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Where’s Your Hill?
When Roy Moore was in the process of being brought down in the Alabama Senate race last December, the standard response from the establishment side of the GOP was, “Look, Moore is a nutcase. This is not a court of law. There is no due process or presumption of innocence. He’s not the hill you want to die on.”
When Alex Jones was purged off of social media the response was, “This is not a government action, but the actions of private individuals. Besides, he’s a nutcase and this is not the hill you want to die on.”
Enter Brett Kavanaugh. As his reputation is destroyed by the minority party suddenly the establishment is appalled. Why? Well, primarily because even though he was nominated to SCOTUS by Donald Trump, Kavanaugh is seen as “one of us,” one of the good chaps whose pedigree of private high schools, Yale and all the right government clerkships and appointments was beyond question.
Is this the hill now? When you surrendered all of that territory before, when you tucked your collective tails between your legs and ran like scalded dogs, now you want to turn and fight? Look what you gave up before. Like the Alabama race, proceedings in the Senate Judiciary Committee are not the equivalent of a court of law. The ideas of due process and presumed innocence you gave away in December are a little hard to reclaim now. When you look at all of the private, non-government entities behind this smear job, how can you rebuke them?
Principles are funny things. If you don’t apply them to the people you dislike then they are unlikely to be of any use when you really need them.
Published in Politics
So, the take-away is that we must defend the indefensible? Say “I believe Judge Moore” and “Those women are paid to say that” when we don’t entirely believe Moore and have seen no evidence that his accusers were paid?
I can’t seem to find the principle in that. I don’t ever want to look in the mirror and see Harry Reid looking back at me.
No one is saying that you have to believe anyone or accuse anyone of anything. The principle is, innocent until proven guilty; if you believe that you have some kind of psychic power which makes it possible for you to know who the sexual predators are without any proof or evidence, then you do not believe in the principle of innocent until proven guilty.
P.S. I am not saying that you should have voted for Moore, just that it isn’t ok to smear him as a sex offender because you wanted him to lose. Vote for who you want to vote for, I don’t care, but when people start to smear others with no evidence, that is a problem.
EJ, that’s nonsense. When you observe something awful about someone who did something awful, that’s not really an evil tactic. When you allege something awful about someone who didn’t, that’s a smear.
A difference in tactic vs. target is a ridiculous standard, because every action becomes different based on the target of that action.
You might observe that someone punched a little old lady who was standing in his way, and that someone punched a home-invader who broke into his house in the middle of the night, and you wouldn’t say “well, it’s the tactic that’s important! You shouldn’t go around punching people!” No… the situation is a lot more important. Discussing Moore’s sexual past, as one of the many problems with Moore, is pretty relevant. Smearing Kavanaugh with 35 year old unsubstantiated and fairly false-sounding claims is a much, much, much different scenario.
I’m sorry, but you are drawing similarities where none exist. By drawing those similarities, you undermine your own credibility. To go back to your own analogy, that is the whole reason why people should be careful about which hills they defend to the death.
his post is literally about roy moore and alex jones. Obviously it is about those people.
Why are you not choosing to die defending the hill that is Al Franken? That same tactic was used against him. Where are your principles, or are you a cowardly and useless bump on the log?
Oh, wait – you clarified… it’s not actually about principles, it’s about defending people on your own side! Got it.
Thing is, I don’t consider Jones or Moore to be on my side. At all. Quite the contrary. Have we yet defined how these lines are drawn? What makes Jones on my side? I mean, I know the media and the left are extremely eager to characterize both these men as being on my side, but why should I? Why not embrace Al Franken, if being a victim of character smears is all it takes to be on my side?
Those are already illegal. Existing law enforcement can deal with it.
When did you observe Roy Moore being a sexual offender? Several people on this thread have stated that they believe he is a sex offender, you are saying that you have observed something? This is interesting. What did you observe Roy Moore doing?
And if you didn’t observe him doing anything, how can you say you are not smearing him?
I’ve seen Moore referred to on more than one occasion as a “child molester” (including on this site). Query whether questioning that description makes one a Moore “supporter” or amounts to a general defense of the man.
Sometimes there are little hills within the big hills. And then Bret Kavanaugh becomes an attempted rapist.
