Kavanaugh and the Death Knell of American Institutions

Hello, reader (or readers, if I’m being especially optimistic). This is usually the time and place where I would go through the ritualistic motions of acknowledging that I haven’t written anything in a very long time, blame it on the toxic nature of our current political climate, and throw out some nasty adjectives to describe our president. I won’t bother you with that today; I’ve done it enough times and I’m quite sure anyone who knows me or has read any of my past missives knows exactly where I stand on contemporary American politics. So let’s just get to the point.

I’m pretty sure the United States Senate died this week. Mind you, what was once known as “The World’s Greatest Deliberative Body” had been on life support since at least 2013, when then-Majority Leader Harry Reid invoked the “nuclear option” to allow most executive branch nominees to be confirmed with a simple majority vote. But things have gone uniformly downhill from there, with the Merrick Garland stonewalling followed by current Majority Leader Mitch McConnell extending the nuclear option to Supreme Court nominees last year and now this.

You know what I’m talking about—the Kavanaugh Debacle. From Cory Booker’s “I am Spartacus” moment to Lindsey Graham’s Tyra-Banks-level screed, the confirmation hearings for retired Justice Anthony Kennedy’s replacement have been an epic display of partisan meltdown. We all already hate each other so much, and the raw tribalism fueling that hate has now spread, virus-like, across our entire federal government. First it was the House, then the Presidency, and now—thanks to Brett Kavanaugh and the Beach Week Ralph Club—it has reached the Senate, and through it, the Supreme Court. By my count, that leaves us with exactly zero governing institutions free of partisan taint. This is bad, folks. This is really bad.

I’d really rather not wade too deep into the matter of the accusations surrounding Judge Kavanaugh. In our current state of play, it’s more than a little tricky for a straight, white male to offer any kind of opinion on sexual assault without getting into some kind of trouble. This is especially true if what I have to say is something other than unequivocally believing Dr. Ford and categorically dismissing Judge Kavanaugh as a boorish, lying rapist. (Or, alternatively, I risk being branded a coward by the other side if I give Dr. Ford even one inch.) That, in and of itself, is a problem—and yet another symptom of our hyper-divided polity. As with everything else, essentially no room has been left for middle ground here, which is particularly troubling considering we are talking about an event that happened 35 years ago with almost no way to know definitively what actually occurred. So let me ask just this one question: is it really so bad that I believe that both Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh told the truth last week? Is it really impossible that Dr. Ford was sexually assaulted and remembers it vividly while her assailant was so drunk—or the event so insignificant in his adolescent eyes—that he doesn’t have any recollection of it whatsoever? Because I watched both her testimony and his and that’s what I saw.

I reject this kind of unconstructive and harmfully dichotomous reasoning (if it can even rightfully be called that). I don’t have to choose between a Christine Blasey Ford who is a paid agent of Democratic sabotage and a Brett Kavanaugh who is a calculated, professional perjurer. I do, however, agree with Ross Douthat and Frank Bruni at the New York Times that our country and our institutions would be best served if Judge Kavanaugh were removed from consideration, regardless of what happened that night three and a half decades ago. We deserve—no, we desperately need—to confirm a Supreme Court Justice who is at least seen as legitimate (if not necessarily agreeable) by both sides. And let’s be clear—these accusations have rendered Judge Kavanaugh illegitimate and his fiery, partisan testimony has disqualified him for this position. Of course, with Senators Collins and Manchin announcing yesterday that they will vote “yes” on Kavanaugh, his ascension to the high court seems all but assured. And that’s a damn shame, because now we’ll have a forever tainted Justice on our Supreme Court, one who could trigger a culture war Armageddon if he goes anywhere near Roe v. Wade.

