Jennifer Rubin makes a good point:
Right-wing male politicians such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) have the audacity to declare that [Dr. Christine Blasey] Ford has been victimized … by Democrats. (Maybe ask her?) Even if you thought that, why would anyone say such a stunningly condescending thing? Telling someone who has said she is the victim of a sexual assault whom she should and should not hold responsible for her pain represents a new low in Senate Republicans’ twisted exercise in blame-shifting.
I don’t know who leaked her identity, so I can’t say whether any Democrats were responsible or not. It’s possible that a Democrat is responsible and that Dr. Ford is angry about it, and I guess it might be interesting to see how she’d answer a question about that possibility.
But one thing should be clearer than anything else in this whole sad, sordid mess. Dr. Ford wrote the letter because she did not want Brett Kavanaugh to be nominated to the Supreme Court. Some people might believe that that was her sole motive. Perhaps she made the whole thing up and her motive was no different from anyone else who doesn’t want to see the Republicans put a conservative on the bench. But she singled out Kavanaugh well in advance of him being selected, and we all know why she says she objected to him in particular.
Assuming that at the very least she earnestly believes that Kavanaugh attacked her (even if, implausibly, it was really his doppelgänger), it should be obvious that the seeing him confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice would the cruelest blow she could possibly receive. That would be victimization on a level that dwarfs the terror of being outed as the author of the letter.
Yet, the Republicans continue to act like they’re concerned for her welfare and to blame the Democrats for causing her to suffer. It’s a sickening, cynical argument.
Almost every Republican in the Senate will vote to confirm Kavanaugh. Perhaps it will be unanimous. And every vote for Kavanaugh is a vote to tell Dr. Ford that either she is not believed or that her experience was just part of a youthful indiscretion on Kavanaugh’s part that ultimately does not matter.
They do not care about her in the slightest.
One of the few things I know is that many many people, and a vast majority of women, hold secrets inside their hearts, on how loved ones have mistreated them, or how they have been physically attacked. It sits there, in some cases causing character rot, but in most cases it just a silent pain and anger, ready for the trigger that can bring it forward, out in the open.
This very well could become such a trigger. There are women everywhere, from the high rises in the biggest cities, to the smallest rural towns in the reddest of states, who hold these secrets. They KNOW, because it’s happened to them. And quite a few of these women have significant others they have shared their pain with, and these men also hold that seething pain and anger.
It’s why the republicans are trying to tie it to the democrats, because this is one of the issues that can go beyond political orientation. Honestly, the democrats will be little, to no help in solving these issues, because it’s cultural. And they feel the cultural landscape has shifted.
It’s well past time for that anger and pain to shift the cultural balance.
.
There are plenty of conservatives who ideologically (because of their investment in white supremacism which almost always implicitly brings patriarchy to the table) don’t care about Ford and think she’s a slut who shouldn’t have been at the party in the first place.
But of course, those are the voters who would never, ever, NOT vote Republican. Who cares about those people? I’ll take that trade ten times out of ten.
See white women split:
Thank God the country is getting younger and less lily white.
Notice though that the worst is the 50-64’s.
. . . my deme for a few more months. I’m not proud of that. 65+ not as bad.
Everything this Trump party does is fraught with wrongdoing. They represent the worst of the human race: greedy, selfish, cruel, brutal…the list goes on and on. So it is not a surprise that they will willingly attack a crime victim and do everything in their ill-gotten power to discredit, damage, and ruin her. If it means trying to pin it on Democrats, that’s a bonus in their eyes.
What may backfire on that ploy is how we women actually view that type of deflection and denial. We resent it. We see it personified in Trump and Kavanaugh and we see McConnell and Graham making it absolutely political instead of a question of ethics and abuse.
And we vote. And we run for public office. And we support candidates who decry what the Republicans do.
The Women’s March showed the volume of numbers we can produce. Stand back, Republican assholes of all stripes. We are coming after you.
My favorite saying is “Once a Republican, forever an asshole”!
I am old enough to recall a liberal wing in the Republican Party. So I take issue with this statement. When I was growing up the Democrats were the party of big city machine politics and racism.
I should have been clear – IF one is a supporter of the fascistic tendencies of the Republican party’s current avatar – then this is true!
I grew up in PA in the 1960s and Gov. Scranton (R) and Ray Shafer (R) were not only moderates but today would be probably be regarded as progressives, believe it or not. The GOP radically changed under Nixon but especially Reagan and thereafter.
This is the same song they always sing, because it’s catchy and effective for their supporters/constituents: every time liberals seem to be acting in any kind of Joan of Arc/Gandhi rôle, selflessly advancing the common public good, don’t you believe it — they’re actually just advancing some cynical, coördinated power play.
It’s effective because liberals distinguish themselves from conservatives as the people who try to see beyond self-interest, and this bothers conservatives, so they always try to puncture it.
The GOP does not care about Dr. Ford…..like the way they never cared about the Americans killed in our embassies until Benghazi.
This is beyond obvious to those who post here. That Republicans care only about power and money. I don’t know what it will take for the scales to fall from the eyes of their voters.
Severe personal hardship…
They’ll still find a way to blame someone or something in accord with their prejudices. Never accountable should be their slogan. At least it would be truthful.
Tom Cotton is a straight up sociopath. His political rhetoric is consistently nihilistic.
This is what power in power looks like. The pie thinking where if they give one piece to anyone else it means less pie for them. The modern corporate model where all that matters is a bottomline for shareholders and all else are obstacles to that end. Gone is the concept from the 50’s where corporations were tasked with problem solving…not saying they were good guys then…but there was a different purposing.
The fight that the Rep are putting up with Ford is all about power; and putting a wrecking ball to anything in its way. Caring about women, or Rep women caring about their gender is entirely off their radar, it doesn’t exist any more than caring about the planet.
The comments here implicitly equate “Republicans” with Republican elected officials and big-money donors. But what about Republican voters? No doubt there are those who would agree with Sen. Cotton and who think that Christine Blasey Ford is a stereotypical slut who deserves a good slut-shaming. There are also, especially in this polarized day and age, those who will vote GOP and support GOP politicians in any case. But are there GOP voters who are troubled by the ongoing spectacle?
We’re back to the debate that rages here over and over: Do we dismiss GOP voters as hopeless supporters of what has turned into an authoritarian cult of personality? Or do we try to peel off marginal GOP voters? Booman, our host, feels that we should do the latter. Most commenters seem to feel that we should do the former.