CSotD: Kabuki Konfirmations
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RJ Matson offers his version of Train Kept A-Rolling. Matt Gaetz was sacrificed so that others might pass through the portals. There was a time when the revelations surrounding Gaetz would have cast him into obscurity, but those days are long gone and he may become the next governor of Florida. And why not?
The issue of trains keeping a-rolling is relevant because, much as I admire the work of Mike Luckovich, I’m calling BS on this one. While the Democratic women of the Armed Services Committee pounded him in the hearings, he didn’t run up a white flag and he didn’t suffer any real damage.
And he certainly took a pounding. In her new, independent Substack, former Washington Post columnist Jen Rubin provided video clips of the damage Tammy Duckworth did in the confirmation hearing, in which he proved himself utterly unprepared and incompetent for the position, as well as incapable of directly answering a question.
Rubin posted another, more extensive takedown of Hegseth, in which she included clips of Kirsten Gillibrand, Jean Shaheen and Elizabeth Warren tearing out his liver.
You would expect him to have left the hearing on his hands and knees, but only if you expected a fair vote on his qualifications. Which is to say, only if you were Rip Van Winkle and had slept through the past several decades.
Which reminds me of an old joke about a man who went into a coma in 1958 and woke up fifteen years later. “How is General Eisenhower?” he asked.
“I’m afraid Eisenhower is dead,” the doctor told him.
“Oh no!” he cried. “Now that bastard Nixon is president!”
Though it’s not so much the case of fools returning to their folly as it is a political party brought under the thumb of one man.
Matson returned with a second cartoon, commenting on the refusal of appointees to break ranks and honestly answer the questions put to them.
Hegseth was combative, challenging both questions and questioners and repeatedly refusing to provide even simple answers to questions of fact, while Bondi ducked and dodged, refusing to say whether she believed the 2020 elections were fair by simply conceding that Biden had been sworn in.
Bondi, who said she hadn’t heard the tape of Trump soliciting fake votes from Georgia, also said that the transition from Trump to Biden had been peaceful. Perhaps someone should have asked her if she owned a television set or had ever read a newspaper.
It’s easy to make wisecracks about her evasive testimony, but it’s painful for those of us who remember the Saturday Night Massacre, in which top DOJ officials resigned rather than aid Nixon in illegally defrauding the courts and the American people.
More is at stake here than whether Bondi has to move from Florida to DC, and, in her examination of the case, Joyce Vance goes beyond that analysis to the core of the problem: “It’s clear she possesses the essential quality Trump seeks in an attorney general: she is loyal to the boss.”
Our politics were not always so, and I’m not sure if it’s more depressing to remember what was or to contemplate the direction in which we’re heading. But to take a stance in the middle of the road today is to become roadkill, and to pretend that confirmation hearings are anything more than an exercise in kabuki theater is to confess yourself a fool.
John McCain ran for president as a maverick, but then another GOP candidate dismissed his five-and-a-half years as a POW, declaring ” I like people that weren’t captured, okay?”
What would have disqualified a candidate a generation ago — even if that candidate hadn’t phonied up a doctor’s letter to keep him from serving in the war in which McCain was captured — made no difference, and Trump was elected, and now has been elected a second time.
Trump is emboldened by his second victory, calling it a landslide despite the narrow margin, and is now threatening to turn the law on Liz Cheney for having gone against GOP solidarity by serving on the Jan 6 committee. He’s also said that other committee members belong in jail.
Gary Varvel (Creators) celebrates the lifting of investigations of the convicted felon without, apparently, noting that those same handcuffs are about to be placed on people not for fraud, for sexual abuse or for theft of classified materials, but for disloyalty to Dear Leader.
Dana Summers (Tribune) cheers the fact that Democratic Senators, despite their relentless pounding of Hegseth for his lack of experience, his failures in other leadership roles, his willingness to abandon the Geneva Conventions, his sexual escapades and his excessive, out-of-control drinking, were unable to dent the loyalist voting of the GOP Senate.
Jeff Danziger (Counterpoint), himself a Vietnam vet, envisions an Army under the dubious control of Pete Hegseth, as Donald Trump, having declined the honor himself, attempts to send other young men to war.
Plus this: Whether Secretary Hegseth actually bans women from combat, his insulting attitude towards women in the military will surely discourage female enlistment, exacerbating the current difficulty in filling enlistment quotas.
And, speaking of quotas:
Juxtaposition of the Day
Hegseth’s defense of his opposition to women in combat, as he explained to a furious Elizabeth Warren, is not based on everything he has said about them for the past several years but on what he has realized since he was nominated for Secretary of Defense: That his hesitation is based on lowering the standards in order to meet quotas.
This is in line with rightwing notions that any woman or minority who has risen above minimum-wage jobs has surely done so as a result of DEI policies and is an incompetent taking the place of a white male applicant who would have done a much better job.
Poking a hole in that logic, as Espinoza and Davies point out, doesn’t require that you prove that Black people, Latinos or women of any ethnicity are competent, but simply that you point out that a totally unqualified, incompetent, unreliable white man has been given a free ride to the top of the candidate list.
Steve Brodner provides an example, in case Espinoza and Davies were too subtle.
Can’t accuse Senator Duckworth of that.
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