So yes, I believe this represents the simultaneous death knell of the Senate and the Supreme Court. Whose fault is it? There’s plenty of blame to go around. As I mentioned earlier, Harry Reid got this train rolling (or, really, Bill Frist did when he first raised the specter of the nuclear option back in 2005). Mitch McConnell did nothing to help with his audacious roll of the dice on Merrick Garland and, later, Neil Gorsuch. And now we have Dianne Feinstein entering the fray with a nasty, below-the-belt blow of her own. Yes, as I’ve said, I find Dr. Ford to be a credible witness and I believe every word she said, but I don’t think I will ever be convinced that the timing of Senator Feinstein’s release of the allegations was anything other than sheer political calculation. She held onto that letter from Dr. Ford for weeks, only to make its contents known at precisely the moment at which Republicans would be unable to withdraw Kavanaugh from consideration and put forward another nominee before the midterm elections. It looks dirty, underhanded, and quite frankly horribly disrespectful toward Dr. Ford. Did the Republicans deserve it after what they did to Merrick Garland? Probably. But the Senate is supposed to be above that kind of eye-for-an-eye pettiness and Senator Feinstein should be ashamed for handling a woman’s courageous account of sexual assault the way she did, whatever her reasons were.

But, if I’m being perfectly honest, I’m having a great deal of trouble working myself up into my usual “the Democrats have been no better than the Republicans in the way they’ve handled this” fervor. I’m just so tired of all of this—the anger, the vitriol, the Facebook newsfeed littered with arguments and memes spreading misinformation to literally thousands of people at a time. And I hate that our governing institutions have sunk to that same low. If we can’t respect each other and we can’t trust the governing institutions that have kept our country standing for nearly two and a half centuries, then what’s left? I don’t know, but I do know that when Brett Kavanaugh gets confirmed later today, it’ll only make things worse.

Well, that’s it for today’s uplifting rhetoric. Here are a couple of quality links if you want some further reading on Kavanaugh: from Rod Dreher at The American Conservative; Caitlin Flanagan at The Atlantic; and the aforementioned conversation between Ross Douthat and Frank Bruni at The New York Times. And let’s not forget my good friend CJ Bergin’s sober analysis via viral Facebook post.

Stay tuned for my next post (yes, I’m actually planning another one) in which I endorse a couple Democrats (gasp!) and talk about the forthcoming electoral bloodbath next month.

All the President’s (Klans)men

I have mentioned many times before in this blog that I find precious little joy in writing during the Age of Trump. I’m not honestly sure, but I feel as if I’ve opened up every blog post in recent memory with some variation of that line. I’ve spent the last two years well outside of my comfort zone—I’ve trashed the Republican Party, condemned the hostile takeover of said party by Trump and his fascist goons, and last month I even found myself discussing the merits of tweeting a WWE gif that shows the President of the United States punching someone with the CNN logo for a face. This is madness; it is the world turned upside down. And now, as I desperately look anywhere for a reprieve, I find myself called upon to tackle the easy, always-enjoyable topic of white supremacy. Yes, folks, that was sarcasm.

I’m quite sure I don’t have to explain to any of you why I’m writing about such a grisly topic this week. The events in Charlottesville earlier this month were a stark distillation of our hyper-polarized nation at its very worst—a heinous display of racial animus, violent unrest, and pure, undisguised hate. This wasn’t just harmless picketing and chanting; it was terrorism. It left a dozen and a half people seriously injured and unthinkably cost an American citizen her life. I am shocked and ashamed that an act of such blatant retrograde bigotry occurred merely an hour away from the city I call home. But, as I’ve said, we’re in the Age of Trump.

And how does Trump respond to a gathering of violent white supremacists in his backyard? By blaming violence “on both sides,” only condemning white supremacists a few days later, and then giving a press conference doubling down on his initial impulse to distract us from homegrown race terrorists by pointing fingers at the “antifa” (anti-fascist) counter-protestors. He even went so far as to say there were “very fine people” on both sides, which presumably implies there are some “very fine” race terrorists out there. This is insane, unpresidential, and mind-boggling in its obtuseness. Here we see a certain President of the United States—a man who has been consistently dogged by accusations of racism, fascism, and xenophobia—given a golden opportunity to speak out against all of the unsavory elements with which he finds himself associated, and what did he do? He took the silver platter that had been handed to him and he took a giant, steaming, metaphorical shit on it. He spat in the eyes of anyone (read: most everyone) who is offended or outright harmed by the behavior of overt white supremacists. He spurned the memory of the American citizen who was murdered by one of them. Make no mistake: if it hadn’t been clear already, this man is not worthy of any American’s respect. He is a fraud, a worm, a charlatan of the lowest order, a speck of filth more debased than the dirt beneath the soles of my shoes. That’s what a good condemnation looks like.

