by roscoe00 | Oct 7, 2018 | Archives, Current Events
I know, let’s do this to the next Supreme Court Nominee. If we want to assess judicial temperament, waterboard the nominee and see if he/she gets mad. If the nominee show a hint of anger or emotion, disqualify them for unacceptable judicial temperament. However, we are not talking about temperament really, we are talking about standards. What standard should we use when judging a person outside of a criminal trial but in a critical role in the U.S. Government? Presumed innocent? Reasonable doubt? Preponderance of evidence? This is apparently a hiring standard not a legal standard. What is the difference, you may ask? There need not be any difference but the standard has gone undefined as far as the Senate is concerned. There are no instructions to the jury about how to view the evidence. Senators can vote their conscience regardless of what standards they wish to use.
But for those that argue this is a job interview and presumed innocent doesn’t matter, they should be reminded that this is not just a job, this is an appointment to the nation’s highest court. This is a democratic process not a job. When I hire somebody for a job there is no democratic process, I can fail to hire them for many unfair reasons. The supreme court is as legal as it gets, and the personnel is picked via Presidential nomination subject to a Senate vote. If this isn’t worthy of constitutional protections I don’t know what is. To have a nominee that is fair game and smeared in open public and branded a predator when he walks into the chambers for the first day is an unacceptable condition for the Supreme Court and this country.
If a nominee isn’t presumed innocent when accusations surface I think we can guarantee that smear tactics like used against Thomas and Kavanaugh will always surface at every critical confirmation decision.You can virtually guarantee that every confirmed judge will sit on the bench carrying some baggage, an “asterisk as they call it, whether real or manufactured. He now sits on the bench, a question mark forever, and drags down the authority of the institution. His decisions will always be questioned for all the wrong reasons. Yes Democrats can be blamed for unleashing a box of demons on the system, same as with Thomas decades ago. But shame on us for not recognizing a confirmation process that needs to be fixed. We need protect our nominees from ourselves. And we need to protect our Senators nominees from the public. We need to decide whether accusations from the public can be lobbed into the mix like a grenade at any time right up until the vote. You just saw that cause unbridled chaos. Can’t we structure a rule that filters that out? Sure allow a window for accusations to be aired to the Senate, but not after the hearings and not leaked all over the media so that Senators can be cornered in elevators. What was allowed to happen was insane.
Now back to the standards. Ms. Ford was never fully vetted because her accusations came at the last minute. But regardless, the loud noise from left and the #metoo movement demanded that she be “heard”. Period. It didn’t demand that she be accurate, or truthful, or even telling her story in good faith. She could have had a tidbit of a memory and extrapolated the rest. The stakes were very high on both sides, there was as much motivation to make up sexual assault stories as there was for the nominee to deny the allegations. So if the standard is that any woman can be heard, then the standard is that anyone can trash a nominee in public. They could have done the right thing and vetted the story behind closed doors. Would it have leaked anyway? Maybe but the Senate could have judged her credibility before bringing the accusations into the mainstream. And maybe, if all the witnesses failed to corroborate the story, the accuser would not have been judged credible and the nominee and his family would have been spared the horror of the ensuing media blitz.
But that didn’t happen, the story got out and the nominee was accused in front of the nation. As such he was immediately judged and convicted – and they do not call it the “court of public opinion” for nothing. He was indeed defending himself as vigorously as if he were in a criminal trial. Nothing short of presumption of innocence should apply here. Nothing short of reasonable doubt should apply here. Why? Because, if nothing else, the penalty was already administered before any trial or conviction occurred. This man’s career, reputation, livelihood and future was trashed whether he was confirmed or not. He is no longer welcome anywhere in legal or educational circles. He is a pariah and his family and more importantly his children will suffer for years to come. This was the price of admission – and the country will pay the price as well.
by roscoe00 | Jun 17, 2018 | Archives, Current Events
There is plenty of stupid to go around in this media rabid environment. Obviously it has infected the FBI. Forget Jim Comey who was fired, instead take for example Peter Strzok who wasn’t. He and Lisa Page are now the world’s best known FBI agents. The FBI, the clandestine law enforcement agency, most famous for highly competent personnel skilled at covering things up, has produced two of the stupidest blabbermouths it possibly could have hired. And this is the same gang that just finished blustering that Trump voters are stupid. Every US citizen and their third grade child knows that these two had an extramarital affair, while attempting to overthrow the government and despite years of training on covert ops … couldn’t keep it a secret. So what is next for the FBI? Clean house but don’t hire from CNN, they can’t keep a secret either, hire from the Inspector General, they are on your side.
