Monthly Archives: October 2018

Frontier Justice

Murderous violence has often been used to settle issues.   Heretics– burn them at the stake, for the love of God!    Those who publicly oppose what they feel to be injustice– hang a few from lamp posts, the rest will get the message. Most humans are not heroic.   A few brave men who resist enslavement?  No problem, just shoot the first couple who step up, the rest of them will quickly calm down.   Violence is necessary to maintain an institution like slavery, there is simply no other way to enslave masses of people.   Thus it has always been, the status quo enforcing the irresistibility of its rights with deadly force.   In America this violence is sometimes called “frontier justice”, which conjures the image of a “necktie party” in the violent old West, or in the former Confederacy, you know, a group of men running down and stringing up some varmint for one reason or another.

My father, a man brutalized as a young boy early and often, had a dark sense of humor that sometimes bordered on the sadistic.  He smiled as he recounted the story to my young sister and me of an old time Texas judge who sometimes let murderers off the hook but always ordered horse thieves hanged by the neck until dead.   “There are some men,” the judge explained, “who need killing because they are evil.   If you kill one of these men, you are actually performing a public service by ridding the world of them.  When you kill a man who needs killing, I cannot condemn you as a murderer.  On the other hand, I never saw a horse that needed stealing.”  My father chuckled after he related the judge’s witty explanation of his folksy ways.

“Guilty!”  Bang the gavel, drop the mic, a lunger into the spittoon, pour a round of drinks, boys, and then, after lunch when it cools off a bit out there, let’s string up this Negro horse thief on the run from his rightful owner.   Yee hah!  (Unlikely as this particular scenario is, an American judge as principled as this one would not confiscate somebody’s personal property without due process of law.  The slave would be returned to the master. Hanging another man’s rightful property would be theft.  Only a free horse thief was fair game for hanging.)

In the United States today, physical violence is no longer the first response to every threat.   You can achieve a lot just by destroying a career, or using a protracted lawsuit to bankrupt somebody.  It is sometimes referred to, if done thoroughly enough, as ‘economic capital punishment’.  

When Charles Koch, still a secretive man who exercised his influence in the shadows of the many organizations he founded and/or funded, got wind of the book being written by long-time New Yorker staffer Jane Mayer (Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right) he hired investigators to find dirt on her.   There apparently wasn’t much to find.  Undeterred, calls were placed by Koch operatives to the editor-in-chief of the New Yorker, seeking to make enough of a stink that Mayer would be fired.  Presumably without her full-time staff salary she’d be unable to finish her book exposing the long history of the Koch’s increasingly effective influence machine.   Also, if she’d been fired in disgrace from a well-known publication, it would be much easier to discredit her clearly vindictive revelations about people who had done her personal harm.  Win-win for Koch, and of no consequence to him if it didn’t work.   Charles Koch refers to this method of exerting leverage as “upping the transactional costs” for his opponents.

I’m thinking about this today, of course, because the most unabashedly corrupt president of our lifetimes has just hastily placed a second corporatist partisan on the Supreme Court.   This one is an actual strident right wing zealot with a questionable background that should disqualify him.   More immediately,  his present day willingness to lie under oath, about things large and small, should make him ineligible for appointment. Not to mention the supremely un-judicial way he hysterically blamed a well-funded liberal conspiracy for old charges of sexual assault being credibly made against him by a reluctant victim.   During the course of reading a written partisan screed he also excoriated shameless liberals for forcing a vulnerable victim of sexual assault to come forward, against her will, thus ‘defending’ her.   If a piece of shit could talk, he’d sound like Brett.  Other Supreme Court judges may have been as nakedly partisan as Kavanugh, but all others had, at least, the skill to hide their zealotry.

I’m thinking about the $15,000,000 that we know about, in perfectly legal “dark money”, that paid for ads promoting this good Christian family man as a well qualified, impartial and independent judge.   Why bother marketing this particular highly divisive nominee of our highly divisive president to the public?   You have the votes to confirm him, why spend millions on ads to convince the public that he is not, in spite of what is easily seen, an angry partisan and clearly not an impartial and independent anything?   The public has no say in his selection, why spend the millions?

Well, the millions spent on ads probably had some effect.  Americans according to a recent poll disapprove of Kavanaugh only 50%-45%, with five percent apparently having no opinion on the matter.   This high rate of disapproval of a Supreme Court nominee is unprecedented, but think of how much worse it might be without the ads.  It would certainly be worse if there hadn’t been the fawning nationally televised interview on Fox right before the resumed hearings when Christine Blasey Ford testified and Kavanaugh repeatedly choked up about the character assassination he was being subjected to.  

That Fox interview was set up by Trump’s communications director, Bill Shine, former Fox executive, former defender of his boss Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and other men at Fox who paid off women they sexually abused.   Imagine how much worse those numbers would have been if the ads hadn’t run, if Kavanaugh himself had not blandly admitted, in a self-promoting op-ed that ran in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal on the eve of the final vote, that, sure he was emotional at the hearing, may have said things that he wouldn’t have otherwise said, but he’s committed to judicial impartiality and independence, if not to integrity.

The millions spent on ads?   That is less than a collective penny to the vastly wealthy donors who anonymously put up the money.  How are they allowed to secretly put up millions to influence the public that way?    Citizens United.   Free speech.  Liberty.  Unlimited liberty, that tree that must be watered with the blood of tyrants from time to time, according to the Author of Liberty, himself born very rich, richer still after marriage.  All the best Americans are born rich, all of them.  If God didn’t love you, why would he have granted you such a blessing?   The rest of the entitled poor people will hate you, sure, but that’s what haters do, wage hopeless class warfare against their betters.  Sticks and stones may break my bones.  Likewise, sputtering rants like this one– ow!   I see your righteousness, boy, and raise you one lynch mob.  What you say now, punk?  Huh?

 

Letter to Jeremy Scahill

Because I sat, utterly voiceless, like almost 300,000,000 other Americans, while the brutal farce of the preordained 51-49 Kavanaugh confirmation was grinding on like a sloppily drunk schoolboy against a girl two years younger, writing this long contemplated proposal to Jeremy Scahill is more urgent than ever.  I had to listen to the likes of David Brooks and Alan Dershowitz insisting that the credible testimony of Blasey Ford and the frustrated, emotional pouting of Kavanaugh was essentially a wash.   A handful of people read my thousands of spewed words on the subject and silently yawned.  

A person is not a writer because he or she writes for hours every day. Being able to occasionally move people with your words is touching, but ultimately, that doesn’t make you a writer.  A person is a writer only if he or she gets paid for writing and the writing is publicly disseminated.   Those are the rules and I understand that more and more clearly as the years go by.

