Category Archives: current events

A Fair Hearing — by a lynch mob

The worst part to a summary trial by a lynch mob has got to be the superior, mocking good cheer of everybody present in the moments before your inevitable death sentence, which has already been decided.   The sick feeling you have looking around at the smiles of the people about to cheer your execution must be what a tiny prey animal feels like when it’s being batted playfully between a cat’s paws.  Imagine that feeling of powerlessness seared into you by the satisfied smiles of the assembled sadists and voyeurs, before the actual sadism of the deliberately painful execution starts, as the leaders of the lynch mob make their cruel jokes at your expense.  What the fuck are they laughing about?  you must think, as they begin cutting your fingers off in preparation for the fiery grand finale of the lynching.   What indeed are they laughing about?    

I have had many opportunities to ponder this lately.  SAD!   I keep thinking of Judge Martha Kavanaugh’s now famous rule for a judge, the one she taught her choir boy son:  use your common sense, what rings true?  what rings false?  If you apply this rule, most of what passes as legitimate process in Trump’s Washington D.C. doesn’t pass the smell test.  Of course, this is a partisan statement, made by a hater, a loser, someone jealous that a young genius could be given a tiny million dollar loan from his father and parlay that into countless billions in personal wealth and then the world’s most powerful office.   OK, perhaps he exaggerated a little, maybe the small loan was more like $60,000,000 (his lawyers are poring over the scandal rag NY Times hit piece that laid out their detailed lies about their client’s mere puffery, there must be some grounds to sue those fucks…) but that’s fake news for you, folks.   The failing NY Times, am I right?  Am I right?

I have to say, applying Martha Kavanaugh’s test– a very unfair test, by the way, very unfair– the woman sent by Bill and Hillary Clinton, Oprah and George Soros to destroy a good man, a pious and even saintly man, rang a little bell of truth when she said that she clearly remembers the laughter of the two drunken older boys who had locked her in that upstairs bedroom and turned the music up when she started protesting.  That particular detail rings true (which is undoubtedly why Soros and the Clintons wrote the line for her).   Two drunken prep schools boys would laugh after one of them forced himself on to a young woman, held his hand over her mouth, to scare the crap out of her, at minimum.

When you get a trial from a lynch mob it’s got to be quick.  That’s the main feature, the extremely speedy trial.  The speed of that trial is blinding because there is no need for cross-examination, testimony, investigation, motions, objections, evidence, doubt, remarks from the judge, pointless discussions about so-called justice.  Justice is we get to kill this guilty fuck. Or, in other cases, justice is we have a 51-49 majority so we win– whatever you might think, whatever millions in the streets might think, whatever the mothers and fathers of every fifteen year-old girl in the country might think.

But here’s the funny part about all that, if we can take a brief break for a bit of levity and a raspy laugh, the mothers and fathers of at least 40% of the millions of American fifteen year-old girls believe that their daughters would never, under any circumstances, drink a beer in a house where the adults were gone, with a bunch of already drunk seventeen year-old guys and only one other girl there.   Inconceivable, you understand?  Our daughter is not a little slut!   If we ever found out she is, we’d beat the fuck out of her– with sanctions I mean, sanctions:  we’d ground her, take away her allowance, force her to come to church with us every Sunday.  If this supposed assault really happened, why didn’t the girl tell her parents and take her punishment like a man?  You see?  You see how we know she’s a fucking liar!

The beauty of a quick trial, from the point of view of a lynch mob, is that so-called good Samaritans don’t get a chance to self-righteously ride up on their white horses and call time out.  Even the people in the crowd, laughing and smirking, if their blood had a chance to cool down, and an appeal was made to their consciences, if other facts were brought out, might not be cheering when we took this sick bastard to pieces before we hung him over a fire and roasted his guilty ass.  Do you see the point of a speedy trial?  It’s in the Constitution!

