If Chuck Grassley keeps pushing Ford’s Republican Senators’ deadline back day by day, it will be a very long time before we hear from her and possibly even longer before Kavanaugh gets confirmed. Actually, the confirmation along with the SCOTUS seat sees to be slipping through the GOP’s hands. Oh, and where did I get the 293 day figure? That is how long Merrick Garland’s nomination was held up by Mitch McConnell and the Republicans.
I’ve never been vengeful, but Michael Moore quoted Steve Bannon the other day that “we”, meaning the alt.right goes for head shots while the Democrats have pillow fights. While to say “a head shot on Kavanaugh” sounds like an unseemly threat, we could ask the Democrats to at least put on the boxing gloves.
I’ve heard some of Kavanaugh’s testimony and of Ford’s testimony. She was believable but Kavanaugh could have rebutted what she said, allowing the Republicans to go forward and secure his confirmation. Instead, Kavanaugh took the Trump route: intimidation, bluster, braggadocio, petulance…. everything we associate with a spoiled frat boy who has fears. Now, that’s just my impression from a bit of exposure to him. I’d like to take time tonight to listen to the observations and reactions of sober pundits, experts, and public intellectuals. I suppose I’ll blog more on this tomorrow.
Added late this evening: Nicole Wallace talked about Brett Kavanaugh’s daughters praying for Christina Ford and how she saw in Kavanaugh’s testimony today a side of him she had never seen in 6 years of working with him (she’s a Republican – or was). She touched on the disaster that Ford’s life has become now (I’d like to see one troll who threatened her and her family caught, arrested, tried amid the glare of lights and cameras, and sentenced to jail, just one, and to smear the face of such a person with the feces of public humiliation. Just to let the others know what creatures they are, hiding under a rock). And she said that this is the human carnage Trump promised us in his inaugural speech. It is the carnage his supporters want to heap on the rest of us to make up for the daily humiliations they encounter. They are echoing Willy Loman: Attention must be paid!
Sept. 28 High drama. Nothing higher as Jeff Flake got up out of his seat and walked by Chris Coons, motioning him out of the chamber for a tete-a-tete. When he came back, the Republicans were lost: Flake sided with the Democrats in wanting an FBI investigation of these charges. They say that when Coons was told of Flake’s earlier decision to vote Kavanaugh out and onto the floor for a vote, he uttered expletive deleted and cried. When he came out of the Senate hearing room after Flake told the committee he would vote Kavanaugh out but only if there is a one week FBI investigation, he cried again. I wrote a friend to tell him to watch The Last Word where Lawrence shows an unprecedented bit of filming from chambers: one cameraman kept his lens on Flake the whole time, catching the agony in the man. Flake later said the encounter with the two protesters at the elevator did not motivate his change, but nobody believes that.
This is why conservatives hate protestors [yes, once with -er and once with -or]
Jessica Valenti and Christina Beltran formed a panel with Joy Reid on the Rachel Maddow show and uttered some emblazoned in our times: White Male Rage, a dying world (of White male privilege), and, the words of one of the two women confronting Flake at an elevator taking him to the hearings, will stand highest: Look at me when I’m talking to you!”. The other woman was Anna Maria Archila.