Kavanaugh, Reality TV

In the Kavanaugh hearing yesterday (9/27/18) the most important question was the very last one of the day, asked by Kamala Harris. It probably should have been the first asked of Judge Kavanaugh. Question to Brett Kavanaugh: “Did you watch Dr. Ford’s testimony”, answer: “No”. 

It immediately begs the question of why did the Senate Majority refuse to allow Dr. Ford to testify after Kavanaugh, as she had requested. The (understandable) reason given was that a person should have the right to hear an accusation in order to respond to it. That obviously was not necessary. 

The eyes of the Press had shown that Kavanaugh spent 9 hours in the White House preparing for this testimony.  Regretfully no Democrat asked him what that preparation was for. How many ways can you say no I didn’t do it? 

In hindsight the obvious strategy had nothing to do with the accusation.  Brett Kavanaugh, Senate Republicans, and Trump did not care what Dr. Ford had to say. Frankly, I think she could have provided photographs and it wouldn’t have made a difference. The strategy devised during those nine hours was out of Trump’s favorite playbook; be loud, be angry, attack, be the victim, and (apparently) be unhinged. 

Whether Kavanaugh might have chosen that tact on his own we’ll never know. Lindsey Graham shamefully (and with equally prepared theatrics) only made this farce more palpable. Graham pointed at Kavanaugh and yelled "YOU HAVE NOTHING TO APOLOGIZE FOR, NOTHING TO APOLOGIZE FOR". It should be noted that an apology never came close to passing Kavanaugh's lips.

They screamed political foul from the first words leaving Kavanaugh’s mouth. 

Republicans and Kavanaugh claimed Democrats conspired to manipulate the timing on a process that HAS NO DEADLINES.  Kavanaugh implied Left-Wing conspiracies headed by the Clintons!! It could have been a Rush Limbaugh broadcast.

This was Reality TV in every respect …except one; the testimony of Dr. Ford. 

Dr. Ford was beyond reproach and totally believable. I believe her and would be at a loss why anyone wouldn’t.  I might have considered that Judge Kavanaugh does not remember the incident, if he had suggested that possibility, but now such is irrelevant. 

His pattern of behavior as a younger man was flagrant, obvious, and consistent with Dr. Ford’s testimony. However, for him to shout thunderously that exposure of this behavior in his youth (which he claims did not happen) has “destroyed me and family…permanently” is absurd on its face. Even with this personal history he has risen to second highest level in the American judiciary, a position of immense power held by few. If he should feel so destroyed it is clearly subjective, possibly from guilt or regret.

Kavanaugh and Senate Republicans either did not realize or did not care that every attack they leveled at Democrats or the accusations was an attack on the only truly neutral party at that hearing…Dr. Ford. Democrats on the Committee had obviously caucused and decided to hone in on the refusal by the Majority and Trump to have the FBI investigate. As a result they appeared to barely listened to Kavanaugh’s testimony or observe his bizarre behavior. For the TV audience, they seem to cower before Graham’s tirade. 

In the end there were two take-a-ways from the hearing. One was the testimony of an honest woman who had done her best, at great personal cost, to do the right thing for her Country. The other was the testimony of a man who demonstrated the absolute opposite of what we should expect in a Supreme Court Judge; emotional, erratic, political, and (sadly to say) unstable. 

If I were a Senator and knew virtually nothing of this nomination other than hearing Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony yesterday, I wouldn’t let him get within a stone’s throw of the Supreme Court.   

Women: Pay Attention to History

As a white American male and a member of a privileged class (with 200+ years of history behind it), it is instructive to imagine how I would feel if suddenly the powers of business and government were continually manipulated to act against my best interest…because I was a white male.  I would feel defensive, and I hope I would have the courage to react furiously and definitively.

Women have faced this discrimination for centuries. Yet somehow too many men in power today think women have arrived, the prejudice is over, and everything is just fine the way it is.

The Republican effort to coronate Brett Kavanaugh to SCOTUS demonstrates just such an attitude. It caps hundreds of years of suppression that have been baked into this culture. If you’re a woman reading this I don’t care if you’re Conservative, if you’re a Republican, if you love guns, if you are repelled by abortion, if you love your man, or any homespun consideration, you should be angrily opposing this nomination.

If you have a daughter or care about young American girls at all you should be livid.

This next Supreme Court Justice will be the Nation’s 114^th. Out of that 114 only 4 have been women and half of them confirmed only in the past 9 years.  Women comprise an absurdly small percentage of the Federal Judiciary, about 20%.  However, that still says that there are about 500 Federal female judges out there.  Are we supposed to believe there isn’t one qualified, moderately Conservative woman in that pool that Republican’s couldn’t find?

They couldn’t find one because they weren’t looking. The token inclusion of Amy Barrett to Trump’s “short list” was simply his version of reality TV applied to reality…meaningless.

Obama appointed 268 judges to the Bench out of which about 40% were women. If you add minority men the percentage approaches 60%. To date, of Trump’s appointments 72% have been white men. It would be too easy just to blame Trump. He is an intellectually challenged and clueless President who takes his lead from those who pay him homage. This is simply the old boy network in action, and I’m sure that suits Trump just fine. They had been feeling a bit neutered with Obama’s Presidency.

