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Do You Believe In Christmas?
When our kids were little we would make Santa’s magic boot prints from the front door to the Christmas tree by sprinkling baking soda around a crude cardboard cutout of a boot print. This explained how the presents showed up for Christmas morning since we didn’t have the fireplace Santa used in every damn storybook. It was cute to see our daughters when they simply believed it was all true. But as they got older, the world of logic crept forward — How’d Santa get past the locked front door? And why didn’t the dog bark?
The real world works that way, sad as it is sometimes to see them grow up. Logic overcomes belief. Otherwise you’re 45 and still wondering if it was really Santa who ate the cookies you left out.
The bad news is the magic is back, at least in terms of politics, as belief takes over from logic. This isn’t the good kind which makes Christmas memories. It is the bad kind which turns rational people into blithering idiots who are ready to believe anything that supports their world view, and who create garbage to fool others. It can get to the point where such folks can be convinced of anything, and that makes them manipulable. After all, if you don’t clean up your room, there’ll be no presents under the tree this year!
Here’s where wanting to believe something so much that it shuts down thinking leads. Accusations become evidence for impeachment or harassment or Islamophobia or a society gone white nationalist wild, and the more accusations the stronger the evidence is seen to be. Simply filling a bus with people claiming someone did something should mean nothing but it now means more than ever.
Same for words. Just calling something a new name not does not change anything. So even as the hive mind agrees a flippant remark is “demanding foreign intervention” or labels an investigation “interference in our democracy” and with even less evidence claims Trump is a Russian agent, Tulsi a Russian plant, Facebook is a Russian tool, and Jill Stein a Russian something or other, it does not make it true. A minimum wage dropout saying something horrible to a fast food customer is indicative of our crappy educational system maybe, but hardly an indictment of “a nation awash in racism,” even if it’s on YouTube. Adding “-gate” to a noun does not create a crime to be investigated. Saying “it’s just like Watergate” over and over does not make it Watergate. Claiming a phone call is bribery, or a tweet is witness intimidation does not negate the need for the law degree that allows you to actually use those words accurately. And kids, I’m sorry, I know how much you wanted to believe in the elves, but it was really Mom and me buying the presents all those years.
It is sadly no surprise the ambiguously favorable witness Democrats allowed to testify at the Impeachment Gladiatorial Thanksgiving Spectacle, Gordon Sondland, was soon accused of sexual misconduct by not one, but three women, so it has to be true. The allegations are true to form at least, because all of the alleged incidents took places years ago, there were no witnesses or physical evidence, and none of the women found a reason to bring the accusations forward until Sondland emerged as a possible weak point in the Dems’ case against Trump. What they said was fully and forever unprovenable, and can only be “believed” based on what outcome you support.
Watching those accusations front-paged by a believing media, and with memories of the Kavanaugh confirmation, one can only view Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s deteriorating health with concern. She has been a fine justice, but seems to be using up her share of amazing recoveries from falls and the flu at a rapid pace. The chances are good Trump will name the Ghost of Christmas Past’s replacement. We all can start to feel that pain in our stomach knowing whomever he nominates will be accused of terrible things. For a male nominee, it will be more sexual harassment incidents than Jack the Ripper, dating back to when he pulled Cindy’s pigtails in fourth grade. For a female nominee, it is inevitable something she wrote in a junior high creative writing class will have her labeled a racist. Never mind the hidden horrors in their income taxes, early decisions from their days on the traffic court bench and so on. It will be endless and ugly and it is as inevitable as Santa’s yearly visit.
What people want to believe is delivered to them. Jessica Kwong was a Newsweek “journalist” fired after she wrote an article claiming Trump was wasting taxpayer money golfing over Thanksgiving when in fact he was serving dinner to the troops in Afghanistan. She just made up a report because it was what she wanted to believe. Wanting to believe accounts for so much of what we call fake news, stuff based on “reports” or anonymous sources who could not possibly know what the president was thinking, or what he said in a closed door meeting, but are quoted anyway because we already know what we want to know is true. Americans are meanwhile still sorting out what they “believe” the Mueller report said. What is true is not a worthy goal. What we believe seemingly is.
