Oct 2, 2018 3 min read

I was very surprised by Dave Ball’s column in the Sept. 23 edition. I would expect that someone with a leadership position with the Republican Party would take a more measured tone. His piece was filled with vitriol, innuendo and baseless name calling. His column represents everything that is wrong with politics. Frankly, we need leaders who will reach across the aisle and work with each other to create solutions for the American people. Ball is demonizing the other side.

He starts by arguing that the Democrats, whom he calls “the left” or “leftists,” only care about Roe v. Wade, which is why they do not want Judge Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court Justice. He speaks of Kavanaugh as if he is a choir boy, erudite and with a “noncontroversial professional history.” This is the same judge whom the White House felt compelled to hide his work while he was on the Kenneth Starr Commission and the work that he did investigating the Vince Foster suicide. In the Starr investigation, he proposed salacious and intimate questions to humiliate President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. These were not necessary to the investigation, but he proposed them anyway in a mean-spirited contempt of the parties involved. During the Foster investigation he brow beat a grieving family until they begged to be left alone.

If Ball can frame the argument as an opposition to abortion rights, then he can take the attention away from Kavanaugh. He says the problem is not Kavanaugh, but a left agenda trying to weaponize the judiciary. He calls it “black-robed mobocracy.” He calls Christine Blasey Ford’s decision to come forward a hail-Mary pass by the left. He makes no room for the fact that Ford has come forward with no possible gain to herself amid death threats and an invasion of her privacy. He says “not to belittle sexual assault,” but proceeds to do that very thing. He says she could not have possibly been hurt because her clothes were not torn, and she did not tell anyone. He is either ignorant of the facts surrounding sexual assault or has conveniently left them out of the discussion to suit his narrative. He claims to “know” that the assault did not happen. Does he have some sort of preternatural ability to determine the legitimacy of assault claims?

Ball would like us to believe that the problem is a “left”-based conspiracy born from unreasonable people hell-bent on weaponizing the judiciary. It is not. It’s Kavanaugh himself.

Gary Bostich

Coal Center