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Kavanaugh Showcases “Persecution Complex”
On Tuesday, Trump mocked Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against his Supreme Court nominee, Brent Kavanagh: “What neighborhood was it in? I don’t know. Where’s the house? I don’t know. Upstairs, downstairs — where was it? I don’t know — but I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.”
Also on Tuesday, the Washington Post reported: “In an unprecedented move, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday released an explicit statement that purports to describe the sexual preferences of a woman who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh of misconduct.”
JENNIFER L. POZNER, jenniferleepozneratgmail.com, @jennpozner
Pozner is a media critic, media literacy educator and media activist. She is the author of Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV and founder of Women In Media & News.
She just wrote the piece “Kavanaugh Hearings Showcase GOP’s White Male Persecution Complex” for Truthout, in which she writes: “Kavanaugh emerged from the hearing looking guiltier than ever, and his apparent history of sexual violence seemed to make the GOP Judiciary members embrace him more fervently. The motives underneath this empathy for Kavanaugh are frightening. In the days since the allegations first leaked, GOP men fell all over themselves to make male sexual violence in high school seem universal and normative. ‘If this is the new standard, no one will ever want or be able to serve in government or on the judiciary,’ said Ed Rollins, a Trump PAC co-chair, while a lawyer close to the White House told Politico, ‘If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.’ …
“Why would they do this with the contentious midterm elections hanging in the balance? It’s not just that they’re obsessed with controlling the Supreme Court, or that they want the seat to go to a guy who would legally prevent prosecution of the president: They simply don’t seem to believe this strategy is a risk.”
Also see from Shamus Khan, the chair of the sociology department at Columbia University in the Washington Post: “Kavanaugh is lying. His upbringing explains why,” which states: “Brett Kavanaugh is not telling the whole truth. When President George W. Bush nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2006, he told senators that he’d had nothing to do with the war on terror’s detention policies; that was not true. Kavanaugh also claimed under oath, that year and again this month, that he didn’t know that Democratic Party memos a GOP staffer showed him in 2003 were illegally obtained; his emails from that period reveal that these statements were probably false. And it cannot be possible that the Supreme Court nominee was both a well-behaved virgin who never lost control as a young man, as he told Fox News and the Senate Judiciary Committee this past week, and an often-drunk member of the ‘Keg City Club’ and a ‘Renate Alumnius,’ as he seems to have bragged to many people and written into his high school yearbook. Then there are the sexual misconduct allegations against him, which he denies.”
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