Lemon, Aid

 

Drawing via Antarctica Journal.

Roy at his Substack and others are understandably feeling heated about the people who aren't feeling heated at all, who call themselves liberals but seem more concerned about the comfort and quiet of Supreme Court justices in their upscale neighborhoods than the 50-odd percent of the population with wombs whose rights are being snatched away by those same justices

It’s pretty wild to see how easily leaders from both sides of the aisle accepted this fraudulent crisis at face value when the engineers of the assault on our rights were the alleged targets.  At the same time, when you talk about the very real danger the draft Dobbs decision poses to not only the right to abortion but also other unenumerated rights such as gay marriage and contraception — as can be clearly read in Alito’s opinion — not to mention the dead certainty that Republicans will use the decision to try and ban abortion outright nationwide, the toffs don’t seem nearly as exercised.

Part of the reason, I think, is because conservatives are loudly declaring that they won’t do any such thing, and the Very Serious Democrats cannot bring themselves to suggest they’re lying.

I'm wondering if the Very Serious Democrats—TV civility Democrats like Paul Begala and Chris Coons, are worth the attention. For one thing,

For the Record: Airborne

Photo by Reuters, via.

Story on today's Morning Edition:

(2) in September Woodward publishes this story, showing that Trump had lied to the public. Trump explains that he did this in order to avoid "panic".

— Airborne Panic (@Yastreblyansky) September 22, 2020

(4) today we get the further explanation that the draft erred in using the word "airborne" which might cause a "panic".

— Airborne Panic (@Yastreblyansky) September 22, 2020

2018 Democrats: Too Punk?

Stainless Steel Skull Skeleton Head Tongue Ring going for £1.05 from ebay.co.uk.

Fearless anti-Trumper Mr. Bret Stephens complaining that these young Democrats in the ongoing millennium ("Democrats Are Blowing It, Again") are just too goddamned punk:

Michael Kelly, the legendary journalist who died covering the invasion of Iraq in 2003, once wrote that the “animating impulse” of modern liberalism was to “marginalize itself and then enjoy its own company. And to make itself as unattractive to as many as possible.”

“If it were a person,” he added, “it would pierce its tongue.”

(Kelly wrote that in 1996 in his debut column as the liberal-hating editor of even-the-liberal New Republic; Stephens's link is to a Maureen Dowd eulogy in which she manages to mention that she once bought Kelly a couch, but doesn't say if it was a fainting couch.)

He seems to really mean to move beyond concern trolling, too—he's suggesting he really wants Democrats to win in November:

Literary Corner: Women. Women. Women.

Panel from Edward Armitage, A Dream of Fair Women, 1870s, via ArtUK.

A Tremendous Number of Women

by Donald J. Trump

The people that spoke to me most vocif—
really in the strongest of terms in his favor
were women. Women. Women were outraged
at what happened to Brett Kavanaugh, outraged,
and I think that’s a total misnomer because
the women, I feel, were in many ways stronger
than the men in his favor. So you have
a lot of women that are extremely happy.

A tremendous number of women. Because
they’re thinking of their sons, they’re thinking
of their husbands and their brothers, their uncles,
and others. And women are I think extremely happy.

A lot of the voices clamoring inside the president's head this week seem to have been voices of women, for some reason. Mrs. Trump was out of town, and the "violent mobs" terrifying the timid Senators as they voted (50-48) to confirm Judge Kavanaugh to a seat on the Supreme Court were  mostly female, experienced as a band of frenzied Maenads—

They said it couldn't be done

Georgetown Prep Moot Court squad.

Yeah, Jonah. Give it up for Mitch, who had faith that he could defeat democracy when nobody thought it was possible! https://t.co/DaXVgystaT

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 6, 2018

It's amazing when you think about it. Back in February of 2016, when old Antonin Scalia's heart choked on its choler and he died, McConnell's reaction, an hour after news of the death came out, seemed whimsical:

The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.