I heard a discussion between investigative journalists recently, talking about their investigations.   They all agreed that the most important single element of an investigation is time.   The kiss of death, as far as truth emerging fully, is an arbitrary time limit imposed on the investigation.  It takes time to talk to enough people, to find enough corroborating evidence, to come to publishable conclusions.   If you write an investigative piece you need to have multiple sources for your reporting.   Finding and interviewing them, and carefully checking out their stories, takes time.   Before the investigative report is published it will be critically read by a team, including lawyers, who will challenge every detail, make sure the piece contains no uncorroborated speculation that could lead to a lawsuit for defamation.  All of these things, the investigation, the vetting of every source, confirming the accuracy of the report based on the sources and other evidence, take time to do properly.  

Which is exactly why a lynch mob has to act quickly, while they have the moral hot hand.   We’re going to give this fuck a fair trial and then, before any bleeding heart bullshit artist outside troublemakers can start making a stink, we’re going to lift him up by his neck and watch his feet kick, which is exactly what he deserves, good ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

As far as the president being a liar– well, everyone knew that when he was running for office.  He’s honest about the fact that he’s a liar– he makes no attempt to hide it, which makes him very truthful, in a way.   He’s lying because he’s up against liars, you understand, he’s lying for us!   His lawyers threatened to sue the NY Times for their vicious hit piece on him and they are going to sue the lying NY Times and put them out of business, watch.   Just because he’s lying doesn’t mean they are not much worse liars than him, much worse liars.  

You’re giving me a headache.  

As for me, I have just one question– where are the people who are supposed to have the president’s back about his hair?   They’re photographing him from his bald side now, those lying fucks?

20181014_235822.jpg

Working out the puzzle

An idea popped up last night as I was trying to improve my handwriting in the little drawing book I always keep in my back pocket.

20181012_042601 (1).jpg

We Americans have been locked in an endless argument, as we so often are, about who is the victim and who is the perpetrator.  Cops, in cheap novels, always call the alleged perpetrator “the perp” as when they walk him, handcuffed and awkwardly trying to hide his face, past a phalanx of news photographers.   While the shame of the perp walk is deliberately inflicted, because that’s what you do to a stinkin’ skel, the identity of the victim (or “vic” in these same dime store books)  is often protected, because every protector naturally has sympathy and protectiveness for the vic.  

All the vic did was be someplace where the perp showed up.   The  vic just provided a vulnerable target for the perp, a malefactor who in most cases would have done the same to just about anyone who could serve the same need.   The vic just happened to be the one this time.   Sucks to be the vic.   Walk into the wrong room and — boom!  Traumatized for life by a scumbag.

This argument rages in public and in private.  I myself have been, it appears, recently turned from vic to perp because of my  stubborn refusal to pretend I wasn’t treated badly several times by an old friend.  The actual crime is not forgiving the old friend.    The guy said sorry, even if he did the same thing again a couple of times afterwards.  Actually, he also defended why he was right in the first place and said he had only apologized because I seemed hurt and mad.   He is currently the deeply wounded, vulnerable party and I am the arrogant, unforgiving hypocrite, so you might want to take the rest of this, as always, with a few large grains of coarse salt.

We saw this hoary debate about who is the perpetrator and who is the victim raging throughout the recent horror show of our latest Supreme Court confirmation hearings.   The only thing both sides agree about regarding the hearings is that they were a despicable circus and a national disgrace.  Men of great discernment and integrity, respected intellectuals like David Brooks and Alan Dershowitz, told us after hearing the testimony of the two alleged victims, Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh, that our opinion of who was more truthful depended entirely on which tribe we belong to.  

There was apparently nothing more at issue during the hearings as far as the judge’s qualifications for a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court aside from whether he drunkenly committed sexual assault on a girl two years younger than him while they were both in high school. An insignificant younger girl none of the other teenagers at the home where they were drinking during an impromptu gathering while the parents were away even recall, apparently.  Sometimes history narrows to a point like this one.

