Motus Mentis

I so dislike Elizabeth Warren, and would so like to see her drummed out of public life, that I’ll pile on a bit here. Not only is she a race-hustling fraud, as she has in these last days kindly demonstrated for all to see, but she is also a plagiarist.

Some time ago she contributed some recipes to an Indian-themed cookbook, published in 1984, called “Pow Wow Chow“. She provided them under the by-line “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee” (which she is not).

It must have seemed odd, to the book’s readers, that dishes such as as “Crab With Tomato Mayonnaise Dressing” would be traditional “chow” for Cherokee Indians, and rightly so: the recipes were cribbed, pretty much verbatim, from the French gourmet Pierre Franey, who had written them up five years previously in the New York Times. Have a look here.

Ms. Warren is up for re-election in three weeks. I hope the good people of Massachusetts will be honorable enough to show her the door.

We won. Not the war, which is just beginning. But we won this battle. Take a moment to savor the victory.

Let us also praise two unlikely heroes of this campaign: Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham. Who knew? War brings out the best and the worst in men. I commend them for their valor.

There’s been a lot of excellent commentary on the Kavanaugh carnage from, to hijack a phrase from an erstwhile commenter of ours, “the adults in the room”. Here’s a sampling (with a hat-tip to Bill Keezer for sme of these links):

First up, we have former senator Tom Coburn, who identifies as a root of this darkening storm the concentration of power in the Federal behemoth — and more specifically, in the Supreme Court. We read:

First, it’s important to ask why both sides treat Supreme Court confirmation hearings as existential, life-and-death struggles. The reality is lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court feel like lifetime prison sentences for those of the opposing ideology. If either side views the stakes as incalculably high, it’s easier to understand why politicians employ the win-at-any-cost rhetoric and tactics Lindsey Graham lambasted.

In our system, the Supreme Court was never designed to be the final arbiter of every difficult and controversial question in American cultural and political life. Yet, both sides see the court as the final decider on everything from marriage to life to what kind of health insurance we can buy. The stakes were never supposed to be this high.

If the Senate wants to lower the nation’s temperature it needs to lower the stakes. The senators can do this by reapplying the timeless advice of our Founders.

As James Madison wrote in Federalist 45 in 1788, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.’

The Constitution’s enumerated powers don’t give the Supreme Court the vast powers it has today. The Founders wanted to focus power in the states in part because they believed it was wise to concentrate power closest to the people having disagreements. Our Founders didn’t have a naÁ¯ve view of what we call “polarization’ today. They viewed passionate debate as the natural outcome of a free and prosperous society. At the same time, they feared government would become unstable if regular citizens lost the ability to resolve differences to an overbearing central government that tried to right every wrong.

If senators love the Constitution as much as they say they do, they should define total victory not as vesting power in the court, but devolving power from the court.

Exactly right. The three branches of government are peers, and each of them is equally qualified to interpret the Constitution. The supremacy of the Court in this regard is what Daniel Horowitz, in this essay, calls “an absurd and tyrannical fiction”:

In the 1780s, our Founders feared many things about the tenuous future of the republic they were creating, but a tyrannical judiciary that acts as supreme to the other branches wasn’t one of them. They would have laughed at the spectacle of two parties at each other’s throats not over the balance of power in the Senate, but over how that balance of power will determine the tilt of the Supreme Court, where the true power resides these days.

Regardless of whom Trump nominates to fill the latest Supreme Court vacancy, both sides will vociferously question the nominee over his or her views of certain court precedents. But we could go a long way toward cooling some of this political acrimony (and fixing our republic to boot) if we focused on just one court precedent: The Supreme Court’s own declaration, during the Warren era, that its decisions over the Constitution are exclusive, final, and universally binding over the other branches of government. It’s this legal fiction that is fueling the high-stakes fights over every other precedent. If we all agreed to end judicial supremacy, control over the other two branches of government ”“ with their more robust powers to affect their respective interpretations of the Constitution ”“ would matter much more than control over the Supreme Court.

Mr. Horowitz adds:

Ultimately, it’s the political branches of government ”“ with their powers of the purse and enforcement ”“ that are tasked with executing the law. When answering the question of “what is to control Congress when backed and even pushed on by a majority of their Constituents’ to enact something unconstitutional, Madison said that ultimately the power resides with the people. “Nothing within the pale of the Constitution but sound argument & conciliatory expostulations addressed both to Congress & to their Constituents.’

