On Sunday, on many, many Sundays, I complain that the pundits aren’t caught up. I whine because something happened on Friday or Saturday long after these folks put their columns to bed and went off to the Hamptons, or the Vineyard, or wherever Real Opinion Writers go when they’ve clocked a thousand words and called it a week. Not this week. This week, I’m really wishing everyone had packed it in. Say on Monday. In June. Of 2015. So that maybe there would be something to talk about that wasn’t so raw, so infuriating, something not a lemon-juice and broken glass cocktail of irredeemable injustice. Because …. ahh damn.
Anyway. The columns might not be all up on the Saturday afternoon outcome, but everyone had a pretty solid sense of where this was all headed. Of how Jeff Flake would live up to his name by pretending there was a serious investigation. And how Susan Collins would demonstrate her “independence” for the four thousandth time. How Republicans would respond with the anger of men who were forced to put down their martinis and step off the golf course long enough to roll their eyes at having to pretend to listen to a woman. Again.
Leonard Pitts talks about the real victim of this whole sorry affair.
Let’s get something straight: Men are not the victims here.
It is a foolish and offensive line of reasoning, so naturally it has caught traction on the political right. Indeed, for some, it is an article of faith as the confirmation of would-be Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh becomes ever more deeply mired in accusations that, as a high school boy, he committed attempted rape. For them, Kavanaugh is every man — and every man is in danger.
Donald Trump Jr. told Britain’s DailyMailTV that he fears for his sons more than his daughters.
Of course he does. Because … they’re his sons. Can Donald Trump even name his daughters? And no, “Ivanka” isn’t even the name of one of them.
Then, there’s Kellyanne Conway who told CNN’s Jake Tapper she feels empathy for victims of sexual assault because she is one. Tapper, clearly moved as anyone would be, sought to explore what kind of psychological gymnastics allow her to defend Donald Trump, who infamously bragged on video about committing sexual assault.
Conway shut him down, making clear that she brought up her experience simply as a means of defending men. “This is Judge Kavanaugh now,” she said. “It could be anybody by next week. It could be any man in any position.”
I’m not going to summarize the rest of Pitt’s column. I’m just going to say what I say most weeks — go read Leonard Pitts. Then come back here and we’ll tackle the rest.
For the convenience of the shell-shocked, I’ve former a little header-fence around this first group of essays.
Kavanaugh
Marina Hyde gives her take on men-as-victims.
I love how fast the men’s rights movement gets stuff done, when women spend for ever fannying about getting nowhere with theories such as “honestly, it’s my uterus” and “sexually assaulting us is bad”. It totally makes you wonder what the men’s rights movement could achieve if they put their minds to it. They definitely top my Ones to Watch list for 2019.
It’s the outrage. Men are allowed to use outrage as a tool. It shows they’re serious. Women must remain calm, otherwise … they’re not serious.
And seriously, if you’re needing an antidote to some of the other columns this week, read Hyde’s take. Yes, last week was a tall glass of battery acid, but Hyde at least provides a chaser.
Dana Milbank and Susan Collins’ “declaration of cowardice.”
After Sen. Susan Collins announced on the Senate floor Friday that she would cast her deciding vote to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) rose to liken her to another Republican from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith, “the first member of the United States Senate to take on Joseph McCarthy . . . this demagogue and the tactics that he employed.”
Forgetting for a second that McCarthy’s right-hand man, Roy Cohn, was a mentor to Donald Trump, and that Republicans have been trying to reform McCarthy’s legacy for the better part of two decades … McCarthy was a Republican. Margaret Chase Smith was a Republican. Smith was bravely taking on forces within her own party, forces that had the approval of party leadership and the support of her male colleagues. She was putting her own career firmly on the line.
[Smith’s] “Declaration of Conscience,” was a lonely denunciation of the demagogue who dominated her Republican Party. Collins’s speech, ignoring the new demagoguery that has overtaken her party while criticizing the other side, was the very opposite. Hers was a Declaration of Convenience, a Declaration of Capitulation.