Democratic candidates have felt the reason for the season, outdoing one another in hinting at what might be under the tree simply because we want it to be there however impractical and honey, yes, I still remember the year you believed there’d be a real pony in the back yard and you cried. Elizabeth Sanders will have rich people give us all Amazon gift cards to pay off student loans and provide free healthcare. Mayor Pete will leave a load in stockings through his Douglass Plan, offering $50 billion (Cory Booker proposes double, $100 billion) for Historically Black Colleges and Universities as just a Christmas Eve teaser. They believe they will find the money under the tree, or in the backyard with the pony. Yeah, we tried to buy our kids’ love with expensive presents, too, but at least we spent equally on each of them.
Yet despite all that proposed giving, belief works for the negative as well. There is a profound belief things are much worse, almost Biblical, than they really are. Democracy has one more chance, or perhaps the Republic is already done and we’re just waiting on funeral arrangements. First maybe a military coup, or a civil war. Or Trump will simply refuse to leave office (NYT, CNN, MSNBC, Vox, Politico, Newsweek, Atlantic, Slate, Salon, MSN all say so.) Certainly women, POC, and LGBT are done for. When pressed for real specifics, there are none though who can count any “specific” that starts with “Well, Trump tweeted…” and never was followed up with legislation or executive action?
Driving the sense the End is upon us is a profound ability to not only know little about history, but not even to remember stuff from a few weeks ago. Those End of Days wars with China, Iran, Venezuela, and worst of all, North Korea, what happened to them? The Kurds do OK with that genocide? “Trump will trigger nuclear armageddon” is a stand-by article when WaPo has to fill Op-Ed space. No one seems to know much about the rise of Hitler in any detail, but everyone believes we are seeing it play out again (except there’s no mass party, no Brownshirt vanguard, no overarching ideology, no rearming for world war, no annexation of neighboring territory, no Nuremberg laws, no Dachau, and no exercise of state power like the 1930s). Scale doesn’t seem to matter; Trump cut back on immigration and so did Hitler, so boom, they are the same.
So it follows a tiny group of Nazi cosplayers in Charlottesville three years ago is proof of sweeping white nationalism, alongside Colin Kaepernick not being able to get a job. It takes a lot of belief to imagine one guy not making the team as proof of much of anything. You get the NYT saying “Trump is president only because a constitutional provision invalidated the choice of the American people,” flippantly referring to the Electoral College created by the Founders in the Constitution to choose 45 presidents over 230 years as a invalidating provision. The same article goes on to say “Democrats and pundits have been bullied into accepting the fiction that he has democratic, and not just constitutional, legitimacy.” Even the clear outcome of an election under the same system in place for centuries is today subject to the belief test.
Adding to this damp blanket of nihilism is the endless failure of insta-heroes. The mood seems so desperate for a savior that a new one is created regularly. The now-discredited anti-semites who organized the Pink Pussy Hat march, the media-abused Parkland Kids, Greta the Amazing Climate Change Gal, celebrities who announce the boycott-of-the-week and then fade just as fast, it’s almost to the point where you can’t trust anyone anymore. At one point Michael Avenatti announced he was looking into running for president, and remember Beto? He went from the cover of Vanity Fair in an Annie Leibovitz glamor photo to, well, we don’t know what he’s doing, working at Wendy’s with Kamala and the other unemployed elves maybe. People started imagining flooding TV commercials with mixed race couples was somehow lessening racial tensions, same as Wakanda and some black superhero characters were going to inspire youth to succeed where Cosby and OJ failed.
None of it is real, that is the nature of belief. Having millions of hits is the illusion of accomplishment. Getting your hashtag trending is the illusion of action. Twitter doesn’t elect anyone, or stop anything, or do anything. It is raising awareness! and it is disappointing when nothing changes in the real world after what seems like a lot of effort online. Someone should do a podcast about that. You can make #SantaIsReal the most popular hashtag ever but it won’t make Santa real. The problem is that like Santa, the belief is no organic. It didn’t grow on its own. It was created and sold, much like each new generation of parents resells the Santa myth to a new generation of toddlers.
Belief has led us to where we don’t just hate ideas, we have come to hate people for holding those ideas because belief is an emotional response not an intellectual one. Hence the flood of articles on “how to get through Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner with your MAGA uncle.” There’s no point in talking, he’s wrong and too ignorant to know it, so the goal is simply to zone out somehow before you can get back to Brooklyn. Thom Hartmann, once a reasonable voice of progressive thought, takes that to its extreme, saying “the parts of America that are still functioning democracies (California comes to mind — there has been discussion of various ‘compacts’ between the three West Coast states, possibly joining with a few Eastern Seaboard states) must consider some form of independence, whether it be ‘soft independence’ like California declared when they established their own air quality standards or some form of partial independence or succession.” Hartmann of course is writing in the context of those Thanksgiving arguments growing into literal violent civil war in America if Trump is re-elected.