Let’s assume for a moment that Kavanaugh was an innocent man and the victim of a vicious coordinated political hit, as he angrily insisted he was. Some people get righteously angry when they’re accused of shameful things, we all can understand that, it proves nothing about a person’s innocence or guilt that he reacts with rage instead of humility to a terrible accusation.   If this inflammatory accusation of atrocious behavior (and a criminal act)  was concocted out of thin air by George Soros and the Clintons for nakedly political reasons, Kavanaugh had every right (if not every reason) to be outraged.   So let’s put his rage about the accusations to the side now, shall we?

Not every innocent person calls for a full investigation of the facts to prove their innocence, to clear their good name.  One reason an innocent person may not want to undergo an FBI investigation into specific allegations of something he never did is because you never know what other unfortunate facts a deep investigation into a specific, long ago time in your life might uncover.  Suppose you had been nothing more than a clandestine (to your parents and teachers)  heavy drinker back in your high school days— would you want that made public as you were about to be confirmed for a seat on the highest court in the land?  Of course not.

Accepting those two scenarios about  Kavanaugh’s righteous anger at the accusation and his, and his Party’s, resistance to a full FBI investigation to clear his name, it is possible to understand both reactions as guiltless displays of human feeling.  Construed this way they constitute no proof that he was hiding anything, or had anything to hide, or had ever hid, or continues to hide,  anything. For the sake of argument, let’s give Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt on his demeanor under pressure, the “presumption of innocence” his defenders get so worked up about when it was rudely denied him during the rush toward a quick FBI probe.

Next we come to the substance of Mr. Kavanaugh’s actual defense, which was submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee in writing the day before Blasey Ford testified.   You can read his complete written denial here, as it was submitted to the Committee the day before both victims testified.   The most muscular and effective allegations about how he was the one being victimized were left out of the first draft of his statement.  He wisely omitted them from the written statement he gave to the Committee, why give your determined enemies a chance to organize themselves against your best attack?    He added these powerful touches to the statement he passionately delivered on national TV:

This has destroyed my family and my good name. A good name built up through decades of very hard work and public service at the highest levels of the American government.

This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons. and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.

This is a circus. The consequences will extend long past my nomination. The consequences will be with us for decades. This grotesque and coordinated character assassination will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions, from serving our country.

And as we all know, in the United States political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around. I am an optimistic guy. I always try to be on the sunrise side of the mountain, to be optimistic about the day that is coming.

But today, I have to say that I fear for the future. Last time I was here, I told this committee that a federal judge must be independent, not swayed by public or political pressure.

I said I was such a judge, and I am. I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process. You’ve tried hard. You’ve given it your all. No one can question your effort, but your coordinated and well-funded effort to destroy my good name and to destroy my family will not drive me out. The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out.

You may defeat me in the final vote, but you’ll never get me to quit. Never.

source

If you are a Republican partisan, or even a right wing radical with no allegiance to any particular political party who is simply eager to have a reliable Supreme Court vote for your views, you were roused by these words.  An innocent man, attacked by vicious, well-funded partisan enemies, forced to defend a spotlessly good name forever besmirched by a godless conspiracy of people without honor, shame or any sort of morals.   Good for him!   To someone impressed by him these lines will sound like a kind of sweet, infinitely just music:

This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons. and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.

People worried about your long record as a Republican operative, your troubling and heavily redacted partisan past, your consistent twelve year judicial record, your evasiveness and surliness during the hearings, the many misleading and false answers you gave, the haste of your controversial appointment, will not be reassured by these words, of course.  The words you spoke in portraying yourself as a saintly victim make you sound like an angry partisan and the farthest thing from the impartial, independent arbiter you claim to be, but that’s not the point.   Fuck those people!

Just one thing troubles me.   Are the American Bar Association, the dean of Yale Law School, retired Supreme Court justice and lifelong Republican John Paul Stevens, the many classmates coming forward to corroborate stories of your heavy drinking and occasional abusiveness while drunk all also part of this vast, vindictive well-funded left wing conspiracy?  