I mean, also without legal foundation, deeply irresponsible, and remarkably ruthless in the wielding of a power to which he had no constitutional entitlement, but also just silly and pointless, as the presidential campaign began to warm up, with the best prepared candidate in history on one side and an unspeakably ridiculous carful of circus clowns on the other.

What could he think he was accomplishing? Just putting the task off for Hillary, whose Supreme Court nomination less than a year away would likely be less friendly to conservatives than Obama's. Maybe she'd just go ahead and name Obama!

But McConnell held firm (and didn't go as far as Cruz and McCain, who said if Clinton won they'd refuse to ever confirm a justice to replace Scalia). And with the help of Vladimir Putin and Alexander Nix a president was put into office representing a reactionary minority, and a reactionary minority reshaped the Supreme Court in its own narrow and selfish image (I can't get over that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh both went to the same repulsive Slytherin prep school, or that the new court will still have not just five reliable conservatives, but all of them once again conservative Catholics, with all the narrowness and nasty-mindedness that implies). Sheer improbability certainly played an essential role in this, but McConnell really did do something.

A Devastating Blow to Intellectual Humility

Uh, humbly?

Hey la hey la my Brooksie's back! From his "book leave", meaning there's apparently a book coming from him that will be about some subject or other, but for now he's leaping back into action, because, folks, there's a war on ("A Complete National Disgrace"):

Over the past few years, hundreds of organizations and thousands of people (myself included) have mobilized to reduce political polarization, encourage civil dialogue and heal national divisions.

Mobilized! It's a war on political polarization, fought by the legions of Brooks?

The first test case for our movement was the Kavanaugh hearings. It’s clear that at least so far our work is a complete failure. Sixty-nine percent of Americans in one poll called the hearings a “national disgrace,” and the only shocking thing is that there are 31 percent who don’t agree.

You see, the Polarized are united in an overwhelming majority. The beleaguered un-Polarized, who don't think the hearings are a national disgrace, teeter on the brink of extinction!

Reconstruction

A couple of weeks ago, after the release of the famous 65-woman letter in defense of the teenage character of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, when folks were wondering how a kid in an all-boy Catholic school managed to be acquainted with that many girls, I thought I knew something about it—not from any personal experience, right, but probably from reading too much fiction set among the upper classes—and let the Twitter know. Upon which I got a response:

Visitation and Holton Schools

— jace austen (@JaceAusten) September 14, 2018

Cool of Twitter to send me confirmation so quickly! So I filed that in my memory, and when it turned out the following week that Christine Blasey's school was Holton Arms, I said to myself, well, there you go.

And there she did go, indeed, in Thursday morning's testimony:

FORD: During my time at this school, girls at Holton-Arms frequently met and became friendly with boys from all-boys schools in the area, including the Landon School, Georgetown Prep, Gonzaga High School, as well as our country clubs and other places where kids and families socialized. This is how I met Brett Kavanaugh, the boy who sexually assaulted me.

During my freshman and sophomore school years, when I was 14 and 15 years old, my group of friends intersected with Brett and his friends for a short period of time. I had been friendly with a classmate of Brett’s for a short time during my freshman and sophomore year, and it was through that connection that I attended a number of parties that Brett also attended. We did not know each other well, but I knew him and he knew me.

Which made it all the more surprising to notice this nugget in the Thursday hearing transcript:

Nous Sommes Tous Brett Kavanaugh

Salvador Dalí (1959), Our Lady of Guadalupe, via Cuevas.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "The Meritocracy Against Itself":

When you're listening to people criticizing Brett Kavanaugh, an obnoxious entitled Catholic prep school douche with a brilliant conservative mind, you should note that many of them come from approximately the same world as he does. I'm not sure why I'm telling you this. On the other hand if you look up my Wikipedia page which I urge you not to, you'll notice I went to Hamden Hall Country Day School in Connecticut, and I'll also mention that I've criticized Kavanaugh myself (I'm afraid his apparent hatred of women might in the long run be bad for the anti-abortion cause). This does not in any sense prove that I'm an obnoxious entitled, through brilliantly conservative, Catholic prep school douche, but it does show you what a big world after all Harvard (where my many working class friends felt even more uncomfortable among the local Kavanaughs than I did) is.