Yes, the Supreme Court can always be used as one avenue for pushing a specific constitutional interpretation, particularly for specific cases and controversies, but it should by no means be the only and final avenue. That is the core difference between judicial review and judicial supremacy. But the Founders purposely didn’t give the judiciary any tools to enforce its decisions, because they relied solely on sound argument resonating with the people to pressure the other branches into acquiescence.

Yes, “…ultimately the power resides with the people.” That’s true, as a purely natural fact, under any form of government or sovereignty. And in a last resort, they may appeal to heaven. (So keep your powder dry.)

Next, here’s Michael Anton, who as “Publius Decius Mus” wrote the critically important Flight 93 Election essay back in 2016. In this essay he writes about what he calls The Gillibrand Standard. Here are some longish excerpts, but you should read the whole thing.

The Left has created a new “standard’ for American politics””indeed, new in the entire history of Anglo-American jurisprudence. Let us call it the Gillibrand Standard, after its most insistent advocate, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

According to the Gillibrand Standard, accusation suffices to destroy. Not only is no corroborating evidence necessary, to ask for such evidence makes one just as guilty as the accused. Especially monstrous is to ask questions of the accuser; that is to repeat or compound the alleged crime. The accusation, once stated, immediately takes on metaphysical certainty. To doubt is to blaspheme.

Actually, “accusation’ is too generous. Machiavelli distinguishes between “accusation’ and “calumny’ in order to demonstrate that “as much as accusations are useful to republics, so much are calumnies pernicious.’ The difference is that accusations are public, subject to critique and refutation, and a mendacious or even inaccurate accuser pays a price. Calumnies, by contrast, “have need neither of witnesses nor any other specific corroboration to prove them, so that everyone can be calumniated by everyone; but everyone cannot be accused, since accusations have need of true corroboration and of circumstances that show the truth of the accusation.’ A more incisive summary of the Gillibrand Standard cannot be found.

… There is but one limiting principle to the Gillibrand Standard: It shalt be used only against the Right and Republicans. Credible accusations””with evidence, witnesses, contemporaneous police reports””against Democrats and liberals are not merely to be ignored but also stonewalled and attacked, alleged victims and witnesses alike smeared. That is, until this or that liberal is no longer useful in the moment and safely can be discarded. Throwing an expired liberal to the wolves now and then is useful to maintain the fiction of evenhandedness.

This is obviously outrageous, unjust, unfair, and offensive to any conceivable standard of decency. Just as obvious, the Democrats and Left not only do not care, they welcome the weaponization of accusation. Their only conceivable regret is that it might not work this time. But even if it doesn’t “work’ in the sense that Kavanaugh is not confirmed, they know that it “works’ in other ways. It rallies their base. It drives fundraising. It degrades public standards of decency and credibility, making its effective use more likely in the future. It delegitimizes institutions””in this case, the Supreme Court, which, with the addition of Justice Kavanaugh, may later rule constitutionally and correctly in ways the Left does not like. And, most important for the nihilistic Left, it delegitimizes and dehumanizes””makes a villain out of””Kavanaugh himself.

It is hard to say what is the most shamelessly disgusting aspect of this affair. I offer as a candidate the following tactic. First, smear your target with uncorroborated, unprovable and almost certainly false allegations. After you have””inevitably””failed to substantiate those charges, insist that your target withdraw since his reputation will now forever be under a cloud and his rulings will lack popular legitimacy. This is akin to breaking an opponent’s arm before a sporting event and then insisting that he forfeit.

Next we have historian Niall Ferguson:

Having watched Ford testify, I have little doubt that she believes the truth of what she said. But as an historian who has spent many long hours interviewing people about past events, including in some cases highly personal matters, I do not regard that as good enough to destroy the reputation of a distinguished judge.

Human memory is, generally speaking, bad at history. Were I writing Kavanaugh’s biography, I could not possibly depict him, on the basis of uncorroborated testimony provided long after the fact, as a man who attempted rape in his youth and lied about it later. His memory is also unlikely to be perfect. But his story ”” that, as a young man, he glugged beer and had the usual Catholic hang-ups about sex ”” is more plausible.