I think you are over-simplifying the issue, here. There are plenty of instances where facebook is allowed to police it’s own website, and that has no impact on its status as a platform rather than a publisher. It does not post nude images, it does not allow for incitement of violence; there are a lot of things that users are not permitted to do on facebook. If they have a term that allows unconscious bias to create disparate outcomes, I think that is worth taking up with Facebook, but it is not a legal issue at all. Furthermore, if you wish to make that an issue, Alex Jones is not the person you want to use as a subject. Why pick the person regarding whom Facebook’s decisions decisions are most defensible? Someone else mentioned Prager. Dennis Prager would be a pretty good subject if you want to confront Facebook about bias, but if you’re putting Alex Jones in the same camp, that does nothing more than strengthen their case and weaken yours. Simply as a tactical matter, why on earth would you want to do that?
With Al Franken, there was photographic evidence. Do you have any photographic evidence of Roy Moore doing something wrong?
If there is a hearing (not convinced accuser is going to testify), I hope some GOP Senator will say, “until this nomination, the Senate of the United States of America was seen as united in the belief all Americans were entitled to presumption of innocence regardless of gender, race, creed, or political affiliation. I wish to state that the Republican Party is committed to that principle and will remain so God-willing as long as we draw breath” …in non-lawyerly tone :-)
You are asserting quite a lot of things. First, you are assuming that you’re talking to people who were “smearing Moore because they wanted him to lose.” There were a lot of allegations about Moore, and it wasn’t any of us who were bringing them. Not all accusations are “smears.” Would you describe Bill Clinton as having been smeared just because people wanted him to lose? I hope you can draw distinctions between Clinton and, say, Kavanaugh, right?
Secondly, yes, of course there is a principle of “innocent until proven guilty.” That principle, in real life, is absolute nonsense. We use it as a legal standard because it is ridiculously extreme, and that is a strong indication of how seriously we take our legal and criminal system. But it remains a legal standard. Obviously you are not innocent until proven guilty. If you are guilty, you are guilty regardless of whether it is ever proven. The legal standard indicates a burden of proof, which requires the government to meet high standards before depriving people of liberty. But the same standard does not apply to the public. You don’t have that same burden of proof when making judgments about friends, or co-workers, or potential hires, and certainly not about people you’re voting for. If that was the standard, then everyone is innocent, and you have no standard for making decisions. Hell, it isn’t even a standard in civil courts. Why do you think OJ Simpson was found guilty in the civil court, but acquitted in the criminal court? Because “innocent until proven guilty” is a very specific standard with a very specific purpose, and it does not apply to any of the people mentioned in this post, not even Brett Kavanaugh, unless he is charged with a crime.
I never said the court case should be about Alex Jones. No, I would suggest some random citizen libeled by some other random citizen. Sue Facebook for publishing it.
I’m not talking about a standard that is any different than what the NYT deals with every day.
I think there are certain presumptions of innocence until proven guilty that can and must be made. Brett Kavanaugh certainly should not be assumed guilty (opposite of innocent) on the basis of being male.
photographic evidence? There was a photo of him pretending to grab a lady’s breast, but not actually doing so. What exactly is that evidence of? Bad taste? A stupid joke? Not being particularly funny? Maybe that lady didn’t have any problem with it, maybe she thought it was funny, too. That’s not what took down Franken. What took him down was allegations of sexual misconduct that were not substantiated by anything more than “he said/she said,” and he denied every one of them. The difference is that, like Moore, people found those allegations to be credible.
Something we don’t really understand about defense… when I did criminal defense, I had clients come in and they would be very angry that their lawyer (me, or a previous lawyer) wasn’t “fighting” as hard as they wanted. They were incensed that people would look at their past record, or that they would make other observations about their character… that’s all hearsay, or that’s all circumstantial evidence, or that’s in the past, or whatever else. Well, guess what? That’s how people form judgments. It’s one thing at trial to say that past convictions are not evidence of guilt. That’s a legal standard. But for a prosecutor deciding how to charge it out? Is it relevant? Of course it is. In real life, is a past conviction evidence of guilt? Of course it is. Criminal defendants will so commonly take the crime itself and wish that it existed in a vacuum, then claim all sorts of injustice and foul play when they aren’t treated exactly the same as some other guy. What they don’t get is that you always consider the totality of the circumstances. In trial, prosecutors are still held to an extremely high standard and they still have a burden to meet. That’s why you get hung juries in cases where a person is obviously guilty. That standard is great for courts, and it helps us to limit power and hold the government accountable. That’s why we have a “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine… but does that standard exist in real life? If you are caught cheating on your wife, do you say “you can’t be mad, because you weren’t supposed to be looking at my phone. You didn’t have my permission to read those texts.”? No, that doctrine doesn’t apply in real life, just like a great many of the legal standards that have become so cliche – there is no confrontation clause in real life, no fruit of the poisonous tree, no innocent until proven guilty, no proof beyond a reasonable doubt, no unquestionable freedom of speech.