Jeremy Scahill is a co-founding editor and the senior investigative reporter at The Intercept, a publication that describes itself this way:  

The Intercept gives its journalists the editorial freedom and legal support they need to pursue investigations that expose corruption and injustice wherever they find it and hold the powerful accountable.  source

A theme Scahill returns to again and again is historical context.  I salute him for this, and will propose writing a piece from time to time providing historical context, legal context.  Jeremy recently gave an excellent contextual introduction to a discussion of Trump’s repudiation of the Obama-era deal with Iran.   Iran’s distrust for America has direct and hideous historical roots dating back to the CIA directed coup, during the Eisenhower administration, that removed the democratically elected president of Iran and helped install a militarily backed monarchy.   The monarch, the Shah, ruled as Persian monarchs of old did, but with an infamous modern secret police force to ensure obedience to his will.  The Shah was very reasonable about sharing his oil wealth with American oil corporations, in a way that his predecessor, who planned to nationalize Iran’s oil reserves, was not.

Scahill laid this out recently and I was grateful for the primer.  The background is important, it is the only way we can ever see things in perspective, from another point of view, and we so rarely get any background on anything.   The reasons for this are fairly obvious, nuance only complicates things for most people.    The reasons for the long war in Iraq, for example, complicated, complicated!  All you need to know is that freedom is on the march and a modern day Hitler is finally being taken out. 

I’ve been intending to contact Jeremy for a long time to confirm what I recall from his book Dirty Wars— namely, that not only were no charges ever brought against American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki before his execution by drone (this I have independently confirmed), but no evidence of any connection to Al Qu’eada or any other terrorist organization was ever produced, let alone evidence that he was involved in planning terrorist attacks, as alleged by President Obama after Al-Awlaki was executed.  

This story contrasts sharply with the unanimous public knowledge and information available about Al-Awlaki.  Every reference to Al-Awlaki to be found anywhere in print or on the internet (outside of Scahill’s excellent book), including recently at the Intercept (to my surprise and shock), identifies him as connected to Islamic terrorism, a highly placed, influential Al Qu’aeda propagandist, most sources also stating that he was directly involved in planning terrorist attacks.

Truth and context matter, particularly when the execution, without trial or even charges, of an American citizen is authorized by a Democratic president.   The current president, using the identical rationale, and citing bi-partisan precedent, can, entirely at his discretion, place any person, American or otherwise, on the enemy combatants list, the kill list, authorize the secret extrajudicial execution– charges optional.  It would be as easy for him, and, one presumes, as politically inconsequential, as shooting somebody on Fifth Avenue with the added bonus of being completely legal to do, based entirely on his say so under the bipartisan rules for our borderless, timeless War on Terrorism.   The only question is why he hasn’t used this extraordinary power against Amy Goodman and Jeremy Scahill yet (or Stephen Colbert, for that matter, though Colbert’s vast popularity might be a restraining factor).  He’s probably just too busy mocking women who’ve been sexually assaulted and attacking black athletes who protest the ongoing killing of unarmed blacks by police at the moment.  There will presumably be time to take care of his more able enemies during his second term, when all squishiness has been pressed out of American democracy.

Instead of the whole truth we are subjected to a cascade of justifications and bullshit everywhere we turn.   Lying attacks from the president are now too common to and too frequent to take note of, the partisan mendacity of the party Trump leads is the new normal.  The best hope for our survival as a democracy is fearless journalism that exposes the details of the widespread corruption in our government.  It may not be a robust hope, in a nation that rarely reads anything but the screen of their phones, while being taught to chant “lying media” at Nuremberg style rallies, but it’s our best hope.  It may be a quaint and naive notion, in our day of ‘alternative fact’, but the truth of what actually happened matters, even as the untruthful version often prevails.  It would be better, of course, if integrity was a real issue in public life, but, of course, that is hoping for a lot in a superficial, celebrity culture like ours.  So we have fearless journalism.

 Scahill’s investigative journalism has taken him to places like Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen where he did the hard, dangerous work of talking to a variety of sources, in the government and on the ground, in his search for the truth about American foreign policy.  It turns out “freedom is on the march” is only a tiny sliver of the real story.   I want to ask him if he got additional information after Dirty Wars was published that supports the contention that Al-Awlaki was a terrorist.    

His reporting on Al-Awlaki’s long ordeal at the hands of the FBI was thorough.   The FBI’s repeated interviews found nothing about terrorism, but they turned up personally compromising material they threatened to blackmail him with if he didn’t become an FBI asset.   The FBI blackmail threat was the final straw that made him decide to leave the US.  After his arrival in Yemen he was arrested and spent a long stretch in solitary in a Yemeni prison (extended at America’s behest).   In the end his transformation from moderate American Muslim imam, the go-to Muslim for American TV interviews,  to America’s deadliest enemy who required immediate extrajudicial killing was complete.   Scahill makes the case that Al-Awlaki was strenuously exercising his First Amendment rights as an outraged American citizen and was no planner of terrorist attacks, nor did he have any known connection to that or any other terrorist group.  Still, history remembers his execution as entirely right and proper, up there with the killing of Osama Bin Laden among the triumphs of Barack Obama.

History remembers, curious phrase, particularly in an increasingly distracted nation with a rapidly shrinking attention span, driven more and more by strictly partisan rage.  We are living now in the age when the preservation of human “liberty” trumps everything else.  You are free to be very, very rich and you are free to die of malnutrition based on your poor food choices, your choice.  It’s all about liberty, so choose wisely what to do with your vast inherited fortune.

And with that, I’m pretty sure I’ve exhausted your attention span, dear reader, and so, onwards and upwards!  I’ve just noticed a link at the Intercept for submissions and proposals, I’m going to read up on what I need to do to have something considered for publication there.  (Alas, it is merely an email address– on the other hand, it gives me free rein, like the FBI recently had investigating the charges against Kavanaugh, to make my pitch!)

 

Fairness is Justice, Justice is Fairness

Admittedly, this simple formulation must be turned on its head by those who stand to gain the most by unfairness being justice.   This is done at law all the time, rules written in coordination with lobbyists, made to preserve privilege, profit, protect the rights of the privileged, at the expense of those without privilege or power.  It happens too regularly to need to give an example of.  Call it unfair if you like, there is nothing you can do about it.  

Fairness demands, to use a quaint phrase, that a victim who comes reluctantly forward, in terror, to publicly describe a traumatic assault by a nominee for high public office she identifies with absolute certainty as the perpetrator, and does so believably, be given a real opportunity to be heard.   This would include, of course, testimony from witnesses who she says were present.   The key to finding the truth in any he said/she said is corroboration.  As long as no hint of corroboration is allowed, it’s always a draw.   Every schoolyard bully knows this at age six.   In he said/she said tie goes to the bully.