…Let me offer two hypotheses about why we are in this mess. The first is that the world’s elite educational institutions are now so dominated by self-styled liberals and progressives, that an inexorably rising proportion of people in other elite institutions ”” corporations, the media, government agencies ”” now subscribe to all or part of their ideology.

Ask today’s graduate trainees (for example) if they think there should be limits to free speech so that people “feel safe.” Ask them if “implicit bias” is something all white men suffer from. Ask them if the achievement of “diversity” matters more than promotion on merit. The answers will mostly be yes. Campus politics is spreading. Soon you, too, will be asked to state your preferred pronouns at the beginning of each meeting, just in case someone present favors the gender-neutral “zhe.”

My second hypothesis is that the rise of internet platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter has disastrously exacerbated the polarization of not only the United States but all Western societies. For it is on social media that the show trials of our time are now held, as anyone knows who followed Thursday’s hearing on Twitter.

The rule of law can be killed in more than one way. In liberal nightmares, a despotic president sweeps aside the Constitution in the manner of a Latin American caudillo. But in conservative nightmares, the graduates of Yale Law School agree that social justice would be best served by discarding the presumption of innocence and relying on Twitter polls to determine guilt.

Victor Davis Hanson comments on the spread of a new and relativistic radicalism from our ivied halls to the halls of power:

The polarizing atmosphere of the university has now spread to Congress.

During the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh, we witnessed how college values have become the norms of the Senate. On campus, constitutional due process vanishes when accusations of sexual harassment arise. America saw that when false charges were lodged against the Duke University lacrosse players and during Rolling Stone magazine’s concocted smear of a University of Virginia fraternity.

Americans may disagree about the relative credibility of either Kavanaugh or his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford. But they all witnessed how the asymmetry of the campus governed the hearings.

Ford’s veracity hinged on empathy and perceived believability. There was little requirement of corroborating testimonies, witnesses and what used to be called physical evidence. In contrast, Kavanaugh was considered guilty from the start. He had to prove his innocence.

One belief of the university is the postmodern idea of relativist truth.

On campus, all can present equally valid narratives. What privileges one story over another is not necessarily any semblance to reality, at least as established by evidence and facts. Instead, powerful victimizers supposedly “construct’ truths based on their own self-interests. As a result, self-described victims of historical biases are under no obligation to play by what they consider to be rigged rules of facts, evidence or testimony.

This dynamic explains why Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J) insisted that Dr. Ford told “her truth.’ In other words, evidence was not so relevant. Ford’s story of events from 36 years ago inherently would have as much claim on reality as Kavanaugh’s rebuttal””and perhaps more so, given their different genders and asymmetrical access to power.

There was little interest in discovering the ancient idea of the Truth.

Here is Roger Kimball on The Democrats’ Dead Ideals:

The ground is littered with dead and wounded ideals: civility, dead; basic decency, dead; the presumption of innocence, gravely wounded, ditto for the idea of due process. And this disgusting carnage is all on you, O ancient one, Dianne Feinstein, and your self-important, preposterous colleagues. You were desperate to keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court so you abandoned any semblance of decency and respect. You travestied the processes of the United States Senate for the sake of a cynical grab at power. I’d say that you should be ashamed of yourselves, but, like the thugs that you are, you have no shame. You believe the acquisition of power is a magical antidote to shame. You are wrong about that, and one can only hope that you will one day reap some portion of the obloquy you have sowed.

…There are not words sufficiently contemptuous to describe this repulsive display. Several commentators have drawn parallels between the unfounded attacks on Judge Kavanaugh and the tirades of Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. A better parallel, perhaps, is the case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was ritually humiliated, drummed out of the French army, and given a sentence of life imprisonment on trumped up charges of espionage. He was eventually cleared, years later, but his career had been shattered and his life ruined. “Where do I go to get my reputation back?’

The real crime of Captain Dreyfus was that he was Jewish. The crime of Brett Kavanaugh is that he is Donald Trump’s nominee.

Here are some facts of the matter. Until he was nominated by President Trump in July, Brett Kavanaugh was not just widely admired, he was universally commended for his intelligence, his judiciousness, and his impartiality. Everyone who worked for him, he worked for, and everyone he worked with sang his praises. In the aftermath of Christine Ford’s accusation, scores of women from Judge Kavanaugh’s past — girls he had been friends with and dated in high school, college friends, professional colleagues — attested to his integrity and decency.