There is an obsession with diversity, to the point where “first black ____” and “first lesbian _____” are celebratory events, even when the achievement under celebration is some minor nothing job and everyone has forgotten we already had the first black president and now we are somehow on the verge of racial war. I’m not sure where everyone gets all these firsts from; is there a secret list? When society checks them all off is there a prize? What happens after that?
But bringing it all home are not the now-expected pseudo-historical/hysterical screeds about how Thanksgiving is actually a holiday celebrating genocide and white nationalism (Paul Krugman actually thinks the holiday “commemorates the struggle to end slavery”), but as the season begins Salon stating without hesitation “whatever enthusiasm I once felt for Christmas has dissipated entirely in the age of Donald Trump. He ruins everything he touches, and Christmas, for me, is no exception… Forget Tiny Tim declaring, ‘God bless us, every one!’ It’s clear that for that 40 percent of people in the Trump cult, it’s closer to ‘Damn anyone to hell who isn’t exactly like us!’ The point of Christmas is to declare white supremacist America as the only ‘real’ America.”
And whatever, climate change means we’ll all be washed out to sea before New Year’s anyway. That’s where belief has brought us these few weeks before the holidays. And kids, it was always me who ate the cookies you left out for Santa. Ho ho ho!
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
What Kavanaugh Tells Us about the Midterms
While Democrats refight the 2016 election, Republicans confirmed their second Supreme Court judge.
The soiled Kavanaugh confirmation process put Democratic strategy for the 2018 midterms in plain view. The question is will what hasn’t worked to date do any better for the Dems a month from now?
This week’s FBI investigation was never going to turn up much beyond incomplete recollections. Apart from liberal Twitter, all of whom are apparently trauma memory experts (last week they were scholars of perjury law), most people in Normal America have a hard time conjuring up long ago details. It is even harder to remember things that never happened. The FBI had done background investigations six times on Kavanaugh over a period of decades without uncovering any of what people said this week, so in reality, the investigation lasted 30 years. Democrats knew unless the FBI miraculously turned up a blue dress with semen stains on it, the facts by themselves were never going to be enough.
The investigation, like Trump’s taxes and Russiagate, was really just a way to turn a scar into a scab to pick at, enough of something to propel the story into another week. Then if no new smoking gun-let drops into the media’s lap, the script says claim the process itself was unfair – Putin stole the election, gerrymandering cheated the vote, the FBI wasn’t allowed to interview enough witnesses.
The real plan was always to force the confirmation into the mold Democrats think will win them the House, the same gambit they thought would deliver a landslide in 2016. And so Kavanaugh’s complex judicial record was discarded in favor of Clinton-esque, er, progressive, talking points: the election, um, sorry, the confirmation is all about respect for women, fighting misogyny, defeating privilege, too many White Men, Trump is evil, we can’t have an accused rapist in the White House, sorry, on the Supreme Court! Disqualification via demonization. The Kavanaugh hearings were an updated version of what was supposed to be the 2016 game-changer, the “pussy grabbing tape.” The Dems would give America another shot at having had it with the patriarchy.
It didn’t work. Despite endless bleating the hearings were a “job interview” (imagine the lawsuit after a Microsoft hiring manager pivoted from coding skills to accusing someone of being a drunk) the hashtags were not enough. Judicial temperament problems? The issue never came up in Kavanaugh’s long career. Even so, few courtroom situations turn a judge into a Senators’ punching bag; maybe a little righteous anger was called for? Some may even remember how Democratic voters abandoned presidential candidate Mike Dukakis when he was too dispassionate in his reaction to a question about someone assaulting his wife.
Things devolved too quickly from concern over Roe v. Wade to an attempt to catch Kavanaugh out on yearbook nomenclature. Dems convinced themselves it was conclusive when Maddow labeled Kavanaugh a liar over what “Devil’s Triangle” really meant in a suburban Maryland boy’s school in 1982. They imagined people would believe wrongly stating the drinking age in Maryland decades ago was perjury and not just a mistake. They thought people would care more if the pool of “victims” (i.e., anyone who saw Kavanaugh with a brewski) increased exponentially. Most everything serious was lost in a cloud of stupid.
