Leonard Pitts does a good job of walking through the steps to arrive at this sorry destination.
Here, then, is where we stand: After supporting senatorial candidate Roy Moore (a credibly accused child molester) Donald Trump (a confessed perpetrator of sexual assault) has nominated to the Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh (a credibly accused attempted rapist) who would, if confirmed, serve alongside Clarence Thomas (a credibly accused sexual harasser).
It’s a confluence of facts that speaks painfully and pointedly to just how unseriously America takes men’s predations against women. You might disagree, noting that the Senate Judiciary Committee has asked Ford to testify. But if history is any guide, that will prove to be a mere formality — a sop to appearances — before the committee recommends confirmation.
And, as Pitts reminds us, Christine Blasey Ford didn’t want this. She understood, and understands, the damage that speaking up will do to her life, as well as her friends and family. Donald Trump believes that if he gets Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, that’s a win. Blasey Ford knows that there is no win here. Not for her. No matter what the outcome. She tried to handle this anonymously. Then quietly. But neither of those things was allowed.
This concern for fairness to Kavanaugh is touching and all, but Ford says surviving a rape attempt “derailed me substantially” for years. She did poorly in school and was unable to have healthy relationships with men. She has since struggled with symptoms of anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder and had to undergo psychotherapy. In other words, she’s been forced to grapple with the alleged incident, even if Kavanaugh has not.
And now she had to deal with one of the worst events of her life again, in public and in front of hostile questioners who aren’t just judging the truth of her words, but looking for any excuse to invalidate her statements and experience and worth.
Michael Stern wonders why Mike Judge, the only known witness to the alleged assault, isn’t being called to testify.
In a recent interview, Ford claimed that Mark Judge, a close friend of Kavanaugh’s, was an eyewitness to the sexual assault. According to Dr Ford, Mark Judge observed the assault and drunkenly jumped on top of Kavanaugh while he was assaulting her, giving Ford the opportunity to escape.
To a prosecutor, learning of a third-party eyewitness to an alleged sexual assault is a boon. Apparently, this additional evidence has had the opposite effect on the Senate judiciary committee.
Rather than embracing testimony from Judge as a means of finding the truth about Ford’s allegation, the Republican Senate judiciary committee chairman, Charles Grassley, has scheduled a hearing for Monday and has refused to call Judge as a witness.
Because finding out the truth isn’t the goal. Dismissing Ford quickly and getting back to confirming Kavanaugh no matter what, that’s the goal.
Ruth Marcus asks if we’ve learned nothing since Anita Hill.
Anita Hill’s truthfulness was brutally questioned. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) accused her of “flat-out perjury.” So was her sanity. I recall a fevered phone call from a White House adviser peddling the notion that Hill suffered from “erotomania,” a psychiatric disorder involving romantic delusions. So was her character. “A little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” was the contemptuous assessment of then-conservative, now-liberal activist David Brock.
The mixed-up / doppelganger theory would be this season’s version of “see, the poor woman just isn’t thinking straight.”
Most fundamentally, the all-male panel of senators grilling the Oklahoma law professor about her sexual harassment allegations against then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas demonstrated repeatedly, floridly, how much they just didn’t get it.
They preened about taking such conduct oh so seriously, then failed, time after time, to demonstrate any grasp of real-world workplace power imbalances. How could Hill have failed to speak out about this alleged mistreatment at the time? If Thomas had behaved as abominably as Hill claimed, they kept asking, how could she have followed him from one job to another?
Yeah, and of course the answer is No. And of course this is one of those moments when history doesn’t just echo, it does so while holding up a fun house mirror and a big sign reading “we’ve all been here before.” The only thing that will signal any change from 1991, is a different outcome. Because right now, this remake is staying way too close to the original script.
David Von Drehle on the person most responsible for putting the nation in this position.
Every chip in Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s pile has been shoved into the center of the table. His high-stakes gamble for conservative control of the Supreme Court may be decided in the coming week.
It is a bet he surely thought he would lose in the autumn of 2016. When the conservative hero Justice Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly in his sleep during a Texas hunting trip early that year, then-President Barack Obama wagered that McConnell (Ky.) might have allowed the Republican-led Senate to confirm Judge Merrick Garland to fill the seat. Garland was well liked, philosophically moderate and, as an added enticement for the GOP, pushing 65. He would have been, relatively speaking, a short-timer.
And then Mitch McConnell screwed the president, the senate, democracy, justice and the nation. So that he could screw women and minorities out of decades of hard won progress. Because he is 100 percent asshole.
McConnell’s gamble on stonewalling Garland may have been the key to Trump’s narrow victory. It made the stakes crystal clear for self-professed Christian conservatives who might otherwise have been loath to vote for a boorish former casino owner. However, blocking Garland merely secured the Supreme Court status quo. Instead of losing Scalia’s seat to a liberal, conservatives filled it with Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. That’s no small matter on such a narrowly divided court — but it set the stage for something bigger.
It didn’t set the stakes for anything except for the end of government by law. That it accomplished right readily.
Patti Davis is Ronald Reagan’s daughter, and unlike the plaster saint that Republicans have set in her father’s place, a real person.
Roughly 40 years ago, I showed up at a prominent music executive’s office for an appointment that had been scheduled suspiciously late in the workday. But I wasn’t suspicious. I was instead eager to try to place some of my original songs with artists he represented. One of my songs had appeared on the Eagles album “One of These Nights,” and I was hoping to turn songwriting into a career.