“We are Republicans. But we are Americans first,” Smith said 68 years ago. “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny — Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.”
Collins had not a bad word for her party — and not one atom of either dignity or respect for the nation, the institution, or the woman who really did speak bravely before the Senate: Christine Blasey Ford.
Ruth Marcus on the poisoning of the Supreme Court.
“The Supreme Court must never, never be viewed as a partisan institution,” Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh observed at the start of his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
That was Sept. 4, just over a month ago, but it feels like an eternity — before the country was convulsed by accusations of sexual assault against the Supreme Court nominee, now on the brink of becoming the nation’s 114th justice.
Before Kavanaugh’s volcanic, partisan attack on the Judiciary Committee’s proceedings as the product of “a frenzy on the left to come up with something, anything to block my confirmation.”
Before Kavanaugh gave not an impassioned, but unhinged, speech in which he insisted on ‘well-funded’ conspiracies, and invoked the involvement of the Clintons. Before he all but declared his intention to use the Court as his personal instrument of vengeance on you, and you, and your little dog too.
This is a dangerous, even scary, moment for the court — one in which Kavanaugh’s admonition against seeing the court in partisan terms seems laughably naive.
It was laughably naive when Kavanaugh said it. No one’s laughing now.
Alexandra Petri reminds us of Kavanaugh’s very special op-ed.
How to say this?
So last week I feel like we got off on the wrong foot a little bit. Like Justice John Paul Stevens, you may have seen the guy shouting about beer and “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” and thought, “Yeeeegh, I don’t love this. Can someone else be lifetime-appointed to the Supreme Court?”
I just want to say: That wasn’t me. I mean, technically, it was me, but in a broader, representational sense, it wasn’t.
I was only throwing a temper tantrum as a father, a son and a husband. As a judge, I am a mind of pure light floating in a vat. The person you saw will cease to exist when he is appointed to the highest court of the land. He will just vanish, poof, like the contents of a keg consumed by someone else, a total stranger to me.
Everything that has seemed bad about this confirmation process is just because you have been trying to judge me as a person. But Person Me and Judge Me are so completely different that that’s really unfair. Hashtag #NotAllMes. Don’t judge me as a person, whom you have seen. Judge me as a judge, whom you have not. (Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe, as I think Jesus said, or whoever was deciding how much of my record needed to be reviewed.)
As with Hyde’s piece, read this one. Because you need it.
Look, why would you judge people by how they behave when they are put unfairly on trial, which is, like, the most stressful point in their entire lives? That just doesn’t seem fair at all and — oh, my God, I am just now understanding how the justice system works and why people are always so upset about it.
Laurence Baum and Neal Devins promise a silver lining to Kavanaugh’s confirmation. No … hang on now. Let’s hear them out.
Democrats may find a surprising silver lining in the impending confirmation of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh: Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. With Kavanaugh replacing the more moderate Anthony M. Kennedy, Roberts will now sit at the ideological center of the court. And the Kavanaugh fight may move Roberts to show more restraint in the pursuit of conservative goals than if some other Republican nominee had been confirmed.
Wait … So … what you’re saying is that John Roberts will be so upset to see the conservative majority on the court expanded by someone who expresses the exact view of the Constitution that he has also mouthed, that he will just, golly gosh darn, slide over into the Kennedy seat and fight back the people he absolutely agrees with? Why, that makes perfect … nope. Moving on.
Arwa Mahdawi on the system behind the men.
If you are very clever and work very hard, you can achieve anything. We know this because successful people are always telling us so. They got where they are because of their work ethic: rich parents, the right connections and random chance had little to do with it.
See, as exhibit one, man of the moment Brett Kavanaugh. You know, the judge who really likes beer and seems to hate women having autonomy over their reproductive systems. When Kavanaugh appeared before a committee to defend himself against accusations of sexual assault, in between sniffles he argued that he has earned everything he has achieved, including his undergraduate place at Yale University. “I have no connections there,” he said. “I got there by busting my tail.”
