For the Record: Lincoln and Kavanaugh

From (I believe) the 14th-century Libro del Buen Amor by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita, via.

Here's some heavy-duty Dinesh, a response to his assertion that Lincoln called himself a conservative (not exactly untrue, but it meant somewhat the opposite of what Dinesh thought it might), and NSFW below the fold, some suggested questions for Senator Kamala Harris to ask Judge Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings:

Contrary to left-wing claims Lincoln was a progressive, Lincoln himself insisted he was conservative @worldnetdaily https://t.co/xdrMJzBytM

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 20, 2018

That's entirely wrong. When Lincoln called himself "conservative" he meant he was not an Abolitionist, in contrast to the radicals in his own party like Sumner and Seward, as this October 1860 editorial from the New York Times makes clear. https://t.co/RRhgx4dfCs pic.twitter.com/hCMyWEbCix

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 20, 2018

"Conservative" meant unwilling to interfere with slavery, as in Franklin Pierce's 1855 defense of the Fugitive Slave Act. https://t.co/VEcKvxP5h8 https://t.co/rjfD4pflhw Your ignorance and unwillingness to learn anything is constantly amazing. pic.twitter.com/l9JJYQ2E63

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 20, 2018

The idea in D'Souza's World Nut Daily piece, that slaveholders fighting a war to hang on to the 200-year-old peculiar institution were being "radical" and the abolitionists fighting to end it and turn the nation's social system upside down by giving black folk not only freedom to work for a wage but also to own property and vote were "conservative", really does up-end the meaning of the terms in a breathtaking way. That Lincoln was a "moderate" or even "conservative" Republican once he left the imploding Whig party is well known, and provides a good text for a sermon on why I think some "moderate" candidates (especially, in my lifetime, Carter, Obama, and Hillary Clinton) deserve enthusiastic support: because that's the background our most radical presidents, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, have come from. A President Greeley or Frémont would have thrilled the base, but he'd never have gotten the 13th Amendment through the legislative process. Lincoln, like FDR, was perfectly ready to be a radical when he saw the politics was right, and not sooner, which is why he succeeded.

Then Dinesh decided he had to come out to defend Judge Brett Kavanaugh for the memo of questions Kavanaugh suggested special counsel Kenneth Starr Bill Clinton when he was a deputy counsel for Starr in the Whitewater investigation that staggered into a fellatio investigation when the thing they were supposed to be investigating turned out not to be a thing, before Kavanaugh decided that "Well, the president’s job is so hard, and the president should be left alone to do his job" (as Senator Hirono said):

If Monica Lewinsky says that on several occasions in the Oval Office area, you used your fingers to stimulate her vagina and bring her to orgasm, would she be lying?”

“If Monica Lewinsky says that you masturbated into a trashcan in your secretary’s office, would she [be] lying?”

Really. This is justified, Dinesh says in an article for World Nut Daily, because Clinton obviously deserves it (he clearly doesn't give a fuck whether Lewinsky deserves it or not):

Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court nominee, proposed graphic questions for Bill Clinton about the Lewinsky affair in 1998 memo https://t.co/rPl1fE02xM

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) August 20, 2018

It's not "explicit", it's fucking prurient. You can practically hear Kavanaugh fapping as he types one-handed.

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 20, 2018

"I ask only because Dinesh D'Souza says we need to be explicit when dealing with a sinuous, evasive prevaricator. How often, would you say? Daily? While you were drafting or after you'd knocked off for the day?"

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 20, 2018

"Which part did you find more stimulating, the oral approaches or the cigar? Did you test whether it's possible to ejaculate into a trash basket? What position did you use?"

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 20, 2018

"Mr. Chairman, I'd just refer you to the work of Prof. Michel Foucault of the Collège de France, whose study of the very explicit confessional manuals of the late Middle Ages showed the importance of questioning sexual behavior as a mode of exerting authority over the penitent."

— Yasty Habits (@Yastreblyansky) August 20, 2018

Or maybe Feinstein should do it. Sadly, it won't happen.