Even more ominously, what in God’s name could have possibly possessed the Jesuits, the famously fair-minded and intellectually rigorous Catholic sect that founded and run the elite prep school you attended, to take part in this calculated and orchestrated political hit by outside left-wing opposition groups?    For the love of God, Brett, how could these defenders of the faith have so treacherously, so faithlessly, abandoned you?   How did the left-wing conspirators recruit even the politically nonpartisan Jesuits?   A truly devilish bit of partisan treachery.    I read about it in this AP account:

The Jesuits took an even stronger stance. Following Thursday’s testimony by Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, the magazine of the Jesuit religious order in the United States publicly withdrew its endorsement of Kavanaugh. An editorial in America Magazine declared that “this nomination is no longer in the best interests of the country.”

Kavanaugh was a student at Georgetown Preparatory School, a Jesuit high school, when the alleged assault took place.

The editorial doesn’t attempt to parse whether Kavanaugh’s or Ford’s testimony was more credible. But it concluded that “in a world that is finally learning to take reports of harassment, assault and abuse seriously,” the nomination must be abandoned.

“If Senate Republicans proceed with his nomination, they will be prioritizing policy aims over a woman’s report of an assault,” it states. “Were he to be confirmed without this allegation being firmly disproved, it would hang over his future decisions on the Supreme Court for decades and further divide the country.”  [emphasis mine, ed.]

The magazine had previously given Kavanaugh a full-throated endorsement, stating that his addition to the Supreme Court may furnish the fifth vote needed to overrule Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide. The Catholic Church firmly opposes abortion.

That original endorsement editorial concluded that “anyone who recognizes the humanity of the unborn should support” Kavanaugh’s nomination.

The reversal is significant given that Kavanaugh has cited his Catholic faith and Jesuit education in defending himself against Ford’s accusations. In his opening statement Thursday, Kavanaugh twice referenced his years as a student at Georgetown Prep.

source

The Jesuits’ editorial stated that unless Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations were firmly disproved doubts would hang over Kavanaugh’s future decisions and further divide the country.    Fortunately for Judge Kavanuagh he was nominated by a man who doesn’t know how to lose.   As far as firmly disproving all doubts, the FBI did it in less than five days.  Disproved by all nine witnesses who didn’t recall anything bad about the nominee!   Give the man his robe.  Next case!    Suck on that, Jesuits!

Jesus, it is so hard to keep your faith in a world as corrupt as this cruel place!

The battle to dominate the narrative

We can call this battle to frame the story the war for history, it is also the war for the present and future.   Those victors who get to frame the story win the most important battle in human affairs — the battle for hearts and minds — legitimacy and power.   These storytellers win the most coveted political and personal prize: convincing people to go along with what they say so that their story prevails.   The correct astutely told narrative will either completely justify or absolutely condemn a course of action.   Masses of people are whipped into action or lulled to sleep by a compelling story told just right.  

There is the undeniable reality that we are all soaking in, the facts on the ground, the war is for which story will be accepted as the credible explanation for what we can all see looking around, reading, watching, discussing.    This was driven home to me yesterday during a talk with a friend.

He has largely tuned out the political news these days.   He doesn’t follow developing stories as they are happening.   It is too aggravating, too harrowing, too depressing, too consistently unfair, too troubling.   I understand all that and I share all those feelings.   It is a reasonable response, to not focus on the predictable parade of horrors that are constantly being thrust into our faces under the seal of the President of the United States.  

I’ve taken a different approach recently, having the time and inclination, I watch certain events closely as they unfold.   The drama is endlessly gripping, if also often horrifying.