You tell me what game he's playing this time, because I have no idea, unless it's just to clarify for us commoners that the whole business is nothing to be alarmed about, just the gentry having their fun. It's what you do when you're too old for lacrosse. He may have gone full avant-garde.

Cutting him loose?

Posted at CNN 2:21 PM:

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump said Tuesday his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is "doing very well" but said his fate will depend on an ongoing FBI investigation.

Speaking to reporters on the South Lawn, Trump also drew a line on lying to Congress.

"I don't think you should lie to Congress and there are a lot of people over the past year who have lied to Congress," he said. "For me, that would not be acceptable."

I think this is the end of the beginning-of-the-end that started Friday, after the crazed doings in the Senate Judiciary Committee that led to the ongoing investigation or pseudo-investigation of the ever-multiplying allegations against Judge Brett Kavanaugh, with Trump's unbalanced encomium , where he praised both Christine Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh but then returned to her:

State of the Kavanaugh, continued

Emily Bazelon and Ben Protess for The New York Times have the skinny on Kavanaugh's bar fight, which Chad Ludington,  one of Kavanaugh's Yale basketball teammates, has been trying to convey to the FBI: it was ice, not beer, that Kav threw on his antagonist, and somebody else seems to have done something to rip up the guy's ear and send him to the hospital, though the person who was arrested for this offense continued to deny it:

Mr. Dudley denied the accusation, according to the report. For his part, speaking to the officers, Mr. Kavanaugh did not want “to say if he threw the ice or not,” the police report said.

That's the Brett we know, already refusing to answer questions about his inappropriate or criminal behavior, at such an early age. I wonder if he asked the cops, "Do you ever throw ice at people?" Or does he reserve that rhetorical maneuver for Senators?

The date of the kerfuffle and a tantalizing paragraph of the story enabled me to learn something that others seem not to have noticed:

#Kavanaugh was one of the younger ones with the good IDs (born 2/1965, he was 20 at the time of the incident) https://t.co/LTey1G22CE pic.twitter.com/dpSkwZLqKu

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 1, 2018

Yes, a couple of years out of high school and now in Connecticut, he was still drinking underage.

Thanks @emilybazelon for letting me scoop this.

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 1, 2018

I wonder if she'll notice me. Probably not, huh?

State of the Kavanaugh

Alessandra Mondolfi/The Nation.

I'm having a hard time transitioning from the way I felt on Thursday, and the statements of Kavanaugh and Graham like allegorical representations of evil taking off its mask and showing its serpent fangs, and likely to triumph in the end, to the way I ought to feel after Friday, whatever that is. I hadn't finished processing the first thing, at all, and now it's all changed, or not, as the case may be, with Senator Jeff Flake's quixotic moment of allowing himself to see why somebody different from him could feel disrespected and ignored and dehumanized, if that's what he did, and to try to do something about it.

Because I definitely don't want to buy the widespread hypothesis offered, for instance, by bmaz at emptywheel, that the whole thing, the offer of an additional week of FBI investigation of the allegations against Kavanaugh before the Senate votes on the nomination, is nothing but a "trumpian sham". In part because that's just senseless paranoid-style thinking; I don't mean to claim there's no sham in it, even on Flake's part, though I'm honestly more inclined to think he meant well—I mean I don't see it as possibly confabulated between Flake and the White House, for some kind of mutual benefit. That's just too complicated, if nothing else, especially for this chaotic administration.

