Worth knowing by heart

Oct18

This is from Isaac Babel’s immortal short story Guy de Mauppassant, perhaps the greatest story ever written about the love of reading and writing.

These line below were set forth by a less skilled craftsman, but they are good enough. They worked. They’ve been rattling through my head a lot since I heard them recently. I need to set them down to study them a bit.

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I know, I know. A dead horse, a dead horse, stop whipping! I jotted these lines down the other day. I will explain. I am using a pen and ink a lot lately, because I suffer from graphomania, an idiopathic, little understood and apparently incurable condition. [1] I need to make marks on paper sometimes, it can become urgent. It’s good to have a few words handy to practice, otherwise the words are completely random and the pages look a little batty.

So these words were handy, since I noted them the other day, and I used them to practice my handwriting and try to master the new pen I need to dip into ink in order satisfy my graphomania. My graphomania has gotten worse over the years. I become quite desperate if I ever find myself without a good writing implement and some nice paper [2]. So, anyway, because I like to have a passage handy to write, unfortunately, I seem to have chosen this one.

While we’re here, let’s examine the banal and unconvincing nature of each element of this half-assed non-defense. These lines were passionately delivered in opening remarks by someone defending himself against charges that he is an angry partisan, an evasive lawyerly crafter of arguably non-perjurious but deliberately misleading answers given under oath [3], and also, of course, to drive home a strong, full-throated, sometimes tearful blanket denial of every detail of every allegation mercilessly made by those tools of the Clintons and George Soros — never drunk, never disrespectful, never out of control, never did anything bad, ever!

Let us take them line by line:

This is standard for any political conspiracy theory — an elite of smart, powerful people making devious calculations to advance their goals and then skillfully orchestrating the actions of a group of disparate conspirators in what amounts to a mob style rub-out, an assassination. I give him points for the two words used like that, calculated and orchestrated, they underscore how much thought and planning go into this kind of partisan torture and execution of an innocent opponent.

The first of these assertions blames the pitiful losers for being so doggoned enraged and desperate they’re prepared to believe ANYTHING that could discredit a good private school boy who has led a storybook life and is a wonderful dad and husband. Their pent-up rage, you understand, makes them irrational, hysterical, capable of insanely justifying any viciousness you could imagine. They are mad, nuts, blinded by anger, in a blind rage, a blindly raging mob, because they’re losers.

This kind of in-your-face violent talk about pent-up anger plays great to the Trump base– anything that makes a libtard cuck look like a loser is gold for this fist pumping MAGA demographic.

The fear that has been stoked about his twelve year federal judicial record is real. It is based on his actual record. So he takes pains to insert “unfairly”, to show that he is the victim of a coordinated effort to make him look bad. Here they go again, the haters, unfairly stoking unreasonable fear. He asserts the fear has been unfairly stoked, though he says this in passing without pause, on his way to his next serial accusation.

But if we pause to have a look at his judicial record on the federal bench we would see a straight line of decisions and dissents that are the proof of the staunchness of his political bona fides. He grew up a Federalist Society member, he resigned briefly, for the optics when he was up for appointment to the federal bench by G. W. Bush, and then rejoined the Federalists as soon as he was informed it was no breach of any kind of judicial ethics to be a member in good standing of an ideologically pure libertarian legal society.

His judicial record reflects his belief in a particular notion of American liberty– business should not be fettered, nor any citizen, corporate or human, coerced, nor is business often unduly accountable to people it may harm, in the service of the common good, corporations are persons with rights and feelings as important, and often more important, than individual human plaintiffs or groups advocating on behalf of the environment, worker safety, non-discrimination, voting rights and so forth.

