiter dictum in one of his tweets: “I believe Dr. Ford. We have every reason to believe a survivor who comes forward at great personal risk under hostile scrutiny. We have every reason to doubt Judge Kavanaugh—after his evasive seemingly misleading testimony.” Blumenthal's unshakable belief was not the result of evidence offered; the reader will note the artful and lawyerly placement of the words  “seemingly misleading” testimony. Kavanaugh's testimony, delivered to the Judiciary Committee after a very lengthy and thorough interrogation, did not convince Blumenthal -- because Connecticut's former Attorney General was never disposed to regard as convincing ANY testimony save that of Kavanaugh's accusers.

In Blumenthal, the will to believe overcomes rationality and justice. And the will to believe is cousin to the will to persuade.   

“First the verdict, then the trial,” said the Queen of Hearts in Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  Blumenthal graduated to the Queen of Hearts school of jurisprudence after having spent more than two decades as Connecticut Attorney General, in which position his modus operandi was unvarying: Blumenthal first made accusations against his targets in the media, then tried his best, more often than not successfully, to encumber his victim’s assets, so that the accused would not have the means to defend himself (or, to be fair, herself ) from costly, seeming interminable litigation. When Blumenthal moved from the Attorney General’s office to the U.S. Senate, carrying all of his virtues and vices in his portmanteau, he bequeathed to incoming Attorney General George Jepsen more than two hundred cases that Jepsen quickly dismissed, freeing Blumenthal’s targets, wiser but much poorer, from the litigation racks upon which they had been stretched.

It has been obvious for some time that New York Senator Chuck Schumer and his political colluders on the Judiciary Committee, Blumenthal and California Senator Dianne Feinstein, have been intent on delaying a vote in the Senate to affirm or deny Trump’s nominee to the high court. A delay past the November elections – assuming a blue wave will put Democrats in charge of one or both houses of congress -- may give progressive Democrats an opportunity to snuff ANY appointment made to ANY court by Trump. Blumenthal has opposed all attempts to regulate his beloved Planned Parenthood abortionists. It is, to say the least odd, to find the  former Attorney General regulator-in-chief now passionately fulminating in the Senate against bills that require abortionists to notify the parents of children seeking abortions that their daughters may suffer a serious operation by medical personnel who may not have visiting privileges at nearby hospitals.

Far more than the sensible regulation of serious surgical procedures, Democrats fear the lengthening  shadow of Justice Scalia, an originalist whose judicial philosophy embraces the now heterodox notion that the best way to preserve the lauded constitutional separation of powers is to require judges to adhere to constitutional prescriptions as they had been understood by the architects of the U.S. Constitution.

Kavanaugh has said numerous times during his testimony that he regards Roe v. Wade as settled law, but Blumenthal, the senator from Planned Parenthood, continues to frighten pro-abortionists with the notion that the settled law will be quickly unsettled if Kavanaugh is elevated to the court. This hobgoblin of the progressive left has weakened virtues and hideously strengthened vices.