The Swamp

mister d wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 2:10 pm What if it were college?

mister d wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 2:15 pm The lack of defiance in those quotes and Conway's make me uneasy.

Giff wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 2:35 pm God damn pathetic. This is why we keep losing elections. There is so much wrong with this nomination, I don't give a fuck how it goes down.

Rex wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 2:52 pm I think the argument that it was long ago and therefore impossible to reliably get the facts straight is better than the argument that we ought to let it pass because he was 17. I mean, it's the Supreme Court. I have a lot more sympathy for the pitcher, because some people seem to think he shouldn't be allowed to make a living at all.

Giff wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 2:35 pm God damn pathetic. This is why we keep losing elections. There is so much wrong with this nomination, I don't give a fuck how it goes down.

brian wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 3:37 pm It's dumb as fuck that the argument against confirming this POS isn't just simply that he'll do away with Roe v. Wade considering that about 70 percent of the country supports abortion rights. In a functioning democracy that should basically be all it takes to turf this fucker.

rass wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 2:03 pm POTUS still hasn't said shit about the assault allegations.

rass wrote: ↑Fri Sep 21, 2018 8:51 am

rass wrote: ↑Mon Sep 17, 2018 2:03 pm POTUS still hasn't said shit about the assault allegations.

nvm

I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!

rass wrote: ↑Fri Sep 21, 2018 8:56 am Was really talking about this horrifying bit of excrement:

I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!

There’s a strange dimension to the Republican campaign to push through Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, on top of a credible accusation of sexual assault from his days in high school, which Kavanaugh denies. It’s their insistence that he is “one of the most qualified Supreme Court nominees to come before the Senate,” as Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley put it. “His credentials are well known.”

But what are these qualifications and credentials? An honest look at his career shows that it’s extraordinarily undistinguished.

Born into a privileged family that was well-connected in Republican Party politics, Kavanaugh coasted from Georgetown Prep, where he was apparently a hard partier, into Yale, where he joined the notoriously hard-partying secret society Truth & Courage, and then on to Yale Law School.

Soon after graduating, he got a gig working for independent counsel Ken Starr — a plum position for a Republican lawyer on the make because the Starr inquiry was supposed to take down the Clinton administration. Instead, it ended up an ignominious, embarrassing failure, generating an impeachment process that was so spectacularly misguided and unpopular that Democrats pulled off the nearly impossible feat of gaining seats during a midterm election when they controlled the White House.

Kavanaugh clerked for Alex Kozinski, an appeals court judge who was well known to the lay public for his witty opinions and well known to the legal community as a sexual harasser. When the sexual harassment became a matter of public embarrassment in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Kavanaugh professed to have simply not noticed anything amiss — including somehow not remembering Kozinski’s dirty jokes email distribution list.

Despite this inattention to detail, Kavanaugh ended up in the George W. Bush White House, playing a critical behind-the-scenes role as staff secretary to an administration that suffered the worst terrorist attack in American history, let the perpetrator get away, invaded Iraq to halt the country’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program, and destroyed the global economy.

Kavanaugh then landed a seat on the DC Circuit Court, though to do so, he had to offer testimony that we now know to have been misleading regarding his role in both William Pryor’s nomination for a different federal judgeship and the handling of some emails stolen from Democratic Party committee staff. On the DC Circuit, he issued some normal GOP party-line rulings befitting his career as a Republican Party foot soldier.

Now he may end up as a Supreme Court justice despite never in his life having been involved in anything that was actually successful. He has never meaningfully taken responsibility for the substantive failures of the Starr inquiry or the Bush White House, where his tenure as a senior staffer coincided with both Hurricane Katrina and failed Social Security privatization plan as well as the email shenanigans he misled Congress about, or for his personal failure as a bystander to Kozinski’s abuses.

He’s been a man on the make ever since his teen years, and has consistently acted with the breezy confidence of privilege. As he told Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law, “What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep,” though the line was mysteriously omitted from the written transcript of the speech given to Congress.

Sexual assault allegations are an unusually stark example of a system that, by and large, allows elites to operate with impunity while demanding maximum accountability for others. People who took out “irresponsible” mortgages lost everything during the financial crisis, while bank executives who required drastic government intervention to stay afloat continue to amass money and power. Donald Trump’s business practices led to a long list of slap-on-the-wrist fines, while youthful drug dealers or car thieves sit in jail.

This is the notion that precisely because Kavanaugh went to the right schools and held important jobs, we should judge his performance in those jobs — including his inattention to the Kozinski harassment and his misleading congressional testimony (to say nothing of the assault allegations) — with a more critical eye than we would apply to an assistant manager at a Target. That if you take on the job of steering the American economy, your performance will be judged based on whether or not you steered it to prosperity — not whether you steered it better than your least informed critics would have.

rass wrote: ↑Fri Sep 21, 2018 8:38 am

DaveInSeattle wrote: ↑Sat Sep 22, 2018 12:03 pm Here's what I don't get: Why doesn't the GOP just pitch Kavanaugh over the side? There are a thousand other douchebag white lawyers who have the same legal qualifications as Kavanaugh, and would gladly vote to repeal Roe v Wade, that would take his place. And then the Republicans could say 'See? We listen to women, and take sexual assault/harassment charges seriously!".

As it is, they now look helplessly out of touch, and it will only get worse the longer this plays out.

degenerasian wrote: ↑Sat Sep 22, 2018 12:13 pm

DaveInSeattle wrote: ↑Sat Sep 22, 2018 12:03 pm Here's what I don't get: Why doesn't the GOP just pitch Kavanaugh over the side? There are a thousand other douchebag white lawyers who have the same legal qualifications as Kavanaugh, and would gladly vote to repeal Roe v Wade, that would take his place. And then the Republicans could say 'See? We listen to women, and take sexual assault/harassment charges seriously!".

As it is, they now look helplessly out of touch, and it will only get worse the longer this plays out.

Maybe the GOP doesn't really want to repeal Roe v Wade but have to put up the facade that they do to appease a small (but important) base. They have to grandstand to block Garland and then appoint their own judges. I believe that if 5 republican judges actually overturn Roe v Wade, it's no risk for the judges, they have a job for life so they'll be fine but the GOP might cease to exist as a party because there would be so much outrage that the GOP will never win another election. That's political suicide.

Also, they want show that the Democrats are evil and these charges are political and not real
"you have nothing on this guy so you can't make up shit to stop us"

DaveInSeattle wrote: ↑Sat Sep 22, 2018 12:03 pm Here's what I don't get: Why doesn't the GOP just pitch Kavanaugh over the side? There are a thousand other douchebag white lawyers who have the same legal qualifications as Kavanaugh, and would gladly vote to repeal Roe v Wade, that would take his place. And then the Republicans could say 'See? We listen to women, and take sexual assault/harassment charges seriously!".

As it is, they now look helplessly out of touch, and it will only get worse the longer this plays out.

What the American right wants, what it’s after, isn’t some abstract pluralist success, like the smooth functioning of government and/or the material improvement of American life. It wants, only and entirely, to defeat its opponents. Those aren’t quite the same thing. The Republican party would not choose the former if it could be accomplished without the latter.