On the other side, what do we have? We have Christine Ford and in her toxic wake increasingly preposterous accusations by unhappy hysterics like Deborah Ramirez, whom The New Yorker spent six days helping to “assess’ her memories, and various lowlifes dredged up by Creepy Porn Lawyerâ„¢ Michael Avenatti. Stepping back, we can see that the spectacle forms a sort of bell curve:

1) Rumors of a letter in Senator Dianne Feinstein’s possession are leaked to the jackals of the press.

2) After the Senate hearings conclude, the letter itself is leaked. It accuses a drunken 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh of pushing Christine Ford on a bed and fumbling with her bathing suit. (That, by the way, was the alleged “assault.’)

3) With Deborah Ramirez, the volume increases in this Wagnerian drama. Now an 18-year-old Brett Kavanaugh is accused (no witnesses, though) of exposing himself to Ramirez at drunken party at Yale.

4) Volume now at full blast, Creepy Porn Lawyerâ„¢ Michael Avenatti pushes Julie Swetnick into the jackals’ klieg lights. She says (but offers no proof or witnesses) that she had been at 10 parties — 10! I guess she liked those soirées — at which Brett Kavanaugh participated in drugging and gang-raping women.

5) Another chap, now under criminal investigation for offering false information to the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that Brett Kavanaugh participated in assaulting a woman on a boat in Newport.

6) Diminuendo now. The Newport story falls apart. The Ramirez story falls apart. The Julie Swetnick story falls apart.

7) The music is very soft now. Almost every particular of Christine Ford’s story disintegrates.

Remember the second front door she wanted installed in her house as an emergency escape route in case the boogeyman came back and assaulted her? She said it was in an argument with her husband over that that she first mentioned Brett Kavanaugh. But that was in 2012, when she was in couples therapy. (It would be nice to know more about Christine Ford’s psychiatric history.) In fact, the Fords got a permit for the front door in 2008, years before. Over the years, the front door was used by renters and then for Ford’s psychology practice (though I can see how her patients might have regarded it as an escape hatch).

Remember her supposed fear of flying? It turns out that she flies all the time. The real question is, who gets her frequent flier miles? Rachel Mitchell, the sex-crimes prosecutor that the GOP senators employed to question Christine Ford at the hearings because she was too delicate to be questioned by men, has released a memo detailing the many contradictions in Ford’s testimony.

8) Back on the ground floor now, the New York Times, in one last, pathetic effort to smear Brett Kavanaugh, runs a piece titled “Kavanaugh was Questioned by Police After Bar Fight in 1985.’ The story, written by an anti-Trump, anti-Kavanaugh Times opinion writer, reveals the astounding fact that Brett Kavanaugh might have thrown ice at someone in a bar. It’s so quiet now that you can hear the titters in the background. From drugging and gang raping women to throwing ice at someone in a bar in one week. Swift work!

Finally, here’s Andrew McCarthy on the question of Mr. Kavanaugh’s ‘judicial temperament”:

Brett Kavanaugh has been a judge for a dozen years on one of the most important judicial tribunals in the country, the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. In that office, not only has he issued over 300 opinions, which have been broadly admired for their craftsmanship and heavily relied on by the Supreme Court and other federal courts; he has also been widely praised for his judicial temperament by litigants, colleagues, and bar associations. The diverse group of clerks he has mentored has been in high demand for Supreme Court clerkships and other distinguished positions in the legal profession.

His judicial temperament could not be more apparent.

By contrast, here is Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg speaking about Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, two years ago:

He is a faker. He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego. . . . How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns?

Guy Benson reminds us of some similarly injudicious remarks by Justice Ginsburg:

In a New York Times interview, Ginsburg doesn’t hold a thing back when it comes to the 2016 election. “I can’t imagine what this place would be ”” I can’t imagine what the country would be ”” with Donald Trump as our president. . . . For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be ”” I don’t even want to contemplate that.’ Ginsburg also recalled something her late husband said about such matters: “Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand.’

Enough for now, I think. The weekend will be interesting.

You’ve probably seen it by now, but here’s Lindsey Graham at today’s hearing.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the man, to put it mildly — but this new, red-pilled Lindsey Graham is something else again.

This is war. Vote.

— Malcolm Pollack (@mtpollack) September 24, 2018

In the latest ploy to stall the Kavanaugh appointment until after the midterm elections, the Democrats have arranged for Mr. Kavanuagh’s accuser, Christine Ford, to demand that the FBI investigate her claim before she will consent to provide any testimony.

