Libs’ attacks a crying shame

TRUMP judicial nominee Lawrence VanDyke broke down in tears during his Senate confirmation hearing last week when asked about allegations he is biased against gay people.

Not just the quivering voice we saw from Brett Kavanaugh, but big, heaving, uncontrollable sobs (right).

As he sat in front of his stricken wife and three children, we saw a complete unmanning of an eminent jurist who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, and served as the solicitorgeneral in Montana and Nevada.

Whether VanDyke’s display of emotion has jettisoned his chances we won’t know until next month.

But what we do know is that, like Justice Kavanaugh, he is the victim of a malicious attack because he is a threat to the liberal world order.

VanDyke’s crime is that he is a social conservative who has defended traditional marriage and a law banning late-term abortions.

His public breakdown at the most important moment of his career is what the liberal establishment wants to do to the conservative heart of this nation.

Progressive activists relished his distress, cheering it as a great victory, mocking him as a crybaby.

Typical was the “woman-owned” Web site Wonkette, which described VanDyke as a “known bigot” under the gloating headline: “Wanna See A Gay-Hatin’ Bigot Baby Cry?”

What wasn’t evident in the video of VanDyke’s tears was that the previous evening he had been dealt a devastating blow by the influential American Bar Association, which assesses judicial nominees on their professional competence.

They gave VanDyke a blistering thumbs-down, an almost unheard of “unqualified” rating.

In a report citing anonymous sources, the ABA damned him as “arrogant, lazy, an ideologue, and lacking in knowledge . . . lacks humility, has an ‘entitlement’ temperament, does not have an open mind, and does not always have a commitment to being candid and truthful.”

But, as Sen. Josh Hawley pointed out during Wednesday’s hearing, the Montana attorney, Marcia Davenport, who led the ABA’s evaluation of VanDyke, was hardly an impartial judge. She reportedly made a campaign donation to VanDyke’s opponent when he ran for the Montana Supreme Court in 2014.

Her assessment of VanDyke bears a remarkable resemblance to hatchet jobs prepared by progressive groups and the obsessively spitefully personal attacks by a Democrat donor, Montana Department of Justice official Michael Black, who has waged a long vendetta against VanDyke.

You have to ask why a Republican Senate allows a partisan lobby group to have such an outsize influence in the vetting of judicial nominees.

The ABA cited a 2004 article by VanDyke in the Harvard Law Record when he was a student: “Children on average fare best in stable, two-parent families,” he wrote, quoting a Massachusetts Supreme Court judicial decision.

In other words, in the early days of the same-sex marriage debate, he was expressing an orthodox legal view.

It also was the view of most Americans. In 2004, a Gallup poll found that 61 percent of Americans opposed same-sex marriage.

The issues for which VanDyke is being crucified are ones on which the nation is divided.

In the case of abortion, six in 10 Americans say it should be banned after 20 weeks, according to two polls this year, by Marist and Reuters/Ipsos.

When it comes to same-sex marriage, approval has risen since the Supreme Court legalized it in 2015, but 40 percent of Americans don’t support it, including a majority of Republicans, according to a survey of 40,000 people released by the Public Religion Research Institute last year.

These are contested issues on which reasonable people can disagree.

But in the Trump era, liberals have a hard-line policy toward anyone who disagrees with them. They take ad hominem to new levels of cruelty. Watch out, because you’re next. VanDyke told the confirmation hearing Wednesday that he has changed his view on same-sex marriage.

But that makes no difference to the liberal witch-hunters. Their great skill is in hunting down every morsel of information they can twist to damn suspected foes, and weaponizing it in the media.

The result is significant reputational damage, if not complete destruction of your career and good name.

They have modeled themselves on Mao Zedong’s sociopathic cultural revolution, during which millions of people suspected of being “Rightists” were damned as “monsters and demons,” whether guilty or innocent.

They don’t care about fairness. If they don’t see you as an “ally” proselytizing for their causes, it doesn’t matter whether or not you actually are a bigot.

Polite silence is not enough. They want to police your thoughts.

This is how the progressive left is changing society rapidly, without the assent of the public.

And it’s one good reason Donald Trump is in the White House.

He may not be “Mr. Nice Guy,” as his latest campaign ad says, but he doesn’t dissolve into tears under liberal attack. He just fights back harder.