Tea at Trianon: Weak 'Dissent'

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

Friday, August 18, 2023

Weak 'Dissent'

From Mark Judge at The Stream:

Jackie Calmes, a respected veteran journalist at the Los Angeles Times, has a new book out. It’s called Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court. The focus is Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court in 2018. Dissent is full of errors, and I make an appearance early on. In fall 2018 the political left and the media tried to destroy Kavanaugh, a high school friend of mine. Using opposition research, extortion threats from criminals and an attempted honey trap, the left tried to make me the nomination about me. A woman named Christine Blasey Ford accused Brett of sexually assaulting her in 1982 when we were all in high school. Ford claimed that I was in the room when it happened.
You can add the contents of Dissent to the long list of intentional media calumny about me, Brett Kavanaugh and Georgetown Prep, the high school we attended. At various times in fall 2018, our East German Stasi media told the public that I’d presided over ten gang rapes. That I’d bought and sold cocaine. That all in all I was a volatile mix of Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson and King Kong.

Vanity Fair had to issue a correction admitting that a woman who’d said we went to college together in fact had attended a different school. The Washington Post withheld an exonerating witness from their explosive first story about Ford. NBC’s Kate Snow withheld damaging facts about Michael Avenatti, whose fever dreams of drugs and gang rapes were touted by New York magazine as the end of Kavanaugh. Avenatti is now awaiting sentencing for extortion and has two more criminal trials coming up. (Read more.)