New Article: The Kavanaugh Rape Enablers: David Suissa, Ross Douthat, and Bret Stephens in Moral Twilight
David Shasha
The Kavanaugh Rape Enablers: David Suissa, Ross Douthat, and Bret Stephens in Moral Twilight
There have been many screeds on behalf of the Lying Rapist Brett “I Like Beer” Kavanaugh, some subtle and some not very subtle, but I particularly enjoyed reading this one by our Self-Hating friend David Suissa:
http://jewishjournal.com/opinion/david_suissa/239771/kavanaugh-fiasco-just-win-baby/
For those who continue to try and process what is going on in the Sephardic community, the Suissa article is starkly representative of where things are at the moment:
Maybe because I don’t recall it ever being so viciously and shamelessly blatant. It’s possible that the stakes are seen as so high—a majority in the Supreme Court for years—that combatants have thrown every scruple and principle out the window. Except for one, of course: Win at all cost.
Our politics have descended all the way down to the UFC cage. Actually, they’re lower. At least with UFC, no one is pretending to have a conversation. They’re only there to fight. The politics of the Kavanaugh hearings is UFC without the honesty.
Behind the fancy suits and righteous blather, it’s hand-to-hand combat. Everyone knows it: Find any weapon you can, destroy whomever you must. The newest standard is now the lowest standard.
Suissa is very “cagey” indeed!
“Win at all cost”?
Is that what this is about for those accusing Kavanaugh?
He does not come right out and say which side he is on, but it is easy to figure out that he is not happy with the pushback on the Rapist Judge nominated by the Rapist-in-Chief.
Did someone say “Rape”?
Do not push back or you will be attacked by the Trumplackeys!
The telltale sign is Suissa’s stone-cold silence on the actual Sexual Assault allegations and Kavanaugh’s infantile temper tantrums and his partisanship and his lying under oath.
Suissa’s rhetorical preference is for the Trumpy “There Are Good People On Both Sides” moral relativism.
Can’t we all just get along?
It is interesting to see Suissa use moral relativism to make his spurious point, given that when it comes to Israel and Zionism he holds fast to absolutes:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/suissa/davidshasha/IfGbBT3hb58/U69yvmlNyUMJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/suissa/davidshasha/tcPSzq85XRI/1F8E5KhICgAJ
Never cross Israel or you’re in for it!
It is not at all hard to notice that Suissa is very “liberal” when it comes to arguments that would support the Right Wing viewpoint, but very constricted when it comes to the Left.
John Hagee and Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump are just fine for him.
Liberal Democrats not so much!
“Tolerance” here is a very relative term.
By using the UFC metaphor to illustrate his point, Suissa demeans the two basic issues that mark the Kavanaugh mess: Lying and Rape.
PILPUL is rooted in a debased manipulation of facts which are deployed in the service of absolutism known in Orthodox Judaism as Da’as Torah.
Reactionary Right Wingers like Suissa want to gin up some hysterical political binary to throw us off-kilter; as if honesty, moral rectitude, and the Rule of Law are not basic principles that must never be compromised.
Just ignore the substantive issues and turn the whole thing into a political circus and make all the sides equal.
That is PILPUL in a nutshell.
It is all about partisan hackery and the ability of the Trump Fascists to ram through a man who is certifiably insane, as well as being a cruel bully who will lie his way through any problem that faces him, a judge who does not pass his own definition of what a judge is required to be:
https://www.gq.com/story/brett-kavanaugh-thinks-brett-kavanaugh-isnt-qualified
We can critically analyze what is happening with Trumpworld in America, but Suissa presents us with something even more disturbing and close to home: the ongoing moral collapse and cultural erosion of the Sephardic community.
For those who attended any of our Synagogues over the recent Holidays, none of this should be surprising. The rot is quite deep.
The Right Wingers at The New York Times seem to be on the same page as Suissa.
They continue to teach us that the Never-Trumpers are not so much Never-Trumpers:
With our Jewish-Christian pal David Brooks AWOL during the Kavanaugh wars, it has been up to the Born-Again Catholic hypocrite Ross Douthat and the Neo-Con Jew Bret Stephens to do the heavy Kavanaugh lifting on the Op-Ed page.
They very much want to see their political-religious ally on the Supreme Court, but feel that they need to be very careful and circumspect about it.
Douthat has been a militant vacillator, wanting to support the Rapist, but trying hard to muddy the moral waters and skirt the issues in what he apparently thinks is a thoughtful and credible way:
His final entry before the rushed confirmation vote dealt confusedly with Sociology, much like the absent Brooks would be doing.
The delusional column is all about the so-called “Meritocracy” and elite Prep Schools. Douthat pretends to agonize over the process and bemoan the “complexity” of the institutional system that he is a part of.
But, as is the case with the vile David Suissa, Douthat’s true sympathies, however much he tries to hide them with pretentious and bombastic rhetoric, are ultimately with Kavanaugh because Kavanaugh, in spite of his immoral behavior, is one of his crowd.
As he duplicitously states:
If I had known Brett Kavanaugh casually freshman year of college, I probably would have disliked him. But across four years at Harvard I watched the freshman-fall patterns of the preppiest students get imitated, adopted and reproduced by, well, most of us. And I often found that the worst people in that elite culture — including myself on my worst days — weren’t the most privileged kids but the hyper-ambitious ones obsessed with vaulting over them.
