The Fault In Ourselves

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From “Twelve against the Gods,” we learn that Charles XII of Sweden was a silent child considered dimwitted, but when he assumed the throne he proved to be something else entirely, setting out to conquer much of Europe. It turns out he had a secret role model he’d found in a book and emulated his heroes supposed silence, austerity, and single-mindedness — Alexander the Great.

From a profile in the “New Yorker” of Mark Zuckerberg we learn he has long had a role model from history as well — the clever, ruthless, empire-building Augustus Caesar who was also initially underestimated. He has even gone so far as to name one of his children August.

This is also the fellow who gloated in the early days of “the facebook” about the willingness of its users to give him access to their personal data. “They ‘trust me,’ Dumb F**ks.” Obviously that turned out to be a bad idea, but it’s nothing new.

After 9/11 we trusted Bush, Cheney, George Tenet, and Colin Powell when they told us to invade Iraq because of imaginary weapons of mass destruction while the real perp, Osama bin Laden, escaped retribution for another decade.

This time the American people were regarded as dumb f**ks by the leaders they had entrusted with their security. and they weren’t wrong. They even reelected the jokers who destabilized the entire Muslim world and alienated our allies. Only when these same clowns fiddled while New Orleans drowned (“heck of a job, Brownie”) did the gullible believers begin to doubt.

In 2008, banks, financial services companies, lenders, the real estate industry, the federal reserve, Bernie Madoff, economists assured the dumb f**ks that the economy was sound, the housing market wasn’t a bubble, and the market could grow forever. What a falling off there was. And once again, blind trust was unjustified.

And in 2016, Donald Trump, a real estate huckster and reality TV Queen of Hearts (“Off with their heads!”) asked the country to trust him with their fate. And not quite a majority of dumb f**k voters did.

There seems to be a pattern here. Perhaps the endless willingness to fall for the snake oil salesman, the televangelist, the silicon valley hype, the Wall Street scams, the oleaginous pol, the seller of self-help nostrums suggests we are the land of the saps and the home of the betrayed.

Is our tragic flaw optimism or laziness? “Trust, but verify,” said Ronald Reagan, but he had it backwards. Verify first, trust later, and only sparingly even then. But falling for cons is easy, Investigating every pitch, treating every scheme as a potential nest of vipers requires effort, analysis, objectivity. Easier to take a selfie and hope for the best.

It is perhaps no accident that a recent study found that only 53% of Americans read books. And we all know quite a lot of those people are lying to the pollsters about it. When America fell for the fat, fraudulent demagogue Joe McCarthy, Edward R. Murrow ended his TV dissection of the charlatan by quoting Shakespeare, and laid the blame at the feet of a carelessly trusting, easily bamboozled public.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.” Of course, Shakespeare is now too hard for us, so maybe we should listen instead to the philosopher king, Mark Zuckerberg, and just try to quit being dumb f**ks.

American Horror Story: Scotus

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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.

Court Of Ill Repute

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The mantra of the Trump era is “this is not normal,” and the Kavanaugh debacle is right at home in that regard, as we await the dueling accounts of accused harasser and harassee.

In the hyper-partisanized process that has become the new normal, the time from nomination to approval for Supreme Court nominees has averaged a dilatory two months, if you don’t count ignoring the existence of Merrick Garland for over a year.

Now, however, Republicans are raring to get Kavanaugh seated by the start of term on the first Monday of October. Not so he won’t miss a day of work, but to avoid the risk that the Democrats might take control of the Senate on November 6.That would doom the chances of any nominees as far right as Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, et al.

If that isn’t abnormal enough, there’s the case of the missing evidence. As a political judge in the Bush White House, Kavanaugh has a voluminous paper trail on issues likely to come before the court, just the sort of thing those tasked by the Constitution with advising and consenting to his nomination might want to see. But the majority has contrived to keep tens of thousands of pages away from prying eyes.

That’s hinky enough, but several of his sworn answers to the committee have also seemed less that entirely truthful. At best he played down his involvement in several controversial judicial appointees by Bush. Also in the new normal world in which we live, his blatant stonewalling of virtually all answers about his positions on judicial matters was not unexpected.