It is a hard ask to get people concerned about health care as a life-or-death issue to take you seriously as a party when all you seem to care about is high school butt sex. Jester Michael Avenatti pushed things further into farce with an “accuser” whose credibility failed sitcom standards. Susan Collins specifically cited Avenatti’s actions as part of her decision to vote yes on Kavanaugh. Yet Democrats still see Avenatti as a useful idiot, a kamikaze working alongside them, without understanding he demeans the seriousness of everything he touches as a tabloid Midas.
It was little surprise the absurdity of it all was missed by the Dems. One Democratic strategist stated “identity politics has really become the ecology you’re operating in. Economics aren’t as dispositive as they used to be.” That makes sense only to a party banking its midterm strategy on voters not noticing the economy is doing pretty well. It follows pretending constant predictions of trade wars and real wars haven’t all turned out to be crying wolf. It starts to make sense America would go along with the idea a guy claiming he wasn’t a drunk in college means he’s a liar unfit to serve on the Supreme Court.
There were issues in Kavanaugh’s judicial history worth debating. Concern over Roe runs deep. But the Democrats spent little thought on that, failing to grasp while American demographics may be changing, they haven’t yet changed.
The only constituency re-energized over Kavanaugh is suburban liberal white women (accuser Ford could not have been more a Clintonite if Murphy Brown was reanimated out of the 1980s via a horcrux from Hillary herself), a group favoring the Democrats anyway. Apparently this group can also be counted on to ignore the likelihood a Democrat Senator outed Ford when she wanted to remain anonymous, and to overlook attempts to slut-shame high school girl Renate Schroeder on the grounds that if she was a pass-around then Kavanaugh was a non-virgin who screwed tramps like that. Same for the tsunami of criticism directed at Susan Collins, labeled a traitor to her gender to the point where people are donating money to her unknown opponent of the future. No one on CNN praised her as a courageous woman who made a thoughtful decision.
There seems little inside the Kavanaugh fight to specifically drive minorities, already understood as reluctant voters, to the polls. Millennial voters share a low historic turnout rate. If you can’t get a lot more than 1 out of 4 in a demographic to show up things are unlikely to work out (71% of Americans over 65 vote, skewing Republican, and the Kavanaugh saga could easily energize them into an even higher turnout). There seems little-to-no Democratic plan to shift these historical trends other than Trump rage, and the warm feelings of consensual hallucination embodied in social media aside, that failed again this week to affect a #RealWorld event.
“Purple” men moving to the Democrat side? One of the things which damaged the women’s movement in the 1980s and helped the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA; remember that?) to fail was an overemphasis on men as the enemy, a feature of the Kavanaugh process. Many women walked away from the feminist groups supporting the ERA, knowing the mantras “all men are rapists” and “Republicans hate women” just weren’t true.
This is what is happening now, when people who support Trump based on economics end up labeled fascists, people who support Kavanaugh based on his judicial history are rape apologists (or traitors), and people who support free speech are Nazis. Same as post-Parkland, when people who support the 2A were slandered as child killers. It’s deplorable. No one supports rapists or child killers. But few voters are willing to trust Democrats that see them as people who do.
The point of politics is to change people’s minds, not declare them unfit to walk among decent folk. Kavanaugh proved the Democrats (and their partnered media) are still unaware while this may be the year of #MeToo in Washington, New York, and Hollywood, it’s still just 2018 in West Virginia.
The Democrats failed in 2016 when they tried to make the election a referendum on Trump’s behavior. They failed again this week with the same strategy, even after elevating Kavanaugh to a psychopathic POTUS mini-me. With no tailwind from Russiagate, Democrats move toward November with little more than more of the same, throwing in some mumbled threats to impeach Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court (will that be before or after they impeach Trump?) if they take the House.
It’s bad enough to pick the wrong hill to die on. Even worse to do it three times.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Before the Vote, What I Saw at the Kavanaugh Confirmation Hearings
Everyone knew the testimony would not clear anything up. You were expecting a Colonel Jessup moment from A Few Good Men? Instead, the Judiciary Committee vote, likely along party lines, is scheduled for Friday with basically the same information in front of members as they had yesterday.
Along the way the world’s self-proclaimed greatest deliberative body soiled itself with partisan rancor – slut-shaming a woman not present, calling a sitting judge a drunk without evidence, and then labeling him a gang rapist, all in efforts to provide… advice and consent.