Justice, if you control the hearing, even with a one vote majority (especially with a one vote majority) demands that the other alleged perpetrator, an admitted former teenaged drunkard and self-described frustrated sex fiend NOT be allowed to testify.  What could be gained, besides making our evasive choir boy look more dishonest than he already does, by putting an alcoholic, currently in hiding, a loose cannon with shaky credibility before the American people, on worldwide TV?   Better, far better, to have that jerk’s lawyer write a sworn denial and spend millions on an ad campaign to convince the world, without ever saying the bitch accuser lied about anything– we’re very careful to say she was believable as hell — we give her full respect — we are powerful white men who always respect women, always — that our boy is of the highest moral character.  Always was, always will be.   Simple.

The same goes for the female friend who the victim says was at the gathering.  She doesn’t remember the actual insignificant early evening hang out at a friend’s house when her friend was silently traumatized.  She has no reason to recall that particular gathering.   She heard no screams, obviously, since that would have been impossible with the attacker’s sweaty hand pressed over the victim’s mouth, but she can testify about the people involved, where they each lived.  She believes her friend, as she stated, and she can tell us why.

Out of the question, obviously!   This woman, if she is as credible as her friend, could do immense damage.  Just by talking about other parties with drunk, entitled boys from Georgetown Prep, by letting any detail slip that might make her belief in her friend’s story more credible.  It would be corroboration.  No, no, a thousand times no!!!

That goes to for the FBI investigation too.  Suppose the layout of Mark Judge’s house was identical to the one described in Blasey Ford’s testimony?  The upstairs bathroom, directly across from the bedroom she was shoved into, door locked, in the moments before both drunken boys were laughing uncontrollably.   Suppose that home was a short walk from the country club where the victim had practiced diving all day?   A short walk from the club but too far from her own home to walk back.   Well, there’s a line of inquiry the FBI will not be asking anyone about, clearly!

I heard Senator Susan Collins long speech yesterday, most of it, about why she is voting for Brett Kavanaugh.   She spent a long time discussing specific cases where he appears to have ruled fairly, with integrity.  She pointed out that in more than 90% of cases that he heard with Merrick Garland, the two ruled the same way.   To me that pointed more to Obama’s attempt at fairness, nominating the conservative, yet non-ideological Garland, than to any impartiality on Kavanaugh’s part.

Collins eventually addressed the sexual assault allegations against the nominee.  She said, along with all other Republicans who spoke on the matter, that she believed Christine Blasey Ford, but that, essentially, it makes no difference, since there was no corroboration and there’s a presumption of innocence, (particularly, one supposes, when a powerful man breaks down crying over and over and is clearly angry, defensive and on the attack.)  Collins pretended, like all of her Republican colleagues, that this was a criminal trial rather than a hearing about the truthfulness and character of a nominee for one of the most powerful positions in our democracy.  Since his guilt could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt by the single witness, he is presumed to be completely innocent, by Republicans.  End of story, for the narrow Republican majority.

Senator Collins  sounded very reasonable, very measured, as she spoke about the principles of fairness, due process, the presumption of innocence in our great democracy.  To the uninformed, to the non-critical, she sounded very principled.   She made her decision, ultimately, because her own party would destroy her if she voted the other way.    Senator Lisa Murkowski was ready to take that risk, though in the end she got to oppose the nomination without actually voting against it.  Her NO vote would have been meaningless in any case in a 50-48 vote.   Collins was not ready to risk her political career, and explained why it was actually a matter of principle,  rather lamely.   The Democratic senator from West Virginia, where Trump won so handily in 2016, was not disposed to end his senatorial career by casting a principled vote defying the president’s will.   The vacillating Jeff Flake revealed himself as the unprincipled man he is.

There you go, the Kochtopus rests its case, government is inherently corrupt, democracy is coercive and unfair to the wealthiest and most vulnerable to deprivation of liberty — don’t vote for any of these fucks, let us, the best and the brightest, take care of public policy.

Fairness is justice, except, of course, when it’s not, when higher principles than mere fairness are at stake.  Principles like power, control, liberty. The liberty of the few, born booted and spurred (in the phrase the Author of Liberty borrowed from a man about to be hanged in England a century earlier) to ride the backs of the rest of you powerless motherfuckers must not be infringed.  We, we powerless motherfuckers.  

 

The Five Minutes that saved the Federalist Supreme Court

If you have unlimited money there is no limit to the number of well-funded organizations you can create.   In the case of Trump’s father Fred Christ Trump, as reported recently in the NY Times, he created 295 income streams for his kids and multiple companies that did all sorts of good work getting dad’s money to his offspring without any of those punitive taxes.   In the case of Charles and David Koch, they created and/or fund institutes, societies, non-profits, think tanks, academic programs, ad campaigns, lobbyist groups, even a popular grassroots movement influential in thwarting much of Obama’s program. [1]  

That last bit, the spontaneous, instantly national Tea Party was pure genius, giving angry Americans, being ruled by a liberal leaning Negro against their will– AGAINST THEIR WILL!!!– a chance to pose as angry patriots on television, night after night.  The fury of those Americans, and a reality based feeling that most Americans are basically powerless and screwed, led to a Tea Party congress in 2010 and, in the end, a straight line to Donald Trump, the most useful imbecile the Koch network has ever had in power.

Of course, that is merely my opinion.   Do I know much about the Koch’s Institute for Humane Studies, for example, outside of its wonderful name?   I do not.  I know the Kochtopus uses ‘majoritarian’ as a pejorative term for those who believe that democracy means respect for both majority opinion and the rights of minorities.   Charles Koch is old, he has no time for that kind of mamby pamby koombaya bullshit.   He and his organizations would free us all, permanently, from majoritarian tyranny.  All it really takes is a Supreme Court with a staunch corporatist majority.  Which we are about to have.

What does any of this have to do with the five minutes that saved Brett Kavanaugh’s partisan nomination to be a dependable deciding partisan vote on the unappealable Supreme Court?   You’re right, I’m sorry for this preamble, I will get to it in less than five minutes.  First, one last bit,  just a few words about the Federalist Society, funded by the Kochs, the Mercers and other right wing billionaires [2] :

The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, most frequently called the Federalist Society, is an organization of conservatives and libertarians seeking reform of the current American legal system in accordance with a textualist or originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.   source

“Originalism” is a judicial philosophy made famous by Antonin Scalia, giving the ring of God-given truth (to his fellow true believers) to the pronouncements he made on the Supreme Court.  Under this theory he was never expressing merely his own ideas, any decision he made, he claimed, was based on uncovering the original intent of the geniuses who wrote the infallible founding document of our democracy and ruling accordingly.  Think about the incredible piousness of that quasi-religious judicial philosophy.

