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.”
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.