Christine Blasey Ford is a serious, empathetic, and sincere woman. That does not alter that prior to her testimony today, Ford’s accusation as she repeated it in front of the Judiciary Committee had already been refuted by everyone she said was present at that party in 1982 where Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh allegedly assaulted her. Her “evidence” was she had told a similar story earlier to her husband (albeit without mentioning Kavanaugh by name), some “beach” friends in California recently, and her therapist (again without mentioning Kavanaugh by name), what most people in or out of a court would consider repetition, not corroboration. When asked about the possibility the assault took place but that she misremembered the assailant as Kavanaugh, Ford just said no and things were left there.
There never could be any physical evidence nor was any suggested to exist to investigate. Ford admitted not remembering specifics that could have formed the basis of exculpation, including how she got home from the party, that driver being in a key position to assess Ford’s condition after the alleged assault and thus support or weaken her story. By not providing an exact date and location for the alleged assault, Ford did not allow for Kavanaugh to present an alibi, proof he was somewhere else. Ford in fact couldn’t say where they both were supposed to be to begin with, apart from “a suburban Maryland house.”
The attorney speaking for the Republicans gently pointed out multiple inconsistencies and inaccuracies between Ford’s previous statements and today’s testimony, walking Ford back from assertions to assumptions. The questioning was consistent with what is done in sexual assault prosecutions to help evaluate the credibility of witnesses. Ford in the end presented a dramatic, heartfelt but ultimately general accusation, backed by the hashtag of #BelieveWomen that precluded any serious questioning of her key assertions, and nothing more.
Brett Kavanaugh made clear from the initial reports right through the hearing Thursday none of what Ford (or his later accusers) said happened, had happened. He was unambiguous. He left no wiggle room. He could add no additional details to describe something that had not taken place. Clever lawyers created the appearance of a he said/she said. These are typically a case of two contradictory versions of a single event, as in date rape cases where sex is acknowledged by both parties who differ over the presence of consent. Kavanaugh’s situation is different; for the past four decades there was no “she said” until a handful of Democratic senators standing behind a victim they may have outed themselves forced Kavanaugh to deliver another round of “he said” denials today.
Kavanaugh showed real emotion in today’s testimony, calling how he has been treated a political hit, revenge, the expression of left-over anger from the 2016 presidential election, a national disgrace, finally breaking into tears. He called out the media for slut-shaming one of his female friends based on a vague high school yearbook reference. Multiple Democrats returned to the same accusations later anyway.
The outcome of all this hinges on a philosophy that believes people without discerning inquiry based on emotional responses and political expediency (i.e., a “credible accusation.”) So about the only real question left after today’s testimony was whether 99.99% or 100% of the people watching had already made up their minds in advance. Like any investigation that might have been launched, no clarity was possible under the circumstances. Ford was unable to prove the positive and Kavanaugh could never prove a negative.
Truth became in the end extraneous to what was really going on. Ford was a prop used against Kavanaugh by Democrats seeking to shift from holding a confirmation hearing they would likely lose to a referendum on mistreatment of victims of sexual assault they might win.
Democrats used their questioning time to make stump speechlets about the horrors of sexual violence, one going as far to say Ford had “inspired men to listen to women.” Nearly every Democrat ceremoniously entered thousands of letters of support for Ford “into the record.” To make sure everyone really, really got the point, Feinstein invited celebrity #MeToo activist Alyssa Milano to attend Thursday’s hearing (and speak with the media, of course.) Everyone cranked out plenty of campaign B-roll. This was theater.At times things seemed one step away from bringing in Handmaiden’s Tale cosplayers. The once great Senator Patrick Leahy engaged in an argument about the meaning of slang terms used in a 40 year old high school year book with a nominee to the Supreme Court, as if proof of immaturity was proof someone was a gang rapist. Another exchange focused on whether a word meant puke or fart. For every careful courtesy shown Dr. Ford during her testimony, Democrats treated Kavanaugh like a cheap punching bag.
Sensing the confirmation might not go their way and needing someone to blame, Feinstein spent her question time trying to coerce Kavanaugh into requesting an FBI inquiry. Senator Durbin demanded Kavanaugh to turn to the White House Counsel present at that moment and demand an FBI investigation on live TV. When Chairperson Grassley cut that off, Durbin responded by telling Kavanaugh if he had nothing to hide, he had nothing to fear, a line often attributed to Joseph Goebbels. Senator Kobuchar played good cop, trying to persuade Kavanaugh to call for the FBI. Expect the demand for an investigation to be Maddow’s (and Wolf’s, and Twitter’s) talking point tonight, when everyone cries for the confirmation vote to be delayed. To call it all a circus is a disservice to real clowns.
