Flashbacks from Another Ugly Hearing

9/24/2018

Sens. Grassley, left, and Hatch, right, 1991. Still around.

As of Monday morning, the Brett Kavanaugh hearing is still on for Thursday.

I find myself viscerally repulsed by the prospect of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford being verbally pawed over by part of the Senate committee.

I recently watched a documentary of the Anita Hill questioning in 1991.
Clarence Thomas was right, it was a high-tech lynching, only it was Anita Hill who was assaulted by (white) (male) senators.

With deadpan zest, they made her enunciate every vulgar detail about her encounters with Thomas – her straight-laced, old-fashioned religious decency being poked and prodded.

There in the clips is Joe Biden, good old Uncle Joe, (white) (male) (Democrat), blandly patronizing Anita Hill, oozing neutrality, handing off the ball to the big boys. (So much for Uncle Joe in 2020. Toastville.)

I get the willies when I see two senators, blasts from the past, still doing their thing – Chuck Grassley from Iowa and Orrin Hatch from the great state of Ephedra. (Look it up.)

Other senators are waiting to take their shot – Lindsey Graham, all the helium out of his psychic balloon since the death of John McCain, now just another (white) (male) Republican.

Graham’s mind is already made up. He said so this past weekend.

Then there is Mitch McConnell, probably the most outwardly vicious powerful senator I can remember, maybe going back to Joe McCarthy, supporting a cause I bet he doesn’t believe in, for the good of his party.

They are all waiting to have a go at Dr. Blasey, knowing their window is closing to get Kavanaugh voted onto the Supreme Court to appease their base.

Dr. Blasey’s allegation is tricky enough; we have all read and heard about the complications of memory, women recalling ugly things that happened, or that they now think happened. We also know many ugly things have happened. (See: Cosby, Bill.)

Kavanaugh deserves a fair hearing, the presumption of innocence. What he also deserves is a detailed investigation by the FBI, now badly maligned by President Trump, who has his own legal troubles, shall we say.

The New Yorker has published another article alleging harassment; a woman named Deborah Ramirez is claiming an ugly episode involving Brett Kavanaugh when they were both undergraduates at Yale. (The Times says it could not corroborate her claims in recent days, to the satisfaction of its own judgment.)

In the New Yorker’s layered article, another woman is alleging misconduct by a young, entitled prep-school frat boy named Brett Kavanaugh with a reputation for drunkenness, at that time.

None of this is easy. Reputations – lives – families – careers – are at stake.

Twenty-seven years have gone by since Grassley and Hatch ran up the score against Anita Hill in the service of their party. Twenty-seven years. Where did the time go?

I already had the creeps. They are getting worse.

bruce

9/24/2018 10:51:36 am

george,

1991 photo is telling us, 'round up the usual suspects' after almost 30 years.

as for mcconnell, a repulsive man in more than one way.

piece on now saying rosenstein is going to be gone.

funny with trump and the failing nyt being fake news, but he believes this story.

spec was he'd be fired after the midterms because it wouldn't be smart politically.

all the nice things said about your new supreme court justice--maybe--mean nothing.

they're not talking about his 'personal' life which might be all sorts of crazy.

and how would they know?

bruce

Brian Savin

9/24/2018 12:11:07 pm

George, it seems the entirety of public life in this nation has devolved into a disgusting circus: be it our government of bad-faith actors, our major media cloaking itself in unwarranted self praise but spinning like a top, our social media filthy with paid trolls.... Morality is now played like a fiddle and today's news takes the cake....until tomorrow.

So let me make sure I get the morning news morality lesson straight: A golfer who is an adult sexual philanderer in numerous of his ports of call gets hailed as a sporting great by major media at the same time that they pillory a brilliant jurist with an impeccable professional and adult conduct record?

George Vecsey

9/24/2018 01:31:10 pm

Brian, nice to see your name. I don't think golf and the Supreme Court are a perfect comparison.
I had to stop and think, wait, he means Woods. Not a golf fan. Was around him once at some major at Bethpage, found him to be snotty, way beyond his portfolio. You know my work -- I grew very leery about deifying athletes. What's the point?
As for a lifetime job on the Supreme Court, I do think there is a higher criteria. I mean, there is, beyond steady hands or whatever, You use the word "adult" and it's a fair point. Boys do some pretty stupid/ugly/dangerous things. Would charges (if true, or apparently true) like this disqualify somebody from the Court? That is the question. I don't expect these people to consider the fine points. Anita Hill II coming up. GV

bruce

9/24/2018 01:43:57 pm

george,

funny you should say that about woods....I had to stop and think for a few seconds.

all legit points you made.

