Supreme travesty
I don’t know what is left to say about the hearings in Congress to decide on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court now that everybody and his dog has chimed in. So I will just say what comes to mind.
Dr. Christine Blaise Ford accuses Kavanaugh of rape when they were both fifteen. Kavanaugh vehemently denies it.
Who is telling the truth?
Personally, I have no doubt that Kavanaugh lied and his accuser told the truth.
Why?
Just by looking at what they said and—more importantly—the way in which they said it.
Ford came across as a person reluctant to be in the limelight, emotionally wrought by having to relive a real and painful experience but always respectful and in control, coming forward with nothing to gain except having her life turned into hell by insult and threat, overcoming her admitted fear out of civic duty. Brave. Consistent. Truthful. Totally credible. A person in full. A straight shooter.
That came across with such force and clarity that even the most reactionary Republican senators, such as the lamentable Orrin Hatch, declined to call her anything but credible. Even Donald Trump, incapable of acknowledging inconvenient truths when they hit him in the face said she was credible.
Kavanaugh. He came across as a spitball. In baseball, that’s a pitch in which the ball has been illegally tampered with by the pitcher with saliva or another fluid. That makes the ball take any number of weird paths on the way to the plate, baffling most hitters. Like a spitball, in his testimony Kavanaugh delivered few straight pitches, even fastballs. He was all over the place. He tried to look earnest, but that’s hard to keep to, and self-pitying.
The most telling moment in the testimony came when Democratic Senator Amy Klubochar asked, in a polite fashion, a straightforward and relevant question. Kavanaugh jumped all over the Senator and, rather than responding, angrily asked the Senator an inappropriate and irrelevant question. He lost it, and thereby dropped his façade. By behaving abusively to Klubochar, he showed that aggression toward women is such a deep-seated part of his behavioral repertoire that he resorts to it virtually as a reflex that he can’t control even when displaying it looks awful to everyone and works against his own interests.
Rape is a crime of violence and aggression the point of which is domination rather than sexual satisfaction. Kavanaugh’s outburst makes Dr. Ford’s narrative all the more credible. Kavanaugh pouncing on Klubochar revealed him as the type of man who is used to bullying women. It also showed that he utterly lacks a judicial temperament and is prone to tantrums and diatribes.
Parenthetically, one almost comical aspect of the hearings was that the women, including Dr. Ford, Senator Klubochar, and Senator Kamala Harris kept their cool while the men, including Kavanaugh and Senator Lindsey Graham, lost theirs, with Graham verging on hysteria.
Only Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, a man with decency and a conscience rare in a Republican member of Congress these days, shaken by his encounter in an elevator with two other victims of sexual abuse, broke rank and demanded an FBI investigation before he would agree to vote to confirm Kavanaugh in the final Senate vote.
Before the hearings, for reasons I discuss below, naming Kavanaugh to the high court was an outrage. After the hearings, it would be tantamount to committing a grand travesty. The problem is that, with possibly a handful of exceptions, Trump and the Republicans would happily commit just such a travesty.
The bill of indictment against Kavanaugh, aside from the allegations of sexual aggression by Ford and other women, should start with the fact that Trump nominated him and he accepted the nomination. During his tenure, Trump has appointed some of the most self-serving, corrupt, contemptible, and unqualified people ever. Why should Kavanaugh be any different? Accepting such an appointment from someone as loathsome as Trump speaks volumes about Kavanaugh.
Looking at Kavanaugh’s papers and rulings, and listening to his opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, it’s evident that the seating of Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court would accelerate critically and set in stone for the conceivable future the undeclared counterrevolution against democracy Republicans have been carrying out for decades. Kavanaugh’s reactionary judicial philosophy, hostile to minorities, women, the middle class and the poor, would create a Court that would consent to policies that are driving American society toward ever higher levels of economic inequality and political control by the wealthiest corporations and individuals.
It will be a sad moment and a damning commentary on the condition of these dis-United States of America in 2018, if a man with as much baggage, personal and political, as Brett Kavanaugh becomes a justice of the Supreme Court of the land.