The Federalist Society, when it was created in 1982, at Yale Law School [3] would have been considered a fairly extremist group.  Today, thanks to movement of the Overton Window (think frog slowly being brought to a boil in a pot of warm water) their recently radical beliefs are ‘mainstream’.  There is a branch of the Federalist Society in virtually every law school in America.  They host parties, are welcoming to new members, all you have to do is believe what they do.  You can join, meet and party with a network of like-minded solidly conservative people.  It is a powerful professional network, perfect if you want to make sure to have people who think like you that you can give good jobs to.

Brett Kavanaugh is a lifelong Federalist Society member and, by all accounts, a very loyal one.  It’s not a knock, it’s what he believes in.  I find their beliefs despicable, but that’s just me.  It is the prerogative of a conservative president to pick a judicial nominee from the Federalist list of pre-approved down the line conservatives.   Kavanaugh is more than that though, more than even a hardline zealot, and for a few hours it looked like the credible testimony of a brave woman detailing an attack by a young, drunken Kavanaugh had revealed that indisputably.  

His interview on Fox, surrounded by his loving family, a few days before the Blasey Ford hearing, was unprecedented in the history of selling a Supreme Court nomination, as were the ads paid for by a conservative coalition, as was the op-ed he published in the Wall Street Journal today, on the day of the final vote, admitting he may have been overly emotional when he attacked so many people at his hearing, but assuring everyone of his perfectly impartial judicial temperament. 

The five minutes?

Kavanaugh’s nomination appeared to be over when Blasey Ford was done testifying.  The advice he got from Trump was to fight, don’t worry about how bad you might look, how transparent your lies might seem, how badly you’ve been damaged, and your family hurt, by the moving testimony of your victim, DO NOT LOSE, just keep swinging, and blustering and bullying, we have the votes and they can’t prove shit, won’t be able to corroborate shit, I CONTROL THE FBI INVESTIGATION– if it comes to that,so  be fearless, this whole thing is rigged– you win, as long as you don’t show a moment of weakness.   Kavanaugh came out raging, an innocent man outrageously attacked.  He blamed liberals seeking “revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left opposition groups.” Still, after an exhausting session of dodging, evading, falsely testifying about any number of things, he was on the ropes.   He finally lashed out at Senator Amy Klobuchar and then asked for, and was given, a time out by the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, dour octogenarian Chuck Grassely.

He was able to regroup during that five minute break.  He apologized to Amy Klobuchar, as any good choir boy would after being as rude as he had been.  Now his intemperate behavior was expunged, he said he was sorry, what more do you want?    The Republican men on the Committee, starting with a positively hissing Lindsay Graham, suddenly found their voices and got angrily to work.  His fellow partisans had his back, expressed his outrage for him, made him the victim of a vicious, orchestrated attack by the shameless Democrats, they snarled the party line for the remainder of the hearing.  Looking back, a crucial five minute break saved his ass.

If Christine Blasey Ford had testified second, after Kavanaugh, his nomination would have been over.  Preet Barara and his guest, former Attorney General of New Jersey Anne Milgram, noted this the other day on his podcast and I realized: fuck.

Back when he was a young Federalist lawyer Brett Kavanaugh advised Kenneth Starr, who was seeking grounds to impeach Clinton, to, under no circumstances, allow Slick Willie to get off the hot seat for even a minute at any point during his grilling under oath.   No breaks!  

I know I raised this detail yesterday, but those five minutes haunt me.   On a single five minute break the history of our nation turns.

 

 

[1]  This is old news, mind you, but the first thing that popped up:  In 2008, the three main Koch family foundations contributed to 34 political and policy organizations, three of which they founded, and several of which they directed.  source

[2] Donors to the Federalist Society include Google, Chevron, Charles G. and David H. Koch; the family foundation of Richard Mellon Scaife; and the Mercer family.[13]

[3] The society began at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Chicago Law Schoolin 1982 as a student organization that challenged what its founding members perceived as the orthodoxAmerican liberal ideology found in most law schools. The society was started by a group of some of the most prominent conservatives in the country, including Attorney General Edwin Meese, Solicitor Generaland Reagan Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, Indiana congressman David M. McIntosh, Lee Liberman Otis, Energy Secretary and Michigan senator Spencer Abraham, and Steven Calabresi. Its membership has since included Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia, John G. Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.[10] The society asserts that it “is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to ourconstitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.”[1]

source

Partisan, zealot, citizen

Many of us, living in these highly polarized, partisan times, have taken to calling everything partisan lately.  We are increasingly told that our perceptions of reality itself are entirely dependent on which tribe we belong to, this is the new mantra which equates truth with partisanship.  There are partisans, zealots and the rest of us, ordinary citizens, living our ordinary lives, hoping for the best.

What is a partisan?  [1]   Republicans marching in lock step to support a nominee for the Supreme Court even if an artificially rushed, heavily redacted sham hearing and reluctant, extremely limited last minute FBI probe (the report of which is being provided to Senate Judiciary Committee members on a top secret basis) are required to cover up the many unseemly things about the nominee, many things that many Republicans no doubt, on a personal level, find as repugnant as the majority of regular American citizens do.   Partisans are loyal, and when they vote, they vote in a block.

Republican partisans march in pretty strict lockstep, taking orders and talking points from leaders, talking points they will not deviate from.   Democrats unify to oppose the Republican march, although rarely with the same unanimity of voice that characterizes the highly disciplined Republicans.   When Republicans are in power nowadays they revile the out-voted Democrats as ‘obstructionist’ losers.    

Of course, it is the other way around when the Democratic party is in power, when Republicans shut down the government (extremist Newt Gingrich was the first to do this, to try to hamstring Clinton, more recently it was the Tea Party fighting Obama) and vow to defeat every idea of the sitting, illegitimate Democratic president.   When Democrats proposed policy, like a conservative health care plan, Republicans united in opposition at every step,  trying to repeal it dozens of times once it was law.  There is no question of the two parties working together to fix the many things in Obamacare that need to be fixed.   There is little question of all (or even any of) six female Republican senators voting against Kavanaugh after the credible testimony that he attempted rape back in high school while stumbling drunk.  They will quickly lose their jobs if they vote against their party’s pick, at least the four who represent states of solidly Republican old Dixie.

Partisans are closed minded, see only  black or white, two sides, right or wrong, good or bad, fair or unfair, just or unjust.  Partisans don’t see nuance, can’t hear arguments that are inconvenient, can’t smell the mess they make.  Partisans will not discuss the many things that need to be fixed, they won’t compromise to address even the most pressing problems, they stick to their guns, their talking points, no matter what.   As long as they win, they’re good.  Winning/not losing is the only thing that drives a partisan.  Discussing an issue based on facts, and policies or candidates based on the actual merits?  So twentieth century, man!

