The Ford-Kavanaugh Hearings Will Be Remembered as a Grotesque Display of Patriarchal Resentment
Judge Brett Kavanaugh is almost certainly going to be appointed the next member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Whatever Christine Blasey Ford said in her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, and whatever Kavanaugh said in his, and however credible and convincing either one seemed, none of it was going to affect this virtual inevitability. The Republicans, if they stick together, have the necessary votes. A veneer of civility made it seem as if the senators were questioning Ford and Kavanaugh to get to the truth of whether Kavanaugh, as a drunk teen-ager, attended a party where he pinned Ford to a bed and sexually assaulted her, thirty-six years ago. But thats not what the hearing was designed to explore. At the time of this writing, composed in the eighth hour of the grotesque historic activity happening in the Capitol Hill chamber, it should be as plain as day that what we witnessed was the patriarchy testing how far its politics of resentment can go. And there is no limit.
Dressed in a blue suit, taking the oath with nervous solemnity, Ford gave us a bristling sense of déjà vu. Why suffer through the annihilation if its not going to matter? Ford had told the Washington Post when she first went public with her allegations. With the word annihilation she conjured the spectre of Anita Hill, who, in her testimony against Clarence Thomas, in 1991, was basically berated over an exhausting two-day period, and diagnosed, by the senators interrogating her, with erotomania and a case of man-eating professionalism. Fords experienceshaped by the optics of the #MeToo moment, by her whiteness and country-club rootswas different. The Republicans on the committee, likely coached by some consultant, did not overtly smear Ford. Some pretended, condescendingly, to extend her empathy. Senator Orrin Hatch, who once claimed that Hill had lifted parts of her harassment allegations against Thomas from The Exorcist, called Ford pleasing, an attractive witness. Instead of questioning her directly, the Republicans hired Rachel Mitchell, a female prosecutor specializing in sex crimes, to serve as their proxy. Mitchells fitful, sometimes aimless questioning did the ugly work of softening the Republican assault on Fords testimony. Ford, in any case, was phenomenal, a witness and expert in one, and it seemed, for a moment following her testimony, that the nation might be unable to deny her credibility.
Then Kavanaugh came in, like an eclipse. He made a show of being unprepared. Echoing Clarence Thomas, he claimed that he did not watch his accusers hearing. (Earlier, it was reported that he did.) I wrote this last night, he said, of his opening statement. No one has seen this draft. Alternating between weeping and yelling, he exemplified the conservatives embrace of bluster and petulance as rhetorical tools. Going on about his harmless love of beer, spinning unbelievably chaste interpretations of what was, by all other accounts, his youthful habit of blatant debauchery, he was as Trumpian as Trump himself, louder than the loudest on Fox News. He evaded questions; he said that the allegations brought against him were revenge on behalf of the Clintons; he said, menacingly, that what goes around comes around. When Senator Amy Klobuchar calmly asked if he had ever gotten blackout drunk, he retorted, Have you? (He later apologized to her.)
There was, in this performance, not even a hint of the sagacity one expects from a potential Supreme Court Justice. More than presenting a convincing rebuttal to Fords extremely credible account, Kavanaughand Hatch, and Lindsey Grahamseemed to be exterminating, live, for an American audience, the faint notion that a massively successful white man could have his birthright questioned or his character held to the most basic type of scrutiny. In the course of Kavanaughs hearing, Mitchell basically disappeared. Republican senators apologized to the judge, incessantly, for what he had suffered. There was talk of his reputation being torpedoed and his life being destroyed. This is the nature of the conspiracy against white male powerthe forces threatening it will always somehow be thwarted at the last minute.
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Guilded Lilly
(5,591 posts)multiple times showing a deeply immature psyche and belligerent nature.
He is a self-aggrandizing alcohol craving frat boy reeking of easily triggered petulant entitlement and a walking worst case scenario of a loose cannon misogynistic punk.
Off his fing nut. Obviously.
It is also obvious that every old fart, sneering lunatic white male Republican thug on the Judicial
Committee will ignore the twisted persona of this blubbering, emotional train wreck of a man in favor of their anti-Democracy power obsession and send our nation into a devastating dismantling spiral of
human rights hell.
Females and non-whites prepare to be damned for a generation.
SWBTATTReg
(22,124 posts)trying to figure out how to stay in power even longer than they should. How many of them are in their 80s already? Isn't it time that they get voted out? The whole thing was like an Animal House episode. Hard to watch, especially when they were abjectly apologizing to the candidate Kav so lavishly. Sickening.
I've never heard someone like beer so much in my life either. What's the problem with this guy Kav?
BeckyDem
(8,361 posts)to manipulate the arena. He was a blubbering insufferable privileged rich white guy hanging on to his turf.
This is terrible for America if he gets seated on the court, he should be thrown off the one he is on now.