A Study in Contrasts

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

"If this is the new norm, you better watch out for your nominees."-  Lindsey Graham to Democrats

“This first allegation was held in secret for weeks by a Democratic member of this committee and by staff. It would be needed only if you couldn’t take me out on the merits. When it was needed, this allegation was unleashed and publicly deployed over Dr. Ford’s wishes.” -Brett Kavanaugh as he poured gasoline on and set the match to his entire judicial career in real time on international television

It was indeed a study in contrasts.

     Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who has a fear of flying, nonetheless boarded a plane at an airport 3000 miles away from her family's home. She's been forced to move to an undisclosed location on account of the threats, angry taunts and attention she'd received when she finally decided to step from the shadows and put a face and a name to the growing number of middle-aged women who'd come out to accuse Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

     She was terrified, so she'd said early in her opening statement, when she went into intense detail about her ordeal at a house in Maryland one night in 1982. She was terrified of the attention, terrified at, she a sexual assault survivor, being interrogated by a partisan right wing prosecutor from Maricopa County, Rachel Mitchell.

     Yet despite her terror, Dr. Ford, a clinical psychologist, kept her calm and poise and answered every question with aplomb or as much as she could manage. Her stubborn yet fragile poise served as the perfect counterpoint to the fear we could all hear in her quavering voice even as Chuck Grassley interrupted time and again, thereby undercutting Ms. Mitchell's very reason for being there. And as one listened to Dr. Ford, it became painfully clear she was no longer a 50-something psychologist and professional woman testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in our nation's capitol. She was once again a terrified 15 year-old girl in a small bedroom in Maryland, loud music being played to mask her cries for help and a hand clamped over her mouth as a drunken boy pulled at her clothes as she feared he would kill her by accident.

     The 11 male Republicans on the committee brought Mitchell to DC so as to not give the appearance of being 11 over the hill frat boys gang banging a defenseless woman. If they hoped for a dramatic Perry Mason moment, with Dr. Blasey Ford breaking down in tears and wailing, "It was a lie, I lied the whole time!", they were disappointed. That was why, when Dr. Ford's ordeal was over, they'd dismissed Mitchell without even an audible word of thanks.

     Dr. Blasey Ford exuded credibility and nothing else except for the pain and emotional toll it took on her to go on national TV and repeat on camera, the whole world watching, a nightmare of an evening with Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge that, until today, she'd only related from a safe distance in a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein. She was simply, to use Sen. Kamala Harris' phrase, "a profile in courage."

     Indeed, Dr. Blasey Ford at times sounded like a victim of warfare. Like a real victim of war, she'd been displaced 3000 miles from her real home, was under siege and looked like an unlikely candidate for a full recovery from what happened to her in that bedroom in Bethesda. If you could not bring yourself to believe her or at the very least, respect her courage for coming forward just to do her civic duty, then perhaps you should slide back into the primordial ooze and give up the pretense of being human.

     And then, it was Brett Kavanaugh's turn to speak.

Do Not Feed Judge Kavanaugh After Midnight

Since early July, we'd been treated to a steady series of appearances by Judge Henry Jekyll.

     Today, we got nothing but Judge Edward Hyde.

     It was as if a switch had been thrown. It was as if Kavanaugh was a gremlin and someone had forgotten the famous rule of not getting him wet or to feed him after midnight. He yelled at Sen. Patrick Leahy when he simply asked him if he wished for Mark Judge to be in the hearing room. He got snippy with Sen. Dick Durbin when he asked him if he personally was in favor of an independent FBI probe of Dr. Ford's allegations. When asked point blank if he was a blackout drunk by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Kavanaugh turned the question back on her, twice. (It's a well-known fact Sen. Klobuchar's father was a violent drunk, making Kavanaugh's deflection tactic that much more despicable.)

     But before any of that, long after Professor Anita Hill's spirit had forced itself into the hearing room, Kavanaugh had already shown what he was made of when he launched into a screaming right wing Fox-inspired boilerplate tirade accusing everybody but Eugene Debs and Karl Marx for the vast left wing conspiracy against his "good name."

     As the theater reviewer once said, "he laughed, he cried." In other words, if during the Benghazi Witch Hunt Hillary Clinton had acted with half the unhinged emotionality that was allowed to Brett Kavanaugh, she would've been laughed out of the hearing room, the State Department and the presidential campaign trail while being confined to a fainting couch for the rest of her days.

     By hiding literally 96% of the documents pertaining to Kavanaugh and his judicial decisions, the Republican Party wanted to celebrate Halloween early and leave a flaming bag of dog shit on the nation's collective stoop then run away before the ruse was discovered. But we've been victimized by the GOP's old bait and switch game too many times and it doesn't work any more. Now Lindsey Graham's reduced to blustering about the Democrats, for a change standing united against the possibility of a Justice Kavanaugh, and threatening what could happen to their judicial nominees.

     You know. Guys like this. for instance.

     What Kavanaugh, and the Republicans who just can't quit him in their drawn-out Brokeback Mountain infatuation with him, forgot is that Kavanaugh wasn't on trial and that especially was true for Dr. Ford. It was a high stakes job interview. One could somewhat forgive them for that misapprehension considering it was the victim in this case who'd gotten grilled by a prosecutor and not the alleged perpetrator. And that alone shows how far south our moral compass had fallen since the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill debacle of 1991.

Closing Argument

At the very least, Brett Kavanaugh gave us more than a mere glimpse of what he looks and sounds like when he's drunk. By several accounts (including his roommate at Yale), he's belligerent, combative and not very pleasant to be around when he's drunk. But today, Judge Kavanaugh was sober, making us question what poor 15 year-old Christine Blasey was facing in that bedroom in Bethesda in 1982. At the very least, waving aside for a second the blackout drinking, the sexual assaults, and the nearly 100,000 documents that have been kept from the American public, Brett Kavanaugh doesn't have the constitution (pardon the pun) to be a Supreme Court Justice.

     He showed the world today how volcanic his rage can be, how emotional he gets when his so-called integrity is impugned in the slightest. It made us wonder if he still drinks and what his behavior is like at home if he does and who suffers the fallout from that volatile behavior.

     Instead, Brett Kavanaugh showed us what a Supreme Court Justice is not supposed to look and sound like as he made an endless series of emoji faces just begging for, courtesy of CSPAN, the theme music from Curb Your Enthusiasm. The Republican Party helpfully demonstrated, just in time for the midterms, what a political party made up of mature men is not supposed to act like.

     Lindsey Graham showed us what an unhinged political party looks like several decades past its shelf life, at what a 50-something frat boy looks like when seriously having his conduct policed for the first time ever. It showed a vengeful electorate what white privilege looks like at the highest levels of government (as if Trump and his stumblebum white nationalists haven't already) when it even threatens to deny that brass ring to one of its own.

     Just as Dr. Blasey Ford's quavering voice was the perfect counterpoint to her courage, Brett Kavanaugh made a stunning counterpoint to Dr. Ford herself. It was a stunning study in contrasts into what character looks like when confronted with someone who only pretends to have it. And do not get me wrong, Faithful Reader- I am not so naive in politics as to believe that the Democrats weren't cynically using Dr. Ford to further their agenda, which is to keep Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court and to deny Trump for once.

     But, listening to Dr. Blasey Ford give a plainly pained testimony to an incident in her life she'd rather not have revisited, even across television screens and videos on Youtube and Twitter, gave one the impression that the Democrats' cynicism had abated somewhat. That, urged by the spirit of Professor Hill, it veered dangerously close into a concern and compassion more genuine than usual.