Dana Mathewson

I believe it was the late Israeli Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Abba Eban who said that in the attempt to make peace in the Middle East, "the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity."

Well, these days, it seems that the Left never misses an opportunity to overreach. Here's an excellent Marc Thiessen article from Fox News.

President Trump apologized to Justice Brett Kavanaugh and his family Monday for the "terrible pain and suffering" they endured during his confirmation process, declaring that "what happened to the Kavanaugh family violates every notion of fairness, decency and due process."

Democrats seem to be taking the opposite lesson from the Kavanaugh fight. As Politico recently tweeted, "After failing to stop Kavanaugh's confirmation, Democrats wonder if it's time to be more ruthless."

 

More ruthless? There are a lot of reasons the effort to stop Kavanaugh failed, but a lack of ruthlessness is not one of them.

Kavanaugh's opponents just tried to destroy a man without a shred of corroborating evidence. No tactic, no unfounded accusation, was too extreme.

Democrats demanded that the FBI investigate not just Christine Blasey Ford's uncorroborated accusations, but also the charge in the New Yorker's hit piece that Kavanaugh had exposed himself to a college classmate, Deborah Ramirez, as well as the scurrilous accusation by Michael Avenatti client Julie Swetnick that Kavanaugh participated in gang rapes at high school parties. How can you get any more ruthless than unfounded accusations of gang rape?

Democrats did not lose the Kavanaugh fight because they were not ruthless enough. They lost because, as always, the left overreached. Their increasingly brazen and unsupported charges against Kavanaugh backfired, strengthening the GOP's case that Kavanaugh was the victim of a political hit job, and actually helping to secure his confirmation.

They also lost because of their disastrous decision last year to filibuster the nomination of Neil Gorsuch, a justice of impeccable qualification and temperament. If Democrats had kept their powder dry then, they would still have had the filibuster in place when Kavanaugh was nominated. As it stands, Republicans were barely able to confirm Kavanaugh; they likely would never have been able to muster the votes to invoke the nuclear option to get him onto the court.

In the case of Gorsuch, at least there was no attempt at character assassination. That was because he was a conservative justice replacing a conservative justice, the late Antonin Scalia. His confirmation simply restored the status quo ante.

Kavanaugh, by contrast, was replacing Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court's key swing vote. His confirmation could swing the court's ideological balance for a generation, so he had to be destroyed.

If they did this to Kennedy's replacement, think of what Democrats will do if, at some point in his presidency, Trump ends up nominating someone to replace a liberal Supreme Court justice. It's hard to imagine anything worse than charges of gang rape, but I doubt we have yet plumbed the depths of the ruthlessness of which Democrats are capable.

Democrats have no one but themselves to blame for Kavanaugh's confirmation. Their strategic miscalculations, and embrace of what they once decried as the "politics of personal destruction," backfired. And the reverberations may not yet be over.

 

 

Marc's article is a must-read, of course, and it's found here:  https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/marc-thiessen-kavanaugh-fight-shows-we-have-not-yet-plumbed-the-depths-of-democratic-ruthlessness

 

Now, I know that it's hard to believe the donkey party thinks it needs to become more ruthless, but it's true. Here's an article from Breitbart by John Nolte, if you have the stomach for it -- and you should. Sun Tzu admonished us to "know your enemy," and these days the Left is a formidable enemy. There are no more political opponents. Only enemies. The problem is that the Republicans haven't figured that out yet.   https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/10/09/democrats-consider-becoming-more-ruthless-losing-kavanaugh-battle/

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