As the situation develops, we start to get a more familiar picture of what's going on in Trumplandia, where there's no real plan at all, just competing power centers in the White House reacting to events over on the Hill, the better organized getting their oars in first, starting with White House Counsel Don McGahn seizing the initiative to issue that list of instructions to the FBI:

Consider where we are

Brews Wayne, I believe, via DrunkenDorkPodcasts.

Consider where we are: It is now considered an outrage that there isn’t an FBI investigation into a Supreme Court nominee’s college drinking https://t.co/8Uf3AaLed0

— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) September 29, 2018

Maybe that's as good a place to start as any. Judge Kavanaugh is accused by various women described as "credible" (including by the president of the United States) as having perpetrated various revolting assaults on them when he was in a state of extreme drunkenness and by a range of witnesses of both sexes as frequently drinking to excess and getting notably aggressive and nasty when he does, including his own apology to a bunch of buddies—

pic.twitter.com/eIQXsOBA8F

— DavKat (@DavKat43) September 29, 2018

—and then denies under oath that he ever drinks to excess, while consistently evading more specific questions on the subject, even to the extent of turning them around on his questioners—"Have you ever had an alcoholic blackout, Senator Klobuchar?" "What do you like to drink, Senator Whitehouse?" I think the question is relevant on its face, I don't see how there can even be any question.

This is the man, by the way, who advised his boss, Kenneth Starr, to ply the president of the United States in his Special Counsel interview with questions such as,

High-Tech Lynchings Then and Now

Uncredited photo from a post by BJ's Mistermix, April 2014 (he said it was Andrew Sullivan and Conor Friedersdorf, but I think that must be some of that satire).

Steven Roberts/New York Times, 8 November 1987:

Under enormous pressure from Administration officials and his own conservative supporters on Capitol Hill, Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg today asked President Reagan to withdraw his nomination to the Supreme Court.

The judge announced his decision only nine days after he was chosen to fill the seat vacated by the retirement of Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. He acted after disclosures about his personal and ethical conduct stirred a storm of criticism.

The disclosures, which culminated Thursday with Judge Ginsburg's admission that he had smoked marijuana several times, embarrassed Mr. Reagan, who had called his confirmation ''vitally important to the fight against crime.'' 

It was the media that sunk Ginsburg—I didn't remember that. He was outed by Nina Totenberg of NPR (who had weekly lunches, still does for all I know, with that Times reporter's spouse, Cokie Roberts, and Linda Wertheimer). There was a bipartisan outcry from the nation's young  potheads, from Claiborne Pell (D-RI) to Newton LeRoy Gingrich (R-GA), including potential presidential candidates Bruce Babbitt and Al Gore, but fearful conservatives begged him to withdraw (he was also accused of "handling a cable television case when he was an investor in a cable company" as a DOJ official, which looks practically innocent by today's Republican standards), and he did, and the nominator named Anthony Kennedy to be vitally important to the fight against crime instead.

Hey, it was a simpler time.

What Happens at Prep

Wait, isn't that what conservatives want? (No, they just want a room with no women.)

A really great piece at Slate by Lili Loofborouw (a name that's harder to spell than mine!) gets Kavanaugh precisely to rights:

For what it’s worth, and absent evidence or allegations to the contrary, I believe Brett Kavanaugh’s claim that he was a virgin through his teens. I believe it in part because it squares with some of the oddities I’ve had a hard time understanding about his alleged behavior: namely, that both allegations are strikingly different from other high-profile stories the past year, most of which feature a man and a woman alone. And yet both the Kavanaugh accusations share certain features: There is no penetrative sex, there are always male onlookers, and, most importantly, there’s laughter. In each case the other men—not the woman—seem to be Kavanaugh’s true intended audience.

Abuse of this type isn't about heterosexual relations with women at all, in fact, it's about homosocial relations with men, at the expense of women. Kavanaugh assaults Blasey Ford only because Mark Judge is there to watch, and to roar with appreciative laughter. And then a male omertà protects him: "What happens at Prep stays at Prep."