Brett Kavanaugh is just another boy in the network. Did he, as a 17 year old Prep School student, attack a 15 year old girl at a party where underage drinking was extensive?  Of course he did. For an accomplished woman with extensive degrees and a professional career to risk it all, including her request for a FBI interview in which lying would be a felony, makes no conceivable sense unless it occurred. Her courage dwarfs those of her adversaries, included Kavanaugh and the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Ultimately, the implied defense by Kavanaugh, Trump, and Senate Republicans will be simply that Dr. Ford is a woman. It worked for Clarence Thomas.

Just the fact that Kavanaugh’s response was to deny it outright instead of arguing the circumstance shows an elevated sense of white male superiority. Add to that his rulings, notably of the 17 year old immigrant girl seeking an abortion last year where he used his power to manipulate the system against her, his attitude toward women is as baked in as it is in our culture.

Please, women of America…pay attention.  Too many of you are not. It makes no difference if he truly loves his wife and daughters or coaches a girl’s soccer team. It makes no difference!!

History should be a continual alarm that keeps going off for women (in the US and around the world). It should keep going off no matter how many times women hit the snooze button.  Women comprise at least half the population. They comprise a majority of college graduates. Their labors underpin economic stability equally with men. Yet they are still treated as a support class by too many men of power.

I am in my 60s and I only have to go back to my mother’s generation to find a time when women in America had no right to vote. The myriad of rules and outright laws that have restricted and underrepresented women in this Country, some confirmed by our Judicial System, have been whittled away over relatively recent years, but only that…whittled.  Status quo should not be an option.

Women of America, hold onto your values be they Conservative, Liberal, or in-between. But rage against a history that has categorized you and your daughters as something less than what you are.

Who Are the Real "Pros"?

With abortion and Roe v Wade surfacing as a political issue again for this coming mid-term election, and the decision regarding Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation, I thought my November 2015 essay was worth reposting:

"Christian, right-to-life Conservatives promote abortions." Wouldn’t that be an interesting concept to see addressed in a serious yet proactive way? That it seems contradictory only adds irony to reality.

Regrettably, abortion has become the biggest social issue political candidates exploit, even though the issue is simply not political, nor should it be. I know good people who will support politicians and vote on this one issue alone, their rationality virtually disabled by emotion and manipulative rhetoric.

The subject of abortion as a significant political issue is nearly unique to the United States among developed countries, regardless that the personal conclusions about abortion exist everywhere.  A primary reason is that those who influence the Conservative electorate in the US have successfully linked the right to choose an abortion as a desire to have an abortion.

 You will rarely if ever hear an activist, "right-to-life" Conservative refer to someone as supporting a “right to choose”.  Instead you will hear the term pro-abortion.  They have even been successful in having the media divide the debate between “anti-” and “pro-”.

The great irony is that, in fact, it is your Christian Conservative who is unwittingly pro-abortion and your right-to-choose liberal who seeks a path toward reducing abortions.  Why?

It is a fact that abortion has been an active human endeavor at least throughout recorded history, if not before.  Look it up.

The world’s historical record shows that from ancient times through the 19^th century when and where abortion was occasionally made illegal was not due to some ethical valuation of life. It reflected the desire of those in power to manipulate the transfer of wealth or to increase the population of the laboring class. 

In other words, those in power who opposed legal abortion did so in their own self interest.  Not much has changed.  Efforts to make abortion illegal today (or impossible to obtain) affect only the poor or disadvantaged. Even your most diehard Christian-Conservative can’t deny that the wealthy will always have the resources to obtain the procedure in a clean, safe environment. So what really are the anti-abortion group's motives?

No one argues that the emotion which right-to-life activists convey is not real. It is clearly born of the ethics they find compelling given their religious faith.  The question, however, is what this outcry of emotion accomplishing?  It is presented as a love of life (I guess not to be confused with life as it relates to warfare, guns, or capital punishment). 

Yet, wouldn’t it make more sense that their efforts be directed at reducing abortions rather than attempting to purify humanity by making women and doctor’s criminals? But the right-to-life movement is not really interested in reducing abortions or the related potential harm to pregnant women.

Nothing short of a social law on the books will do. They overtly or unconsciously want to promote and satisfy their own personal self-righteousness at the cost of women's lives and increased abortions. They will vote for any politician, no matter how corrupt or unethical, as long as he vows to support their goal.

There are no women who desire an abortion or find it a positive experience.  They don’t get pregnant for the purpose of having an abortion. How refreshing would it be for all participants in this debate to take this fact and mutually find ways of reducing unwanted pregnancies, not even taking into consideration the societal gains from less burdened single women or families. Most of what Planned Parenthood does is just that.

Unfortunately, unwanted pregnancies cannot be reduced without sex education and contraception, two factors Christian-Conservatives often don’t want to address or oppose outright. 

For example; they’ll rile about abortions by African-American women in New York City exceeding live births by the same minority, but never mention the soaring teen pregnancies within that group.  How mindless to think making abortion a crime will stop these girls from getting pregnant.