I would add one thing about how it's done up here in canuckistan.

scoc judges have to retire at 75.

we've only one had controversy, I can recall in my lifetime when it came to choosing a supreme court judge.

it happened several years ago when our hard right wing (by our standards. he'd be a lefty in the usa,i think) PM nominated somebody who wasn't qualified.

he tried to smear the chief justice by saying she interfered when she called to tell him the guy wasn't qualified and why.

he made a big thing that he'd refused her call when all she was doing was her job.

didn't work. he was pilloried far and wide including internationally by academics and others in the legal profession.

the nomination was withdrawn.

thank god we got rid of him three years ago next month.

bruce

Brian Savin

9/26/2018 07:50:35 am

George, I think given some defensiveness in your comment to me, you mistook my comment as an attack on your post. Your blog post here is about conduct of politicians. I wanted you to view that conduct in what I believe is the much more important context: the standards that are being applied to political process have sunk to newer lows that are damaging to democratic values, our cultural heritage, and our ability to remain one nation.

Accepted morality is a fundamental constant that binds a people and a civilization. It doesn't change in different contexts. If it does, it isn't morality at all. What we have here is an example of an attempt to say it's all relative. A hundred years ago when Einstein's Theory of Relativity took hold on the general consciousness, its ramifications to some went crazy. It ushered in an era where everything was reexamined as "relative" and we got the rush to conclusions about moral relativity. Some civilizations were better than others, it was claimed, because they had morally evolved to "higher" levels.

Well, that's what is being done here all over again. If a moral standard is being applied, it needs to be an accepted moral constant, but it isn't. And it needs to meet the society's burden of proof that it is properly applicable in the context being applied. Without meeting the burden of showing a moral constant is both real and applicable, accusations amount to nothing but a political trick to change the burden of proof as per the Queen of oh Hearts "Verdict First, Trial Afterwards."

And that is the reason why the accusations against Judge Kavanaugh are doubly inapplicable to this particular approval process. I am hopeful for our nation that he will be approved and this example will be studied and mark the low point in our national unraveling.

Alan Rubin link

9/25/2018 11:17:20 am

In the past year our Berkshire County community western MA was treated to lectures by David Gergen, Howard Dean and other well respected political observers. Their common message was that they had faith in millennials to be the generation to begin turning things around.

They were comfortable interacting with people of diverse backgrounds and different points of view.

I thought about these lectures when reading the NYT Sept 21, 2018 article "What Teenagers Think About the Allegations Against Brett Kavanaugh".

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/us/brett-kavanaugh-high-school.html

These youngsters had a more mature take on the issues than the gang of eleven male republicans on the Judiciary Committee.

We need to hang in until this group begins to vote and run for office.

Mike McIntyre

9/25/2018 03:18:26 pm

George,

Thanks for your thoughts on this subject. I agree with you. Anita Hill was all alone in that disgusting inquisition.

I am more concerned about this nominee for his aggressive attack in the Whitewater, Travel-gate, Vincent Foster death, and finally his investigation of a stain on a blue dress. That aggressive investigation ended up with the President lying under oath. A six plus year investigation at a cost to taxpayers of 70 + million dollars. Today Judge Kavanaugh says the Special Counselor should not be needed to investigate a sitting President. He says that role can be fulfilled by Congressional oversight. Not when we have the Chairmen of the House Intelligence Committee playing Paul Revere in support of the President.

To protect the reputation of the Supreme Court the FBI must look into those classmates stories at Georgetown Prep and at Yale. If I were Kavanaugh and I were innocent I would want nothing less.

The Hill hearing was a disgrace. The 800 pound gorilla in the room was the William Smith rape case that embarrassingly silenced Senator Kennedy and the other Democrats.

The current Judiciary Committee is on a short self imposed deadline with extremely late document dumps and voiding witness participation. Grassley was on a mission to approve a controversial selection.

The Senate Majority Leader is a disgrace. The Senate has been minimized by his abusive role in selection of Federal judges. His deployment of the nuclear option has forever changed the Supreme Court make up. We are less of a country because of his abusive grab for power.

Finally, Joe Biden could have done a better job but he did get President Bush to have the FBI investigate. Joe Biden also was the driving force for the Defense of Women’s Act that was a major piece of legislation to protect women across the country. Joe Biden should be proud of his work on that important legislation for women.

Thanh you George.

George Vecsey

9/27/2018 07:58:31 pm

Hi, thanks for your enlightened comments. First, I appreciate your sane note about Biden. I have liked him for the last decade-plus. I wouldn't drop him off at the dog track the way I would with a very sclerotic elders I could mention. (I just watched all of Thursday's opera bouffa: all the ghosts in the room -- Nixon, Bork, Thomas, Foster, Lewinsky, Garland. On it goes. I appreciate your points; thanks for commenting. GV

bruce

9/25/2018 06:41:28 pm

george,

you know how it amazes me how often americans talk in superlatives without much knowledge of what's going on outside the 95%--or so--of the planet that isn't 'merican.

apparently, the senate has now scheduled a vote first thing Friday morning.

that's some deliberation by the--as always--'world's greatest deliberative body'.

compared to what? a kindergarten class?

bruce

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

Flashbacks from Another Ugly Hearing

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