The particulars might be different. But any differences you can find don’t matter any more than the fact that they have different initials or that their moms have different first names. This is not about anything except the fact that they are not Democrats. Stop overanalyzing the little crap that doesn’t matter in the big picture.
Just as an aside: This is what I think needs to be fixed, and I’ve thought so since the Clarence Thomas hearings.
The role of the Senate in prosecution needs clarity in the public’s mind. What is missing from the Senate that is present in an actual courtroom is a judge who can “throw out” evidence when necessary and can instruct the jury. And the Senate is not a “jury of one’s peers” for most people.
People are confused because a person swears an oath to the tell the truth in the Senate hearings. But all that means is that the police can later charge that person with perjury if necessary.
The Senate is not a courtroom. It hosts hearings. It does not run jury trials.
This is true, but decades after the fact, it is impossible to know whether an accusation is true or not. Which is why we should strongly encourage women who have been assaulted to bring the matter to the police as quickly as possible-and strongly discourage them from trying to litigate the issue in the court of public opinion decades later. Obviously, people are free to believe in whatever they want, but if people start believing in human sacrifice, I am going to be concerned-and when people start believing that some men are sexual predators absent any proof or evidence, I am concerned.
I get that. But it doesn’t matter. The Democrats are establishing a precedent in the minds of the public that all it takes is an accusation for the person to be destroyed. If we don’t stand against this now, we’re lost. We should have stood against it with Moore and Jones. If we had, maybe none of this would be happening.
Thing is, I totally agree with this. But we weigh evidence and we look at the totality of the circumstances.
I don’t say to my wife, “listen, you can’t prove that the perfume on my shirt isn’t from walking through macy’s, and you can’t prove that the lipstick on my collar isn’t from accidentally brushing up against an old lady in the starbucks line, so you don’t get to leave me.”
We don’t just look at the specific evidence, we look at the whole thing. A person’s actions, the substance of his denial, the substance of the allegations, his character in other areas… all of these things are relevant to our assessment of whether a person is trustworthy in public office. Would those things count in a court of law? No court on earth would convict Kavanaugh, and to be honest, no court on earth would convict Roy Moore. But public trust isn’t a court of law – we look at a lot more things, and we weigh things much differently. We’re not talking about whether a person is going to jail, we’re talking about whether that person has earned our trust, our respect, and ultimately, our vote. I have zero problem holding people to a different standard than I would expect from a prosecutor, a cop, or a judge. But that is the whole stinking point – Kavanaugh is credible, and the accusations against him are not only weak, but blatantly strategic, cynical, and politically motivated. The allegations against Moore were credible, and they were icing on the cake of an otherwise terrible candidate for a much less important office. EJ condemns us for not being willing to die for Moore, as if somehow that renders us hypocritical when we go to bat for Kavanaugh, or as if it makes us traitors… the answer is that we’re not a tribe, we’re not at war, and blind partisanship is not our standard (even if it is the standard of some on the left). We value our credibility, we still value our high standards – and we don’t defend a man like Moore precisely because we want to be able to better defend a man like Kavanaugh.
I didn’t say “his post” isn’t about them. I meant this whole mess isn’t. I meant that the specific people the Democrats are doing specific things to are about something bigger. And no amount of your triumphant little snarky sarcastic rejoinders (which I have helpfully bolded above in case you don’t understand what I mean) will change that.
here is an honest question for you, Right Angles.
Why don’t you defend Al Franken on principle? Why not Harvey Weinstein?
If you’re “looking at the bigger picture” and defending people who you deem to be on your side, then you’re not acting on principle. If you defend Alex Jones because he is anti-immigration and pro-Trump, then that is your principle. At that point, it is not important to discover the truth about whether allegations are credible, or really to discover anything at all against a person’s character or life. All you need to know is what side that person is on, whether he’s pro-Trump or anti-Trump, and whether he is going to support “your side.” Is that our standard?