I find myself absolutely in agreement with John Oliver: A man who attended a private high school so ritzy it had its own private golf course, should not be on the Supreme Court. Even if there were no accusations, that one thing should be enough.
Let’s move from Kavanaugh to an equally delightful master of the universe: Donald Trump. One of Trump’s favourite subjects of conversation is how he is a self-made billionaire who got to the big league off the back of his abnormally high IQ and a negligible $1m loan from dad. Which, by the way, he paid back with interest. I hate to call Trump a shameless liar, but evidence suggests his self-made schtick is fake news. An investigation by the New York Times found Trump actually received about $413m (£317m) in today’s money from his dad, most of which was from dubious tax dodges. You need to have a passion for alternative facts to square that with being “self-made”.
Okay, I know I devoted an entire day and 6,000 words (yes, really, and sorry about that) to detailing Donald Trump’s financial history on a day when there wasn’t a whole lot of interest that topic. But if you haven’t read it, go read it. Because, I worked hard on it, “busted my tail” you might say. And yes, I did grow up on a golf course. My grandfather was the groundskeeper.
Other Topics
Leonard Pitts and the secret Republicans.
[Rhode Island congresswoman Claudine Schneider] has assembled a group of like-minded former GOP officials, Republicans for Integrity, to hold the party to account. “Though we are lifelong Republicans,” she wrote in a Miami Herald op-ed, “we are urging you to vote only for candidates who will restore the kind of integrity and constitutional accountability that our nation’s forefathers intended.”
“I’m not going to be one that’s going to argue that we should defeat all Republicans,” RFI member and former Arizona Rep. Jim Kolbe told me. “. . . . But I do believe Republicans need to stand up for principles and for integrity and they need to stand up to a president when he’s not following those principles.”
And doesn’t the group’s name speak volumes? Like “Jews for Jesus” or “Blacks for Trump,” it’s an implicit acknowledgment that what it describes is a departure from the norm. In “Republicans for Integrity,” then, we have a group of Republicans conceding that integrity has become rather rare in the GOP.
Rare? I wouldn’t describe it as rare.
Nicole Austin-Hillery and lessons from the trial over the murder of Laquan McDonald.
What happened in Chicago was a fulfillment of the American promise: that when injustice is done, justice will be served. Far too often Americans have watched unarmed black men and women killed by police officers who rarely even faced indictment, let alone a guilty verdict at the end of a trial. Black America, and those who understood this pain, lost more faith in our system of justice with each death that was not redressed by the system. Many of us wondered if we would ever see an outcome that didn’t follow this familiar pattern — until Friday.
But what are the lessons learned, and how do we ensure this verdict does not simply stand as an aberration? Two things made a huge difference in the outcome of the McDonald case. First, the eventual exposure of video evidence. Advocates for justice reform have long called for the use of dashcam and other police videos to help show what actually happened during such killings. As is often the case, the video in the McDonald shooting was not turned over quickly or easily. It took tenacious efforts of civil rights lawyers who, even after the city withheld it for more than a year, refused to allow the video to remain hidden from the public. Prosecuting these cases has proved nearly impossible without video evidence. Communities must continue to demand transparency around video evidence when a shooting occurs, including releasing it to the public.
That’s one. It’s a thousand names away from even putting a dent in the scope of injustice. But it’s one.
Robert Kagan frets that we’re getting close to taking a word away from the phrase “trade war.” And that word is not “war.”
If the world was just about money, and the primary goal of U.S. foreign policy was just to get more of it, then Donald Trump might be someone you would want in the White House. With tough talk, threats of tariffs, and last-minute accommodations and concessions, the president has squeezed new deals out of allies such as Canada and Mexico that may be marginally better for some U.S. industries than were the old ones. He may have similar successes in his trade war with China, if only because, contrary to the declinist talk of the past decade, the United States, with its massive and lucrative market, enjoys real advantages over its trading partners. If a president is willing to exploit them, as Trump has been, he can force others to knuckle under.