How did the very serious business of #MeToo end up a political tool?Only about ten days ago, without the votes to reject Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats started throwing stuff against the wall hoping something would stick. It started with Cory Booker’s failed Spartacus stunt. Kamala Harris, a fellow 2020 Democratic presidential aspirant, demanded more documents about well, something, we hardly knew then or remember now the issues from two administrations ago, brought forward likely in the hope there might be a perjury trapplet buried in those 100,000 pages for an intern to find.
Kavanaugh was accused of having a gambling problem, and of being an alcoholic (Senators Hirano, Kobuchar, and Booker accused him of having a drinking problem again today, Kobuchar explaining she knew one when she saw one because her grandpa was in AA.) And how had he paid off his debts after buying baseball tickets for friends? A pattern emerged: the goal wasn’t to suggest Kavanaugh was unqualified as a jurist but to insist he was unqualified as a human being. In each instance Kavanaugh denied the accusations. He couldn’t add much more. He couldn’t prove a negative no matter how many times the Democrats and the media demanded he try. Until…
Until a strategy ripe for 2018 finally emerged – he’s a witch! How do we know he’s a witch? Just see how vehemently he denies it! Well, maybe not a witch, that’s so 17th century. But a rapist is 2018, where a Resistance-charged mob can be convinced denial is proof of guilt. One can still credibly deny being a drinker, or a gambler, or stealing money in 2018, but one is no longer allowed to simply say no when accused of sexual assault.Democratic lawmakers went out of their way to gleefully proclaim this was a hearing (or “a job interview,” in Feinstein’s Constitution-contradicting words), not a trial, and so their plan was not going to be sidelined by fussy old stuff like a presumption of innocence. There was no question Ford’s testimony was really just an excuse to prosecute Kavanaugh. Senator Hirano, in basically announcing no holds were barred because this was not a trial, sounded more like she belonged in the Octagon than a Senate chamber. Cory Booker asked questions like a bad first year law student, stopping just short of demanding if Kavanaugh still beat his wife. A woman of lost virtue had been found by the Democrats, was willing to point her finger, and we was gonna have us a lynching. It might as well have all been set in a sweaty Alabama courtroom decorated to look like 1950.
With all the theatrics, much of the context behind today’s main event was missed. Christine Blasey Ford’s path to the hearing has not been given much critical attention. She wrote to her local representative this July with a request for anonymity. The letter was sent to Dianne Feinstein, who sent it to the FBI. Ford as the victim was then outed publicly after all of the above gambits to derail Kavanaugh failed, dramatically just hours before his assured confirmation vote. Ford testified today she never gave anyone permission to release her letter or name to the public.
The media, normally reluctant to splash victims of sexual assault across the front pages, went into spasm. Nobody seemed overly concerned about who, how, or why Ford’s name was leaked. No one seemed to include Feinstein’s sitting on the letter for weeks in their stories claiming Republicans weren’t giving the accusations enough time to be heard, though Chairman Chuck Grassley raised the point today.
Ford was near-perfect for the Democrats’ purposes, the archetype Clinton voter, down to a photo circulating of her in her pink pussy hat. The hearings brought together everything anyone hated about Trump in a mediagenic bundle: mistreatment of women, fears over Roe, white male privilege, every tidbit of identity politics teed up. And when idea emerged really “credible” cases had multiple accusers, the always-reliable Rowan Farrow dug around until he found another. Michael Avenatti, the Fagin-like wrangler of Trump-era accusers, was unleashed. He did not disappoint, phoning The View the afternoon before Ford’s testimony to accept congratulations for finding a victim (again with no evidence or corroboration; 64 people who knew Kavanaugh well in high school say they have no idea who the accuser is) who upped the accusations against Kavanaugh to gang rape.Alongside, Politico called Kavanaugh a liar for claiming he was a virgin in high school (Kavanaugh re-confirmed his virginity as a senior today) and thus questioned his credibility on all things. A new witness appeared then disappeared. Two men claimed they were the ones who assaulted Ford. Third-party hearsay accusations made headlines. Rawstory libeled by association the attorney Republicans hired to question Ford. Mark Judge, a supposed witness to the Ford assault who actually exculpated Kavanaugh, was smeared as a drug and sex fiend. Yale was painted as Sodom.