If you care about principles, then you should be that voice for maintaining standards and holding people to them. What do you say to facebook? You say “yes, you get rid of a guy like Alex Jones, but you also need to get rid of these hateful left-wing groups, or these other extremists as well.” You don’t fight hypocrisy and double standards by claiming that everyone “on your side” is innocent… you fight it by pointing out that the double standard is not applied to people who are not “on your side.” In that way, you are actually maintaining some principle beyond mere allegiance to one side over the other.
Ok, so what exactly are Democrats doing to Alex Jones that implicates you?
I can tell you what seems most likely… Democrats want nothing more than for ordinary republicans to feel that they are required to defend people like Alex Jones. They want nothing more than for ordinary Republicans to take the worst parts about Donald Trump and pretend that they are somehow virtuous. All that does is strengthen their assertion that we’re all the same.
The last thing they want us to do is be consistent. The last thing they want is for us to say “yeah, Jones is a scumbag even though he is anti-immigration and supports Trump.” The last thing they want is for us to say “Trump was out of like for saying XYZ, and he should apologize,” and then for us to focus on de-regulation, the economy, liberty.
They want you to defend that hill to the death, because they know it’s not a hill, it’s a ditch, and if you’re down in that ditch, you’re an easy target. They want you to think it’s war, because then they can keep you defending indefensible people instead of talking about things that matter.
If you’re looking at the big picture, why are you doing exactly what they want you to do?
I always defend anyone until the accusations have been proven or until they admit they are true. I’m done with this post. I have a deadline to meet. I can’t stand another minute of being disappointed in people I used to think were smart.
Beer time out!
Maybe you found the “evidence” against the judge compelling and without doubt, others did not. And that’s the point. No one actually observed the act or had contemporaneous evidence. I’d say the real lesson of the MeToo movement is speak up right away, not 30 or 40 or 50 years down the line.
But it lets certain aspects of the narrative take hold in the public mind, namely all women are vulnerable, all men are potential rapists, all accusations must be believed regardless of time and that the “victims” never lie (even though there’s dozens and dozens of cases of the opposite, such as UVA, Duke lacrosse, and most recently, this.)
You may not be at war with the left, but the left is certainly at war with you. And maybe, just maybe, had we fought harder and earlier, such as in the case of Miguel Estrada, we may have never even heard of Roy Moore or ever had to contemplate a Trump presidency. (And maybe Mrs. Estrada might still be alive, too.)
If you’re saying that no evidence or testimony of a candidate’s character should be considered during a campaign, just vote as to how well s/he lines up with your political preferences, okay. That is certainly a description of how the hard left approaches electoral politics. For most voters, that is just not realistic.
If that’s not what you’re saying, then I still don’t know what action you’re suggesting I take in these circumstances. I didn’t smear anybody.
I don’t know how I missed this post. I’m not going to read through the comment stream, but merely say this:
I regret the inclusion of Brett Kavanaugh in any list that includes Roy Moore and Alex Jones. Moore was a bad judge; Jones is an ugly poseur and/or a nut.
I see a lot of talk about basic concepts like innocent until proven guilty and the right to face your accuser and address the accusations being written off as legal concepts alone. Only valid in a court of law.
I was taught that idle gossip and backbiting is a sign of poor character. Destructive, cruel and unfair. So sure, you have every right, legally and constitutionally, to judge someone on unsubstantiated innuendo and accusations based only upon your previous opinion of them if you wish. But let’s not pretend it is virtuous to do so. And let’s not pretend that once the standard is set so low, it will not eventually be turned against you.
A wise man once warned: Judge not lest you be judged. For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again.
It wasn’t just about calling out sinners. It was about judging others using the same standards you would like to be judged under. Which of us would like to be judged based on accusations from our enemies offered without evidence?
This is beautiful, @phenry, thank you. It should also be noted: we can’t totally separate the culture from the legal system. Leftists are telling us that women never lie and all accusations must be believed: if we accept that reasoning, then why even bother having a criminal justice system?
Keep in mind, that is only true when those are women making accusations against the right people. Just ask Juanita Brodderick, etc.