He almost managed to do it. Trump almost managed to act like a decent human being.
And then today his true nature rose and he blew it.
You of course all know about Christine Blasey Ford, the California professor who (shades of Anita Hill) described a teenage Brett Kavanaugh, drunk out of his mind, attempting to sexually assault her. The obvious question is, should something a stupid teenager do be held against him decades later? The obvious answer is, if he’s black, yes. If he’s white, no. At least that is most likely what his defenders believe, even if they wouldn’t admit it.
Yet with his candidate under assault, Trump was displaying an astonishing even-handedness, stating that Ford should be heard. He wasn’t tweet-assaulting her. He was actually behaving like a concerned citizen with a sense of the trauma attempted rape would have on a frightened teenager, and advocating that Ford be given a hearing. Even his staff expressed genuine surprise that Trump was behaving like someone who had a moral center, something that until this week he appeared not to possess.
And that lasted until today, when Trump suddenly launched an assault against her from his Twitter haven, declaring that he wanted to see the police report because certainly a terrified teenager who didn’t want her parents to know she’d been at a party where drinking was going on would tell them all about it.
1). I would ask if Trump was insane, but sadly we all know the answer to that.
The fact is this: Back in the early 1980s, a teenage girl who accused a guy–especially a rich guy or an athlete–of sexually assaulting her was likely setting herself up to be a social pariah. This is what she would have faced: “Did he actually rape you? Penetrate you? No? Then why ruin the rest of his life for a stupid mistake. Besides, admit it: you really wanted it, didn’t you. You wanted it and then changed your mind at the last second, right, you stupid šlûŧ?” If she had said what happened, the chances are huge that she would have been talked out of pursuing it while simultaneously getting herself marked as a temptress who likes to get guys in trouble. Of course she didn’t say anything; she would get her life slagged while everyone else would be patting Kavanaugh on the back and telling him to ignore the little troublemaker.
This is, of course, a policy only held toward women. When hundreds and hundreds of boys are assaulted/raped by Catholic priests years ago, everyone accepts it and demands justice. But one scared teenage girl sexually assaulted by a Trump nominee? Sorry, but if she’s unwilling to testify by Monday, toss her aside, and she was probably lying anyway.
I’m not the slightest bit surprised that Ford wants the FBI to examine it before she testifies. You never know how many Trump-loving gun nuts are going to want to punish her for making life difficult for Trump. Having an actual investigation that backs her up, she figures, is sure to serve as proof of her allegations.
Yet Trump falsely claimed that the FBI wasn’t interested in investigating it. Trump has no trouble ordering the FBI to investigate “crooked Hillary,” but an actual crime? No, he claims it’s not their thing. Not their thing? IT’S IN THEIR ÐÃMNÊÐ NAME. Plus, no surprise here, the FBI stated that Trump was lying. That he had not spoken to them, and they would be perfectly happy to begin investigating it if he told them to. Which of course he won’t. Because nothing, not even the humiliation of a teen girl, is going to derail Trump’s ultraconservative selection who will send the SCOTUS spiraling downward for a generation or more.
Could Trump remotely be expected to understand the shame of a teenage girl? Of course not. He thinks it’s okay to grab women by the pussy, for God’s sake.
The fact is that Kavanaugh is going to wind up on the Supreme Court no matter what he’s done. The GOP is walking in lockstep to make sure this culmination to their plan to make the SCOTUS conservative goes through. They first made it incredibly obvious when they stole a nomination from Obama, manufacturing arguments about how a president shouldn’t be able to nominate anyone during an election year, an excuse they completely threw away when it came to Trump nominating someone during an election year. They have forsaken any adherence to the notion of serving the people; they just want everything they can get as fast as possible. I still think Obama’s biggest mistake was not saying, “If they’re not going to do their job, that’s their choice, but I’m going to do mine. He’s now a Supreme Court justice. Presto.” If he had, we wouldn’t be in this fix.
2). Hey Sessions–you don’t exist. . Trump told “The Hill” two days ago that he doesn’t have an attorney general. What he really means is that he doesn’t have an attorney general who will do whatever he wants him to do. If Sessions would shut down Mueller, Trump would love him. Unfortunately for Trump, Jeff Sessions–who really is, frankly, something of a dìçk–at least has enough respect for the Constitution to place his loyalty to that over his loyalty to Trump. That makes him ineffective and a subject of ridicule.
