Trump becomes a voice of reason on Kavanaugh nomination

Michael Goodwin:

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With Democrats going mad, Republicans going wobbly and the media mob acting like a lynching party, it was left to the president to call bulls–t on the Brett Kavanaugh allegations — and remind the nation of the enormous stakes involved.

On a normal day, in a saner world, Trump’s tough-love speech at the United Nations would deserve our full attention. It was a comprehensive outline of his America First doctrine, but the elephant in the room is that America cannot lead the world when it is unraveling at home.

And so the president stepped away from the General Assembly and onto the bully pulpit to forcefully denounce the partisan attacks on his Supreme Court nominee as a “con game.” He accused Dems and, by extension, the media of playing “a very dangerous game” by instantly embracing every charge as gospel.

Trump made no mention of fellow Republicans, but didn’t need to. His aggressive and at times angry pushback amounted to a certain trumpet call for GOP senators to stiffen their spines and stop the hand-wringing.

Yet the larger significance of Trump’s comments was not about the hazy claims of the two accusers or counting votes in the Senate. This was at heart a plea for simple decency at a moment when it appears headed for extinction.

That the plea came from Trump makes it easy for the left to mock it, as they mercilessly did when they didn’t ignore it altogether. But this is not about him, or shouldn’t be, nor is it just about the makeup of the Supreme Court, as important as that is.

This is about whether there are any boundaries left in our politics. Or whether this is a war where anything goes and the goal is the total annihilation of the other side.

The president cited the toll on Kavanaugh’s family as Exhibit A of the damage already done. Probably referring to the appearance of the judge and wife Ashley on Fox News Monday, where they both looked shocked and wounded, Trump said, “His wife is devastated, his children are devastated. I don’t mean they’re like, ‘Oh, gee I’m a little unhappy,’ they’re devastated.”

That could be any family sitting there, their world savagely ripped open because they dared to excel in their field and sacrifice material riches for the honor of public service. As Trump said, if Kavanaugh is kept off the high court on charges that go back more than 30 years and that have no known proof or corroboration, “it’ll be a horrible, horrible thing for future political people, judges, anything you want, it’ll be a horrible thing. It cannot be allowed to happen.”

Unfortunately, it is happening, which is why the president was right to drop his earlier more respectful tone toward the accusers and Dems. Being polite gets you nowhere with a wolf pack, and good faith is meaningless when the aim is complete character assassination.
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Democrats have been acting in bad faith since the nomination was announced.  They are probably immune from any voice of reason, but voters deserve to know about their con game and their politics of personal destruction.  They should be called out on it and hopefully should be punished at the ballot box.