But I digress. CNN is another case in stupid. It used to be my favorite website and my oft viewed news channel. I got my news every morning from CNN site during the Obama and Bush years. I was a Bush supporter and an early Obama supporter, concluding that McCain was always going to be ineffective. I changed back when Obamacare was rammed through without anyone reading it and realized that Obama was never going to get around to improving race relations or the city of Chicago. Yes he managed to improve the economy but back in 2008 the economy couldn’t go anywhere but up.
I was never that political but I am now that everyone else is. CNN used to be the goto website for reasonably solid reporting, rather than have to suffer through the radical New York Times or the too business oriented WSJ. You could tell CNN was gushy thrown in with Obama but that was typical. Usually left wing news outlets and high profile entertainers were Bush Bashing and Obama swooning. You kind of get used to it, at least until Trump hit the scene. Then the news networks magically transformed into grotesque mutations, with little resemblance to their original forms. To this day CNN is now a horror show of distorted “fake”: news, hostile opinions and overblown hype with attack writers working 24/7 and using arrays of extreme adjectives to describe Trump’s every move. Everything he says is “Wild, Astonishing, Incredible, ridiculous” and the superlatives drone on. Even solid, respected academicians have fallen in line to pile on. Julian Zelizer was once a credible even keeled writer with Princeton credentials but then wound up on the dark side writing near juvenile articles like his inferiors.
I could give CNN writers and pundits the benefit of the doubt and call them naive because Trump is clearly a new phenomenon that has them baffled. The media is stuck with taking what he says at face value and extrapolating nothing. However CNN is far more malicious than that and simply intends to force one-sided spin on the public. It is so obvious now that we can thank Trump for exposing an extremely biased media on all fronts. Who knew? I can tolerate some left or right of center but I cannot tolerate totally acrimonious, snarky, cynical one-sided reporting. It means CNN is nothing more than a op-ed blog and not a news organization with journalists.
CNN should not be surprised in the least by Trump’s disrespect for the media. They didn’t decide later on to be biased, they were that way the day he ran for President. He presented a live target who talked like a real human instead of a politician, which made anything he said fair game. But then a strange thing happened. He fought back – big time. He bashed the media right back as much as they bashed him. What a surprise. So all the left wing big media players, along with Hollywood, are as rabid as packs of wild dogs and looking for a lynching – which is why there is all this talk about impeachment. And as much as they love to see him rant, lie, brag, bluster and boast, they are taking it on the chin every day as he hammers away at the blatant hypocrisies and bias.
One would think CNN could tone it down somewhat to make all the opinion pieces (and this is 90% of their reporting) vaguely credible, but these guys have been following suit for some time. The New York Times spews attack pieces one after another as does the Huffington Post. Yes social media has to some degree been the facilitator of political attack journalism but it goes deeper. The utter hate speech towards the President as well as the actual voters of this country has been building on itself with each liberal news source attempting to out-puke the other. Late night news hosts and celebrities are giving themselves high-fives and piling on as the whole gutter-ridden process lends courage to the next group of hecklers. Which nauseates the average American who is stuck watching or reading politically motivated garbage from people not even in the know. Now the football, basketball, Olympics, movies, actors are all tripping over themselves trying to get out the worst possible filthy comments they can dream up.
I guess millionaires don’t like billionaires running the country. In fact, Mark Cuban would tell you, even billionaires don’t like billionaires running the country. I guarantee if Cuban were President you would see every bit of feigned moral selective outrage from all corners come at him, no matter what his policies. But back to CNN, the buck stops with the news media. The news starts with them and so do the opinions. If I were Robert Di Niro reading the Huff all the time you bet I would swear at the President.
What fascinates all of us on the right is that CNN and its minions, are actually forced to come out in support of the dictators and terrorists of the world, and against law and order, in order to get their political messaging straight. I mean they are compelled to claim that Kim Jong Un is winning and Trump is losing, that we should not even enforce our border laws despite never-ending illegal crossings or that Vladimir Putin has got us right where he wants us. These are things our enemies love to hear. Sadly CNN is locked into a strategy of fighting against America and its institutions but it isn’t their fault. When a news organization chooses ideological sides it is no longer a neutral observer beholden to nobody, but a political operative with its own agenda and directives that supersede the public’s interests.
