If Ben Franklin were alive today, he would amend his famous quote on Death and Taxes to say the only things certain in life are Death, Taxes and that liberals will attack any judicial nominee of President Trump.  Today we will briefly go over that the fallout over the defamatory attacks on Judge Brett Kavanaugh continue, the latest outrageous attack on a Jewish nominee, and a bit of news on the future. 

The Past

What people tend to forget: it was not just Justice Kavanaugh whose character was attacked and impugned without merit.  Today it was announced:  

A former classmate of Justice Brett Kavanaugh sued HuffPost for defamation Wednesday, alleging that the liberal news site concocted a false story about their high school’s “party scene” as the Senate reviewed Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual misconduct. . . . 

The contested article is an extended interview with an unnamed Georgetown Prep alumnus who described the school’s libertine social life while Kavanaugh was enrolled. The piece identifies the apex of Prep’s alleged debauchery as the 1984 death of David Kennedy, who overdosed on a lethal stimulant-narcotic cocktail at The Brazilian Court Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida.

“In HuffPost and Feinberg’s zeal to embellish a salacious article about Justice Kavanaugh’s years at Georgetown Prep and to capitalize upon the controversy surrounding his confirmation hearing and thereby drive traffic to its website, they fabricated the false claim that Douglas Kennedy and Derrick Evans ‘helped score’ the illegal narcotics that killed Douglas’s older brother David in April 1984,” the complaint reads.

The plaintiff is Derrick Evans, a teacher and civil rights activist who was a contemporary of Kavanaugh’s at Georgetown Prep. Both Feinberg and HuffPost are named as defendants.

The Present

While HuffPost's alleged desperation to embellish a story is bad enough, today they are calling a Jewish Second Circuit nominee a white nationalist.   Second Circuit nominee Steven Menashi is the latest target of blind liberal hate. As Carrie Severio explains in an article entitled:  Does Rachel Maddow Put Israel and White Supremacy in the Same Category.

Rachel Maddow launched a lengthy smear of Second Circuit nominee Steven Menashi based on a grossly distorted summary of a law-review article he wrote in 2010, in which he stated that “ethnonationalism remains a common and accepted feature of liberal democracy that is consistent with current state practice and international law.” She accused Menashi of nothing less than making “a highbrow argument for racial purity in the nation-state.” . . .

Maddow completely ignores the context of Menashi’s article, which was a defense of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish homeland. In fact, her extended discussion of the article does not once mention Israel or the persecution of Jews that played a central role in the establishment of Israel. To add insult to injury, she even began her segment by defining the “ethnonationalism” Menashi wrote about with reference to “white nationalism, which is the new branding that domestic terrorists are using in this country for white supremacy.”

Ed Whalen explains the Menashi article in question. 

In a 2010 law-review article titled “Ethnonationalism and Liberal Democracy,” Second Circuit nominee Steven Menashi argues that “ethnonationalism remains a common and accepted feature of liberal democracy that is consistent with current state practice and international law.” . . . 

But Menashi’s argument about national identity is clearly not about “racial purity” or a “unifying race.” Indeed, the fact that Israelis from Ethiopia are black makes it impossible to take seriously the claim that Menashi is making a case for “racial purity.” Menashi further states that it “is not even clear … that Israel’s national identity can even be described as ‘ethnic’” (in a narrow sense of that concept), as Israeli Jews come from “Argentina, Ethiopia, Germany, Morocco, Russia, and Yemen.”

As former Judiciary Committee Counsel Mike Davis puts it:

Last week, @maddow & others on the Left blew their anti-Semitic dog whistles & falsely accused Second Circuit judicial nominee Steve Menashi — whose family are Middle Eastern Jewish refugees and who supports Israel as a Jewish state — of being a white nationalist. #ConfirmMenashi https://t.co/xe0OlyKsjJ

— Mike Davis (@mrddmia) August 22, 2019

The Future

The attacks on Steven Menashi are without intellectual merit.  They aren’t debatable policy matters but really the worst kind of political smear jobs.  They are also a warning of what will happen if another Supreme Court vacancy should occur.  That is never far from the left’s mind as the news today was that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just finished treatment for another cancerous malignant tumor on her pancreas.  We wish Justice Ginsburg the best as she recovers and admire her stamina and continued legal acumen (though we disagree with many of her opinions and judicial philosophy).  As recent history is our guide, the truth would be no obstacle to the left’s attacks on any nominee to replace Justice Ginsburg.