Bret Stephens has been somewhat less circumspect about Kavanaugh and far more Trumpy in his relentless attacks on the Left and on the desperately pathetic process from the Democratic minority that is trying to prevent a lying rapist from joining our highest court.
We should note parenthetically that Stephens is seen as a very important member of the Jewish hierarchy, an “authority” on American Judaism and its future.
He is scheduled to participate in a high-minded discussion of the Jewish Future sponsored by The New York Jewish Week to take place at the Park Avenue Synagogue on October 9th:
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/event/keinanstephens/
His views on the current Supreme Court SHANDA are truly abhorrent.
The so-called “Never-Trumper” has made a crucial exception to his usual Trump-hate in the Kavanaugh case and goes full FOX News/Wall Street Journal on the Democratic Party and Liberals in his disgraceful column “For Once, I’m Grateful to Trump.”
He is insisting that Kavanaugh be judged by a strictly criminal standard rather than by a reasonable judgement standard which would easily be able to point out his many lies and inconsistencies on multiple issues, including his drinking and predatory sexual behavior.
The confirmation process is not a criminal trial, but a job interview which must judge the nominee according to rigorous ethical standards.
Stephens is not at all interested in evidence, but seeks to go the full PILPUL Dershowitz in his defense of the vile Kavanaugh.
Like Douthat, he too wants to vent about the elite Prep School world and how wonderful it is, and how wonderful Kavanaugh is.
How dare you treat a privileged White man this way?
It is all about selective argument and apologetic PILPUL which would aggressively attack Kavanaugh’s accusers and ignore the substantial evidence that has marked the judge as a serial liar and moral degenerate.
As Suissa openly admits, the process – controlled since the benighted Age of Reagan (who nominated the despicable Nixon-enabler Robert Bork, a move wisely rebuffed by the Senate) by the Right Wing extremist bloc led by The Federalist Society – has indeed become a UFC cage match.
The Liberal bloc is largely impotent in the face of the truly vicious Right Wing onslaught; desperate to save the remnants of the 20th Century Progressive juridical Civil Rights legacy that has helped to provide more equality in our contentious society.
While there are some Right Wingers who want to be seen as, using Kavanaugh’s term “Fair Umpires,” of the Trump calamity, the Kavanaugh nomination has apparently forced them back into their primitive Man Cave where the Fascist, Racist, and Sexist impulses of Trumpworld are given ample airing.
As we enter into the corrupted zone of Mitch McConnell and his take-no-prisoners attitude towards our democratic system, we have seen the lies of Kavanaugh paired with a White House that has manipulated the FBI investigatory process in order to whitewash a Judicial Confirmation process that now has absolutely no integrity:
The Republican majority, as the late John McCain well-noted, has effectively removed Regular Order and sought to break all the rules that have governed our institutional processes in Washington.
The following New Republic article by Jeet Heer shows how Rapist Kavanaugh’s “strategy” has “worked”:
We have seen how the flakey Jeff Flake, and his equally pusillanimous “moderate” Susan Collins, have both taken the poison and apparently liked it:
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/04/politics/susan-collins-jeff-flake-kavanaugh-fbi-report/index.html
It seems that there are no additional “facts” in the FBI report to corroborate the charges against Kavanaugh because the witnesses who could have provided such “facts” were not interviewed!
Trump wins again!
For the Republicans only the result counts, the legal legitimacy of the process is irrelevant. New rules are invented out of whole cloth, like the one that prevented Barack Obama from appointing a Supreme Court Justice after the death of Antonin Scalia, and the old rules are just pissed on without compunction.
Indeed, McConnell has absolutely no shame:
He is very confident that he will run roughshod over democracy and that he and his Republican blood-suckers will not have to pay a price for their malfeasance.
After all, isn’t the Pornographer Clarence Thomas still on the Court?
Actions seem not to have consequences these days.
Let’s suspend the Rule of Law when it comes to our judges!
Put a Rapist on the Court!
Just wait it out, it will all be forgotten in a few days anyway.
It is therefore critical to contextualize the compromised Kavanaugh nomination with the bombshell report from The New York Times which shows how Trump himself has built his criminal financial empire on fraud and lies:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html
It comes as no surprise that a financial empire built on criminality, corruption, and lies has led to a presidency which trafficks in prevarications, bullying, and cruelty; something we saw when Trump dropped his fake “reasonable” demeanor on Christine Blasey Ford, and went after her in the most gross and obscene manner:
In his Mississippi Fascist rally, one of many such whip-up-the-hoi-polloi Idiocracy “Apprentice Live” events, Trump made no pretense at fairness and balance on the Kavanaugh Rape charges and all the perjury, but took off his temporary human mask and returned to his usual “Grab Them By The Pussy” obnoxiousness.
As he giddily attacked a female victim of Sexual Assault, Trump not only exposed himself as a vicious animal, but he also exposed decrepit Right Wing lackeys like David Suissa, Ross Douthat, and Bret Stephens whose undermining of the Rule of Law and standards of human decency have been cloaked in a morally-compromised discourse that is loaded up with PILPUL and willful avoidance of basic ethical values.
The damage that Trump has done to America is incalculable.
David Shasha