Good morning, kids. Much like George Jetson had a collapsible flying car in a suitcase, Harvey Weinstein, had a collapsible Posturepedic in his back pocket, and whipped it out con gusto to threaten career death to female starlets unless they gobbled his pockmarked johnson. Yet, he had his 2020 rape conviction tossed by the NY State Court of appeals yesterday.
Having worked in the film biz during his heyday in the 90s, scores of anecdotal stories abound from men and women of how he screwed them over, both figuratively and quite literally. Mira Sorvino, whose career tanked when she came forward with accusations, and her late father Paul wanted to justifiably tear Weinstein limb from limb, had this reaction on the X-Twitter deal:
“Day after #DenimDay honoring sexual violence survivors, Harvey Weinstein’s conviction overturned, due partly to ‘Molineux witnesses’ testifying to prior bad acts, like lioness Annabella Sciorra,” Sorvino’s post read, referring to a term meaning “witnesses in a trial who are allowed to testify about criminal acts that the defendant has not been charged with committing,” The New York Times noted.
“Since when don’t courts allow evidence of pattern of prior bad acts to be admitted?” she added. “He’s a prolific serial predator who raped/harmed 200+women! Disgusted w/justice system skew [to] predators not victims.”
In the interest of full disclosure, I was neither a juror nor an observer of the trial, and so was not privy to the evidence that led to his conviction, my anecdotal experience/knowledge of his reputation notwithstanding. In one sense, I feel bad for Sorvino and the other victims.
That said, with all due respect to Ms. Sorvino, I could care fuck all. She's "disgusted" at the justice system? Funny how she and all the other supposed "victims" of Harvey Weinstein were dead silent when the same NY court convicted Donald Trump of libel and awarded multi-millions of dollars to E. Jean Carrol for her cock and bull story of being raped and/or groped by Trump. Which he had neither been charged nor convicted, as if that matters these days, but I digress. For the crime against humanity of calling her out for the liar she was – which is in the febrile, reptilian, pea-sized mind of Leftists a crime against humanity – Trump got what he deserved.
I have no love for Weinstein. But it's kind of sickly ironic that perhaps the court did the right thing for tossing his conviction. Perhaps not. And yet after a sham of a travesty of two mockeries of a farce of a libel trial, the same court system has Trump on trial for supposedly using campaign cash as hush money to silence Sloppy Daniels prior to 2016. The case is a joke and everyone knows it. The problem is the system is so abjectly corrupted that the Constitution and rule of law are out the window in service to leftist political expedience.
Despite the prosecution’s best efforts to insinuate former President Trump‘s involvement in—or even knowledge of—the “catch and kill” scheme, Pecker’s testimony continues to fall short of any direct implication. The prosecution frequently used the “catch and kill” term as well as referring to Cohen and Pecker’s activities as a “scheme,” hoping to convince the jury of illegal activity when, in fact, there appears to be none.Under cross-examination by Trump‘s attorney Emil Bove, Pecker even admitted he’d never heard the term “catch and kill” before the prosecution used it. Bove asked Pecker if “it was always your intention, dating back to the early days of this friendship, not to publish negative stories about President Trump?” The tabloid newsman responded, “Yes.”
Pecker also acknowledged he has held back negative stories about other notable public figures, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, businessman Ronald Perelman, and Obama Chief of Staff-turned-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Further undermining the prosecution’s case, he added that it was his understanding that Cohen was acting in a personal capacity for Trump, not on behalf of the presidential campaign.
Like the E. Jean Carrol case, will this matter in the end with a judge, prosecutor and likely 12 angry New York City hand-picked stooges? Doubtful.
Writer Ray Bradbury once said, “Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.” In Thursday’s case before the Supreme Court on the immunity of former President Donald Trump, nine justices appear to be feverishly working with feathers and glue on a plunge into a constitutional abyss.