This is the bit that reveals, more than any other part of his long angry opening, what an insanely partisan fuck this man is. After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, upon the recommendation of disgraced former federal judge Alex Kozinsky [4], he assisted Ken Starr in the far-ranging investigation that led to Bill Clinton’s famous perjury charges for lying about oral sex in the White House, perjury that was used as the grounds for his impeachment. Kavanuagh was one of the most extreme and zealous of Starr’s advisors. He urged Starr to aggressively press Clinton under oath, without a break, as the best way to get him to slip up and say something that could be used for a perjury charge. Talk about hypocrites… He references the second Clinton too, Hillary, one of the most divisive and hated personalities in American politics. She has reason to hate him too, according to his tribe, because Trump beat her, because she sucks and because she’s an angry, vindictive loser bitch.

The rest of Brett Kavanaugh’s independent, impartial legal career was no less partisan. After his work with the Independent Counsel Ken Starr he worked for the Bush/Cheney campaign and was one of the lawyers who successfully prosecuted Bush v. Gore which stopped the Florida recount and led to George W. Bush being declared president by a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court in a special one-off decision that instructed posterity that it could not be cited as a precedent. He then worked loyally for the Bush White House and Bush appointed him to the federal bench a few years later. Virtually every piece of controversial legal advice he ever gave President Bush was classified and off-limits during his confirmation hearings. Deemed top secret by his friend who got to make the final call on every document.

There has never been a time in his ambitious, well-connected life when he has been impartial or independent, especially when it comes to his strong activist political ideology, his deepest convictions.

But we really should take him at his word, when he speaks to Fox News during the hearings, on the eve of his accuser’s testimony, or when he writes an editorial in the Wall Street Journal about his impartiality and independence on the eve of the Senate Judiciary Committee vote to send his name to the full Senate, and tells us again that he is not only an impartial judge, but independent. He amply demonstrated both of those things in this articulate denial of the fake charges against him. The People rest.

[1] See Confessions of an Aged Graphomaniac, E. Widaen (coming soon to a university press near you), This book combines writing with a generous portion of visual art and graphics.

[2] In the days before we finally had to put the beloved Baron down I finally broke down and paid $160 for a fountain pen. It was a beautiful pen with a unique, soft, flexible nib, and I began immediately working on writing in a more elegant hand. It was a pure pleasure to write and draw with that soft, flexible nib. Sadly but predictably, my graphomania worsened with this beautiful flexible nib fountain pen always in my shirt pocket. After six months, the nib — the part that actually makes the marks on paper — was irreparably ruined and replacing the delicate nib would cost at least $140. I was too bitter to even consider this, but later found readily available Speedball C-4 nibs that, if dipped in ink, could make a line very similar to the beautiful flexible line of the defunct $160 pen. The Speedball rig costs about $5.

[3] One seemingly petty example to stand in for many: asked by Senator Whitehouse for a definition of the term “Devil’s Triangle” on his printed yearbook page, he invented a drinking game of that name. Any search of the internet would show a definition for the term that was a sexual act, two males one female. Kavanaugh made up a drinking game by that name that was nowhere referenced on the internet, the repository of the world’s accumulated knowledge, fact and opinion.

Almost as soon as he was done falsely testifying, a new Wikipedia page was suddenly on-line, describing a drinking game similar to the one Kavanaugh had just made up. The authors of LikeWars, a recent investigation into the weaponization of social media, were interviewed recently on Fresh Air. Here is a link to the interview.

According to them, Wikipedia was updated to include the fanciful new drinking game by someone connected to the House of Representatives. Apparently, because every computer and location have a particular IP address and some other location data indicators, it could be determined that the new Wikipedia information had been uploaded by somebody sitting in the offices of the House of Representatives.

One data point, lost among billions in lightning paced cyber space, but fuck. Talk about your calculated and orchestrated political hit squad work! Nice going, Team Brett!!!

[4] Wikipedia: Alex Kozinski (born July 23, 1950)^[1] is a former United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where he served from 1985 until announcing his retirement on December 18, 2017, after a growing number of allegations of improper sexual conduct and abusive practices toward law clerks.^[2] Kozinski was chief judge of that court from November 2007 to December 1, 2014.

