ROGER KIMBALL: Another Week, Another Pseudo-Scandal.
Can anyone keep them all straight? They rise like noxious bubbles from the cauldron of deep-state anti-Trump sentiment, only to pass away almost immediately, carried off by their own insubstantiality and the contrasting bright-light series of real achievements on the part of the Trump Administration.
Just this last week, we saw the New York chapter of the left-over Left make a last-ditch effort to smear Justice Brett Kavanaugh by fabricating yet another spurious complaint that an 18-year-old Kavanaugh had been over-served and acted rudely to a fellow female student at Yale. Only the student in question had no memory of the incident.
Like every other complaint against the teenaged Kavanaugh, it was a matter of “my cousin Ernie’s brother’s girlfriend heard from her college roommate that three people whose names she cannot remember told her best friend that someone who might have been Brett Kavanaugh was rumored to have exposed himself at a drunken white-privilege party at Yale 35 or maybe 36 years ago.” That was enough for the wretched New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly to take to the bank.
In fact, it was worse, for the fount of the rumor they published, without mentioning that the woman in question had no memory of the incident, wasn’t even your cousin Ernie; it was a Democratic Party activist named Max Stier. The dynamic duo did not mention the ideological coloration of their source, nor did they mention that Stier was part of Bill Clinton’s defense team when the priapic former president was endeavoring to extricate himself from l’affair Lewinsky without damaging any more cigars.
But wait, there’s more:
But back to the Ukraine. On Friday, the oyez, oyez, oyez boys in the press whipped up the big display type to announce that someone in the “intelligence community” (we don’t know whom) issued an official complaint that President Trump made a “promise” (we don’t know what) to an unnamed foreign leader that the complainant, whoever it is, found “troubling.” . . .
Stepping back for a moment from that snarling imbroglio, I do wonder whether the latest “Trump abused his powers, let’s impeach him!” gambit is not rather an impressive deployment of a rhetorical-political gambit known as the “preemptive tu quoque I-tagged-you-first” strategy. The media and anti-Trump commentariat is jumping up and down in unison saying, “Trump is leaning on a foreign power in order to gain a political advantage.”
But what is that charge cover for? A chap called Robert Barnes, writing on Twitter, reminds us of a pertinent fact. “The same Democrats who used all the powers of the Presidency to spy on an opposing campaign, and continue to use every power of the House to invade the privacy of the President, are deeply offended that Trump would want corruption investigated involving a former Vice President?” That’s what Latinists called a nonne question, one that expects the answer “Yes.”
In military terms, it’s a spoiling attack.
UPDATE: Just another Schiff show?