Did he do anyt–Oh, screw it. Why even bother asking anymore?
PAD
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Something that, alas, all to often can be said about how Democrats have handled things. A lot</b. of the trouble we find ourselves in now could have been prevented if Dems had more regularly (or ever) called the Republicans on their šhìŧ, insisted they do their jobs, and went ahead on their own.
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Trying to work with Republicans is a strategy that should have been abandoned decades ago. It's long past time to stop trying to work with Lucy to kick the football.
I was pretty bitter about Obama not making a recess appointment to the Supreme Court at first. Turns out the constitutional text says ‘The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.’ So if he HAD just appointed Garland to the court during recess, the vacancy would not have been lifetime (and they could have declared the session over immediately and had him out in mere days, I believe I heard).
Literally everything sucks right now but it feels better to know that wasn’t a viable option we passed on… and that Trump can’t do the same if the Dems take the senate.
100% agree that the Dems can no longer afford to work with the Republicants, nor to ever presume good faith from them again.
It would have been great if there were a recess.
McConnell used Senate bylaws to create a situation where the Senate was called into session every couple of days by a single person reading an announcement so that Obama could not make any recess appointments.
To G. T. Blake:
McConnell has the power he does because he’s Senate Majority Leader.
Call up the U.S. Constitution on the website of your choice that contains its full text in actual text form. [Ctrl]+[F]ind “Senate Majority Leader” — Not Found!
How is it that an office not mentioned in the Constitution even exists in the first place, let alone wields such vast power greatly exceeding that of the Senate-specific office that is mentioned therein, namely, the President pro tempore of the Senate (Hatch for the remainder of this Congress — not that he’d be all that much better)?
Answer: because we didn’t listen to key Framers including our first couple of Presidents who warned against allowing political parties to exist. There couldn’t be a Senate Majority Leader if there were no Majority Party, and there couldn’t be a Majority Party if there were no parties, period.
This is just one way that allowing parties to not only exist but to take over all of our politics has become the thing that is bringing us to the point of extinction as a nation (already past the point of no return in terms of retaining our leadership position in the world). There are many others.
That said, vote Democratic and only Democratic this election and for the next few, at State legislature level and above, at least until near-parity in party control of State legislatures is achieved. Why? Because the GOP is just one state legislature away from the ⅔supermajority needed to unilaterally invoke a Constitutional Convention under Article V. To get that, they need only defeat, replace, or flip, as few as three individual State legislators.
If that happens, they could conceivably repeal and replace the entire Constitution. And don’t c9ount on the ¾ supermajority requirement to ratify saving us — that only counts for ordinary Amendments. A full repeal-and-replace could set its own ratification rules, just as the 1787 one did. Compare Article VII of the Constitution with Article XIII of the Articles of Confederation, and keep in mind that no part of the Constitution including Article VII could logically be considered valid and in effect in any way, shape, form, or fasion, until it’d been ratified under the then-existing rules, meaning AoC Article XIII, NOT USC Article VII! And yet, once they got that ninth State to ratify as per USC VII and not AoC XIII, they proceeded to implement the Constitutional government including the bicameral Congress and electing George Washington as first President years before the last remaining holdout states finally ratified, as would’ve been required under AoC XIII which required unanimous consent of the States to ratify!
Anyway, a new Constitution would be permanent and irrevocable. And it could do anything they want. They could make being a Dominioinist a requirement to hold public office, make being at least a Dispensationalist a requirement to vote, and make being at least a Protestant a requirement for citizenship itself. They could re-define “treason” from the Article III §3 definition to, “having ever held office as a Democrat or other left-wing Party or any Party to the left of the GOP.” Capital offense. They could declare the teaching of evolution in public schools as form of child abuse, and all of this at the Constitutional level.