In the end, watching or not, my friend and I arrive, along with hundreds of millions of our countrymen, billions more worldwide, at the same seemingly inevitable bad place (or glorious place, if you think catastrophic climate change is fake, poor people and immigrants are criminal parasites, pre-existing medical conditions should condemn a middle class person to death, and so forth).   My friend at least spares himself the agony of constantly thwarted hope while watching the driverless car careen towards its inevitable destination.

I understood again,  watching recent events unfold in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, how history can sometimes turn on a single unexpected moment, a small detail can change an outcome — things that the best strategists seize on to turn into political narratives that change outcomes.   Here is where storytelling comes in, who is the hero, who is the victim, who is the vicious participant in a vast, well-funded conspiracy?  

The funny thing is that in each opposing story the victim is actually the persecutor and vice versa — since the only information we really have is her claim and his strenuous denial. Anybody else who was there has no memory of that inconsequential summer hang out at somebody’d house, it apparently only meant something to the younger girl who was traumatized there, if you believe her.   The truth is often not zero-sum, one side is 100% right the other side 100% wrong, but a good partisan story makes it seem so. 

If she’s lying, he’s the victim.  If he’s lying, she’s the victim.  Oh, dear, who do you believe?   Who gets the presumption of innocence?   Several others who knew the nominee well in high school and college stepped forward to give further detail about the nominee during the time he was accused by two different women of drunken sexual assault, seeming to corroborate— but, wait, corroboration is bad…. oh, dear!  A secret, limited investigation should put everything to rest.  

In our current tribal cannibal culture only one of the two gets the presumption of innocence, the other one has to disprove a presumption of guilt.  Depending on which zero-sum story you embrace, your view of the facts will be completely different.    Which story makes more sense to you?   Use Judge Martha Kavanaugh’s famous test:  use your common sense, what rings true, what rings false?

There are facts, things that actually happened.  Without witnesses, of course, it’s a matter of faith that people who vow to tell the truth under the penalties of perjury are in fact telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.   A liar will always try to take advantage of this presumption that people do not lie under oath.   They always do if they know there is no definitive proof that they are lying.

Our current president galvanized a lot of rage and discontent during a carnival-like campaign, spinning a shifting narrative that was dismissed by his many detractors as the inane blathering of an idiot con-man.  His crowds, fond of raising their arms in unison and lustily chanting things like “Lock Her Up! Lock her Up!” are easy to make fun of (from afar, anyway).    In the end this shameless huckster became president by less than 100,000 votes nationwide.  Broken into the individual precincts necessary for his Electoral College margin, his national victory came down to deciding handfuls of votes in a few hundred, or maybe even only a few dozen, shrewdly targeted polling places.  

That fact, that his victory depended on genius analytics, skillful marketing and aggressive voter mobilization in selected counties of selected ‘battleground’ states, contrasts with the wider narrative that he was swept into power by a populist movement, millions and millions of average Americans sick of corrupt American politics, tired of America no longer being great.  The candidate himself frankly described how at first he had dismissed “Drain the Swamp,” considering it a fairly lackluster slogan.   He only changed his mind when he saw how quickly crowds seemed to take to it, how they loved chanting it.   He made it a central part of every rally after that.  What good showman refuses to play one of his greatest hits when the crowd screams for an encore?   

It is sickening to repeat, particularly in a political environment that makes an excellent case against the proposition (and repeatedly, about the existence of truth itself), but facts really do matter.  The largest lesson of his victory in 2016 is not that a plain-spoken outsider with a long history of using the media to promote himself and get massive amounts of free publicity can reach millions of disaffected people, with the help of a few supportive billionaires, and get enough votes to win.  

The more important story is how the powerful people who wanted to consolidate their power in perpetuity, willing to ride even this particular crude, cruel, unsportsmanlike donkey to their larger, long-term goals, got that crucial margin of a few thousand votes exactly where they needed them to put an unqualified fake into the White House and a long-term majority of justices they trained and selected on to the Supreme Court.