This jibes with another story (from Emily Peck/HuffPost via Lemieux) about the abominable Judge Alex Kozinski, for whom Kavanaugh clerked in the early 1990s:

Gossip

So now apparently it's going to be Friday night all week long from here on in, and I'm just clutching onto Twitter. Kavanaugh has a calendar from 1982 on which he recorded all his major engagements, tutoring sessions, football practices, debutante balls, and whatnot, which he will submit in evidence to Senate Judiciary, and it apparently does not indicate any small drinking parties at friends' houses where he attempted to rape anybody, which could indicate that he didn't go to any, or that he had some reason for not writing it down. There's a Drudge rumor that Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer have another Kavanaugh accuser lined up, with a story that involves a "dildo" (Drudge's quotes, I believe). Drudge may be leaking the news in an effort to lessen the impact of whatever it is. And then there's this, from Washington Post's Philippe Reines h/t Lulu Lemew):

Washington Post confirms Sarah Slanders™️ Deputy @RajShah45 shared Christine Ford’s name with Republican operatives before it became public. He essentially lit the GOP Bat Signal, alerting henchmen like @EdWhelanEPPC to hop to it.

Raj Shah, keeping it classy to the very end. pic.twitter.com/utf4X62gxP

— Philippe Reines (@PhilippeReines) September 22, 2018

Oh, really? It was Raj Shah who knew the name of Kavanaugh's accuser, Professor Blasey Ford, when Senator Feinstein was keeping it secret, apparently because—what other explanation could there be?—the White House has known all along, presumably because Kavanaugh told them himself ("Oh, the other thing you need to watch out for, this girl I—well, I wouldn't say I assaulted her exactly, but she might say something like that, you know how girls get") enabling them to prepare, as with the list of 65 women from his high school social circle who were willing to vouch for his character (except to the extent they weren't, which is hard to determine, but it's clear Fox and AP weren't able to get statements from the very large majority) and Republican propagandist Ed Whelan's carefully worked out, though in the end unsustainable, theory, apartment floor plans and all, of the Doppelgänger resembling Kavanaugh who made Blasey Ford imagine that Kavanaugh had attacked her.

The actual Farrow and Mayer story, with no dildo, just a "gag plastic penis" being wielded by somebody else and a flesh one wielded by Kavanaugh, is from the nominee's Yale years:

After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, [Deborah] Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away. Ramirez is now calling for the F.B.I. to investigate Kavanaugh’s role in the incident. “I would think an F.B.I. investigation would be warranted,” she said.

Kavanaugh denies that such an incident took place. The New Yorker piece also has a new and very unpleasant high school gang-rape anecdote about Mark Judge, not featuring Kavanaugh. And lawyer Michael Avenatti, last seen representing adult film star Stormy Daniels or running for president, as the case may be, has a client with something else to report about Kavanaugh and Judge, who he says is not Deborah Ramirez. I would think firing all the writers on this show would be warranted. I'm expecting to wake up in the morning to hear that Bobby Ewing is still alive, and if I don't I'm going to be really pissed off. 

Literary Corner: Pinocchios for Brett

Enzo Pazzagli, Tre Pinocchi, steel and plexiglass, 1990. Via Artnet. 

The Universe of Memos; or, Three Pinocchios

By Brett Kavanaugh

No, Senator. That’s correct.
I’m not aware of the memos.
I never saw such memos that
I think you’re referring to. I mean,
I don’t know what the universe
of memos might be, but I do know that
I never received any memos and
was not aware of any such memos. So,
I just want to correct that premise
that I think was in your question.

Cited from Senate Judiciary Committee proceedings in Salvador Rizzo, "Brett Kavanaugh’s unlikely story about Democrats’ stolen documents", Washington Post, 20 September 2018. My poetic response:

If memos exist,
Then these would be
Among the memos
I did not see.

But if I saw them,
As I recall,
Those memos did not
Exist at all.

Kavanaugh

Photo via PoliticsUSA.

