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

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.

Nobody knows better than the Democrats how to turn the moment against them:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can, of course, count on the character and integrity of President Trump in this and congratulate him for the “free rein” he’s generously given to the FBI to investigate multiple allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.   Our peerless leader has demonstrated these qualities endlessly, as that Great Wall of China on our southern border, the only thing that will save America, is being speedily built and paid for by Mexican rapists.   Faith in the president’s strong sense of justice is what caused Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley to bang the gavel as soon as they had the party line 11-10 vote for Kavanaugh in his committee.  “Two hour rule,” he said as he gaveled the session closed, using a never used antique procedural rule to cut off discussion of the “limited scope” of the “maximum one week FBI investigation” that Jeff Flake, weakly but with principle, had insisted on as the condition of his vote.

As it turned out, partisan Democrats and people of the left had nothing to worry about.   The president assured everybody by tweet that he’d instructed the FBI to do a full and unrestricted investigation.   He placed only a few minimal conditions:  nobody can talk to Kavanaugh, he did very well at the hearing, beautifully, really, and no reason to follow up on anything, very unfair and upsetting to put him through anything more; nobody can talk to Blasey Ford, she said everything she has to say and it was very damaging, she really said more than enough; no interview with Julie Swetnick, she’s clearly a bitter gang rape survivor trying to take it out on Kavanaugh who she has no idea if he was in the train or not because she was passed out while being gang-raped, allegedly, allegedly=-and you know how women love to play the victim card about “rape’, so, no, not her.   Just a few other minor guidelines:

Each of these minor conditions makes perfect sense, in Trumpworld.   Whether or not Kavanaugh was a mean drunk in high school is irrelevant, it has nothing to do with the accusation that he tried to rape her while drunk.    So, no, the FBI can’t ask any of his former classmates about how he behaved when he had had too many beers– and let us say once more for the record, he never drank anything stronger than beer.  The FBI, in conducting any investigation that is not a total witch hunt, must investigate only exactly what the White House decides is relevant.   After all, who better to decide how to investigate something fairly than the president who has been trying to just get this fine man’s confirmation done?    The FBI does not assess credibility, and if it does, it has no right to judge a man as wonderful and well-qualified as federal judge for life Brett Kavanaugh.   The White House is the only power impartial enough to make a fair assessment of what, if anything the FBI finds.   Don’t forget, the FBI and CIA behave like Nazis and are not very loyal to the president.

Six female Republican senators will vote yes or no to confirm Brett Kavanaugh based on the most heavily redacted record of any candidate for the Supreme Court.   The votes of four of those women are never mentioned, as though, because they come from Republican strongholds in the former Confederacy, they would NEVER vote against the party.   If they voted against the party line they’d be primaried out of office quicker than you could say “Jackie Roosevelt Robinson”, yes suh.   Such is the bawdy house of current American democracy.  The two female senators from states that do not always vote straight Republican are supposed to be the votes in play.   We don’t hear much from them yet, they’re probably waiting for the results of the White House’s scrupulously fair limited FBI investigation.

Reagan’s nominee Douglas Ginsberg smoked marijuana (Ronnie was bitterly surprised to learn this) and withdrew his name when it came out, rather than lie about it, pout, fight, hiss, bluster, threaten, make sarcastic remarks, yell, glare, conjure vast conspiracies against him and curse the millions spent to make him look like he smoked pot which he never DID, NEVER– YOU SMOKED POT!

Brett Kavanaugh, accused of something much less serious, of course, than smoking a joint, is made of sterner stuff.  He’s like Trump.   He’s a fighter who lashes out when cornered.  In fact, he’ll scratch your fucking eyes out before he’ll even think about backing down, he has amply demonstrated his fighting judicial spirit to the pussies who tried to make him look bad at the eleventh hour, after he already did OK enough that he would actually get confirmed.   That fighting spirit makes him, according to Trump, the ideal impartial-imsmartial deciding vote on the Supreme Court for, insha’Allah, many years to come.

Speaking of rigid, studiously reasonable sounding political hacks, Brooks, predictably, viewed the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford and the fierce rebuttal by Brett Kavanaugh as basically a wash, one’s opinion of who was the victim breaking down 100% along tribal lines.  

Along tribal lines, of course.  Nothing to see here, boys and girls.   Alan Dershowitz had the same observation, as did so many others in their tribe. There is no such thing as truth to a tribe who believes that outraged impudence is a wholly appropriate substitute for candidly answering questions at a hearing.  Good people on many sides, on many sides, no doubt, no doubt.  

The angry man is an outraged victim of a vast conspiracy, the woman, although credible and reasonable and refusing to speculate about things beyond the details of the traumatic experience she was relating — well, your opinion of who was more credible and who testified more compellingly will break down along tribal lines.

“Truth before justice” is David Brooks’ motto [1] — and there is truth on both sides, there appears to be, according to David Brooks.  None of us can know who is more truthful, and therefore who we believe must break down along tribal lines.  If you supported Clinton, you hate Kavanaugh.  If you hated Clinton, you love Kavanaugh.  There is no way, at present, that any of us can know which of the two was actually more truthful, or even who demonstrated better character.  Thus Spake David Brooks. 

Unless of course, you impartially apply Judge Martha Kavanaugh’s famous test:    ‘Use your common sense. What rings true? What rings false?’

If you apply this test, Brooks, and compare the ring of Blasey Ford’s meek but firm description of events and the ring of Kavanaugh’s raging contempt for the very accusation and still conclude it all depends on your tribal allegiance, I must conclude that your tribe, the assholes, is finally beyond redemption.  But, of course, that only confirms my membership in the enemy tribe, proving your point.  Don’t give me that smug smile, Brooks, go wash your ass instead, eh?

I would be fascinated to hear Judge Martha Kavanaugh’s unguarded opinion on the application of her now famous test to the testimony of her son and his accuser.

[1]  Though to understand exactly what that dramatic-sounding credo actually means you’d need a mind as deep as David Brooks’ finely tuned, elegant thinking machine.