But the Associate Press has "Fact Checked" Republican allegations made against Judge Jackson and concluded they were all wrong. Well, all but one. One was a fair objection, but then it was explained away and clearly no big deal.
A main cause of the AP's ire is that the RNC forgot the presumption of innocence, the very bedrock of our legal system. So says the AP, 03/25/2022. You know, that presumption that was mighty twisted and turned in previous cases, such as the Kavanaugh hearings? That's when we learned presumption of innocence only belongs in those dusty old courtrooms. In the real world, your arse belongs to the Left. As Senator Booker so eloquently put it back then, it's simply not a question of guilt or innocence.
Another thing that leaped out at me was the AP's smacking down the accusation that she was mitigating the severity of child pornography. Unlike Justice Kavanaugh, who the press was pretty sure had headed an international sex slave organization because of course he did, the AP jumps on the GOP for drawing a conclusion based upon her questions and responses in one particular case.
Just because she asked questions was no reason to assume she had drawn a conclusion. Thus says the AP. Which I agree with, BTW. It would be nice if the AP held such lofty standards when Republican nominees are accused of writing secret racist slogans in their high school yearbooks thirty years ago. Nonetheless consistency isn't exactly the best trait of modern journalism.
But here's what really hit me. In the part where the AP is Fact Checking the claim of her softness on Child Porn, it says this:
But several behavioral science researchers testified at that hearing that there may be nonsexual motivations among a portion of child-sex criminals. It is not a radical view. And many judges do see a distinction between those who produce child pornography and those who receive it.
You see that? A big difference between those who receive child pornography and those who produce it? I'm sure there is. And fifty years ago it was lumped into a single 'kiddy rapist' category, the perpetrator to be dealt with in the local penitentiary.
Then we entered the free wheeling 60s and 70s, when there was no such thing as a criminal, only a victim of unjust and oppressive social structures. That's when we could all giggle and laugh about this sort of comedy routine:
We also heard more music and saw more movies and read more books pushing the line when it came to anything sex or drugs, including the ages involved.
Then came the late 90s, when any and all sex crimes warranted being branded on the forehead as a sex offender for life. Try to break down the cases in the Catholic Church, or ask if one sexual assault charge should be equated with all sex crimes, and you were a pedophile defender, end of statement. This was especially true in the wake of the Catholic Church abuse scandal.
And yet, Mark Shea noted something I think was rather insightful. He said there will come a time when the Catholic Church is no longer condemned for allowing children to be sexually assaulted, but because the Church condemns the sexual assault of children.
Which makes sense. More than one ancient culture assumed adults sexually 'training' the youngsters was simply a right of passage. Since a vague secular paganism is modernity's carrot dangling at the end of the stick, I don't really see us holding the line against sex with children in the future. And it's just this sort of thing, that minor moving of the ball a single yard when we're all focusing on something else, that will allow it to happen.
Given that you just never know anymore about what the Left says is right or wrong, false or true, good or bad, making such a move shouldn't be too difficult. Heck, we've just learned making blanket statements about child porn is passé, and most of our attention was on a blog post about AP Fact Checkers. See how easy it is?
Hey, remember when Robert Bork was rejected by the Senate? What about Clement Haynsworth? G. Harrold Carswell? Oh I could go back quite a ways where there's 3 or 4 rejected Republican nominees for every 1 rejected Democrat nominee. (full list)
ReplyDeleteAs the Federalist podcast on this topic noted, you push all the policy power onto the courts, then questioning judges policy and politics becomes completely relevant.
Anyway, Tim Pool loves to make jokes and examples about how the "fact checkers" play around with the 'false' rating. So I decided to test this. AP says...
HAWLEY: “Judge Jackson went below the maximum, the minimum, and below what the government requested in every single case for which we can find records, except two. In those two the law required her to impose the sentence the government recommended.” — statement Friday.
THE FACTS: Not so. In most of the child pornography cases where she imposed lighter sentences than federal guidelines suggested, prosecutors or others representing the Justice Department generally argued for sentences that were lighter than those recommended by federal guidelines.
Notice first of all the AP doing the sleight of hand. Hawley mentions "the government recommends" which has 2 possible interpretations. The AP is playing around with this by using that to mean to the federal guidelines (interpretation 1), not the prosecutor recommendations (interpretation 2). Let's look at the transcript:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/03/21/sen_hawley_to_ketanji_brown_jackson_i_look_forward_to_you_explaining_the_lenient_sentences_for_child_predators.html
The federal sentencing guidelines recommended a sentence of 97 to 121 months in prison. Prosecutors recommended 24 months in prison. Judge Jackson gave the defendant three months in prison.
. . .
The federal guidelines recommended 151 to 188 months in prison. That's a long time. The prosecutor recommended 72 months. Judge Jackson gave the defendant 60 months, which was the lowest sentence permitted by the law.
You can scroll down there but the point remains that in every case hawley brings up, in EITHER interpretation, law or prosecutor, the judge STILL was below the recommendation. But what does the AP conclude?
So it is not correct to assert that all but two sentences she handed down in such cases, when she served as a district court judge from 2013 until last year, were “below what the government requested.”
But it is true. The fact check is a complete lie. Notice the quote of Hawley's the AP uses instead of say... this quote:
And what concerns me, and I've been very candid about this, is that in every case, in each of these seven, Judge Jackson handed down a lenient sentence that was below what the federal guidelines recommended and below what prosecutors requested.
See? One quote is completely unambiguous. The other quote allows just a tiny bit of ambiguity and they use that one to try and claim it's false - even though even by their own efforts, it ends up being true.
Fact Checkers are like the Pet Rocks of modern journalism. They're a stupid fad that everyone knows is rubbish and yet people can't get enough of them. Especially when they know they exist to further the progressive/Democrat cause.
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