But that’s not even what upsets me the most. What truly baffles me is that I find various denizens of the American Right—bloggers, journalists, Facebook commenters, friends—following Trump’s lead in steering the discussion about Charlottesville away from white supremacists and toward vague Black Lives Matter and antifa bogeymen. Not only is this a false equivalence (a darling term of the American Left that I use with just a little bit of vomit in my mouth), it is completely tone-deaf and not worth anyone’s time. And that should be a no-brainer. When a group of avowed white supremacists stage a protest, turn violent, and plow a car into an innocent American citizen, I find myself caring very little what the “other side” was doing to incite them. If some of my cohabitants on the Right want to have a discussion about the tactics used by BLM and antifa and whether or not they are misguided, that’s all well and good. It’s a discussion I’m very willing to have, but for god’s sake, not now. That particular topic has almost nothing to do with what happened in Charlottesville. And attempting to distract from a very real act of domestic, white supremacist terrorism is not only harmful, but constitutes an act of complicity in that terrorism. The first, second, and third thoughts we should all be having as reasonable human beings in response to these events are: white supremacy and terrorism are bad. This one’s easy, folks.

I increasingly fear, though, that this is what being a part of the American Right has come to be. These days, we find ourselves called upon to defend white supremacist terrorists. They are, after all, a vocal and important part of President Trump’s base. What’s more, it seems they have hijacked the ongoing discussion regarding Southern heritage as well. (Let’s not forget the rally in Charlottesville was organized in response to the proposed removal of a Robert E. Lee statue.) As someone who has defended both the Republican Party’s small-government platform and the right of Southerners to preserve elements of their Confederate heritage, I despair at both of these developments. It is quite impossible for me to stand by a party and a cause that are both in bed with the scum of the Earth.

I’ve written before about the relationship between Confederate memorabilia and race terrorists. In “We Are Not Dylan Roof,” I defended Southern heritage as a product of regional pride, not racist hate. I did, however, ask this question: “Is there perhaps some unseen font of particularly vile racism that lurks somewhere in American society—somewhere where Dylann Roof was able to tap into it and feed his own demented hatred?” While I thought then that the answer to that question might very well be yes, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine it would be confirmed in such stark and blatant terms a mere two years later. In a weird way, maybe I owe President Trump a thank you for bringing this scum to light. They have helped me realize that even though a well-intentioned Southerner like myself can admire a statue of Robert E. Lee without harboring any resentment toward by brothers and sisters of color, this doesn’t mean we might not be better off without public memorials of past sins. And maybe I was a fool in the first place for believing that if I defended the display of monuments to men who fought to own slaves, I wasn’t throwing my lot in with a bunch of full-throated racists and bigots. Obviously I was always aware that a small, unsavory minority of the American Right consisted of this ilk, but I never thought I’d live to see a time where they were brought enough into the mainstream to be vocal and accepted as legitimate. Well, if that’s truly the case—if defending my old party and my heritage puts me in bed with open white supremacists—then I’m out.

Postscript: I know it probably seems downright vapid for me to act surprised that I’m being joined by racists in defending statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, but I promise you I’m going for something more nuanced than that. In my view, even if Confederate statues were constructed by white supremacists one hundred or so years ago, a contemporary defense of Confederate statues would ideally come from a sense of regional pride and historical inclusion, not white supremacy. Perhaps I was naïve in thinking that most of my allies felt the same way. Maybe most of them do feel this way, but that’s irrelevant if they’re going to waste their time obfuscating about what happened in Charlottesville. 

CNN is Fake News

First of all, please let me explain. To anyone who has spoken to me about politics more than once (or, really, at all), my general loathing of the news media should be quite obvious. I imagine the majority of my posts on this blog would make that fact rather self-evident as well. Nevertheless, I should probably endeavor to offer some sort of justification if I’m going to do something as inflammatory as slapping CNN with the Trumpian epithet of “fake news.” And don’t fret, friends—I think I can do it without actually defending the President.

