I am a man and I have never experienced a sexual assault. I am really, really struggling today.
One in six women in this country have experienced a rape or an attempted rape. There are more than 26 million women in this country who are reliving those experiences.
I'm going to visit my 90-year-old mother today. She's devastated. I have nothing for her except my sympathy.
Real progress is measured by actions and results, not by empathy. We have not made any progress since Anita Hill came forward in 1992. We keep destroying and re-assaulting the brave women who come forward and we keep rewarding known sexual predators with our most powerful jobs, including seats on the Supreme Court and the Presidency. And let's be honest—Donald Trump is not the first sexual predator to hold that office.
It's impossible not to struggle when you have to face the reality that at a single point in our messy history as a country every institution--the voting citizenry, the courts, the executive branch, the Congress--that you've counted on in some fashion to keep us progressing and to provide some kind of balance has failed utterly. Constitutionally, today, there is no there there.
In time, I'll resurrect my hope that the 2018 midterms will give us a Congress that actually works, if only to keep myself from becoming completely disoriented.
What do those 26 million women have to hope for? How do they keep their sanity? What are we going to do for them, and when?
The Only Prosecutor With a Vagina Who Would Take This Shitty Gig
Trying to follow the glacial pace of the perpetually interrupted, aimless questions of Rachel Mitchell was like watching a slow-motion film of a sloth going to sleep. She reminded me of a deeply committed middle-school vice principal trying to get to the bottom of who removed the missing pencils from the supply cabinet. When she finally delivered her final, 23-miles-per-hour knuckleball directly at Ford's ankles, it turned out to be the killer observation that the absolute worst way to respond to Ford's accusation was to have the kind of hearing that the Republicans had devised. !!!!!!
Republican Suicide Watch
It’s hard to imagine how Thursday’s Senate Judicial Committee hearing with Kavanaugh and Ford will be anything but a shudder-inducing orgy of GOP self immolation. Once again, we will watch open mouthed as the Eleven White Male Republicans on that Committee voluntarily push their faces into the whirring blades of a fan of female fury. When the Republicans have to grapple with women’s issues in public, the one thing you can be sure of is that they will leave their anemic blood splattered all over the walls.
You can’t fault them for not wanting anyone in America to watch Orrin Hatch interrogate Ford or to have to apologize for him the next day. Very bad optics, indeed! But their solution to that very real problem—to hire an outside female to do their dirty work for them—will leave each of them with a great big “C” for cowardice carved into the middle of his forehead. Instead of having the guts to do their jobs and question their tormentor themselves, they will literally hire a queen of the Quislings to complete the rape that Kavanaugh couldn’t finish. They will bravely hand their jobs over to the one person in that room on Thursday who will definitely know the least about what happened. As students of the Confederacy, they will be borrowing a page from the official slaveowner’s manual: when one of your human chattel needs a whipping, double the punishment by forcing another slave to wield the lash.
Supposedly each Senator will get five minutes—five minutes!—to question each witness. So viewers will see the Democratic senators, two of whom are former prosecutors, asking their own questions, as if they were real U.S. Senators, and then watch as each of their Republican colleagues cedes his time to the Great Inquisitor With A Vagina and then sit, mute, peeking through her skirts like the close-minded, sexist sphinx that he is.
Who on earth thought up this shit?
The horror movie won’t stop there. The Republicans will adamantly contend that they are defending an innocent man, but their actions will show them to be scuzzy mob lawyers who you can always count on to know an unlicensed doc who can patch up gunshot wounds on the sly or to create new, phony rules to “ram this thing through.” An innocent man would welcome the facts, but there will be, unlike other confirmation hearings, no FBI investigation. The only other person in that bedroom in 1982, Mark Judge, is in hiding and won’t be called as a witness. Nor will the corroborating witnesses of Dr. Ford. Nor will the second accuser and her corroborating witnesses. Nor will the former classmates who came forth yesterday to counter Kavanaugh’s claims of spotlessness in his Fox News interview. Nor will the third accuser who has hired Michael Avannati and is expected to explode upon the scene tomorrow night with tales of gang rape. But you can be sure that the Democrats and Dr. Ford will mention these people, and often.
Thursday’s hearing will be a sickening tableau, something between the Salem witch trials and the Stalinist show tribunals, but less entertaining.
Twelve hours later, on Friday morning, those eleven male GOP senators will nevertheless approve, thanks to their one-vote advantage on the committee, Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination, after which they will retire to their Washington, D.C. watering holes and strip clubs to savor the sweetness of their victory.
But there will be two more votes ahead of them. The vote on Kavanaugh by the entire Senate, and the vote on November 6th. That’s when the reviews of Thursday’s Grand Guignol spectacle will finally come in.
News Flash From the Battlefield
For the second time during President Trump’s war on the United States of America, one of the his biggest offensive weapons has been attacked by his own Navy.
Just over one year ago, the HMS Obamacare Repeal, the largest legislative carrier in the Trump navy, was sunk instantly after suffering a direct hit from a kamikaze aircraft launched from the Arizona and piloted by turncoat airman John McCain.
Military observers confirm that the HMS Kavanaugh, Trump’s newest warship, was attacked at 7 p.m. Eastern time tonight by another jet fighter launched from the decks of the Arizona, this time piloted by the traitorous Jeff Flake.
A second major attack by his own forces is certainly a major, humiliating defeat for the beleaguered President. The loss of the HMS Kavanaugh could be a death blow to Trump’s war strategy. The Kavanaugh, launched only last month, is a state-of-the-art destroyer designed to be impervious to the United States’ pitifully antiquated offensive weaponry. Constructed this year at the Republican Naval Yard according to exacting specifications derived from years of input from the most brilliant conservative military planners, the Kavanaugh was, according to a recent tweet by the President, “totally unsinkable.”
It is nighttime on the Potomac, and details of the attack are few and incomplete. There are unconfirmed reports of fires breaking out on board the ship and of the crew (the Kavanaugh is manned by Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee) making preparations to abandon ship.
We will publish new details on the situation as they develop.