By Dave Lindorff
It looks like Brett “I like beer” Kavanaugh will soon be the ninth member of the Supreme Court.
The FBI has turned in a submissive fig leaf of a report on its cursory, rushed and presidentially circumscribed “investigation” into the claims of sexual abuse leveled against him by several women who assert that he attacked them when they were in high school or college, and now the three Republican senators who pretended to be concerned about his behavior and his veracity in denying the charges leveled against him appear ready to pretend they’ve been convinced by the FBI’s pretend investigation clearing him.
It was pretty much foreordained that gang-bang Kavanaugh would be confirmed by a Republican Party that, at least in the narrowly divided Senate, works in lockstep. Getting a fifth right-winger on the High Court bench was far too important a goal for Republicans for them to miss this chance, particularly with Democrats looking increasingly as if they may take control for at least the next two years of both houses of Congress this Nov 6 (or actually on Jan. 3, 2020, when the new Congress is convened and lame duck members who were not re-elected have their current terms end).
That last point — the lame duck session in which current members of Congress remain legislatively capable but essentially unmoored from constituent pressure for almost two months — is an important thing to remember in all of this heavy breathing over the dick-wagging Kavanaugh nomination: If ‘dry drunk’ Kavanaugh were to lose a vote by the full Senate, Trump would almost certainly respond by quickly nominating an even more right-wing replacement, Amy Coney Barrett, a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Barrett is a conservative Catholic cultist and not someone with any qualms about tossing out Roe v. Wade. She also supports the death penalty, virtually unchecked presidential power, tough immigration enforcement, etc. And because she is a woman, who would bring the male/female mix on the High Court to as close to parity as you can get with an odd number of jurists on the bench, it would be hard to bring a charge of sexism against her and make it stick. She’s also 47 and, being a woman, has a longer statistical life expectancy than the hard-drinking, anger-challenged, 53-year-old male Kavanaugh.
Looking at it that way, liberals and feminists should probably look at Kavanaugh as the better option than Barrett.
At least three-way Kavanaugh, after his pathetic performance in his return testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, is severely damaged goods…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net
Kavanaugh in offering up his own defense actually gave us the reason why he should never have been confirmed: he told us how close an advisor he was to President Bush during his tenure as President. Bush in my mind was a war criminal among other descriptors I might offer. He surely did not preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. He is quoted as saying at one point that the Constitution is just a piece of paper. And that’s how he treated it. Kavanaugh never stood up to defend the Constitution, instead offering support for Bush’s unconstitutional behavior. That should have disqualified him from ever holding office for he probably could legitimately be charged with being a war criminal himself. What is disturbing to me is that during the hearings and/or in the mainstream media, before or after the hearing, the argument I am making never came up. That does not give me hope that we as a people have a real chance of preserving our rights and freedoms, which are disappearing before our eyes. Our citizens do not appear sufficiently educated or conscious enough to face the challenges we face. Without a legitimate respect for the rule of law, or the value of the truth this grand American experiment is lost. Our first task if we are going to have a chance to recover what we’ve lost is to make sure that our family, friends, neighbors and our communities at large become aware of the real threat against us. And it’s not Russia, China, or North Korea. It’s our own abdication of our citizenship responsibilities and a willingness to be open to hear what those not in the mainstream have to say.
Where does one get to see these comments. I just made one and don’t see it anywhere.