Why God is Laughing at Kavanaugh
(article from Politico)
God, it’s sometimes said, has an awesome sense of humor; if so, the Almighty must have been vastly entertained by the turns of fortune on display this past weekend in American politics
Not amused, to be clear, by the sad story of what a middle-aged university professor recalls of an ugly night in high school with future Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and how it echoed in her mind for years. An uproar over this allegation Sunday pivoted quickly from the first question—what’s true?—to an equally vexing one: What is even fair to be debating some 36 years after the fact?
It is on this point that the cosmos may be having a laugh not just at Kavanaugh’s expense but at many other people’s. After decades of competitive moralizing and situational ethics—in which every accuser in due course becomes the accused, and anyone riding a high horse can expect to be bucked off—even the concept of fairness in American politics seemingly is defunct.
Three decades of remorseless ideological and cultural combat—over Robert Bork, over Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, over Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, over Bush v. Gore, and, at last and above all, over Donald Trump—have made the question virtually irrelevant.
Fairness is rooted in the idea of principles, precedent, proportionality. Few people in American life witnessed at closer range than Kavanaugh the modern reality that when things really matter—in the way that the balance of the Supreme Court matters—all these fine notions matter less than the cold, hard exercise of power.
So here was Kavanaugh—who spent his early thirties as a Ken Starr warrior pursuing Bill Clinton for the political and legal implications of his most intimate moral failings—now in his early fifties facing a political crisis over disturbingly vivid, passionately contested, decades-old allegations about Kavanaugh’s own possible moral failings. (read more)
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/09/17/kavanaugh-supreme-court-ford-sexual-assault-219983
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