Nightmare Number one, wide awake: In the summer of 1959, my father, an Air Force bomber pilot, was transferred to a base near Cheyenne, Wyoming. There my mother sent me and several of my siblings to St. Mary’s, the Catholic school downtown. It was across the street from the state Capitol. St. Mary’s was run … Continue reading Dog Days Reading: A Tale of Two Nightmares: One Asleep, One Wide Awake
If my intuition is right — that her fighting voice and image best fits this moment and the angry, fired up base — this could well be her moment.
“We won’t always win when we fight,” she said, “But if we don’t put up a fight, we’ll always lose.”
So far, the Committee newcomers, Harris, Booker and Klobuchar, are promising, but just not yet in the same class.
So these are my current speculations on the 2020 Democratic horse race. I’ll close with a quote from a Warren floor speech before the vote, about the ultra-secret FBI instant-“investigation”. She declared flatly that, despite all its shortcomings,
“ . . . the available documents contradict statements Mr. Kavanaugh made under oath. I would like to back up these points with explicit statements from the FBI documents — explicit statements that should be available for the American people to see. But the Republicans have locked the documents behind closed doors.”
If anybody can find a way to pay open those closed doors, it could be her. And if that happens, Brett Kavanaugh may soon have many new reasons to Ralph. And the White House could be faced with a real fighter in 2020.
It would be about time. Overdue, in fact.
I don’t mean to diminish for a minute the magnitude of the institutional violence done to women this week, especially survivors of direct assault and abuse. Yet the list of legal catastrophes whose likelihood would climb with Kavanaugh’s ascension had already gotten long, and portends massive negative impact on many other segments of the population.
Further, there was an excellent, but now forgotten overview of this in the opening session of Kavanaugh hearings, presented by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
I don’t know why Whitehouse isn’t better known. Maybe it’s Rhode Island’s mini-size (at barely 1200 square miles, it makes Vermont — 8 times as large– look huge; or maybe its due to the state’s mostly Democratic voting record.) Perhaps it’s because he is not running for president.
Whatever; Whitehouse was a prosecutor and state attorney general before he came to Washington. He knows how to make a case succinctly and trenchantly. And he made this detailed pre-rapist case against Kavanaugh in the first round of opening statements on September 4.
“For Erin Green, who graduated from APU in May and is now co-executive director for Brave Commons, a national organization that looks to support LGBTQ students specifically at Christian universities, the reversal is a disappointment. Green, who participated in the discussions last year with university administrators that led to the policy’s removal, went so far as to describe it as a betrayal because the administrators were the ones who reached out to her and other students.
“We poured our hearts out, were vulnerable and relived our trauma telling our stories, telling stories of previous students who were damaged or hurt in some way by the institution, which had action taken against them for being gay or being in a same-sex relationship,” Green said.
“They looked us in the eye and said this policy is harmful, it’s discriminatory, it’s stigmatizing and we’re going to get rid of it,” she said. “And we trusted them.” But . . .
So when the committee reconvened to hear Kavanaugh, the tactical plan had changed markedly. I don’t know if they consciously thought of it this way, but they clearly decided to do a remake of the Clarence Thomas triumph.
Kavanaugh insisted that no one but a few clerks had seen his opening statement before he made it. Perhaps so, but he had spent much time consulting at the White House and with others in prepping for the appearance. As he is known for his studies of precedents, my guess is he went over the Thomas hearings in the process.
The Thomas scenario is built on flipping the abuse script and making the wannabe rapist into the victim.