A partisan is a fighter willing to go to extremes to advance his zero sum cause.   In the current American government, many partisans also fight to keep from being killed by their own more powerful partisans for the crime of insufficient partisanship.   Partisans are often willing to do things that violate norms, rules, laws, as long as their risk advances their cause.   A true partisan will never compromise.   We have many of these motherfuckers in government today, most of them on the right, sad to say.   They have been training them for decades, with glittering rewards for loyalty.   A supremely loyal partisan is poised to be confirmed for a seat on the Supreme Court by other partisans, on a straight 51-49 vote.

Zealots [2] are uber-partisans willing to die (at least metaphorically)  before they will surrender.  They will do whatever it takes, no matter the cost.  They will strive to win no matter how undignified, how ugly the battle might make them look.   “Extremism in the defense of freedom is no vice” is an expression of zealotry that cost Barry Goldwater a lot of votes in 1964.  It made him sound like an extremist.  The trick for zealots is, no matter how extreme your beliefs might be, to never, ever appear extreme.  The Kochtopus has learned this over the years, present your ideas in an attractive way, even if it means lying about your actual ideas.   Always appear reasonable and do not publicly reveal details of your plans that will make people angry.   Call your favorite far-right think thanks things like “The Institute for Humane Studies” (Charles Koch reportedly loved this particular institute).  Couch everything in terms of unrestricted liberty, even, and especially, when proposing a form of serfdom for 90% of citizens.

Everybody else in a nation where partisans fight for control of the government is a citizen, or an immigrant.    Citizens are concerned with their neighborhood, with public services, with the habitability of the world around them.   As a general rule, citizens want fairness and decent treatment.   You would think senators and representatives, the president, the Cabinet, the justices of the Supreme Court, are also citizens, they must be, under the law.  In a narrow sense they are citizens.   In a larger sense, they are an elite that is not accountable to the needs and desires of the less powerful citizens.    

Democracy, which is supposed to be an expression of the will of its citizens, majority rule that respects and protects minority views, becomes a casualty of unprincipled partisanship.   Particularly when unlimited money to support extreme partisan politicians is thrown on to one side of the scale to decide elections, manipulate citizens.   For the first time in American history, we see beautifully produced ads extolling a Supreme Court nominee, to counter the stink of his sworn testimony, the credible charges against him.  

Of course, limiting the numbers of citizens opposed to your party who can vote is also very important — disenfranchisement of the poor has been on the upswing in recent elections.  Voter suppression has been an important goal of the Kochtopus.  A small turn out favors the right wing status quo.  Any kind of change takes millions and millions of votes to initiate.

Brett Kavanaugh is a partisan, even a zealot, who will do whatever is necessary, including appearing to be a smug, entitled jerk and publicly crying in frustration, to advance his party’s beliefs.   He started his political life, after being a law school (and lifetime) member of the ultra-conservative Federalist Society, as a Republican operative, pressing for an aggressive investigation of Bill Clinton’s sex life to find grounds to impeach him, rushing with other young Republican lawyers to stop the recount in Florida, providing legal advice on judicial appointments, torture and other classified matters to Bush and Cheney.  

He railed, immediately after he was nominated for the top court,  against a left wing claim that Bush staffed his White House with former Kenneth Starr assistants, noting that he was the only one.  Let’s take him at his word.   For our present purposes we need only look at him and the current FBI director, Christopher Wray, a partisan presidential loyalist who was also an assistant of Kenneth Starr during the long, ranging investigation of Bill Clinton that led to his impeachment for perjury about oral sex.   The FBI director had the last word, along with his boss, the president who appointed him, on the scope of the belated, rushed probe into fellow partisan Kavanaugh.   Therefore neither Kavanaugh nor his accuser Blasey Ford were contacted for follow up interviews.  Fair is fair.

Those who had any doubt that Kavanaugh is a partisan, should no longer have any after the speech he gave defending his ruined good name.  In that speech, which he pointed out he wrote himself, he ranted intemperately about a vast Left Wing Conspiracy, motivated in part by revenge for Hillary Clinton’s loss, that had spent untold millions to produce fake charges against him, at the eleventh hour of an urgently rushed confirmation process, for purely political reasons.  

Nobody who is not a partisan would have made that speech, those over the top assertions of persecution by political enemies.   It would never have occurred to most nominees to claim that the person complaining credibly against him was strictly a political plant, part of a “calculated political hit”.  He called desperate Democratic opposition to his immediate confirmation a “circus” and a “disgrace”.  Clarence Thomas used identical words as support for him plummeted from 90 votes to 52 in the days after Anita Hill’s handlers orchestrated his ‘high tech lynching for an uppity black’.    Sadly for Kavanaugh, he couldn’t use that last bit of wonderfully moving innocent victim rhetoric.

Confronted with Blasey Ford’s strong testimony, another nominee might have withdrawn their name, as Reagan-appointee Douglas Ginsberg did when confronted with proof that he smoked marijuana on occasion.  He might have tried to address the woman’s credible allegations against him, though that would have been fairly hard to do, given the apparent sincerity of the witness and her damningly credible allegations.   He might have called for a full FBI investigation, having nothing whatsoever to hide, to clear his good name.  Seems the best move for an innocent man, let them interview everyone who was supposedly there, including himself and his accuser, confirm his innocence once and for all time.  Instead he screeched like a wounded animal about a despicable partisan lynch mob coming to get him for no reason except ugly political calculation and he fought, smug-faced, against any additional delay for an investigation of any of the new charges against him.   It pleases and energizes Trump’s base to hear someone screaming indignantly, angrily blaming and vilifying others, as long as he’s a powerful white man from their tribe.

Republicans were soiling themselves over Kavanaugh’s chances for confirmation when they saw how compelling Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony was.   Unlike most liars, she did not claim to know anything she didn’t remember clearly.   She was meek, and clearly frightened of the spotlight.  Her account was credible, quite specific in what she was able to recall.  She was believable and made a very sympathetic witness.   Importantly, she had nothing to gain by subjecting herself and her family to the angry reaction they faced, except that it was important to bring these ugly facts to light, for everyone’s sake.  Even the Fox news partisans were saying as much by the time she was finished testifying.   The president reportedly complained that nobody had warned him what a good witness she was.

Kavanaugh’s nomination— and this is a judge who has written that he doesn’t like the Special Counsel Statute (the one that authorizes the Mueller probe), that a president, on his own, should be able to declare laws unconstitutional, and that a sitting president should not be the subject of a criminal or civil  investigation– was in real trouble when Blasey Ford was done testifying.   She may not have given enough concrete detail to support a criminal indictment of Kavanaugh, as Rachel Mitchell concluded in her report to the Judiciary Committee Republicans she acted as mouthpiece for,  but Christine Blasey Ford gave more than enough specific detail, under oath,  to trigger a full FBI investigation.

