President Trump’s speech at the United Nations on Tuesday (9/25) is one of the greatest political speeches ever delivered in peacetime.

Barack Obama is reputed to be an impressive orator. But he never gave a speech that, in substance, could hold a candle to President Trump’s speeches at Warsaw, at Riyadh, before the joint session of Congress last year, or indeed his “rocket man” speech at the United Nations.

And this topped them all for forcefulness, clarity, and wisdom.  What, in the end, was this speech about? It was an elaboration of Trump’s chief foreign policy idea, “principled realism.”

“Realism” connotes an accurate and unsentimental appreciation of the metabolism of power. The “principles” in question involve an affirmation of who we are as a people, which turns on our affirmation of national sovereignty.

The President’s articulation of this simple, yet deep, idea is what lifted his speech out of the realm of pedestrian blather and marked it for the history books.  For now, however, we should pay attention to these key phrases in the President’s speech:

Today (9/25), President Trump is in New York, meeting world leaders attending the latest UNGA (United Nations General Assembly) gathering.  Tomorrow (9/26), he chairs the 15-member UN Security Council’s meeting on Iran.  Should be fun to watch.

The present continuance of institutions such as the EU, NATO, UN, and others suggests that the world goes on exactly as before.

In fact, these alphabet organizations are becoming shadows of their former selves, more trouble to end than to allow to grow irrelevant. The conditions that created them after the end of World War II, and subsequently sustained them even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, no longer really exist.

By 2016 Americans saw the postwar order as a sort of a naked global emperor, about whom all were ordered to lie that he was splendidly clothed.  Then came along the abrasive Donald Trump, who screamed that it was all pretense.  And he was right.

It’s been nearly a year since Ronan Farrow torpedoed the career of Harvey Weinstein, printing in The New Yorker a series of credible accusations that the Hollywood producer had sexually abused several women.

His piece touched off a firestorm that led to purges of incredibly powerful men in a variety of industries, finally forcing them to face consequences for their sexual misconduct.

Yesterday (9.24), though, Farrow and his colleague Jane Mayer did a huge disservice to the Me Too movement by publishing an incredibly thin sexual-abuse allegation against Brett Kavanaugh.  Critics by the boatload have condemned it, “Lazy at Best, Slimy at Worst.”

That story, a prime example of how some media outlets and left-wing voices have mishandled the accusations against the judge, will likely create a climate in which fewer victims are believed, more innocent men suffer for crimes they didn’t commit, and neutral observers are more inclined to doubt claims of sexual assault.

The political circus overwhelming the Kavanaugh confirmation will almost certainly weaken the Me Too movement in the long run by undermining its promise that the truth matters and that it will enable us to obtain justice.  It may already suffered a mortal wound.

The progressive street is leading fossilized Democrats into a dead end of collective madness.  From Dianne Feinstein to John Kerry to Maxine Waters to Cory ‘Spartacus’ Booker, Democrats are losing their marbles.

The dinosaurs of the party desperately seek relevance by sounding crazier than the new unhinged base that disrupts Senate hearings, loudly pronounces a new socialist future, and envisions octogenarian Maxine Waters (age 80) as more the future of the party than is septuagenarian Nancy Pelosi (age 78).

The spectacle is right out of Euripides’s Bacchae, as the creaky old guard of the polis, Tiresias and Cadmus, dress up in trendy, ridiculous ritual costumes to stumble along after the racing and frenzied young maenads (the “raving ones”) in their lethal courtship of suicidal Dionysian madness.  

Here’s a summary of the madness.

[This editorial was published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Sept. 20.  TTP reproduces it here as a public service.]

It is still true: What begins as tragedy can end as farce. So it is with the case of Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her when she was 15 and he was 17 [36 years ago in 1982].

Let us posit that the one thing not at issue here is the truth. As a matter of law and fact, Ms. Ford’s accusation can be neither proved nor disproved.  This is as obvious now as it must have been when Dianne Feinstein and the other Democrats came into possession of this incident.

Surely someone pointed out that based on what was disclosed, this accusation could not be substantiated. To which the Democrats responded: So what? Its political value is that it cannot be disproved.

Christine Blasey Ford's lawyer has announced that Ms. Ford will not testify until the FBI completes yet another investigation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh that everyone knows will never happen.

It was already highly unlikely she was ever going to testify; this is a convenient excuse, a stalling game. But it is more than the usual cheap political stunt.  It's vicious, ugly, and more than slightly sadistic. In regards to Judge Kavanaugh, Democrats are channeling Comrade Beria's famous dictum: "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."

But in the grand tradition of Stalin and Beria, it is our FBI that leads the pack, and the man whose crime they wished to "show" is President Trump.

Unfortunately for the FBI, the tables have turned and the crime stoppers are about to be unmasked as the criminals.

The Salem Witch Trials (Feb. 1692-May 1693) turned on what was called “spectral evidence.”

That was testimony from witnesses—either malicious or hysterical—who claimed the accused had assumed the form of a black cat or some other devilish creature and had come visiting in the night in order to torment the witness with bites and scratches, or to rearrange the bedroom furniture, or to send the baby into paroxysms.

Susannah Sheldon, aged about 18, testified that the defendant Sarah Good’s apparition—not the actual Sarah Good, but her spirit, her specter—“most violently pulled down my head behind a chest and tied my hands together with a whale band and almost choked me to death.” Other witnesses blamed Good for the mysterious deaths of cows or for causing a broom to fly up into an apple tree.

The judge, William Stoughton, admitted this nonsense into evidence. Hysterical fantasies had real consequences: Sarah Good and four other defendants were hanged on July 19, 1692.

Three hundred twenty-six years later, an anonymous woman—a spectral and possibly nonexistent woman, for all that one knew when the story emerged—accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her 36 years ago, when he was a high-school student.

It seemed as if the American constitutional process might be drawn back to the three centuries-old neighborhood of Salem, Mass.

If Senate Democrats and their media allies manage to destroy Brett Kavanaugh, they will bring America one step closer to a new, liberal style of totalitarianism.

I don’t use the “T”-word lightly. I’ve spent years pushing back against those who fling it about in free societies like ours. But totalitarianism doesn’t require cartoonish, 1984-style secret police and Big Brother. The classical definition is a society where everything — ethical norms and moral principles and truth itself — is subjugated to political ends.

By that measure, the Democrats’ campaign to block Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, based on a hazy, uncorroborated, decades-old assault allegation, is further proof the totalitarian society is their goal.

Certainly, it has many of the elements of abusive politics that Americans normally associate with foreign lands untouched by the light of liberty and reason:

[This editorial was published in today’s Sept. 18 edition of the Wall Street Journal --JW]

The woman accusing Brett Kavanaugh of a drunken assault when both were teenagers has now come forward publicly, and on Monday (9/17) it caused Republicans to delay a confirmation vote and schedule another public hearing.

Yet there is no way to confirm her story after 36 years, and to let it stop Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation would ratify what has all the earmarks of a calculated political ambush.

Ms. Ford’s story is simply too distant and uncorroborated to warrant a new hearing or to delay a vote. We’ve heard from all three principals, and there are no other witnesses to call. Democrats will use Monday’s (9/24) hearing as a political spectacle to coax Mr. Kavanaugh into looking defensive or angry, and to portray Republicans as anti-women. Odds are it will be a circus.

GOP Senators should understand that the political cost of defeating Mr. Kavanaugh will likely include the loss of the Senate. Democrats are already motivated to vote against Donald Trump, and if Republicans panic now their own voters will rightly be furious. They would be letting Democrats get away with the same dirty trick they tried and failed to pull off against Clarence Thomas.