I’ll start off by making one thing perfectly clear: I unequivocally believe that it is unbecoming of the office of President of the United States to tweet personal attacks, unsubstantiated claims, or late-night rants in the manner preferred by our current commander-in-chief. From the nonsense of covfefe to the boorishness of his middle-school-level attacks on Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, our President has put on a master class in how to debase himself and his office before the eyes of the internet (read: the world). But just because President Trump’s tweets are unprecedented and wholly unprofessional does not mean that they should automatically dominate our 24-hour news cycle. This is where the mainstream media and I apparently disagree.

Cable news in particular has made a veritable sport of breathlessly covering President Trump’s Twitter misadventures, with each major network vying to outdo the others in bumping more important storylines in favor of a roundtable discussion regarding POTUS’s most recent 140-character outburst. Never mind Senate Republicans’ ongoing efforts to complete a Congressional repeal of the Affordable Care Act or North Korea’s recent test of an ICBM theoretically capable of reaching Alaska. What really matters is keeping a daily list of everything he tweeted, retweeted, and didn’t tweet at all.  

The circus reached a fever pitch last week when President Trump tweeted a gif of an old Wrestlemania clip that showed him punching an individual whose face had been replaced with the CNN logo. Now, I must admit there are some newsworthy elements here—a President who not only has been on Wrestlemania but also decides to use that footage as ammunition in his ongoing feud with a major news network is certainly worth mentioning (and mind-bogglingly bizarre). The adult thing to do, though, is to point out the obvious fact that such behavior is beneath the POTUS and then move on to the real stories. But CNN, of course, would rather take the bait, stoop to Trump’s level, and keep the feud going strong. What does that entail? It entails things like ambushing a freshman Congressman from Virginia into discussing the merits of the tweet, the newsworthiness of tweets in general, and the adequacy of the condemnations of said tweet by Republican leaders in Congress before he is permitted to discuss anything of substance. Scott Taylor (R-VA), the Congressman in question, sits on the powerful Appropriations Subcommittees on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security, but really what he needs to be talking about is an animated gif. As Congressman Taylor himself points out, “You guys are getting played, man.”

CNN, and the media in general, have gone a lot farther than merely attacking the President for hurting their feelings, though. They feverishly worked to spin the tweet as encouraging violence against the press or, as Robert Reich contended in The Guardian, an attack on democracy itself. This is overblown and patently absurd. Trump’s CNN tweet certainly further diminishes his credibility and demonstrates an astonishing lack of judgment, but that’s about as far as any reasonable person can interpret that gif. While I’m sure there is someone somewhere in this country who could watch Donald Trump punch someone with a CNN logo for a head and become inspired to physically harm a journalist, that person does not represent the average (or even below-average) American. This hypothetical person is a dangerous idiot and would have been a dangerous idiot in the absence of this particular tweet.

But this saga doesn’t stop there. CNN took it upon themselves to track down the Redditor who supposedly created the gif, made him repent for his sins (he apparently posted vile anti-Semitic and racist material in the past), and then showed mercy by deciding not to release his identity to the public. This is what CNN, the Holy Arbiter of Truth, had to say about HanA**holeSolo, the offending troll:

CNN is not publishing ‘HanA**holeSolo’s’ name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.

Holy cow. This is what is looks like when a media giant abuses its power and thought-polices an individual American citizen. Now, don’t get me wrong—I agree with The Federalist’s David Harsanyi in thinking that this troll deserves no sympathy and that CNN would have been wiser to just release the guy’s name instead of going full Spanish Inquisition on him. After all, what CNN has done here is reveal that if you promise not to offend them anymore, they can protect you. That statement is, as Harsanyi says, “a threat” implying that if HanA**holeSolo were to go back on his repentance, “the network reserves the right to put him in ‘danger.’” That kind of behavior is, I daresay, Trump-like. And building your entire news cycle around a juvenile presidential tweet and an anonymous, bigoted Redditor is—wait for it—fake news.

UPDATE 7/11/17: Maybe this scandal involving Donald Trump Jr.’s emails will give CNN something of real substance to talk about. One can only hope.