Quick Take: Have They No Shame?
When it comes to the progressive assault on the Supreme Court, anything goes
In their ongoing campaign to destroy the United States Supreme Court, progressives have launched an attack on Justice Samuel Alito. According to a story published by ProPublica, he’s guilty of egregious ethics violations, but Justice Alito’s real offense is ideological. He just can’t be trusted to do the comrades’ bidding.
The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board has exposed the distortions and lies embodied in the ProPublica hit piece, characterizing it as a “fishing expedition.” And indeed, this campaign against the Supreme Court’s conservative majority does remind one of Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of the Great White Whale. See here for a sample of the bad faith and mendacity attendant on that pursuit. Such are the means by which the comrades purport to defend “our democracy.”
By way of illustrating the double standard at work, I note that the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg visited Tel Aviv, Israel in 2018, where she was given a lifetime achievement award by the Genesis Prize Foundation. While in Israel, she was the guest of billionaire businessman Morris Kahn, who provided her with transportation, food and lodging. As it happens, Kahn had a patent-related case before the Supreme Court in 2017. He was handed a win when the Court declined to take the matter up.
Now to be clear, I’m not accusing Justice Ginsburg of corruption. I am suggesting that if the same set of facts was applicable, say, to Justice Amy Coney Barratt, the ladies of The View et al. would be screaming bloody murder.
How little progressives care about ethics in government is betrayed by their devotion to Joe Biden: So long as he does their bidding, his lies and corruption are studiously overlooked. How little they care about democracy is betrayed by their embrace of the administrative state. It is there, in the bunkers of the bureaucracy, that the real power of government is concentrated. That power rests in the hands of nameless, faceless, unelected apparatchiks, America’s real legislators. This suits progressives just fine, and one reason for their displeasure with the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is that it might not take a sufficiently lenient view of legislation by administrative fiat.
Since they have no real case against the Supreme Court, progressives resort to lies, misdirection, hysteria, and adolescent name calling. To give an example, reproduced below is a rejoinder to me in an exchange about the ProPublicia article that I got into with a denizen of the leftie fever swamps on Substack Notes:
I know that to you and your kind a lie is as good as the truth and that right and wrong have no meaning. But I’m here to tell you that I’m not going to put up with lies from you. You know that you are lying when you say the bribes, for which there is ample evidence and which they admit to, are b.s. You know you are lying when you imply that you would accept a prosecution by the Justice Department. You know that the very idea plainly contradicts what you were pretending to believe at the beginning of this conversation, which is that no other branch of the government has the right to oversee the Supreme Court. You and I both know that you and all the other little ditto head freaks would start shrieking “Stalin!” the moment it became a possibility anyway. Why do you want to live in a corrupt, decaying-ass country? Do you think it will ultimately be good for you? Maybe you do. Maybe you think you can get in there and steal some of the money and buy off your own judge. If so, then fine just say it. Just spare us all the stupid lies.
“[T]o you and your kind a lie is as good as the truth and that right and wrong have no meaning.” Here we have a clear case of projection. A clearer, more accurate description of the tactics being employed by progressives in their campaign to delegitimize the Supreme Court and destroy its independence would be hard to formulate.
Thanks, Comrade!
Because i was raised in a progressive household-- my dad, mom and my sister are all progressive liberal democrats, i know from experience that progressives who like narcissists, succumbing to freudian denial and repression, resort to gas lighting and ad hominem arguments, to win arguments by either silencing you, or else making debate impossible by shutting it down (can’t we stop arguing? I don’t want to debate), so they can’t lose; or they try to win by manipulating your emotions such that they pivot from an empirical debate rooted in facts, to a heated moral confrontation, where either you agree with them making you a good person, or you double down and you are a worse person, and reason doesn’t matter here, so they’re relieved from the pressure of having to use reason. Here are some examples my sister loves to insult my intelligence, and intelligence she conspicuously considers identical with having progressive moral views on everything. I was telling her how I think affirmative action is wrong on principle, arguing calmly from premises, and she descended into a narcissistic explosion of screaming and tears, where she insanely started telling me how “stupid” i am. She kept trying to manipulate me by appealing to my pride in my intellectual superiority, that she exaggerates, saying “you read so many books! How can you be so stupid!” Of course she’s really just projecting her insecurity about her own intelligence because she went to NYU, and lives in the city, yet she has a dire status-seeking mental need to be progressive and she can’t talk about affirmative action on the merits. Another example, if I ever try and debate with my mom she gets all insecurely, defensively partisan, and she says to shut me down, “i’m never going to agree with you ok? I’m never ever ever going to see eye to eye with you.” She’s had the arrogance to say “conservatism is a variation on nazism.” And my dad always tries to insinuate that if you’re fiscally conservative, then you’re automatically callous and care nothing at all about poor people. Since progressives can’t prevail in any factual argument they have to resort to petty insults and peer pressure to convince you to abandon reason to get you to conform. The social commonsense behind the pressure to let them win is strong which is why it takes a lot of independence and strong character, I find, to remain a principled conservative like an island in this confederacy of dunces. It is lonely work we do
The Khan case was not taken up by the court. They declined to ajudicate beyond the result of the appeal. So, there was nothing to recuse from. Please cite other cases you refer to. She did declare the "gifts" though, didn't she? You ignore the bits that do not favor your perspective. One thing that does "bother" me, is when someone speculates, with no cause, regarding subjects that may or may not "bother" me. Makes me wonder what else they assume, without cause.