Even if it was just money, Trump would be the wrong pick. His history is not just loaded with failures, they’re often intentional failures, in which Trump bankrupts the investors who trusted him, then comes back to pick up the crumbs at bargain prices. How he’ll do that with a whole nation is an interesting question. Hopefully he hasn’t figured it out.
Unfortunately, however, geoeconomics is not the only game in town. There is also geopolitics, a game Trump does not understand — as his naive dealings with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un show. And so, while Trump’s economic hardball may get us some jobs and money, it could also get us into trouble for which we are neither psychologically nor materially prepared. … economics and trade have always been an adjunct to geopolitics. Trade wars and economic competition were often precursors to real wars — Germany and Britain before World War I, for example, or the mercantilist competition among England, Spain and France in the 17th and 18th centuries. “Rich nation, strong army” was the motto of Imperial Japan and of modernizing China.
Colbert King speaks to an announcement that didn’t get the attention it deserves in this hectic week.
I don’t know much about Jason Kander, except what I read about him in the news. Former Army intelligence officer and Afghanistan veteran. First millennial to win a statewide office when he was elected Missouri secretary of state in 2012. Up-and-coming Democratic Party leader.
This week, Kander abandoned his campaign to become mayor of Kansas City, Mo., citing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression that he traces to his tour of duty in Afghanistan. He had a hole inside that he was hiding from himself and the world, he said. To his credit, he faced up to a problem that he did not bring on himself. He went so far as to state publicly that he was depressed to the point of calling the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Veterans Crisis Line, “tearfully conceding that, yes, I have had suicidal thoughts.”
And King has a public statement of his own.
I’ve been there, done that, too.
Unless you are suffering from it, you can’t know what depression is like. Oh, you can read about it or listen to someone try to tell you what it’s like. But nothing comes close to living with it, and the frustration of not knowing how to put into words how you are feeling, and why.
Anne Applebaum on Russia hackers busted in the act — by a government that admitted they were a problem and did something about it.
Dutch authorities have photographs of four Russian military intelligence (GRU) operatives arriving at the Amsterdam airport last April, escorted by a member of the Russian embassy. They have copies of the men’s passports — two of them with serial numbers one digit apart. Because they caught them, red-handed, inside a car parked beside the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague — the GRU team was trying to hack into the OPCW WiFi system — Dutch authorities also confiscated multiple phones, antennae and laptop computers.
These have produced a trove of additional information. Among other things, the Dutch have proof that some of these men have been to Malaysia, where they were spying on the team investigating the crash of MH17 , the passenger plane brought down by a Russian missile in eastern Ukraine in July 2014. They have proof that these same men hacked a computer belonging to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the organization that revealed the drug use by Russian athletes. They found train tickets to Switzerland, where it seems the GRU team was planning to hack the laboratory tasked with identifying Novichok, the chemical nerve agent that their colleagues used to attack an ex-spy in England. They even found a taxi receipt from the cab the team took from GRU headquarters to the Moscow airport.
Hacking has become the go-to method of both manipulation and punishment for Russia. Need someone to do something? Hack them. Want to hurt them? Hack them. Want to change the oucome of an election? You need an army. Of hackers.
How to fight back? Here is one way: Do what the Dutch did. Conduct a competent and thorough investigation, and then flash the contents of the GRU’s laptops on a big screen. Do what Bellingcat did and provide confirmation of the Dutch presentation, plus some extra amusing details. Do what the British tabloids did, and think up angry and amusing headlines to describe the whole thing (“Novichumps”). And then let a million social media accounts spread the word.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump’s efforts to stop Russia from hacking US elections are about as real as his investigation into Brett Kavanaugh.
And the beer thing is the truth. I grew up Southern Baptist. Never had a taste of beer until I was in my thirties, and didn’t like it then. Sometimes when I’m out with friends, I feel a little apologetic about that. But I’m feeling better about my position.