Who would?
Roger Cohen nailed the Kavanaugh operetta well:
What America saw before the Senate Judiciary Committee was an injudicious man, an angry brat veering from fury to sniveling sobs, a judge so bereft of composure and proportion that it was difficult not to squirm. Brett Kavanaugh actually got teary over keeping a calendar because that’s what his dad did. His performance was right out of Norman Rockwell with a touch of “Mad Men.”
This is what you get from the unexamined life, a product of white male privilege so unadulterated that, until a couple of weeks ago, Kavanaugh never had to ask himself what might have lurked, and may still linger, behind the football, the basketball, the lifting weights, the workouts with a great high-school quarterback, the pro-golf tournaments with Dad, the rah-rah Renate-ribbing yearbook, the Yale fraternity, and the professed sexual abstinence until “many years” after high school.
Oh and one more thing, that doesn’t get enough attention – the Catholicism. There’s nothing like religion for making unreflective people think they’re inherently and necessarily better than other people. A good Catholic boy would never try to rape a girl! That’s something an atheist would do! Or a Jew or a wimpy liberal Protestant.
Christine Blasey Ford rang true. I’ll take her “100 percent” over his. She felt no need to yell. Nor did she hide behind a shield of repetition. She did not succumb to pathos (“I may never be able to coach again”). She spoke with a deliberation, balance and humanity missing in the judge.
This was a job interview, not a criminal trial. The accusation against Kavanaugh — involving an incident 36 years ago in an undetermined location, uncorroborated by those present — would not currently stand up in a court of law. As a juror, with the available evidence, I could not say “beyond a reasonable doubt” that he committed this assault. (This, of course, is precisely the evidence that the F.B.I. investigation that Kavanaugh evaded backing, and that Senator Jeff Flake has now decisively endorsed, might produce.)
But Kavanaugh’s bleating about due process and presumption of innocence — his rage at a supposed “national disgrace” — misses the point. He failed the job interview. Who would want this spoiled man pieced together on a foundation of repressed anger and circumscribed privilege — this man who quite plausibly was the teenage drunk near-suffocating Christine Blasey Ford as he ground his body against hers, this man who may now have perjured himself — occupying a place for life on the highest court in the land?
Who indeed; it amazes me that anyone would, Republicans included.
“Who indeed; it amazes me that anyone would, Republicans included.”
It amazes me, too. I came across this Atlantic piece by Eliot Cohen that decries the lack of principled conservatism in this matter and others. I don’t agree with his characterizations, but I think he makes a number of useful points.
That anyone—*anyone*—could have watched the two testimonies and come to the conclusion that “Dr. Ford’s was good, but Kavanaugh’s was GREAT!” is an indictment of the superficial reality-show mentality which has so deeply infected every facet of our shared culture. It isn’t about the truth; it isn’t even really about ‘optics’, in the same way as in the Clinton years. It’s all about the gut-wrenching emotion on display, and the attendant engagement—positive or negative—by the audience.
Through this lens, the pathos and the screaming and the indignation and the righteous anger were the way to go. I’ll be surprised, in a way I very much wasn’t in 2016, if Kavanaugh isn’t confirmed not despite, but rather because, of his performance. Even, or especially, after the curtailed and prescribed ‘investigation’ that he and the current occupant of the Oval Office are setting the parameters for.
(And what the hell is with that, anyhow? Since when do those under investigation—or the supporters of same—get to set the parameters under which they or their chosen-ones are investigated? How did we get there, of all the places we’ve gotten?)
When they are rich, white, conservative males who went to fancy, expensive prep schools and to Yale.