After a long lunch break, (Grassley had called for a half hour break, which I thought at the time niggardly, they were out three times as long) Kavanaugh would have his turn to tell the truth.   Kavanaugh apparently spent the break steeling himself, and putting the finishing flourishes on the passionate, angry opening statement he wrote himself, as he stated.   At one point during the hearing, Rachel Mitchell, the female prosecutor brought on by the 11 man Republican majority on the Judiciary Committee to avoid the optics of the Anita Hill hearing, closed in on a date on Kavanaugh’s calendar, July 1, 1982, an entry with the names of others Blasey Ford had named as being present in the house, and began asking about it.   Kavanaugh seemed to begin coming unhinged as he carefully answered questions about his former drinking buddies, named in the box for that day.   When Senator Amy Klobuchar next asked him about his drinking, he became testy, surly, and finally outright rude.  He lost control of himself when he defiantly asked her if she was a black out drunk.  He then called for, and was given, a five minute break, to compose himself.

After crying it out and pulling himself together, Kavanaugh apologized to Ms. Klobuchar for his outburst and the hearing proceeded.  The outraged men of the Judiciary Committee left their mouthpiece,  Rachel Mitchell, sitting silently at her tiny desk as they hurled invective at the unprincipled partisans on the Democratic side, the ones who were making the hearings into a circus, a forum for disgraceful political grandstanding, seizing a chance to crucify a good, super-qualified, impartial judicial nominee.  The Jesuits and the nonpartisan American Bar Association would soon weigh in on the side of not confirming Kavanaugh, but that’s neither here nor there.  They have no power to do anything, so who cares?

That five minute break, and a quick on-the-fly change in Republican tactics, saved that unethical partisan motherfucker’s lifetime dream from going down in flames. His nomination, burnt toast as he called for the time out, was golden again once he came back and the other partisan bullies stuck up for him, privileged white men angrily, indignantly attacking, like the partisan hacks they are.   There is only one thing for partisans, winning.

Which is why, when he was a young, extremely conservative political operative, working for Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, Kavanaugh strongly advised that under no circumstances should President Bill Clinton be permitted to take a break when they were grilling him under oath.   He knew that a guilty man will crack, no matter how smart a lawyer he is, if the pressure is not relieved.  Smart guy, Brett Kavanaugh, even if hypocritical, unethical, and fit only for partisan purposes.

David Brooks, moderate Republican smart guy, cannot admit that Kavanaugh behaved atrociously at the hearing because… partisans don’t admit shit.  It all depends, you dig, on what tribe you’re in.  Truth is tribal now.  My tribe is winning, suck it.

And God bless these United Shayyyssssh.

 

 

[1]   par·ti·san (n):  1.  a strong supporter of a party, cause, or person.                      synonyms:  supporter, follower, adherent, devotee, champion                                        2.   a member of an armed group formed to fight secretly against an occupying force, in particular one operating in enemy-occupied Yugoslavia, Italy, and parts of eastern Europe in World War II.         synonyms: guerrilla, freedom fighter” underground fighter, irregular (soldier)

partisan (adj):  prejudiced in favor of a particular cause
synonyms;  biased, prejudiced, one-sided, discriminatory, colored. partial, interested, sectarian, factional

[2]    zealot (n):  a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their religious, political, or other ideals.     synonyms: fanatic, enthusiast, extremist, radical, young Turk, diehard, true believer, activist, militant.

 

Paid for by…

These wild baboons are playing by reality TV rules.   Alpha males RULE!Screen shot 2018-10-03 at 11.13.01 PM.png

The survey’s not the point, it’s the message that this guy is tough.  The base loves every reminder they can get of how fucking tough their guy is.   Look at him.  Inspires confidence, that confident pose.   Stay on message, the media is lying, so is the evidence of your own eyes and ears watching the battling testimony.   A woman who appears sincere is no more believable than a man your party supports raging in indignant innocence.

The problem is not a cover-up and a mad rush to confirm a candidate of demonstrated bad character, and possibly worse.  The problem is tribalism, the other tribe is insane!

The real problem is the fake news, that liberal conspiracy to undermine the Leader and thwart his will. Like this fake news from the fake New York Failing Fake Times:

As the 1980s ended, Donald Trump’s big bets began to go bust. Trump Shuttle was failing to make loan payments within 15 months. The Plaza, drowning in debt, was bankrupt in four years. His Atlantic City casinos, also drowning in debt, tumbled one by one into bankruptcy.

What didn’t fail was the Trump safety net. Just as Donald Trump’s finances were crumbling, family partnerships and companies dramatically increased distributions to him and his siblings. Between 1989 and 1992, tax records show, four entities created by Fred Trump to support his children paid Donald Trump today’s equivalent of $8.3 million.

source

You decide– are you a real man (that includes you too, ladies) or are you a pencil necked freedom-hating wimp who reads old fashioned newspapers and thinks it’s real news? Take the survey!

 

Kavanaugh’s Candor Under Oath

formerly FN [1]

Kavanaugh has been evasive, belligerent and defiant under questioning during the confirmation process.   It also strongly appears he’s been untruthful under oath, deliberately misleading, or both.  His repeated assertions about drinking only beer, beer and nothing but beer included a frank, but tacit admission that he had been drinking beer illegally before he was allowed to do so legally, during his senior year of high school, when he was eighteen.   The use of the word “beer” dozens of times suggests, at least to this beer drinker, an effort to deny drinking anything stronger than beer, just beer and nothing but beer.  The beer drinker doth say “beer” too much, methinks.  Also, it turns out, the legal drinking age in Maryland, in 1983, when Kavanaugh was an 18 year old beer drinker, was actually 21.

Then there is reframing and refuting a question not asked, a classic lawyerly dodge, as when he claims he never blacked out from beer, which he said was the accusation here, but only fell asleep from it.   There was no accusation that Kavanaugh was a black out drunk, only that he had been stumblingly drunk when he and his equally drunk buddy pushed a fifteen year-old girl into an upstairs bedroom, across from the bathroom, and locked the door. 

An example of a more direct Kavanaugh untruth is his stating, emphatically, and more than once, that witnesses had refuted Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony about his attempted rape of her.  He repeated the word “refuted”, with great emphasis, to hammer home his point that only the alleged victim seems to recall that long ago day when he held her down, his friend turned up the music, he covered her mouth when she tried to call for help, etc.   The other four or five people in the house… well, they say it never happened, according to Kavanaugh.  Not only don’t they recall that particular unremarkable early evening — every witness, according to Kavanaugh, REFUTED the vengeful, well-financed partisan lie against him.  

