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.

Homer’s Muse sings of the rage of Achilles, brought forth from his tent by the death of his friend Patroclus to engage the Trojan hero, Hector, in mortal combat.

But Achilles’ anger solves nothing; although he kills Hector, he then desecrates the body by dragging it around the walls of Troy, thus violating the laws of warfare and sealing his own fate.

His determination to avenge his friend thus becomes “the accursed rage that brought great suffering to the Achaeans.” In the end, it’s not the rage of Achilles that wins the war for the Greeks, but the trickery of Odysseus that finagles the wooden horse inside the impregnable gates of Ilium.

We are witnessing a similar self-destructive rage today: the rage of the American Left against the Trump Administration in general and the president in particular.

What besides a profound, educationally inculcated, and emotionally juvenile hatred for the United States motivates them to such paroxysms of hysteria?