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October
07
2018

There Was No Debate When We Needed One
Paul Craig Roberts

The utter failure of democratic politics

The Democrats and their feminist allies failed the country in their approach to the Kavanaugh hearing. Instead of finding out whether Kavanaugh believes in the unitary executive theory that the president has powers unaccountable to Congress and the Judiciary and agrees that a Justice Department underling, a Korean immigrant, can write secret memos that permit the president to violate the US Constitution, US statutory law, and international treaties, the Democrats’ entire focus was on a vague and unsubstantiated accusation that Kavanaugh when 17 years old and under the influence of alcohol tussled fully clothed with a fully clothed 15 year old girl in a bed at an unchaperoned house party. 

Feminists turned this vague accusation missing in crucial details into “rape,” with a crazed feminist Georgetown University professor declaring Kavanaugh to be “a serial rapist” who along with the Senate Judiciary Committee’s male members should be given agonizing deaths and then castrated and fed to swine. 

A presstitute at USA Today suggested that Kavanaugh was a pedofile and should not be allowed to coach his daughter’s sports team. On the basis of nothing real, a Supreme Court nominee’s reputation was squandered.

There are important issues before the United States having to do with the very soul of the country. They involve constitutional and seperation of powers constraints on executive branch powers and the protection of US civil liberty. Important books, such as Charlie Savage’s Takeover have been written about the Cheney-Bush successful assault on the principle that the president is accountable under law. Can the executive branch torture despite domestic and international laws against torture? Can the executive branch spy on citizens without warrants and cause, despite laws and constitutional prohibitions to the contrary? Can the executive branch detain citizens indefinitely despite habeas corpus, despite the US Constitution’s prohibition? Can the executive branch kill US citizens without due process of law, despite the US Constitution’s prohibition? Dick Cheney and University of California law professor John Yoo say “yes the president can.” 

Instead of using the opportunity to find out if Kavanaugh stood for liberty or unbridled presidential power, feminist harpies indulged in an orgy of man-hate.

And it wasn’t just the RadFem harpies. It was the entire liberal/progresive/left which has discredited itself even more than the crazed feminist Georgetown University professor, who, by the way, unlike what would have been required of a heterosexual male, did not have to apologize and was not fired as a male would have been. 

There is now a “funding platform” endorsed by liberal/progressive/left websites that claims to have raised $3 million to unseat Senator Susan Collins for voting, after hearing all the scant evidence, to confirm Kavanaugh. Websites such as Commondreams, CounterPunch, OpEdNews are losing their credibility as they mire themselves in divisive Identity Politics in which everyone is innocent except the white heterosexual male. Precisely at the time when Trump’s capture by the Zionist neoconservative warmongers needs protests and opposition as the US is being driven to war with Iran, Russia, and China, there is no opposition as the United States dissolves into the hatreds spawned by Identity Politics.

To see how absurd the RadFem/liberal/progressive/left is, let’s assume that the vague, unsubstantiated accusation that is 30 to 40 years late against Kavanaugh is true. Let’s assume that the encounter of bed tussleing occurred. If rape was the intention, why wasn’t she raped? I suggest a likely scenario. There is an unchaperoned house party. Alcohol is present. The accuser admits to drinking beer with boys in a house with access to bedrooms. The accused assumes, which would have been a normal assumption in the 1980s, that the girl is available. Otherwise, why is she there? So he tries her, and she is not. So he gives up and lets her go. How is this a serious sexual offense? 

Even if the accused had persisted and raped his accuser, how does this crime compare to the enormous extraordinary horrific crimes against humanity resulting in the destruction in whole or part of eight countries and millions of human beings during the Clinton, Cheney-Bush, Obama, and Trump regimes? 

There has been no accountability for these obvious and undeniable crimes. Why are not feminists and presidents of Catholic Universities such as Georgetown and Catholic University in Washington, and the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the US media, and the liberal/progressive/left websites concerned about real crimes instead of make-believe ones? What has happened to our country that nothing that really matters ever becomes part of public notice?

US administrations have not only murdered, maimed, orphened, and dislocated millions of totally innocent human beings, but also the evil and corrupt US government, protected by the presstitute media, which is devoid of character and integrity, has tortured in violation of United States law hundreds of innocents sold to it under the US bounty system in Afghanistan, when the Cheney-Bush regime desperately needed “terrorists” to justify its war based on nothing but its lies.

All sorts of totally innocent people were tortured by sadistic US government personnel who delighted in making people under their power suffer. These were unprotected people picked up by war lords in response to Washington’s offfer of a bounty for “terrorists” and sold to the Americans. The victims included aid workers, traveling salesmen, unprotected visitors, and others who lacked protection from being misrepresented as “terrorists” in order to be sold for $5,000 so that Dick Cheney and the criminal Zionist neocons would have some “terrorists” to show to justify their war crime.

The utterly corrup US media was very reticent about telling Americans that close to 100% of the “world’s most dangerous terrorists,” in the words of the criminal US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, were released as innocent of all charges after undergoing years of torture and abuse and having their lives and the lives of their families ruined by their totally unjust incarcerations, incarcerations that were totally illegal under all known laws. 

Dear reader, don’t you think that these crimes are a million times worse that a drunk teenage Kavanaugh tussleing on a bed with Christine Ford, assuming it really happened, and refraining from raping her? If you don’t, you are an idiot, and I despise you for your stupidity and total absence of moral conscience.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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