It's clear to me that Brett Kavanaugh is an extremist on the abortion issue, soaked in the rhetoric of the movement, from his conduct in the Jane Doe case, as Mark Joseph Stern wrote at Slate:

Under Casey, the government cannot impose an “undue burden” on a woman seeking an abortion before viability. Yet the Trump administration had imposed a flat ban on abortion for undocumented minors in federally funded shelters. (It maintained that minors who wished to terminate their pregnancies should either find a sponsor in the U.S.—a near impossible task for many without family here—or leave the country.) Kavanaugh held that this position did not constitute an undue burden, in a ruling which would have forced “Jane Doe,” a 17-year-old who was already 15 weeks pregnant, to continue her unwanted pregnancy. [Unable to leave Texas and its almost complete ban on abortion after 20 weeks, she'd soon have no legal choice.]

The full D.C. Circuit swiftly overturned Kavanaugh’s ruling and granted Doe access to abortion. In response, Kavanaugh penned a furious dissent that brimmed over with anti-abortion rhetoric. The majority, he sneered, had granted Doe “abortion on demand”—a phrase that, as Irin Carmon notes, is deployed by the right to “denote women capriciously making decisions for themselves.” He claimed that Doe was not mature enough to make this “major life decision” on her own, even though she had already received the necessary judicial bypass from a state court. And he asserted, incredibly, that the Trump administration was being unlawfully forced to “facilitate” Doe’s abortion by merely stepping aside and letting her obtain it. (This argument is fundamentally theological, not legal.)

I don't know what he told Senator Collins, and I actually don't care. I don't want to see him promoted to a court where the judges are allowed to make up their own precedents if he behaves like this on the circuit court, mansplaining Texas law to Texas judges and insisting that the White House has the right to force a stop to a completely legal medical procedure when there's no constitutional issue involved (I thought that was settled when the Bush administration lost the Terry Schiavo case and the poor woman was allowed to die in peace).

For the Record: Lincoln and Kavanaugh

From (I believe) the 14th-century Libro del Buen Amor by Juan Ruiz, Arcipreste de Hita, via.

Here's some heavy-duty Dinesh, a response to his assertion that Lincoln called himself a conservative (not exactly untrue, but it meant somewhat the opposite of what Dinesh thought it might), and NSFW below the fold, some suggested questions for Senator Kamala Harris to ask Judge Kavanaugh at his confirmation hearings:

Contrary to left-wing claims Lincoln was a progressive, Lincoln himself insisted he was conservative @worldnetdaily https://t.co/xdrMJzBytM

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 20, 2018

The New York Times Welcomes Brett Kavanaugh

Welcoming committee at the Baroque city of Karlskrona in southeast Sweden, via Cruise Baltic,

David Brooks getting first in line for the New York Times parade of greetings on the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh ("It Took a Village to Raise Kavanaugh") is really adorable, in the way you can figure out how he proceeded to write it: knowing somebody was going to get named yesterday, he wrote one of his book report columns with blanks in the first two paragraphs—

In the weeks ahead, we’re going to spend a lot of time going over _______ _______’s biography — where he’s from and what he’s written. But that’s not the most important way to understand the guy.

_______ is the product of a community. He is the product of a conservative legal infrastructure that develops ideas, recruits talent, links rising stars, nurtures genius, molds and launches judicial nominees. It almost doesn’t matter which Republican is president. The conservative legal infrastructure is the entity driving the whole project. It almost doesn’t even matter if _______ is confirmed or shot down; there are dozens more who can fill the vacancy, just as smart and just as conservative.

—and then, when the announcement came out last night, filled in the blanks with Kavanaugh's name and filed the piece. It works, in its way, because "the best way to understand the guy" is to realize that it doesn't matter who it is; it will turn out to be is a product of the same cookie cutter created in the 1980s, as described by Steven Teles in The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (2009), which is the subject of Brooks's book report for today.