It has been almost 50 years since the high court ruled presidents have absolute immunity from civil lawsuits in Nixon v. Fitzgerald. The court held ex-President Richard Nixon had such immunity for acts taken “within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.” Yet in 1974’s United States v. Nixon, the court ruled a president is not immune from a criminal subpoena. Nixon was forced to comply with a subpoena for his White House tapes in the Watergate scandal from special counsel Leon Jaworski.
Since then, the court has avoided any significant ruling on the extension of immunity to a criminal case — until now. There are cliffs on both sides of this case. If the court were to embrace special counsel Jack Smith’s arguments, a president would have no immunity from criminal charges, even for official acts taken in his presidency. It would leave a president without protection from endless charges from politically motivated prosecutors. If the court were to embrace Trump counsel’s arguments, a president would have complete immunity. It would leave a president largely unaccountable under the criminal code for any criminal acts.
The first cliff is made obvious by the lower-court opinion. While the media have largely focused on extreme examples of president-ordered assassinations and coups, the justices are clearly as concerned with the sweeping implications of the DC Circuit opinion. . .
. . . The other cliff is more than obvious from the other proceedings occuring as these arguments were made. Trump’s best attorney proved to be Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. If the justices want insight into the implications of denying any immunity, they just need to look north to New York City. The ongoing prosecution of Trump is legally absurd but has resulted in the leading presidential candidate not only being gagged but prevented from campaigning.
Alvin Bragg is very personification of the danger immunity is meant to avoid. . .
. . . I have long opposed sweeping arguments of immunity from criminal charges for presidents. The devil is in the details, and many justices are struggling with how to define official versus nonofficial conduct. The line-drawing proved maddening for the justices in the oral argument. The most they could say is similar to the story of the man who jumped off a building. As he passes an office window halfway down, another man calls out to ask how he’s doing. The jumper responds, “So far so good.”
As the justices work on a new set of legal wings, anything is possible as the nation waits for the court to hit ground zero in the middle of the 2024 presidential election.
So, let's say SCOTUS does manage to perform a Solomonic miracle and "mostly peacefully" cleave the baby in half. The only thing that will do is enrage a perpetually enraged Democrat-Left to either dissolve or permanently pack SCOTUS with a bench full of Roland Freisler/Enorgon-Erdogon-Enron-Gorgon clones.
That underscores my argument that this nation is divided not only on a panoply of issues but on the legitimacy of the nation itself, and on those of us who are desperate to restore and preserve what it once was. Or at least as we had imagined it to be.
The annihilationist rhetoric about Jews heard on campuses around the country, horrendous as it is, is not merely about Jews, nor did it spring up in a vacuum. It happened because of decades of anti-American and anti-Western indoctrination on said campuses going at least as far back as when individuals like Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse fled actual European Fascism and paid us back by injected the poison of Marx and Gramsci into the American educational system.
Presto chango, 80 years later and voila! We live in a nation that resembles the bastard child of 1968 Chicago with 1938 Nuremberg. Everything is upside-down, thoroughly corrupt almost everywhere you turn, and really nowhere to run.
Even if we somehow win in 2024, or win every election for the next 40 years, and both of those are seriously in doubt, we will still have at least a third of the population (not including the millions of illegal foreigners who I wouldn't count on for help) wanting us dead as well as a propaganda/brainwashing complex disguised as academia that will produce yet another generation of useless pod people who will be eager to line us up and shoot us into a ditch. Ironic considering their hatred of the Second Amendment.
I used the "R" word yesterday maybe reluctantly but now, there really is no other way out. Face it. America as it was is virtually if not completely gone. If we somehow survive the coming maelstrom of internal conflict and end up victorious, we must reconstruct a society and form of government that never again allows the scum who destroyed us in the first place to ever be within a billion billion light years of power and influence. If that means ditching the Constitution, so be it.
If a revolution is what they want, then we should be the ones to give it to them. Good and hard.
My latest essay is up at Taki's Magazine. Have a good weekend.
NOTE: The opinions expressed in the links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue.
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