What the witnesses said was that they have no recollection of an ordinary long ago summer late afternoon or evening gathering of six teenagers that was of no significance to anyone but the fifteen year-old who was traumatized that day.  There is a slight difference between “refute” and “don’t recall”, as even a neophyte judge should be able to easily judge.   Repeated assertions of “refute” in place of  “don’t recall” might well be grounds for a perjury charge, particularly if, as here, the repetition is integral to one’s defense.   The only thing not in dispute is that the misleading statement, whether deliberate or in the heat of the moment under great emotional stress, was made under oath.  

When Brett Kavanuagh was vetting material for the Bush/Cheney White House for hearings about judicial appointees, (prior to his own appointment to the federal bench, obviously) he disclosed the contents of hacked (illegally obtained) emails with classified background memos prepared by Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee.   He denied this charge, denies ever seeing the hacked emails, let alone unethically forwarding them to parties who should not have seen them, but the author of some of the memos improperly obtained and passed on to the nominees (think debate questions obtained before the debate), former Judiciary Committee staffer Lisa Graves,  saw whole paragraphs of her 4,000 word report cut and pasted into emails that Kavanaugh sent and received.   This could easily be resolved by a subpoena for the emails, although the emails Lisa Graves cites are already part of the small percentage of Kavanaugh-related documents the Senate Judiciary Committees has allowed to become part of the record.

There is another answer by Kavanaugh that could be proved or disproved as perjury by a subpoena for related emails.   The truth or falsity of the statement is a question of fact that could easily be determined by seeing some of the disputed emails.   Kavanaugh denied knowledge of the conduct and sexually off-color email listserve of his disgraced friend and former mentor, Alex Kozinsky, the federal judge who resigned recently amid multiple allegations of sexual harassment over a span of many years.  This denial appears to have been another lie, told to keep the shine on his choir boy image.  It’s hard to believe this longtime confidant of Judge Kozinsky’s could be unaware of the well-known reputation of his disgraced friend, a reputation for doing things every one of Kozinsky’s former clerks who has spoken on the issue has confirmed he did.

There is also evidence that team Kavanaugh contacted Yale classmates as soon as he heard that Debbie Ramirez’s claim that he’d drunkenly exposed himself to her when they were freshmen at Yale were going to be published in the New Yorker.  Potential witnesses were contacted by team Kavanaugh before the New Yorker article that broke the story was published.  At the hearing last Thursday Kavanaugh swore to Orin Hatch that the first he learned of the allegations from the New Yorker article, though there is an argument about whether this meant the publication date or when he got advance knowledge that Debbie Rodriguez’s charges were about to be published.  

If this were a criminal trial, these attempts to get witnesses to line up behind him and say things on his behalf so that he could be confirmed to a high appointment would be seen as a clear case of witness tampering.   Since it is not a criminal trial, nothing to see here, yo, except a naughty bit of standard corrupt practice that any powerful person routinely engages in.  The appearance of impropriety is only that, an appearance.  The answer to that is 51-49, suck it.

 

The president is fine

For purposes of the longtime right wing agenda– no taxes, no regulations (except against pregnant women and maybe pot smokers), a powerful military, a government that does not coerce anybody to do anything, making any false claims necessary to hide secret plans that disadvantage the vast majority of Americans – this president we have here is fine, better than fine.   He also, conveniently, undermines people’s faith in democracy, even common decency, with his shameless lying and his willingness to attack others and promote even the most indefensible policies.

The current president is the personification of government incompetence, corruption and overreach. A living argument for why you cannot trust your government.  Sure, it’s easy to criticize a man who hasn’t filled a record number of important government jobs in the first 20 months of his administration (like in the agency that oversees our stockpile of nukes), but on the other hand, he’s filled the federal bench with a record number of lifetime federal judges, vetted by the top conservative think tanks for their fealty to a core set of beliefs, he’s slashed taxes dramatically for America’s wealthiest and our corporations, he’s on the inhumane side of every humanitarian situation.   He has thousands of ‘migrant kids’ being moved to open air desert prison camps like the ones Joe Arpaio used to run.  He has expressed concern, in the wake of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, that many completely innocent men are being victimized and publicly destroyed by this #metoo movement.

He’s a divider, not a uniter, he honestly doesn’t understand democracy, the idea of it, he loves autocrats wherever he encounters them.  He is, his vulgarity aside, exactly what the Koch brothers and the rest of the best people, the best people, want.  That he knows very little about how our democracy actually works appears to be a plus for the smirking rich winners who are currently riding his donkey ass to their dreamed of land of unlimited liberty free from government tyranny.

He can be excused for insisting, as he did the other day, that the Senate majority, that inviolable 51-49 mandate they have in the Senate, is in charge of what the FBI investigates and what they don’t investigate about a Supreme Court nominee who could be, among other things, colorably charged with perjury [1].  It would probably be a first, a sitting Supreme Court justice hauled into a House investigation for perjury.  There is also the nominee’s reported belligerent drunkeness, strongly hinted at by his belligerent ‘rebuttal’ of Blasey Ford’s allegations, and more than one woman alleging sexual assault by the nominee.  There is, perhaps most importantly for purposes of a Supreme Court justice, the over the top partisan rage he displayed during his testimony to counter Blasey Ford’s detailed story of a stumbling drunk, privileged seventeen year-old trying to rape a fifteen year-old at a gathering of six high school kids when there were no adults in the house.   He appears, based on his childish temper tantrum before the Judiciary Committee, to have a supremely unjudicial temperament.  

I have been before many judges, only an insignificant fraction of whom appeared to lack the ability to rule fairly on what was in front of them.  An even tinier fraction appeared to be bellicose jerks venting about their personal problems, or acting based on anger at their imagined persecutors, in their courtrooms.  There is a Judicial Code of Conduct (naturally not enforceable against the Supreme Court justices) that requires a judge to act in a way that inspires confidence in the integrity of the courts.  So much for that, Brett.   Trump’s tribe might get excited by the belligerent defiance, but it’s not judicial temperament any more than the thin-skinned reflexively attacking Trump is an example of presidential temperament.

The president, with his limited understanding of anything but “winning” and “losing”, grasps only this– we’re winning 51-49.  If this was a game, and it is, we win.   The obstructionist Democrats are losers, everybody not included in that robust 51-49 mandate for whatever he wants, or has been convinced, to do — losers!    

