After spending many hours glued to the Kavanaugh/Ford TV melodrama, here are a few random thoughts.
Either, one is telling the trust and one isn’t, or one has no memory of his actions. Some of the questioning of Kavanaugh appeared intended to offer him an escape hatch based on alcohol abuse. He declined to jump at the opportunity. Not good for the choirboy image.
Dr. Ford came across as a smart, pleasant, polite, meticulous, traumatized, harmless, vulnerable witness. Even Republican committee members and President Trump grudgingly agreed and called her credible. But that didn’t mean they were prepared to act on that assumption.
It wouldn’t be far fetched to imagine that such an air of harmlessness and vulnerability would have made 15-year-old Christine Blasey an appealing target for bullies and predators. Maybe she wouldn’t fight back. This was apparently also one reason the Georgetown Prep jockocracy singled out Renate, a girl from the poor side of town, as the butt of vulgar slander. Bullies target for their sport the weak and the entitled those they regard as inferior.
Reports suggest that the Republicans and Trump felt the cause might be lost when Dr. Ford was credible. And the female prosecutor brought in to spare the nation the spectacle of eleven old, privileged, angry, white men beating up on a defenseless woman, failed to shake Ford’s account. Trump let it be known that Kavanaugh also had seemed wimpy in previous appearances, including one on Fox.
Obviously Kavanaugh got the message. His performance was filled with fury and followed the playbook Trump learned at the feet of his favorite lawyer, Roy Cohn. When attacked, deny everything, never give an inch, hit back harder than you are hit. Denial has been the usual response by powerful men accused of such behavior from Clinton to Weinstein, Cosby, Moonves, Trump and the rest.
But hitting back directly at a defenseless woman you are accused of sexually assaulting would hardly have been a winning strategy in this case. So Kavanaugh blamed the Democrats. This was hardly an accident. Lindsey Graham, Donald Trump and the rest of the Republicans had already written the script.
So he ranted that the entire hearing was a disgrace, a farce, a plot, a sham, a con job, fake new, an abuse of power engineered by liberal Diane Feinstein who had the information weeks earlier. She and the rest of the Democrats were out to get Kavanaugh because they hate Trump, want to get even for Clinton, and scorn Kavanaugh’s jurisprudence. They want to keep he seat open until they win in 2020. You know, like Mitch McConnell did to Obama.
This theory of the case allowed Kavanaugh to make neither a moral nor a legal nor a factual defense, but a political argument. And here the mask may have slipped a bit and revealed he real Kavanaugh.
He would be one of the most overtly political Justices in memory — his resume includes clerkships for far right justices, working for Ken Starr’s investigation of the Clinton’s sex scandal — and insisting that all the most salacious details be included in the report he helped write— then working in the George W. Bush White House where he was useful in finding legal justifications for executive branch overreach, including how to ignore Supreme Court precedents and legislative controls.
Most bizarre was the fact that Kavanaugh, the accused perpetrator in a series of sexual assaults, expressed no concern or compassion for the victims, even if he denied being the perp. He seemed to be consumed with self-pity and rage. The last ten days have been hell. His life and that of his family has been destroyed. But wasn’t it the victim who has suffered the aftershocks and trauma for the last 36 years? Isn’t it Dr. Ford whose life has been haunted, if not ruined?
All the while Kavanaugh has lived his charmed life untroubled by regret, remorse or memory. His fury may be at having his transgressions catch up with him, assuming Judge Jekyll wasn’t a blackout drunk who mercifully has no memory of his days as Mr. Hyde.
Finally, for forty years out of power, Republicans built their brand on demonizing the wicked majority, but why have they not found a new script now. They control both branches of the legislature, the presidency and, with the naming of a replacement for Anthony Kennedy, will have captured the Supreme Court too. Shouldn’t they act like winners instead of aggreived losers? Or is governing when many of your policies are unpopular a problem?
And why or why didn’t they throw Kavanaugh overboard at the fist whiff or trouble and pick another untainted nominee from the list of right-wing originalists provided by the Federalist Society? The only plausible answers are they like fighting Democrats better than governing, and Trump chose Kavanaugh because he was more extreme on one issue than any other candidate.
He is on record as believing presidents, no matter how corrupt, can not be indicted, subpoenaed, called before a grand jury, forced to testify or subjected to legal jeopardy so long as they are in office. Trump is wiling to overlook Kavanaugh’s crimes if he will get the Supreme court to overlook Trump’s.