Whether Russian hackers hired by Vladimir Putin helped the effort or it was a 100% American initiative, or some combination of both, the outcome is not in question: Mr. Trump got the tiny slice of votes required, exactly where he needed them, for a majority in the Electoral College.  He is legally the president, end of story.

I was thinking of this to watch/not to watch decision in the context of the recent Kavanaugh nomination hearings.   The conclusion was foregone, as my friend wearily pointed out, as we all knew going in.   A partisan Senate with a 51-49 majority, there was no way the majority party’s partisan nominee was not getting confirmed.   Which, of course, is exactly what happened, so all that anxiety about the outcome while the depressing circus ground on was a waste of energy.   But as always, the real drama, and any possible lessons, of the story live in the devilish details that can only be seen by watching closely.

Everyone who saw Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony found it to some degree credible.   She came forward reluctantly, with nothing to gain, in well-founded fear, facing death threats.   She spoke meekly but also with certainty about the details she remembered, including the identity of the drunk teenager who for a few unforgettably scarring moments (for her) made an involuntary sex toy of her.   She even explained how trauma is indelibly stamped on the hippocampus, making a victim’s visual recall of certain specific details highly accurate.   She did not make an irrefutable criminal case against the man who had sexually assaulted her decades earlier, nor was she required to, but she made a very credible case about the events of that day and the identity of the boy who held his hand over her mouth after locking her in a bedroom.  Another woman came forward seeking to testify about another drunken assault at Yale.   A third woman came forward.   The desperate liberal conspiracy in full bloom!

In light of the nominee’s confirmation a few days later, my friend considered Blasey Ford and her compelling testimony ‘collateral damage’, the whole kangaroo hearing so much dirty water down the drain.   Accurate description, of course, in terms of how little effect her testimony wound up having, how her life was destroyed in passing by forces who 100% didn’t give a rat’s cuisse about the truth or falseness of what she said.  

The issue had been reframed: she had not made a credible criminal case that would have stood up to get a conviction in court– plus he denied it 100%, the exact degree of certainty she had about him being the attacker.  A nothingburger!   No need to even look for corroboration, let’s vote!

The issue as she testified was not about making a criminal case, of course, but about shining a light on the nominee’s character, including his willingness to make many misleading and untruthful statements, and the long-time Republican operative’s possibly unjudicial temperament.   Once the nominee denied it all, and the issue was reframed that her testimony didn’t rise to the level needed for a criminal conviction, all that was left to the nominee was to demonstrate his innocence and his judicial temperament.   That he did neither, outside of indignant conspiracy-bashing 100% denials, did nothing to contradict even the reframed story. And, of course, because it was 51-49, no story was actually even required.   Yet we are left with a potent right wing talking point now, good enough for their base, about the Democrats’ self-serving “abandonment of the presumption of innocence.” Their guy was, as always, the only victim here.

Christine Blasey Ford is, absolutely, in the minds of millions, ‘collateral damage’.   You can see right wing women on youTube picking apart her facial expressions as she awaited her public ordeal, about to relive the trauma on live TV– “she involuntarily opened and shut her mouth twice, clear indication that she’s preparing to lie”.   Right wing women jumped on this with both feet, apparently.

My thought was that we should make her name part of a rallying cry to mobilize voters in the upcoming elections.   Make her sacrifice mean something politically, was my thought.   It was this absurd idea I was toying with, in trying to think up ways to support the opposition in the crucial upcoming elections, that caused my friend to try to straighten me out.

I’d described to him how, immediately after she testified, Republicans, including the crew at Fox, were worriedly questioning whether Kavanaugh could survive this totally believable and very damaging testimony.   There was a short period when it appeared that a brave citizen might have been able to stop a political gang bang in progress.  In spite of everything, in spite of 51-49, when they broke for lunch, it appeared the nominee was in big trouble.   Fox was worried and so, reportedly, was the president.

