Hearing What You Want to Hear

The Hearing: One cried, ranted and was belligerent, the other was composed, consistent and impressive. The first one may well make it on to the Supreme Court.  The second one now serves as an inspiration for women, and quite a few men, everywhere.  Speaking first, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, the composed one, trembled sometimes but was soft spoken and unfailingly polite in the face of persistent, and sometimes inappropriate, questions from Republican surrogate Rachel Mitchell, the sex crimes prosecutor who stood in for the white, mostly too old Republican Senators who were so afraid that they would sound like insensitive buffoons that they contracted out their responsibility.  Dr. Blasey effectively destroyed any doppelganger defense by saying she was 100% confident that Judge Kavanaugh was the person who had tried to rape her years ago at a high school party.  You couldn’t help but feel her pain as she explained that it was her peculiar demand that her husband install an extra front door on their house that led the two to couples therapy where she revealed the details of her attack to her therapist and her husband.  The most haunting part of her testimony was her statement that the thing she remembered most about the attack was the sound of Kavanaugh and his friend and co-attacker Mark Judge laughing.  After her lengthy time on the hotseat, time frequently eased by supportive questions by the Democratic Senators who used their time allotments to drop countless documents about sex abuse into the record,  it looked like she might have swung a few Republicans to her side but that was before Kavanaugh’s time at the mic.  He came out swinging, blamed a toxic political environment for the attack on his virtue, demanded sympathy for the trauma that he and his family were going through and, taking a page from the Trump playbook, also blamed residual frustration over Clinton’s 2016 election loss for the way he, an accomplished Yale grad, was being treated.  He dismissed any suggestion that he had ever acted inappropriately with any woman, admitted to loving beer, really loving beer, but insisted that any suggestion that he’d ever gotten drunk enough to do anything violent was ridiculous even though his aggressive posture made him sound a lot like the type of guy who would beat up a woman or two when drunk. Has anyone interviewed his wife about that?  He went so far as to turn a question about his drinking back at Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, asking her if she’d ever had a blackout from too much drinking.  Even he knew he’d gone to far with that one, he apologized later during a break.  Senator Klobuchar’s father is an alcoholic, she doesn’t have a drinking problem but is pretty good at detecting drinking problems in others, and based on her expression, it looked like Kavanaugh’s behavior was all too familiar to her.  Republican Senator Lindsey Graham also came out swinging, he fired Republican surrogate Rachel Mitchell on the spot chiefly because she started to ask Kavanaugh some probing questions.  Graham became Kavanaugh’s  leading advocate in the hearing room and outside in the Senate hallways during meeting breaks.  When approached in the Senate hall by one protester who revealed to him that she’d been raped and that like Dr. Blasey she only remembered selected details of her experience, he got caught on camera crassly snapping that she should report her attack to the cops as he stormed past.  Graham, who may well be auditioning for a cabinet position,  Attorney General comes immediately to mind, is now Trump’s number one wingman; John McCain would be so proud.  One or more Democratic Senators pressed Kavanaugh to request an FBI investigation, one that could clear up the inconsistencies between his and Dr. Blasey’s testimony, and each time he pushed back hard.  Likewise he dissed the value of polygraph tests, making it clear that unlike Blasey, he had no intention of going that route and given his anger management problem, that’s probably a good decision for him, not so much for the rest of us.  When asked about Mark Judge’s book about his alcoholic high school years and the inclusion of a reference in that book to a Bart O’Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh refused to comment instead saying that those questions should be directed to Mark Judge, a snide response given that Republican Chairman Grassley refused to subpoena Judge, or any other witnesses, to testify. 

What’s Next?  By the end of Kavanaugh’s testimony, it was clear that most of the Republicans in the room, with the possible exception of the conflicted Senator Flake, are firmly on team Kavanaugh and that all of the Democrats remain firmly on team Blasey.  Kavanaugh’s fate now hangs in the hands of Republican Senators Flake, Murkowski and Collins.  Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s name has also been thrown into that mix but it’s likely that he’s more a follower than a leader, that he, along with some of the other Red state Democrats, will vote with whichever side is going to win anyway. Republican Senator Corker who had once been viewed by only the most delusional as a possible no vote announced last night that he will be voting for Kavanaugh.  The three swing Senators and Manchin held their own behind closed doors meeting last night before heading out while Trump, the teetotaler, celebrated Kavanaugh’s bombastic testimony, probably with a round of Diet Cokes. The Judiciary Committee vote is scheduled to take place this morning at 9:30, with another procedural vote on the schedule for tomorrow.  Senate Majority Leader McConnell will probably find a way to get the Kavanaugh nomination to the Senate floor even if Flake, the only fence sitter on the Judiciary Committee, abstains or votes no.  Providing further evidence of the nation’s divisiveness and the absurdity of the moment, late yesterday, after Kavanaugh tried to explain away the definition of the term Devil’s Triangle by saying that it was a reference to a benign drinking game, a Republican staffer edited the term’s more nefarious sexual connotation out of Wikipedia.  Just another one of those alternative facts.  One more thing, special mention goes to Vermont’s Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, who proved that some old white guys do get it, he said that he believes all of the three women who’ve come forward as he called for an FBI investigation.