I don’t know about you, but late last week I hit the wall about the midterm election: the swirl of attack ads, the endless urgent fund appeal emails, the feverish palaver about polls. Not to mention the shocks of the Khashoggi assassination, the mail bombs, and the massacre in Pittsburgh. When the funerals there were … Continue reading Trauma & Triggers: Coping With Campaign Overload
The ever reliable Fox News piled on, crowing that, “When it comes to political mistakes [she] . . . just made a doozy. President Trump wasted no time drawing more attention to Warren’s foolish move with two stinging tweets Tuesday.
Gosh, if she hadn’t done it, does anyone think Trump would have stopped sending out racist tweets about her? Really? {His early comment: “a scam and a lie.” Also: “Who cares, who cares?”}
What was surprising to me was how eager some liberal pundits were to jump into the echo chamber. The one who made the biggest fool of himself was the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank. He struck a faux empathetic tone:
“Poor Elizabeth Warren.
She took President Trump’s bait and submitted to a DNA test to demonstrate her Native American genealogy — and, in so doing, may have doomed her presidential campaign before it began.”
And why were her hopes now doomed? Milbank made a grab for Ross Douthat’s smoking gun, agreeing that it was “her contribution to the ’80s cookbook, Pow Wow Chow: A Collection of Recipes from Families of the Five Civilized Tribes, and found that one of the recipes Warren sent in was for a cold crab omelet. Further, he insinuated, it was plagiarized from the New York Times. This was enough to convince Milbank why “all people of good taste — might wish to disavow Warren: It’s the crab mayonnaise.”
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.
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.
The hog industry’s PR agencies cultivate a wholesome, (white) family-friendly image. But most of the hogs and the farms are really owned by giant international corporations; and the biggest is Chinese. (That ginormous Smithfield plant? Chinese-owned.)
And Big Poop can also play hardball, in that vast battleground, the front lawn. The Republican NC legislature is comfortably stashed in the pocket of their newest jeans.