After a long lunch break and presumably a hurried war council, the nomination was saved by angry counter-accusations during which Blasey Ford’s credible allegations, although barely even referred to, were strongly shouted down by one Republican man after another, denounced as part of an orchestrated political hit funded, according to these angry partisans, by millions of dollars from rich liberals. A series of loudly sounding charred pots and kettles, talking about how black the motives of their unprincipled opponents were.  A draw, decided 51-49 (50-48 in the end).

My friend, by not watching the drama as it unfolded and before it came to its preordained conclusion, had no trouble dismissing Blasey Ford as anything but the latest example of another innocent, decent person burned up by the ruthless application of opportunistic partisan politics.    Having seen the proceedings, I believe her name, properly invoked, could be a powerful political rallying cry, get many otherwise apathetic, resigned people to the polls for midterm elections that are typically voted in by only the tiniest slice of our electorate, decided by handfuls of votes. 

I don’t have the phrase yet, and even if I did, I have no way to reach anyone with my ideas.  A few friends might think it a good phrase, if could I coin it pithily, present it winningly, and that would be that. On the other hand, we need to use every persuasive technique at our disposal to change the outcome of enough state elections to return subpoena power to the opposition party.   A 51-49 Senate majority is hardly the expression of democracy that full investigations into widespread government wrong-doing is.   

How is it that a woman can face death threats (ongoing we hear) to testify credibly about a traumatic attack that has tortured her anew since her long ago prep school sexual assaulter was put on the short list to be one of the nine most powerful people in the country, and be effectively shouted down by enraged partisan men ignoring the allegations entirely, and that is the end of it?   I know, I know, 51-49.

But does that inevitable ‘collateral damage’ apply to any woman who comes forward and testifies against a powerful man as credibly as Blasey Ford did?   Collateral damage, sister, if the guy is as connected and powerful as this good, God-fearing Jesuit prep school graduate.    The Jesuits disowned him in their national weekly, but who the hell are they, anyway?  A bunch of self-righteous partisan traitors, if the prevailing story, in all of its many contradictory wrinkles, is to be believed.

We tell the stories we need to tell, privately and publicly.  It is up to fair-minded people of good will to decide which stories are more believable than others.  My own story, for example, is a long tale of seemingly willful refusal to succeed.   I tell it differently, of course, bringing integrity and other fantastic notions into it, but there is a powerful case to be made that I am a deluded, judgmental, viciously opinionated loser who can’t even write half as well as I believe I can.   Luckily for me, it’s not up to me to convince anyone about anything.  

 

Silence!

I learned young, in my cells, the truth that the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.   Whenever something scary or painful happened to me or my sister, something that cried out for discussion in the home I grew up in, silence was imposed.   “You have to respect my right to ignore your pain,” was my father’s position.   He actually said as much to me explicitly, when we were both adults.    He had his own terrible pain, clearly, which made him very uncomfortable in these situations.    Why did I have to respect his silence?   I lived in his house, he bought me my clothes, my food and everything else.   I suppose that was how his logic worked, though it applied long after the childhood rationale was gone and he’d regret it all bitterly as he was dying.    

Silence is a prerogative of power.   If you have the power, you simply sit, lips pressed together, a silent “fuck you” the most irrefutable response to anything you don’t feel  like talking about, for any reason or no real reason.   That’s power.  Ask the powerful nominee a question he doesn’t want to answer.  He has already spent hours strategizing with the lawyers of the man who nominated him, has vast experience in this process himself as legal advisor on such nominations to a past president.   He is asked a question he doesn’t want to answer.  Clamps his lips together, stares at the questioner with undisguised hostility, knowing he can eventually run out the game clock.  “My answer, sir, is a loud, silent FUCK YOU!” he glares, mouth constricted to the size of a tightly clenched sphincter.

If a powerless person is sexually assaulted in the woods, a hand clamped over her mouth, and there is nobody there to hear her muffled protests– was there a sexual assault?   Come on.   Is this even a question?  