The counter-narrative that this was a Democratic set-up, with Ford as an unwitting victim of that, too, is all of this emerged organically and righteously, after decades, albeit right on time. The accusers were never compelled to speak up by civic duty during Kavanaugh’s years in the White House. Or when he worked with Special Counsel Ken Starr and was looked into by Bill’s Clinton’s supporters doing opposition research. Or during the confirmation hearings that seated him as a lifetime appointee on the Court of Appeals. Or during his original hearings a week or so ago, including by Dianne Feinstein, who already had the information from Ford literally in hand. And none of the assaults, including ten “gang rape” parties, ever resulted in even one complaint by a parent who noticed her child come home in the condition someone who was drugged and raped by multiple men would be in. And the FBI, which conducted six full background checks on Kavanaugh over his decades of government employment, just plain missed it all.In the end, everyone is going to believe what they want to believe. It is unclear a single mind was changed today, as it is equally likely not a single mind today was open to change. Something terrible happened to Christine Blasey Ford when she was in high school, there seems little doubt, but it is quite unclear that that also involved Brett Kavanaugh.
Ford, despite her doctorate, came off as almost naive, claiming not to know what exculpatory evidence was, saying she didn’t understand why people encouraged her to hire a lawyer before going public, testifying she didn’t know why she took a polygraph test and had no idea who paid for it. She said she did not know how her lawyers, one a Democratic regular recommended to her by Feinstein, were paid. She appeared a bit mystified by the vast forces swirling around her, and seeming to believe, a modern-day Mr. Smith, the system would work and honorable people would empower her, not use her. As the day ends and we move into the nightly news cycle, no one in America will have the conversation they need to about whether the Democrats’ ends justify their means.
The final question goes beyond what happens to Kavanaugh. Will the same strategy the Democrats ran and lost on in 2016 — Trump and his people are pigs, vote for someone else — serve them any better in November than it did this week?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Requiem for Justice: “Credible Accusation” and Brett Kavanaugh
Without the votes to reject Brett Kavanaugh, and after a failed Spartacus stunt or two, a strategy ripe for 2018 emerged– he’s a witch! How do we know he’s a witch? Just see how vehemently he denies it!Well, maybe not a witch, that’s so 17th century. But a rapist is 2018, where a Resistance-charged #MeToo mob can be convinced denial is proof of guilt and evidence is unnecessary.
(This is published before the testimony of Professor Ford and Judge Kavanaugh on September 27)
Though we will somehow move on from Kavanaugh no matter the ending of his confirmation, those problems do not go away gently. Like those claiming it’s great news the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies, allowing non-progressives’ free speech rights to be dumped in the trash, claiming because Kavanaugh’s confirmation wasn’t a trial anything goes – particularly the weaponized use of “credible accusations” — is making us incapable of rational participation in civic life.“Credible accusation” is not a legal standard. But in 2018 politics “credible” has become a pseudo-standard with enormous power handed essentially to a mob buttressed by traditional and social media, especially when coupled with another new hashtag standard, #BelieveWomen (morphing into the more dramatic #BelieveSurvivors.) They are meant in the best of intentions to correct injustices of the past. They are used now under the worst of intentions as political weapons. No past mistakes are resolved by defining credibility as an emotional reaction to an accuser’s story, twisted for partisan political ends.
How partisan this all is is made clear when the new rules are applied only in cases of sexual assault. We are not admonished to believe women are more accurate witnesses in income tax fraud cases, even against white male Republicans. We are not told to believe women face no challenges of politically motivated accusations around shoplifting incidents. We are not admonished to believe women are incapable of lying, misremembering, exaggerating or making a mistake in water rights disputes.
This all allows a unitary actor declared “credible” by default (there seems to be no allowance for a non-credible accusation of sexual assault in 2018) to initiate harm simply by pointing a finger. It really is conceived by progressives as just that easy: “Even if it wouldn’t support a criminal conviction or civil liability, a merely credible allegation is enough to disqualify him,” wrote the New York Times.
And when the public tires of the one accuser, dig around until you find another. Send Michael Avenatti, the Fagin-like wrangler of Trump-era accusers, to round up as many as needed. Without the need for corroboration, they are not hard to find in bulk. Under the Kavanaugh standards, nearly any person can destroy anyone among tens of thousands of people they went to high school or college alongside of, or ever worked with. Not convinced? In the comments below, leave the details of your next scheduled job interview. And then be prepared to prove you were not in a specific room four decades ago if you want the job, because someone might make a call.
