I suppose it is some small, cold comfort that Sen. Lindsey Graham is at least honest about his deeply misogynistic and blindly partisan ethics.
Because the same man who thought that Bill Clinton should not be in the Oval Office for his consensual (but still wholly inappropriate) extramarital affair, will not be swayed in the least by the idea that he is putting a sexual assaulter on the highest court of the land to sit in judgment of women's bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.
“What am I supposed to do? Go ahead and ruin this guy’s life based on an accusation?"
Hold on, Huckleberry. His life isn't ruined. He still has a federal judgeship. He still has his freedom. He hasn't spent decades dealing with the trauma like Christine Blasey Ford has.
Years later, Ford would describe college as a time when she “derailed,” struggling with symptoms of trauma she did not yet understand.
She’d been a cheerleader in high school and joined a sorority, but the lifestyle was too much like the place from which she’d come. Despite the talent for math she had shown in high school, one college classmate recalled Ford failing a statistics class.[..]
It was during Ford’s junior year when Goldstein, who now works as an English teacher in Japan, gave her the advice that would change the course of her life.
“He said, ‘You’re really smart, and you’re just like totally [messed] up,’ ” Ford recalled. She remembers him saying, “ ‘What are you doing? . . . Everybody’s getting it together but you’re like not.’ It was kind of a harsh talk.”
If she was going to graduate on time, he said, she ought to major in psychology. The major didn’t require students to take classes in a specific order, so Ford could take them all at once.
That was how Christine Blasey Ford came to spend her life researching trauma and if it is possible to get past it.
Yeah, my heart breaks for poor Brett Kavanaugh's life, if he doesn't get to sit on the Supreme Court.
The other great fallacy that Graham and other conservatives keep framing the discussion around is the presumption of innocence for Kavanaugh. “You can’t bring it in a criminal court, you would never sue civilly, you couldn’t even get a warrant,” Graham whined.
Let's be clear. This is NOT a criminal investigation. If Dr. Blasey Ford wants to pursue that on her own, that's her prerogative, since Maryland has no statute of limitations on sexual assault reporting.
This is a job interview.
Kavanaugh does not get a presumption of innocence, because that's not the standard by which he should be evaluated. Seriously, who goes to a potential employer and says, "You should still hire me because I haven't been convicted of rape, no matter what anyone says."?
He is there to show the Senate, and therefore the American people they represent, that he has the temperament to sit on the Supreme Court. He needs to show that he can be impartial and open minded when faced with people unlike him. He needs to show that he can look at issues both up close and from 30,000 feet and consider implications on all sides. He needs to show that he has patience, courtesy, tact, courage, firmness, understanding, compassion, humility and common sense and can practice them even under personal duress. Because the decisions he will make will affect millions of people, potentially long after he's left his un-ruined life.
