Rage, rage against the dying of the white male
by Tom Sullivan
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.” — Carl Sandburg
Judge Brett Kavanaugh yelled like hell in protesting his innocence before the Senate Judiciary Committee. His high school friend, Mark Judge, remains in hiding. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in her Senate testimony Thursday alleged both were in the suburban Maryland bedroom when Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at 15.
The hearing itself was bifurcated, with the mood dramatically different morning and afternoon. Ford’s survivor’s tale, emotional, authentic, articulate and convincing, kept the committee room and the country rapt. Holding back tears, admittedly terrified, Ford nonetheless detailed for a national audience her long-ago assault by laughing, drunken frat boys:
“I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified. I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh and I were in high school.”
She detailed the alleged attack:
“Brett groped me and tried to take off my clothes. He had a hard time, because he was very inebriated, and because I was wearing a one-piece bathing suit underneath my clothing.
“I believed he was going to rape me.
“I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from yelling. This is what terrified me the most, and has had the most lasting impact on my life. It was hard for me to breathe, and I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.”
Asked if she could be sure her attacker was Kavanaugh after so long, Ford said, “100 percent.”
Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, denied everything. He was belligerent, tearful, evasive, combative, contemptuous of the process, and above all entitled. Asked multiple times by Democrats whether he would agree to FBI fact-finding investigation to provide a basis for the panel to get at the truth, Kavanaugh hedged again and again, irate to be questioned at all. For their part, Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee were not trying to get to the truth. They were just trying to get through the hearing. The rest was theater.
His credibility, if it is not in shreds, should be. If Kavanaugh believes himself an innocent man wronged (and he might), his affect was that of a privileged kid angry at being caught. Much like Trump himself. Kavanaugh repeatedly responded to sharp questioning about his past and heavy drinking by reciting his resume.
He attended “the legendary Five-Star Basketball Camp.” In football, he played “quarterback and wide receiver.” He got into Yale Law School. “That’s the number one law school in the country,” Kavanaugh boasted. “I had no connections there. I got there by busting my tail in college.” He has a “unanimous, well qualified rating from the American Bar Association.” How dare anyone impede his elevation to the Supreme Court?
Shortly after this post goes live, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a scheduled vote to send the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the floor of the Senate for a full vote on Saturday.
“This confirmation process has become a national disgrace,” Kavanaugh shouted. Indeed it has.
The culture has changed since court nominee Clarence Thomas faced questioning about sexually harassing Anita Hill in 1991. The country was shaken to its core by the September 11, 2001 attacks. It abandoned its principles and sanctioned torturing prisoners. (For all we know, Kavanaugh was part of that effort by the George W. Bush White House. But those records, like Mark Judge, remain hidden.) The Great Recession precipitated by elite greed punished the weak and rewarded the powerful with more riches. The U.S. elected the first African-American president, convincing many the country had turned the page on institutional racism.
The backlash to Obama was immediate. T-party reactionaries arose supported by white billionaires among the One Percent. Christians accustomed to believing their God is God found their theological primacy challenged in an increasingly secular society, and that loss of privileged status they labeled persecution. Whites aggrieved at seeing their demographic primacy challenged by a browning America and by a movement that insists black lives matter too, float rumors of white genocide. Throughout, men accustomed to millennia of dominance in human society saw their status and power threatened. Women empowered by education and control of their reproduction now demand their share. The #MeToo movement challenges men’s right to do as they please with whomever they might please themselves. That includes corrupt men like Donald Trump.
We stand at the nexus between the world that was and the world that will be, observed Eugene Robinson on MSNBC. The dying one will not let go without a fight.
The privileged believe high status is theirs by birthright (or by virtue of highly superior genes, if one believes Donald Trump). The privileged rule according to race and gender. Challenged, they fight back. Viciously and loudly, as Brett Kavanaugh did through tears:
“This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons. And millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”
Kavanaugh, the man who boasted of his judicial temperament, revealed himself as a bitter partisan. The man who crafted sexually graphic questions for Bill Clinton as a member of Ken Starr’s Whitewater investigation team, can dish it out but cannot abide being on the receiving end. Don’t we know he went to Georgetown Prep and Yale?
Having soiled the Oval Office, the sitting president and his enablers on Capitol Hill are determined to soil the Supreme Court by installing a partisan warrior with a past he fears being closely examined. Mark Judge, identified by Ford as the third person in the room during her assault, remains in hiding and unquestioned.
“Judge Kavanaugh, will you support an FBI investigation,” Sen. Dick Durbin and other Democrats on the panel asked. Kavanaugh repeatedly refused to give a direct answer. Republicans designed the hearing as a he-said, she-said affair. There would be no independent fact-finding by career federal investigators.
With Ford’s testimony out of the way, Kavanaugh’s supporters on Judiciary — all of them old, white males — came out swinging too. How dare anyone question Kavanaugh’s veracity (or apparent lack of it). Do you know who Brett Kavanaugh is?
Will Bunch wants us to “make no mistake” what it all means:
This was also a kind of cultural Pearl Harbor, a date — September 27, 2018 — which will live in infamy in the culture wars between a deeply entrenched patriarchy and a rising #MeToo movement of women telling their survivor stories of sexual abuse and harassment. That rising ride [sic] encouraged Dr. Ford to come forward with her long-repressed reckoning, and her courage in testifying on Thursday seemed to pay the #MeToo movement back with interest.
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s shouted tirade against the challenge to Kavanaugh will be a lasting testament to that date. His declaration of partisan war could only have been more complete if he’d fired it from The Battery in Charleston. The war that started there was also about preserving a dying social order.
* * * * * * * * *
For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