Of course these are confirmation hearings, not a trial, some say, gleeful the written rules of law don’t apply and they are free to create new standards and expedient practices to fit the needs of the moment. But that is a gross misunderstanding of the “rule of law” which will haunt America past Kavanaugh.
Like free speech, fairness, and justice, rule of law is a philosophy that underlies a just society, not merely something partially codified in dusty books. Rule of law is a way of living together under a known set of standards, equally applied, with changes broadly supported. Things like the accuser rightly bears the burden of proof. Jobs, respect, property, and freedoms are not taken away by accusation. Claims of innocence are not treated as proof of guilt.
In Kavanaugh’s case, no evidence has been presented other than the accusations themselves. Whether written to a Congressperson, told to a therapist, or mumbled to a friend, in the end the circle is a circle that points back to a single person, the accuser herself. That’s repetition, not corroboration. Kavanaugh stated the events did not happen. For the past four decades there was no “she said” until a handful of Democratic senators forced Kavanaugh to deliver a “he said.”
With Kavanaugh, his unambiguous denials are by definition not credible, as the inverse of Believe Accusers is to Disbelieve the Accused. Kavanaugh has been repeatedly asked for more details, somehow a more persuasive denial, of something he says never happened. The task set before him was to prove a negative, then do it again when a new accuser was produced with an even vaguer scenario from years ago. Give us more details of the trip to Paris you never took!
We were warned. Franz Kafka, in The Trial, has his main character, known only as K, taken to jail without ever being told what his crime might have been. “I’m not guilty,” said K. “There’s been a mistake.” “That is how the guilty speak,” replied the priest counseling him.
It seemed any defense at all was wrong. “Though Kavanaugh has been careful not to slime Ford, his denial of the incident impugns her anyway,” wrote the Atlantic. When asked if there was anything a truly innocent Kavanaugh could do to prove his innocence, Senator Tim Kaine replied: “That’s kind of very hypothetical.” Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post claimed it didn’t really matter what Kavanaugh said, it wasn’t even in his hands: “It’s not simply that Kavanaugh must be convincing — Christine Blasey Ford has to seem unconvincing.” Matthew Dowd at ABC took that even further and claimed it didn’t matter what either party testified, simply that “Let’s believe the she… For 250 years we have believed the he in these scenarios. Enough is enough.”
Reason and judgment become subordinate to a social and political agenda. The point is to take advantage of alleged victim-hood before it’s been proven, to use assumed victim-hood to shut down questioning whether there even is a victim. In this mindset Kavanaugh should have been finished months ago when the first accusation appeared anonymously, or maybe it was really all over in 1982 that very night at the high school party, and the rest of this, including his decades on the bench, has been unnecessary epilogue.
It all tracks with a dire situation in our society where people are increasingly unable or unwilling to listen to different viewpoints as forces inside America have succeeded in turning people against the once-sacred ideal of free speech. Now, speech, fairness, and justice are no longer goals or ideals, just tools to be manipulated expediently to serve political ends. “That’s offensive!” (or sexist, or racist) is an accusation, but it is also understood as evidence itself of the truth of the accusation; why would the accuser be motivated to lie? Aren’t all opinions valid, even if the opinion becomes an accusation? How can a self-absorbed individual leave mental space for her own thoughts to be… wrong? The accusation is enough to demand resolution. Take that and expose it to shrewd Democratic politicians and you get the Kavanaugh confirmation process. And likely the next one, too.
This is very dangerous territory for a nation claiming to fear the loss of the rule of law. In the worst days of racial injustice, evidence-free accusations of rape from a white woman sent groups of black men to be lynched, her testimony as unquestionable as virtue itself. During the McCarthy era, mere accusations of communist ties were used to destroy political enemies; questioning that meant you were unpatriotic. Scholars find evidence accusations during the infamous Salem witchcraft trials were used to settle land disputes, with questioning the accusers seen as a direct affront to God. In my time in Iraq, an accusation of al Qaeda affiliation from a tribal leader being courted by the U.S. could bring a Special Forces night raid down on a neighbor of his choosing. There are dark lessons here.
The Democrats have managed in about a week to take the very serious business of #MeToo and turn it into a partisan weapon. In the extreme, they propose no common humanity, simply a society of rapists and their enablers, and victims and their allies. Kavanaugh, the recent process demanded, is more than unqualified for the Court; he is a rapist and liar, unqualified as a human being. Which side will you vote for? It might create a Blue Wave, or it might drive people to vote Republican as a matter of self-defense, more soul-crushing negative partisanship to the body politic.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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