This is ridiculous, of course: the FBI exists to investigate federal crimes, not decades-old recovered memories of gropings alleged to have happened at unspecified times and locations, with no witnesses beyond those accused. Moreover, the FBI is an executive-branch agency, and cannot be summoned to action at the whim of the Senate. The whole thing is a transparently political maneuver, a desperate attempt by Democrats to get their way at any cost. (If you have liberal friends who think this is a fair tactic, you should ask them what, exactly, Judge Kavanaugh would have to do to refute this accusation to their satisfaction.)

Today Mr. Grassley has responded with a letter to Ms. Ford’s lawyers. It is clear and succinct: if Ms. Ford would like to tell her story to the Judiciary Committee, she may do so on Monday — in open or closed session, as she may prefer. And that’s that.

Read the letter here.

As the Democrats launch a desperate last-ditch offensive against Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, the president, in a flanking maneuver, has declassified an assortment of records — FISA applications, Strzok-Page texts, and whole lot more — that may be of considerable importance in exposing the real scandal in Washington: the weaponization of government agencies, by fraud, stealth, and deception, against a political opponent and a duly elected President.

For those of you keeping score at home, the blogger Doug Ross has put together an enormous timeline of deep-state skulduggery, complete with links to sources. You can read the embedded spreadsheet here.

This really is starting to feel like total war, no? The sides are starkly divided, and all pretense of comity is gone. As we can see from this last-minute sandbagging of Brett Kavanaugh with a wholly unsupported allegation (against which, I should add, he can make no possible defense), the Democrats will do anything within their power to sabotage the appointment, hoping to wrest the levers of Congressional power from the GOP in a few weeks. Meanwhile the battle-lines are just as clear outside the Capitol as well. There are two Americas now, and they have already moved, I think, beyond any hope of reconciliation. In the eyes of much of the Left, at least, the cause is no longer political, it is moral and religious. The enemy is no longer the loyal opposition, playing a well-known game with familiar rules and a presumption of mutual respect; they are now, as Joe Biden said a few days ago, “virulent people” — the “dregs of society”. For anyone old enough to have been taught any history in school, such dehumanization of one’s countrymen should have a distinctly recognizable sound: it is the ominous opening chord of an all-too-familiar march.

With that in mind, you should listen to the latest in John Batchelor’s ongoing conversation with historian Michael Vlahos on the topic of civil war. It is in two parts, here and here.

Returning from a month of happy isolation and indifference to the news, I see that we’ve been slipping ever deeper into bitter factional strife, if not yet (quite) outright war. The Kavanaugh hearings, which I had on in the background as I worked these past two days, are an obvious and dispiriting example. A steady stream of obstreperous lunatics rose during the proceedings to holler and disrupt, and to be swiftly arrested, one after another, by the hard-working Capitol police. (An exercise for the reader: why are these brats, whose response to reasoned debate is to bawl like infants, always of the Left?) Meanwhile, from the very first seconds of the hearing, Democrat senators ignored rules of order, spoke out of turn, and tried to shut the whole thing down on the fatuous premise that they hadn’t been given enough information to assess Mr. Kavanaugh’s record — his more than 300 publicly available opinions and scores of published essays notwithstanding. What had been intended by the Framers to be an august proceeding among dignified adults in what has been called “the world’s greatest deliberative body” seemed more like Black Friday at Best Buy.

Why is this?

First and foremost, it is because of the great, century-long movement of power from localities to the Federal government, even as the nation has grown vastly larger and more diverse. It should be obvious to all that the size and diversity of the United States has already pushed it well beyond the point where it can be governed responsively, or flexibly — to put it simply, governed well — by a unitary apparatus in Washington. This accelerating centripetal shift has hoovered up power from state and local systems with increasing thoroughness and granularity, to the point where even the most obviously provincial and personal matters fall under the vigilance and regulation of the Federal panopticon. This is a thing that simply could not have happened, or perhaps even been imagined, in the Founders’ day: given the limitations of communication and transportation in that era, even the most tyrannical despot could not have presumed to manage every detail of a vast and variegated empire the way Washington controls every American’s life and business now. (It has only become possible, to use Churchill’s ominous phrase, “by the lights of perverted science”.) Because of this enormous concentration of power, control of Washington is now of paramount, even existential, importance to both political parties.