Into the mix drops the lying New York Times recent piece about the source of Trump’s self-made fortune.  Donald was paid the equivalent of $200,000 current dollars a year starting when he was three years old. Nice work if you can get it!  He was a millionaire by age eight.   An inspiring American diaper to riches story! After dad’s first choice, Fred Jr., turned out to be unsuited to take over his father’s empire, Fred Christ Trump began grooming his second choice, Donald, in earnest.    The details of daddy Trump’s manipulative generosity are sickening, but unsurprising.   We know the president is a lying self-promoter, even his base acknowledges this– they just don’t care.   Still, some of the details of things he lied about, his entire self-made billionaire origin story, are truly sickening.   The luxurious first class safety net provided by his father explains the reckless fearlessness with which Donald has always conducted his many failed businesses and vanity projects.  It emerges that the president’s brother Robert is cut from the same cloth as Donald.    His defensive statement about having the decency to leave their dead, sainted parents to rest in peace, leaves a bit of a stench.   Of course, as David Brooks points out, the tendency to perceive that stench/breath of fresh air is purely tribal.  The president is loved by his tribe, and that is his only concern, to remain beloved of almost 40% of the angriest people in America.

But that New York Times hatchet job is just another distraction.   As far as getting Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, all Trump needs to do is run out the clock to have the game end 51-49.  He’s set an artificial, arbitrary deadline of one week for the FBI to fully investigate multiple allegations against his nominee.   To stack the deck just a bit more toward his beleaguered, unfairly crucified nominee, he ran three days off the clock by saying publicly that the FBI would have “free rein”, while imposing severe restrictions on the definition of free rein.   Then he said that Mitch McConnell must decide the scope of the investigation, then apparently learning that the president alone dictates the scope of any FBI probe he orders, blandly opined that the FBI should talk to anyone they can find, including Kavanaugh.  As long as it’s all done before my inviolable Friday deadline when everybody votes 51-49 and we have this great man, with his spotless record, to rule on all the most important matters of constitutional law.   Because the constitution, you understand, is an inviolable and indisputable blueprint for our highest aspirations as a free democracy and it must be interpreted faithfully by the best people, the very best people.  Especially those who kiss my ass the most passionately, if you know what I’m saying.

 

 

[1]  Kavanaugh has been evasive, belligerent and defiant under questioning during the confirmation process.   It also strongly appears he’s been untruthful under oath, deliberately misleading, or both.  His repeated assertions about drinking only beer, beer and nothing but beer included a frank, but tacit admission that he had been drinking beer illegally before he was allowed to do so legally, during his senior year of high school, when he was eighteen.   The use of the word “beer” dozens of times suggests, at least to this beer drinker, an effort to deny drinking anything stronger than beer, just beer and nothing but beer.  The beer drinker doth say “beer” too much, methinks.   Also, it turns out, the legal drinking age in Maryland, in 1983, when Kavanaugh was an 18 year old beer drinker, was actually 21.

Then there is reframing and refuting a question not asked, a classic lawyerly dodge, as when he claims he never blacked out from beer, which he said was the accusation here, but only fell asleep from it.   There was no accusation that Kavanaugh was a black out drunk, only that he had been stumblingly drunk when he and his equally drunk buddy pushed a fifteen year-old girl into an upstairs bedroom, across from the bathroom, and locked the door. 

An example of a more direct Kavanaugh untruth is his stating, emphatically, and more than once, that witnesses had refuted Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony about his attempted rape of her.  He repeated the word “refuted”, with great emphasis, to hammer home his point that only the alleged victim seems to recall that long ago day when he held her down, his friend turned up the music, he covered her mouth when she tried to call for help, etc.   The other four or five people in the house… well, they say it never happened, according to Kavanaugh.  Not only don’t they recall that particular unremarkable early evening — every witness, according to Kavanaugh, REFUTED the vengeful, well-financed partisan lie against him.  

What the witnesses said was that they have no recollection of an ordinary long ago summer late afternoon or evening gathering of six teenagers that was of no significance to anyone but the fifteen year-old who was traumatized that day.  There is a slight difference between “refute” and “don’t recall”, as even a neophyte judge should be able to easily judge.   Repeated assertions of “refute” in place of  “don’t recall” might well be grounds for a perjury charge, particularly if, as here, the repetition is integral to one’s defense.   The only thing not in dispute is that the misleading statement, whether deliberate or in the heat of the moment under great emotional stress, was made under oath.    

When Brett Kavanuagh was vetting material for the Bush/Cheney White House for hearings about judicial appointees, (prior to his own appointment to the federal bench, obviously) he disclosed the contents of hacked, (illegally obtained) emails with classified background memos prepared by Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee.   He denied this charge, denies ever seeing the hacked emails, let alone unethically forwarding them to parties who should not have seen them, but the author of some of the memos improperly obtained and passed on to the nominees (think debate questions obtained before the debate), former Judiciary Committee staffer Lisa Graves,  saw whole paragraphs of her 4,000 word report cut and pasted into emails that Kavanaugh sent and received.   This could easily be resolved by a subpoena for the emails, although the emails Lisa Graves cites are already part of the small percentage of Kavanaugh-related documents the Senate Judiciary Committees has allowed to become part of the record.

There is another answer by Kavanaugh that could be proved or disproved as perjury by a subpoena for related emails.   The truth or falsity of the statement is a question of fact that could easily be determined by seeing some of the disputed emails.   Kavanaugh denied knowledge of the conduct and sexually off-color email listserve of his disgraced friend and former mentor, Alex Kozinsky, the federal judge who resigned recently amid multiple allegations of sexual harassment over a span of many years.  This denial appears to have been another lie, told to keep the shine on his choir boy image.    It’s hard to believe this longtime confidant of Judge Kozinsky’s could be unaware of the well-known reputation of his disgraced friend, a reputation for doing things every one of Kozinsky’s former clerks who has spoken on the issue has confirmed he did.  Common knowledge that Kavanaugh insisted he knew nothing about.  Why open that door, you know?

There is also evidence that team Kavanaugh contacted Yale classmates as soon as he heard that Debbie Ramirez’s claim that he’d drunkenly exposed himself to her when they were freshmen at Yale were going to be published in the New Yorker.  Potential witnesses were contacted by team Kavanaugh before the New Yorker article that broke the story was published.  At the hearing last Thursday Kavanaugh swore to Orin Hatch that the first he learned of the allegations from the New Yorker article, though there is an argument about whether this meant the publication date or when he got advance knowledge that Debbie Rodriguez’s charges were about to be published.  

If this were a criminal trial, these attempts to get witnesses to line up behind him and say things on his behalf so that he could be confirmed to a high appointment would be seen as a clear case of witness tampering.   Since it is not a criminal trial, nothing to see here, yo, except a naughty bit of standard corrupt practice that any powerful person routinely engages in.  The appearance of impropriety is only that, an appearance.  The answer to that is 51-49, suck it.