During his tenure as a court of appeals judge, he has become a prominent feeder judge. Between 2009–13, he placed nine of his clerks on the United States Supreme Court, the fifth most of any judge during that time period.^[13] He has been particularly successful placing his clerks with Justice Anthony Kennedy, for whom he had himself clerked.

Impartially disproving an accuser’s lies

Oct17

If you are confronted with an accusation about yourself that makes you look really bad, there is a way out. The first thing to remember is that if you apologize, it’s over. You’re guilty. Done. So, rule number one, never apologize for anything, even if they have videotape. You can always argue the tape was an extremely well-financed forgery, a complete fake.

That goes to rule number two of what are sometimes called Roy Cohn’s rules or Roger Stone’s rules. These are the rules the president lives by as well, he imbibed them at the breasts of these two father figures. Rule one is admit nothing/never apologize. Rule number two is counterattack twice as hard.

You do this by going on the offensive. Two women testify that you did aggressive, sexually fucked up things to them when you were drunk. It goes without saying that they are liars, so there is no reason to dignify those infuriating charges. Say something like this, as you snort in righteous, barely containable anger, the women peddling these vicious lies are part of:

Once you have established this new story line, everybody on your team merely has to double down. You have fired up your base, they will begin swinging their clubs for you. The skeptics and critics will always cavil, try to show illogic, etc., but if you have the money and the votes– fuck them, seriously.

The third thing you have to do, after doubling down, is keep repeating your talking point. The Democrats have no shame, they made a circus of the hearings, they denied the nominee the presumption of innocence that every accused criminal is entitled to under our system of law. They hate the presumption of innocence, they are a lynch mob, an enraged out of control mob. A mob of ruthless, lying haters!

Justice Kavanaugh said he wrote this opening statement himself, a powerful refutation of all the many false charges that he’d ever done anything wrong while drunk as a teenager. I take that claim, like many of his other statements, as worthy of skepticism. In fact, I can affirm under the penalty of perjury that I wrote the above words. You can see they are in my handwriting.

Seriously, though, Stephen Miller seems to have had a hand in its composition, as does the philosopher Sean Hannity. Rush Limbaugh may also have given some editorial input.

The president is very generous with the presumption of innocence, for those who publicly kiss his ass, as well as for those whose power he respects. A strong, powerful denial is as good as a full investigation, a trial in a court and full exoneration, if you’re someone he loves. The inadvertent murder of a Saudi journalist, dismembered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul? According to the AP, the president had this to say: “You know, here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh. And he was innocent all the way.” Again, another witch hunt, like with the unconscionable Democrat torture of Brett Kavanaugh who also forcefully and strongly denied everything. Hey, he fucking denied it! The Saudi’s completely denied it. So what if they accidentally did murder a critical journalist working for the Washington Post? So? What don’t you get about a strong, powerful denial?

Oh, yeah, now I can go after Horseface. A loser. I’m not a baby. No baby! No puppet. You’re the puppets, you’re the puppets!

Unfortunately, you can’t make this shit up, boys and girls.

can you spot the typo in this second version of the statement I wrote?

Et tu, Fox News?

Oct15

So much for fair and balanced, sheesh. What’t the world coming to? It’s like they’re deliberately ignoring the detailed instructions media gets for photographing the president. These instructions go back decades, a friend in news once had a copy of them. They were quite specific. Lighting is key, as is shooting him from the side where he has a full, thick head of hair and never, NEVER, shooting him from the bald side! FOX? Really? This is how you have the president’s back?

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A Fair Hearing — by a lynch mob

Oct15

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?

The battle to dominate the narrative

Oct11

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.

Fairness is Justice, Justice is Fairness

Oct6

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

Oct5

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

Oct4

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…

Oct3

These wild baboons are playing by reality TV rules. Alpha males RULE!

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

Oct3

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.

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warning: gratuitous fucking f-word & (c) E. Widaen 2012-2026

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