Tea at Trianon: Hit Job

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Hit Job

From The Daily Wire:

Brett Kavanaugh was announced as President Donald Trump's nomination to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy left by Anthony Kennedy on July 9, 2018. On July 10, investigative reporter for the New York Times Steve Eder made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request under Maryland's Public Information Act....

Virtually nothing about his FOIA request could be characterized as not searching out embarrassing partisan information designed to make Kavanaugh look like a “Conservative Warrior” as the title of the July 15^th article suggests. In other words, Eder's request was not objective or investigative. By contrast the AP's request was literally for everything, all the emails from the day Trump announced he was running for President to the present. It is understandable that Eder would make a more narrow request since FOIAs are sometimes denied for having too wide a scope thus creating an undue burden upon the government agency fulfilling the request. But this is the NYT! The number of times their FOIAs have been rejected is assuredly small. Especially when considering the AP press felt comfortable issuing a much broader request also casts suspicion upon the practicality of Eder's focus.

If Eder had made the same request as the AP did he could have electronically searched the documents for those key words anyway. Then he would have had access to all the relevant information not merely a partisan hack of the info he really wanted to write about. In some sense what is even more disturbing isn't just the partisan hit job that this research was designed to create but the lack of professionalism. Because this nomination really does matter. Former Justice Kennedy's decisions disappointed conservatives just as much as liberals on numerous occasions. That's the nature of being the swing voter on a severely divided court. Replacing him with a genuine principled originalist is a high priority for Trump's base and could have significant ramifications for 2020. (Read more.)