Second, while all this has been going on, the Congress — the branch of government that was designed to be the most closely controlled by, and answerable to, the people — has for decades been delegating its law-making power to other, unelected and unaccountable, agencies of government. This is in large part, I think, an inherent liability of the system itself, in that members of Congress, who must stand for election every two or six years, can in this way insulate themselves from responsibility for actually legislating: they can simply outsource the decision-making (and in actual effect, their Constitutional power of law-making) to agencies like the EPA, the ICC, the FCC, OSHA, etc.

Third, in no small part because of increasing demographic diversity, but also because of cultural Marxism’s “long march through the institutions”, American comity and commonality has diminished sharply (and catastrophically). This loss of commonality, together with increasing secularism and an ascendant philosophy of presentism, materialism and skepticism, has led to a sharp assault on the traditional vertical hierarchies and horizontal ligatures that the Founders understood to be essential for binding a diverse population into a nation.

Once, the idea of rights (and by that I mean what are called “negative” rights, which are simply various natural rights of personal liberty, and were, for the most part, all that the Founders thought necessary to secure) entailed a corresponding sense of civic duty. Now the idea of duties seems quaint — while every imaginable blessing has become a “right”, regardless of whether a newly discovered right (such as healthcare, food, shelter, college education, etc.) imposes a duty upon someone else to provide it. This has led to a widening fissure between those Americans who believe in, and seek to live by, the general principles of the nation’s founding, and those who believe that the nation should be ordered only according to this new and expansive concept of “rights”, with outmoded traditions of family, civic, and religious life stripped away. Moreover, the latter vision isn’t going to come into being all by itself: the coercive nature of positive “rights”, which by definition entail taking the fruits of the labor of others for their provision, necessarily involves the government in confiscation and redistribution — often, if not always, in violation of what the Founders saw as the natural rights of liberty and property. This is not to say that a good-hearted people cannot agree to systems of redistribution, both public and private, for the sake of expansive social services — but such a thing is most easily accomplished in societies that have at least three important, perhaps even necessary qualities: social cohesion, public trust, and industriousness. In the United States the first of these is effectively destroyed, the second is failing rapidly, and the third is far from evenly distributed. This means that the instantiation of the new and expansive notion of “rights” depends, almost exclusively, upon exertions of Federal power. And so control of the Federal apparatus becomes paramount.

Fourth, this increase in factional strife having led to an increasingly divided and feckless Congress, one that tends whenever possible to dodge accountability for promising the impossible by punting its powers to the great Federal bureaucracy, the judiciary has established greater and greater power — both by its own assertion of such supremacy, and by the vacuum created by Congressional lassitude and paralysis. The Supreme Court has, in many recent decisions, effectively written new and supreme law, often of fundamental importance for the social and political structure of the nation. This means that control of the Court is in many ways the most important prize of all; even the Presidency itself is so bitterly contested, in large part, because of the presidential power to appoint Justices.

In short, then: the Federal government — which was originally imagined as a small and lightweight apparatus, with powers few and limited, intended only to arrange matters of common interest to the States, and to present a unitary face to the world at large — has become so overwhelmingly powerful that controlling it is worth fighting to the death, even as the Court has emerged as the reigning authority within the government. All this is happening at a time when the traditions, virtues, mutual loyalties, and cultural commonalities so necessary to the survival of a great nation as a nation are being ground into dust.

How can this end well?

With a hat-tip to Bill Vallicella, here’s a survey of the blood-soaked political battlefield from Victor Davis Hanson.

John Batchelor discusses, with former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, the FISA-court application that got the Mueller investigation started. (The redacted application was finally released this weekend in response to persistent FOIA pressure by Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch.)

The interview is in two parts, here and here.

Mr. McCarthy writes about the release in his latest column, here. He focuses in particular on the FBI’s use of the word “VERIFIED” to describe the wholly unverified allegations in the Steele dossier, and is astonished that the FBI, the DOJ, and the FISA court would work together to produce a FISA warrant without rigorously vetting the sources of the relevant allegations. (Christopher Steele, on whose say-so the whole thing rests, was not a primary, and perhaps was not even a secondary or tertiary, source.)

See also Byron York’s careful comparison of the newly released document with the claims made in the Nunes memo of five months ago.

My God, this man: