Abbreviated pundit roundup: Braking the Kavanaugh hearings; Puerto Rico—tax paradise for the rich
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E.J. Dionne Jr. says today in his column that the most infuriating aspect of the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is the GOP’s insistence that their speedy timeline must be kept. You know, the one that—before the midtermsAbbreviated pundit roundup: Braking the Kavanaugh hearings; Puerto Rico—tax paradise for the rich
E.J. Dionne Jr. says today in his column that the most infuriating aspect of the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is the GOP’s insistence that their speedy timeline must be kept. You know, the one that—before the midterms—adds this right-wing extremist judge to the extremist judges already on the court. Republicans become irked when anybody mentions another GOP confirmation timeline—the one that kept the moderate Merrick Garland from getting a hearing for nine-and-a-half months. As much as it raises my blood pressure, I can’t quite agree that this is the most infuriating element of the hearings. In fact, it’s hard to prioritize what’s worst when the candidate is a perjurer with an agenda who likes to pretend he doesn’t have one. Then there’s the fury from the fact that Republican senators and the party’s media sycophants have been behaving exactly like everyone who has ever reported a sexual assault knew they would behave regarding Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s stepping forward with her own report of an attempted rape by Kavanaugh at a high school party. The outpouring of disinformation, initiated or amplified by social media, is just part of the what amounts to an assault of its own. A quarter-century ago, in the wake of the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas and the public slamming of Anita Hill for her testimony asserting that Thomas had sexually harassed her for years, Judith Lewis Herman wrote Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. She succinctly described what Thomas and his supporters did and what Republicans and their favored pundits are doing now regarding Dr. Blasey Ford: “In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.” xThese are the 12 white, Republican men who will be questioning Christine Blasey Ford on the Senate Judiciary committee.Retweet if this DISGUSTS you! pic.twitter.com/qvk2J3iBl4— ð¦ Cathleen Burke ð¦ (@ItsMeCathi) September 19, 2018 Read more