The Constitution was largely silent on the question of slavery.  To many of those who did not immensely profit from the “Peculiar Institution”, chattel slavery was an abomination.  For the rest a virulent racism was encouraged, so they didn’t care about the slaves.  It would not do to enshrine slavery too explicitly in the liberty-granting blueprint for republican democracy written by men who believed that all men were created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable human rights and so forth.  Lawyers are geniuses of this kind of thing, inserting the devilish, controlling details between two commas, bland as all get out.   “… such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit…” [1]  yeah, there we go– the constitutional basis for the Fugitive Slave Act is authorized by an equally innocuous-sounding clause.  Read the Constitution, it’s not long.  See if you can find the three discrete, discreet phrases making slavery as lawful as anything else a landed white man had a right to.  As a law student it took me a long time to find all three.

Silence!  Those who would be tyrants must become masters of this.   Speaking with a definitive, uncontradictable voice is only possible when no contradiction is allowed.   First thing you do, silence all the investigative journalists.  Then the lawyers of the opposition.   Once these troublesome elements are dealt with, the sailing is much smoother for a tyrant.  Of course, “tyrant” is such a judgmental word.   Can’t we just say Leader?   Or Winner?  

Silence!  Your right to be heard is limited by my right not to hear you, fucker.  If you can make yourself heard, go right ahead.   Let me just put on my state-of-the-art noise canceling headphones and my sleep blinders, ah, that’s much better.  Alone with my own thoughts.   Among them, no thought of taking off my blinders and deafeners.   Scream away in your victimhood, assholes, it’s so much faint white noise to me.

Silence, while sometimes the best response when tempers are hot, more often than not benefits the powerful and the guilty.   The most important single thing required for an unjust scheme to  succeed, without adverse consequences for the hatchers, for any crime to be committed with impunity, is silence.   Silence is golden, literally.

Irrelevant Logic

Advocates for Brett Kavanaugh felt great urgency to get him on the Supreme Court as quickly as possible, for many reasons.    Delay would only allow for more and more basic and uncomfortable questions to be asked, more people willing to testify against him to come forward.   Our brazen president decided to double down [1], have the nominee brazen it out, short delay for very limited, top secret investigation — for the optics of transparency and fairness — then immediate vote and we win.

An exercise in logic for all you non-partisans out there:

Democrats and Republicans alike found Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony credible, and nobody who spoke publicly on either side said they didn’t believe her story, though Republicans were reticent about one particular detail, which was neither corroborated nor disproved by the limited FBI probe.   To a man, the men on the Senate Judiciary Committee who spoke publicly said they believed Blasey Ford’s testimony.   They would have sounded like liars, and insensitive, morally tone-deaf  cads, if they had claimed not to believe her, since she did come across as truthful.  

Keep that thought in mind — credible testimony.  

Now keep this thought in mind:  Blasey Ford’s testimony was, at the same time, part of an orchestrated political hit, a calculated partisan smear against this fine, highly qualified nominee, as the impeccable nominee himself and the indignant Republican men of the Committee all claimed .

Logic?   Truthful, yes, but a smear.  In the end: a wash.  Although, logically, she could not have been testifying truthfully and, at the same time,  been part of a vicious partisan smear against an innocent man.

Basic logic is often collateral damage in our zero-sum post-fact media spin world.  In any case, logic is irrelevant in modern political interpretive dance.

That said, it is important, as a democratic corrective, that Democrats and Independents take the House in the upcoming midterms.   Progressives on the House Judiciary Committee have already informed the president that, once they have subpoena power back, they intend to examine what appears to be Kavanaugh’s untruthfulness under oath during his recent confirmation hearings and his testimony before being confirmed for the federal bench more than a decade ago.    That is the only picture that gives me any solace in this dark moment for the silenced majority, a real investigation into the truthfulness of this smug, petulant, entitled zealot fuck.

 

 

[1] One commentator noted that he was “tripling down” in this case.   This is a characteristic move of our zero-sum winner-in-chief.

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