When Judge Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation hearing began on September 4, I was totally skeeved out by the guy. It wasn't just his mushy, pale complexion, retrograde politics, and fake "aw-schucks" demeanor that made my skin crawl. His opening statement was just fuckin' weird. I tweeted, "I gotta tell ya: Between spurning the handshake of Fred Guttenberg and name-checking all the girls on his daughter's basketball team, Kavanaugh came across as one creepy bastard." I stand uncorrected on that. And I'm not even talking about his ultra-creepy attention to Bill Clinton's dick and semen and Monica Lewinsky's vagina back when he worked for Ken Starr.
So many of his first words to the committee were about how much he really, really loves and respects women that I thought it was just a way to mitigate his opposition to Roe v. Wade. I mean, c'mon. Between going on about how great his mom is to his coaching of his daughter's basketball team to "A majority of my 48 law clerks have been women," Kavanaugh may as well have just winked at Dianne Feinstein and said, "See? I have no problem with the ladies."
During the questioning, Kavanaugh revealed that there were already two other letters from groups of women talking about what a great guy he is. No, really. Here's Kavanaugh, responding to Sen. Orrin Hatch: "You've received a letter from 10 college friends of mine who were women, who were women athletes at Yale. Talked about how I treated them and women's sports with respect and as equal, even when I was in college. You have a letter from 84 women I worked with in the Bush administration who talked about my efforts to work with them in the intense environment of the West Wing, especially after September 11th."
Prior to the revelation that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford wrote a letter to Feinstein saying that Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her when she was 15 and he was 17, this could easily be seen as a kind of inoculation against all those liberals saying that he's going to send women to their deaths in back alleys (even if, you know, he really is going to send women to their deaths in back alleys). I mean, his creepy-ass dissent in Garza v. Hargan, where he argued a 17 year-old undocumented girl could be blocked from getting an abortion, speaks volumes about what he really thinks about young women, more so than coaching them.
But now, with the addition of the already-prepped letter from 65 women who claim Kavanaugh was aces in high school, it's clear that Republicans knew something was up with this creepy motherfucker, and they were ready with the signatures to soften the blow. And, frankly, it ought to make us wonder what else Republicans are hiding in all those pages of documents they have refused to release or even allowed Democrats to see.
Any attack on Ford's credibility has to start with the simple question of what she has to gain from all of this. She initially wanted to remain anonymous, but then the information on Ford's letter was leaked by "multiple sources" to The Intercept, as well as to Ronan Farrow at The New Yorker. She's a professor at Palo Alto University, connected with Stanford, so she has a successful career. Hell, she's written on recovery and growth after the trauma of 9/11. Now, she's going to face an unending shitstorm from the right. If she hasn't already, she'll get death threats, her college will be inundated with fake complaints trying to get her fired, and she'll have her looks torn to shreds. Hell, the fuckin' brain trust of conservative nutzoids, including gender traitor Laura Ingraham, already tried to go after her but ended up attacking another Christine Ford.
Some of us also remember the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings, which was about egregious sexual harassment. I wrote then in the college paper about it, saying that Thomas wasn't going to go to jail or even lose his job. He just won't get the promotion. "Only one of them is telling the truth," I wrote. "One of them is an insane liar, and I believe he now sits on the Supreme Court." And every fucking decision that Thomas has made about women's rights has proven how little he thinks of women's agency beyond being objects for male sexuality, fit for subservience. But Hill was dragged through the mud, degraded and insulted, and ultimately treated as if she were just making it all up for shits and giggles. Those hearings, led by Joe Biden (who later apologized for them), were a national embarrassment.
Twenty-seven years later, how difficult is it to take Ford at face value when she says that Kavanaugh held her down, tried to take off her clothes, and covered her mouth to silence her screams, that she thought she might be killed? Is it really that difficult to imagine that she didn't tell anyone about this deep trauma until years later? Is it really that difficult to believe that a preppy little douchebag senior from an elite all-boy's high school in the DC suburbs would get shit-faced at a preppy douchebag party in 1982 and think he could get away with raping the sophomore from the girl's school?
There's another letter, this one from over 200 women who went to Ford's high school around the same time period, and it says, essentially, "Yeah, this is the way these little rapist shits acted."
Motherfuckers, I grew up in the 1980s. Half our pop culture, from Sixteen Candles to the book Less Than Zero to MTV's Spring Break, was about getting girls so drunk or high that they couldn't say, "No," when it wasn't about trying to tear their clothes off or peep at them in their showers or bedrooms or locker rooms. Most of us knew that it was all fantasy bullshit about a lack of consequences for assholes. But a fuck of a lot of young men thought it was a license to bust a nut whenever and wherever and however.
Yeah, I fuckin' think Kavanaugh did it. I don't give a shit if it happened in high school because I think he's lying about it now, which even some Republicans have said is enough to get him voted down. There should be an investigation. And there are going to be hearings next week. A smart administration would pull the nomination. Hell, when George W. Bush pulled Harriet Miers, he got Samuel Alito. But, you know, we're dealing with Trump here.
Kavanaugh's creepy need to demonstrate how much he cares about women was there all the time, showing us, by protesting so vociferously, who he really is. We should thank Ford for putting her trauma out there for the world to judge, which is another kind of trauma, and being brave enough to take on this cyclone of condemnation and rage.