Yet his copious published record makes his sudden shyness seem absurd. In a sane world, it might not be unreasonable to expect a nominee to answer questions about where he stands on issues of judicial philosophy or his Catholic faith when it comes to divisive issues such as women’s rights, gay rights, abortion rights.

He also refused to discuss whether judicial ethics require a justice to recuse himself if cases of criminal law or impeachment come before the court if they concern the person who appointed him to the bench. Perhaps for all those reasons, Kavanaugh is the least popular nominee in the history of Supreme Court polling. And that was before the headline incident from his prep school days took center stage.

We all know now that he has been accused of attempted rape while staggering drunk at a house party, abetted by a second man, Mark Judge, who has described his alcoholic prep school experience in print. He even included a cameo by a fellow topper, Bart O’Kavanaugh. Could that be the judge in question?

The cry from the Republicans has been “he said, she said,” and both Kavanaugh and Judge have denied everything, including even being at such a party. But why wouldn’t they? Maryland has no statute of limitations on rape, and it’s not every day you get offered a Supreme Court seat. Conversely, what has his accuser got to gain by manufacturing such a tale. Especially since she didn’t make it up recently, but told the story, that continues to haunt her, six years ago to a therapist.

Defenders of Kavanaugh decided calling her a partisan liar was a dog that wouldn’t hunt, especially in the #MeToo era when blaming the victim is frowned on. So, they came up with a new angle. She was attacked by a doppelganger, a Kavanaugh look alike. Only in soap operas and B movies does the old mistaken identity wheeze work. And the geniuses who came up with this idea may have given the sap they singled out as the fall guy a heckuva good defamation case if he decides to take them to court.

To add hilarity to injury, Donald Trump vouches for Kavanaugh and wonders why the alleged victim didn’t call the cops or come forward when she was fifteen. Since he has a long history of sexual harassment, self-admitted pussy grabbing, payoffs to Playboy bunnies and porn stars, and has even been accused of spousal rape by Ivana, Trump would seem to be less than worthless as a character witness. With friends like him, Kavanaugh needs no enemies.

Amusingly, the Republican senators seem equally committed to making Kavanaugh look guilty by refusing to request an FBI probe of the allegations, as Christine Blasey Ford has demanded. That was done in the case of Anita Hill and is standard operating procedure whenever skeezy rumors about nominees have to be run to ground. Oddly, Kavanaugh, who loudly proclaims his innocence, has not chimed in to demand an FBI probe. Neither has Trump? Something to hide?

Even worse for the president’s cause, his outburst attacking the victim has provoked a galvanic response from women who have suffered the same kind of abuse. Tens of thousands rushed to explain to the molester-in-chief why a victim might not speak up. See, #why i didn’t report. They were joined by Ronald Reagan’s daughter, Patti Davis, who explained in a Washington Post op-ed why she never reported an attack years ago.

Most astonishing, perhaps, is the bio of Kavanaugh from the scene of the crime, the prep school’s yearbook. In it his jock accomplishments are listed. These include his several sports, but also name him as treasurer of the alcoholic Keg Club and a member of the aspirational 100 Keg or Bust squad. And then there’s his membership in the Devil’s Triangle? What’s that, you ask? Some Catholic secret society, perchance? No. According to the Urban Dictionary, a Devil’s Triangle is a sexual frolic with a cast of two men and one woman, not necessarily consenting.

In other words, Kavanaugh’s yearbook may actually finger him as a participant in the crime of which he stands accused. You can’t make this stuff up. Yet in our topsy turvy world it is not Kavanaugh but his accuser who is afraid to return home and has received death threats.

You be the judge. Does this gentleman belong on the Supreme Court? Especially since additional accusers have now emerged, perhaps just what his backers feared, and another reason for their unseemly haste. If elevated, a peculiar odor will cling to him for life, and for the first time in history two of nine seats, just about 30%, of the Supreme Court will be occupied by men accused of sex crimes. If we continue to taint our most important institutions, they will cease to possess the moral authority upon which they depend.