Morning Headlines, 27 January 2024:

“On the Staggering $83.3 Million Carroll II Verdict against Trump”
“Trump ordered to pay $83M, vows to appeal”

Andrew McCarthy of the National Review On Line helped us wake up this morning. Andrew is a columnist for the National Review, a right-wing digital publication originally founded by one of our favorite commentators- Mr. William F. Buckley. His contribution is why we started reading it, though why we continue is a mystery since he is long deceased. His power was in speaking out about some of the things that impact our Republic in the public sphere. He would not hesitate to remind us that our nation is not a democracy, but an acknowledged Representative Republic.

We are not sure Mr. Buckley would subscribe to the publication these days. For us, on this morning, revelations poured in around zero-five-hundred on the digital clock by the Cot-in-the-Corner. You may have heard the news in generally the same way, which seems to rely on re-runs at this moment in the endless campaign.

We were reading the morning headlines as a way to get energized and figure out the number of clicks that makes it worthwhile to publish this stuff. What sparked this approach to “news” was the reprise of other public service judicial proceedings. Our photo montage to start this turn of the literary sums it up pretty nicely.

We are not going to name the individuals since with repetition they become virtually identical. You can see the first victim in this series, and we will not assert that the evidence she presented against the nominee was invalid, since we don’t know anything more that came over the airwaves. We have a member of the Writer’s Section who was working the Hill in the late 103rd and 104th Sessions of Congress. The Member we were told to look out for has had a pretty good run after those hearings and we were glad not to get dragged into the. earlier ones.

The organization targeted in that episode of justice was the Supreme Court, and to no one’s surprise, the script was played out again. We all saw the first version of it, the one in which ancient allegations of possible felonious conduct are brought forward. The important factor of “reasonable doubt” would be one of the first issues in these cases, but we are fortunate that a New York Jury has decided the result of what these allegations claim.

In the current case, the facts are almost identical to the ones used in the two previous nominations. It is a little unbelievable. Oh Hell, the whole thing is unbelievable. We have to be careful here, since the current headline is from a woman who claims that sometime around thirty years ago, some guy took advantage of a woman he considered “not his type.”

The news angle was sort of shallow, but similar. The current case has remarkable similarities to an episode of a television show called “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.” That episode aired in 2012, and was probably a stunning hour of drama. Some of the details are curiously similar to the ones that just earned Ms. Carrey $83 million bucks.

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We could go further, but at that juncture we were forced to not review old television but current events, even if they are the same thing.

Let’s do a quick recap of some of the strange coincident details in SVU scripts. The accuser could not remember the day the alleged assault occurred. In fact, also not recalled were details about which season it was for what year.

As you can imagine, not knowing what day for which a defendant needs an aliby

The more headlines we read this morning- many of them read aloud to general amusement. Andrew McCarthy may be wrong. Or the process may be unfair. His point seems valid, though. The award to Ms. Carroll may be erroneous and may be ridiculously inflated. But understand: This is what the next nine months will be like. Every day.

Since we are in re-run territory, it is possible we are mistaking the current flurry for “new news” which is not the same as “old news,” which means you are supposed to insert something encouraging or opposing whatever is supposed to happen. We will keep it to McCarthy’s column this morning since this is so crazy.

The assertions in this matter are bizarre. A former nominee to the Supreme Court was not asked if he wished to play in a new version of political process. Central to that narrative was a woman named Anita Hill, who appeared before Congress to accuse the nominee of inappropriate conduct

The tactic regarding the first of three confirmation assaults was unsuccessful. The nominee is now serving as Associate Justice on the Supreme Court. During the next nomination hearing, virtually the same argument was made, this time with multiple acrimonious allegations and multiple women came forward with accusations of sexual assault against him.

The star in the parade of accusations was a PhD who testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that the nominee had pinned her to a bed and attempted to rape her at a party when they were both in high school. That accusation was never judged truthful, and gradually expanded in scope to the assertion that the nominee ran a wholesale trafficking scheme. While in High School.

However serious the allegations, several on-the-fence senators sealed the slim majority in the nominee’s favor with votes to confirm him, citing a lack of hard evidence supporting the accusations against him. That was true in the latest version of the story. We think we can do it briefly, since the legal argument was intended to depict suspense in the episode.

The series attempted to show the workings of our judicial system, beginning with the arraignment, and continuing through the lawyers process of building a case, investigating leads, and preparing witnesses and defendants for trial.
There it is. There are complexities of course. The accuser could not recall the day, month or year of the alleged assault. In fairness to ALCON, we take no position on the facts of the matter. A couple quotes have flown around which would seem to indicate something happened thirty years ago on a day none of us can specifically remember. In the first iteration, a New York Jury awarded $12 million to the accuser, but did so in a matter that only produced a “more likely than not” verdict, which generally speaking is a debatable result insufficient in a criminal, vice civil trail.

But when the system is used to cast a felonious web around the likely- or unlikely- defendant there is an uneasy feeling that things may have been manipulated. The current story is in the headlines to justify an increase in the accuser’s award, up from a few million dollars to the number used in the $83 million awarded.

The story is simple. A woman alleges she was abused in a changing room at the Bergdorf-Goodman Department Store on an afternoon a long time ago. Both juries involved took some of the story as truthful, and worth the better part of a hundred million dollars in damages.

You recall that the accuser did not specify the date of the alleged criminal assault. We derive a certain satisfaction in seeing what justification is part of this legal strategy. The quote about rich guys being able to drag other people around by their private parts? When we heard it the first time, we generally agreed that in the naughty nineties a lot of activity by those with a lot of cash. He did not admit to anything, and it is a challenge that no evidence was offered as proof of the allegation.

Beyond the headlines this morning, we have the feeling that we will be seeing this strategy again, since all it requires is one individual willing to tell a bogus story in exchange for all the money one could possibly spend, plus notoriety and the full fifteen minutes of fame.

We would wish everyone involved in this the best of luck going forward. We took a poll of the group out on the Patio at Big Pink. Most of us thought this was a tired exercise in the LawFare battles that augment the regular general election process. You already know this one inside out, but we have no doubt it will be trotted out again in the battle for a presumed majority on a High Court.

In fact, that is happening now, only with bigger stakes. That means we have more than nine months to go. The legal system will produce more headlines from the wobbly tradition of fairness, and we agreed to not take this episode with a certain air of je ne sais quoi.

We hate to change languages on you this far down the page, but things happen. Those four words are the basis of a French expression that means “I don’t know what!” We have inserted the exclamation point to provide clarity, since it is used to describe a pleasing quality that cannot be exactly named or described in “examples, pronunciation, translations and related words.”

So, forgive us for this use of ‘je ne sais quoi.’ If you need additional information about which of the examples and translations amount to $83 million bucks, we can help. Splash laughed from his corner of the circle, saying that the verdict represented more than 16 times his complete lifetime income, and considerably more than he will make until the time he is in the ground.

As we have tried to emphasize over the past few episodes of this column, there is a lot of stuff going on. The Appeal to this particularly notorious story will now commence in earnest and is loosely scheduled to keep the “convicted as charged” in front of the voting public.

We will see how that goes, but we think it is likely we are going to see this strategy again. And by the way, what were you doing on this day (OTD) in High School? In our new system of justice, it may be more accurate to say “how did you feel on that day, even if we can’t specifically identify which one?”

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com