The symptoms of age-related cognitive decline include being unable to remember whether you’re in Vermont or New Hampshire, and what the talking points of your own presidential campaign are, but recalling exactly what you said nearly 60 years ago when you had a summer job as a lifeguard at a pool in Wilmington, Del. and a ‘bad dude’ called Corn Pop took umbrage when you ordered him to put on a shower cap so he looked like an old lady and then, to further emasculate him in front of his ‘boys’, called him ‘Esther’.
The symptoms of gross partisanship and journalistic incompetence include running accusations of sexual assault against a Supreme Court judge without mentioning that your source worked for Bill Clinton when he was accused of sexual misdemeanors, and then attaching a ‘clarification’ to the article, admitting that the alleged victim has no recollection of the incident, and that you knew this, but didn’t think the public should know it, so left it out of your article.
One Max Stier claims he saw Kavanaugh pull down his pants at a Yale party in the early Eighties, and that Kavanaugh’s ‘friends pushed his penis into the hand of a fellow student’.
‘Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun,’ the Times tweeted, presumably after the adults had left the Twitter account with a Yalie. The paper later issued an erection, sorry, correction.
Kavanaugh’s penis is to the left punditry as Ruth Bader’s Ginsburg’s pancreas is to the right: an object of infinite political import whose standing might shape the future of American jurisprudence. Mr Stier took his accusation to the FBI. The people have a right to know the size of Justice Kavanaugh’s penis, how many friends were required to direct it, and whether they used a wheelbarrow to push it.
If only the editors of the New York Times Sunday Review investigated their sources with the zeal with which Joe Biden’s minions probed the microfiches in Delaware’s libraries. Pogrebin and Kelly’s article was a puff for their forthcoming book. They repeated Stier’s accusation, but the excerpt failed to mention that their ‘book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed’ and that ‘friends say that she does not recall the incident’. They described Stier as working for ‘a nonprofit organization in Washington’, but didn’t mention that he worked on Bill Clinton’s defense team during the Whitewater investigation, when a young Brett Kavanaugh was working for independent counsel Kenneth Starr.
Compare the Times’s sloppiness to the sleuthing of CNN’s Daniel Dale, or perhaps the person who did the actual sleuthing and then pushed the information into Dale’s hand like a penis at a Yale frat party. Dale has produced evidence that there really was an African American resident of Wilmington called William L. ‘Corn Pop’ Morris (1943-2016), and that there really had been a street gang in Sixties’ Wilmington called the Romans, just like Biden claimed.
It has also emerged that Corn Pop believed that the confrontation with Biden cured him of his innate criminality, and that he spent the rest of his life playing spoken-word records on his record player while reading from a dictionary in case his children came into the room. According to sources close to the Biden campaign, Corn Pop’s last words were that, should the whites of the United States choose, as Biden once said, ‘to put y’all back in chains’, he would prefer to do light work around Biden’s house, and to help Biden’s son Hunter learn Ukrainian.
The Times’s hit-piece is obviously appalling. The Sunday Review editors hid evidence in order to give the story a partisan edge. The effort to vindicate Biden over the Corn Pop story is appalling in a subtler way. It isn’t that Biden made it all up, or that Corn Pop may have taken to the diving board at a municipal pool in 1960 without wearing a hair net. It’s that Biden has offered this story as proof that he understands black people — as if ‘they’ don’t know how to parent or swim responsibly, and ‘they’ only understand force.
It’s also the implied pitch to white voters that Biden knows how to be tough on law and order, and that as president, he’ll keep black people in their place by waving a figurative length of metal chain. Biden inevitably will fumble this message, and boast about how he went hand to hand with a gang-banger called ‘Porn Cop’ who was glistening with suntan oil and wearing a thong.
The Kavanaugh and Corn Pop stories must at all times be considered separately, for two reasons. First, if taken together, these stories show the extent to which pro-Democratic media, even the upmarket kind which advertises its fact-checking, will go in order to slander its enemies and support its team — and that the obvious cognitive decline of the Democratic frontrunner might not be as alarming as the obvious ethical decline in the press, because a party can find a better candidate, but the Times, it isn’t a-changin’.
Second, there’s the risk that the two stories will merge into a single image in which Joe Biden’s friends push his penis into Corn Pop’s hand in order to prove his tolerance, while Brett Kavanaugh the Porn Cop stands pink and proud for family values. This composite is the true image of American politics today, so is best not considered at all, let along pushed into anyone’s face as part of a presidential nomination strategy.
Dominic Green is Life & Arts Editor of Spectator USA.