Just who benefits from tying abortions to acts of sin and criminality?  It is certainly not the unborn in the US, where abortion rates are higher than other western nations with greater abortion availability and acceptance.  Nor is it the disadvantaged pregnant women who are subjected to a system that wrenches from them their self-esteem as they deal with emotional and physical distress.

The great beneficiaries are the Republican politicians who manipulate the issue as a means of garnishing votes for elective office, or at least in the primary process if not general elections. 

An omniscient Christian God could have designed women to lay eggs instead of live births, where wealthy white men could oversee their gestation…but he didn’t.  By design, women have the difficult burden to decide what happens within their own bodies, not Republican politicians or religious zealots.

Perhaps Republicans can kindle Huxley’s Brave New World concept of human hatcheries. The necessary technology isn’t all that far away.  Now there’s a great job for “limited government”. Until that nightmare, Republicans and Christian-Conservatives can continue to facilitate the killing of unplanned and unwanted fetuses which their own self-interest forces to take place.

Jack

“Satan is a liberal, anything goes, no rules, no

laws, no borders, no evil, murder is encouraged,

law and order is condemned, can you believe

any sane human would be a liberal??? NO WAY.”

Jack (I won't give his last name) shared these comments on Facebook reacting to the posting of a generic statement from nolabels.org on the need for National unity. It called for ending “political polarization” and “breaking the gridlock in Congress”…pretty standard stuff in this day in age.

Jack fits a stereotype (white male over 60 – his picture is below), but his comments shouldn’t be dismissed or marginalized by either Conservatives or Liberals simply because they express an extreme position. If his words were a picture, we would be wrong to focus solely on the colors.

I believe if pressed most Conservatives would not defend the notion that Liberals promote murder, that Liberals advocate the elimination of laws and regulations (they’re usually attacked for the opposite), that they want the abolishment of all boarders, or that Satan, a religious construct, has a political affiliation.  Is God really a Conservative?

Yet even then I think a majority of those politically Conservative would support Jack. They would because he represents what they feel. He articulates at a primary level the fear they fear. Jack essentially mirrors their emotions.

How did this fear and the hatred that has grown from that fear become so pervasive? Looking back through my generation I can remember that Liberal and Conservative positions were argued passionately, including their impact on foreign affairs.  However, I cannot recall a time in the last century when the supporters of an opposing issue were desperately feared.

Political party affiliation wasn’t limited by philosophical leanings as it is today. The socially liberal Republicans prior to the 1990s are now not only publicly extinct; they are viewed as never existing. That is hard to believe. The joke that says a Republican Congressman is anti-abortion until his girlfriend gets pregnant has real teeth.

I firmly believe the beginning of this divide began specifically in August 1987.

Analysis after World War II concluded that the totalitarian axis powers (notably Germany) were able to exist at all because of their control of mass media, a new 20^th century phenomenon. They concluded that unchallenged information made possible the horrors we can barely grasp today. It answered the question, “how could any nation let this happen?”.

In 1949 the US responded to this reality by having the new FCC enact the Fairness Doctrine , which mandated that in order to be licensed to broadcast, a station had to provide competing views on issues of national interest. This doctrine stood in place with practically no complaint by the public for 38 years (and through 6 Presidents) before Ronald Reagan succumbed to pressures in his seventh year. He ended it in August 1987 and soon after vetoed Congress’s attempt to make it law.  In less than a year, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk began their non-stop, dogmatic, hate-filled rhetoric…the seeds for making Jack who he is today.

The Republicans are a minority party, but they have been finely crafted by the circumstances that have evolved over the past 30 years. They have become attuned to the necessities of obtaining and maintaining power. They only needed money and Rush Limbaugh (figuratively speaking).

They have fed and been fed by the fears this new era of echo communication has engendered. In order to maintain power they need to keep their entire Party in lockstep. They do this by supporting the communication that keeps their Conservative minority (the famous Trump base) in lockstep, then using that base to keep individual Republican feet to the flame or face losing elections.

They need Jack to be afraid and to hate. It is their mother’s milk.

There are easily discernible reasons why Trump is as he is, even medical ones (take 20 minutes to read about people with the relatively rare condition known as a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, it explains everything). It is less understandable why intelligent men and women in Congress cannot see the danger his Office presents to this Nation.

These Republican leaders in Washington are so compromised by their desire for power and the wealthy that finance them, they cannot confront the Jacks of the Nation, no matter how ludicrous and destructive Jack’s fears are.

With Woodward’s account and the declaration of another Trump official, the instability of Donald Trump (something painfully obvious since he excoriated his inauguration coverage by, what we now know as, the “enemy of the people”) has now been sounded publically. That bell cannot be un-rung.  It all depends on Republicans in Congress and, to a lesser extent, this coming election November 6^th  to stop the bleeding.

If 3 Republican Senators said they would not vote for Kavanaugh’s confirmation in favor of a bipartisan panel of Republicans and Democrats to produce a list of acceptable Conservative nominees (in the style of Anthony Kennedy) that Trump had to accept, it would change the entire trajectory of Washington governance. It won’t happen. But the irony is that it would be in the Republican Party’s best interest if it did.

What do you think Jack?