Of course, their corporate paymasters would get their clauses in as well: attempting unionization or ever having been a union officer would also be included in “treason.” So would ever having served on any organization, whether government regulatory or NGO, attempting to protect consumers, the general public, and/or the environment, from the corporations (the Dispensationalist leaders do believe in global warming but pretend not to because they want it to happen because it would fulfill Revelation 16:8–9). Corporate Personhood would be far more absolute than Natural Personhood (it pretty much already is, which, if the Dispensationalists and Dominionists were the Christians they pretend to be, should be the ultimate blasphemy in and of itself: it means we human beings have taken it upon ourselves to create a whole new type of Person and endow it with Rights just like they say that Almighty God [as “their Creator” in the Declaration of Independence] did for Natural Persons! How blasphemous is that!?)
I’m starting to think that we all should revise our ideas of what a Republican dystopia would look like. There are studies that show that the Republican base is rapidly becoming more secular (though not at the same rate as the Democrats), and that the Religious Right crazies were sweethearts when compared to the Trumpist Right.
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Because there are also studies that show that the more secular a Republican is, the more likely he is to support Trump on immigraton, white identity politics, etc.
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As retrograde as they are in the matter of gender roles and sexual minorities, the Religious Right at least had some concept of human dignity, even though you and I would disagree with their version of it. The Social Darwinist alt-right has no such concept in their worldview.
I think from now on we will be on an era where we will only have new Supreme Court Judges when the Excutive office and senate are held by the same party. I wonder what will be the next excalation. Will a party in power increase the number of judges?
Since the number of Justices is determined by the Congress anyway, why not?
“This is, of course, a policy only held toward women. When hundreds and hundreds of boys are assaulted/raped by Catholic priests years ago, everyone accepts it and demands justice”
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Except, that’s not totally true. When you look at the actions back then of much of the same conservative media that’s attacking Ford now, you see how they really handled it.
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They downplayed. They asked why people waited years or decades to come forward. They claimed it was part of that liberal attack on Christianity. They blamed it on the liberal agenda and claimed it was all because the church was forced to allow homosexuals in. They tried to equate homosexuality with pedophilia in every way and on every level to shift the blame and demonize homosexuals during the gay marriage and gay adoption debates by pretending that the priests who molested those children were all homosexuals and that’s just what homosexuals do.
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Now more than ever before, a defining characteristic of the conservative movement- especially the Party of Trump -is that no charge against a conservative is ever legitimate no matter the evidence. Brett Kavanaugh could leave a hearing Monday, walk out of the Congressional offices, and rape a woman in the middle of the hallway in full view of the press cameras and there will still be Trump supporters lining up to claim it wasn’t what the MSM claimed it was, talking about the corrupt FBI, spouting drooling idiocy about a Deep State, and still supporting Brett Kavanaugh for the SCOTUS because Trump wants it and Trump has to be able to win.
Unfortunately Obama could not have given a recess appointment to Garland for a couple of reasons.
1) He can only make a recess appointment when the Senate is in recess and even when the Senators are not there someone stills call it into session and then immediately closes the session. It is a game to provide a legal argument against making a recess appointment and has been upheld in court with other appointments.
2) The appointment is only valid until the end of the next Senate session. When Trump was elected the Senate would have ended their session and let Trump make the appointment.
Bottom line is nothing would have really changed. Doesn’t mean O’Connell didn’t corrupt the process or set a highly dangerous precedent that will most certainly be invoked every time the President & Senate are controlled by different parties.
Just a note: The Senate session would NOT necessarily have ended upon Trump’s “election.” That’s why we periodically get those silly things called “lame duck sessions.” A Congressional “session” officially ends on Jan 2 of a given year (the new Congress takes over on Jan 3).
Don’t forget his, as usual, abysmal responses to a hurricane’s victims.
The two responses I’ve heard most frequently about this have been “It was over 30 years ago!” and “He was only 17!” So Republicans feel that rape or attempted rape should have a statute of limitations and that it’s ok if the perpetrator is underage?
Yes, that’s absolutely how they feel. After all, what boy hasn’t done that in high school, right? And, hey, if you don’t report it as it’s happening it doesn’t count.
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Well, unless the accused is a Democrat. Then it’s okay to go back as far as you want; maybe even as far back as telling them to justify what a parent did.
Hëll, it’s 2018 and women are are more often than not still turned into social pariahs in these situations. Actually, I should amend that: we treat non-white males like šhìŧ, period, and victims are treated even worse.