I brought along a cassette tape of my material, but I don’t remember what the executive said about the songs. Nor do I recall what we talked about. I remember the sky turning dark outside the window behind his desk. I remember sensing that people had left the building and we were there alone. …
What happened next, though, is indelible. He crossed the room. There was a dark-green carpet, but his footsteps seemed loud, hard. He was against me, on top of me — so quickly — with his hands under my skirt and his mouth on mine, that I froze. I lay there as he pushed himself inside me. The leather couch stuck to my skin, made noises beneath me. His breath smelled like coffee and stale bread. He didn’t use a condom. I remember leaving afterward, driving home, the night around me glittered with streetlights and alive with people out at dinner or bars. I felt alone, ashamed and disgusted with myself. Why didn’t I get out of there? Why didn’t I push him off? Why did I freeze?
Davis’ story deserves to be read in full, both to appreciate the indignity, violence, and anguish she was made to suffer, the lasting effects of that moment, and her understanding of what it means to remember — when you’ve struggled every day to forget.
Walter Shapiro on what it would mean if Kavanaugh is confirmed after even McConnell warned Trump to pick someone else.
It is possible that McConnell was also concerned about something personal on Kavanaugh’s record in addition to his paper trail from the George W Bush White House. But Trump, whose idea of a “listening tour” is to watch recordings of his own rallies, turned a deaf ear to McConnell’s plea. The selling point for Trump may have been Kavanaugh’s extreme belief that a president (even one who watches Fox News all day) is far too busy to be questioned by an outside investigation.
Now the nomination is teetering on the precipice after Christine Blasey Ford went public Sunday with her allegation that a drunk Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her as a 15-year-old at a high-school party. As for McConnell, whose political career has been a portrait in cynicism, he now faces a choice between trying to save Kavanaugh and trying to save his suddenly imperiled Senate majority.
If Republicans win, Trump will celebrate. And of course, Kavanaugh will have a lifetime seat on the bench, from which he can grab women by the rights all day long. They let you do that when you’re a Supreme Court justice. But Trump may have a hard time understanding why no one else is smiling.
Steve Petrow on Republicans robbing Christine Blasey Ford of not just her dignity, but her name, and the personal recognition that goes with having a name.
As for Ford, well, the president has not said her name out loud, referring to the psychologist and Palo Alto University professor earlier this week as “that woman.” Only on Friday did he call her “Dr. Ford,” in a tweet that questioned her credibility.
So, too, Kellyanne Conway, a senior counselor to the president, who repeatedly invoked Kavanaugh’s name during a PBS NewsHour interview with Judy Woodruff, but never called Ford by her name, always using “she,” “her” or “the accuser.” Meanwhile Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) complained in a statement to The Post: “This has been a drive-by shooting when it comes to Kavanaugh. . . . I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close.”
Many in the media — and I know I did this myself — avoided using Ford’s name in the first hours or days after it became public knowledge. Not in an effort to diminish Dr. Ford, but out of what may be outdated or misguided traditions of not parading the name of someone who has suffered such a trauma across every page of an article. That may be well intentioned. It may also be a mistake. But there certainly comes a point where denying someone’s name isn’t a service, it’s a slight.
Anita Hill, who accused Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991, urged in the New York Times this week that the Senate committee “refer to Christine Blasey Ford by her name.” She is “not simply ‘Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser’ . . . she is a human being with a life of her own.” And a name of her own.
Sebastian Mallaby dares take a closer look at Donald trump’s vaunted economic miracle.
U.S. growth came in at 4.2 percent in the second quarter, trouncing the 1.5 percent recorded in the euro zone and the 3 percent in Japan. U.S. unemployment stands at a rock-bottom 3.9 percent , less than half the rate of the euro zone. The S&P 500 stock market index is up more than 9 percent this year, while European and Japanese markets have fallen slightly, and China has taken a big hit. Fully 64 percent of Americans tell Gallup that now is a good time to find a quality job.
So is Trumponomics working? With one significant caveat, the answer is no. For one thing, Trump’s trade policy is turning out to be worse than expected. For another, the growth surge mostly reflects a temporary sugar high from last December’s tax cut. Economists are already penciling in a recession for 2020.
Donald Trump bought good economic numbers for the Republicans this fall at the cost of driving up the debt and turning the economy into one big oh-so-poppable bubble. Don’t worry. They’ll figure out a way to blame it on Democrats.
And Trump has looted the nation and handed the wealth over to the one percent of the one percent. Honestly, he could leave right now, because he’s done what he came to do.
David Ignatius thinks that Trump has a deal in the works in North Korea.
After the big bang of the Singapore summit in June, with its showy but vague North Korean commitment to denuclearization, many analysts doubted that the deal had any real substance. But we’re beginning to see the first signs of what a serious accord would look like.
This week’s North-South summit meeting in Pyongyang produced agreement on some basic essentials of a real denuclearization process. North Korea agreed to accept internal inspectors to monitor destruction of one of its test sites, a first step toward the broader inspection process that will be essential for any verifiable pact.
I don’t suppose that it’s worth pointing out that the test site is worthless, the agreement for inspectors is less than what was agreed to more than a decade earlier, and the details are still lacking?
North Korea also agreed in principle to dismantle its main nuclear-weapons facility at Yongbyon, though the details are fuzzy and its offer is conditioned on reciprocal U.S. “corresponding measures.”
Everyone loves a fuzzy nuclear deal. Except maybe the Washington Post which … did have a contradictory column, except now their HTML had gone bad. So … we’ll just let Ignatius keep dreaming a while longer.