CSotD: What is, not what should be

So here we are, and, as Jim Morin notes, we’ve even had an FBI investigation of the latest charges against Brett Kavanaugh, which was conducted along the same lines as the administration uses in exploring environmental science: Round up the stuff that supports your position and avoid the parts that don’t.

Which would just be liberal mewling and puking if there weren’t so many reports of people who logically should have been interviewed, who even tried hard to be interviewed, and who were ignored and passed over in a sharply limited probe that only addressed the specific incident of sexual assault and not the extremely dubious under-oath defenses of the fair-haired boy.

 

It doesn’t matter. As Tom the Dancing Bug points out, Kavanaugh is using the OJ defense: I didn’t do it, you can’t prove it and you’ll be on my side regardless. It got a president elected and now we’ll see if it gets a Supreme Court Justice confirmed.

And it’s not that complicated, however much Jeff Flake (R-Elsinore) wants to hem and haw and contemplate the matter. We’re coming up on the moment when the choices are Aye and Nay.

At which point we’ll know what else the Pussy Grabber in Chief has tightly clutched in his little hands, which, for the children in the audience, is a reference to the Vietnam-era response to those who felt it might help if we tried harder to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people:

“When you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

Which sounds bold and decisive to those who value power over decency, but is about as cold-hearted and anti-democratic and to-hell-with-human-values as you can get.

 

And here we are, and here’s a series of cartoons by Ann Telnaes on the topic and it’s biting and accurate and infuriating and yet …

… and yet it won’t make a damn bit of difference if the GOP Senators line up and vote in lockstep for a man who, whatever his degree of honestly, clearly holds their branch of government in contempt.

As Ann suggests, it’s less about Brett Kavanaugh and more about the status of women, which makes it depressing to go back to the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings of 1991 that propelled Telnaes into cartooning, since the cartoons from back then could easily be running today:

 

BTW, I couldn’t find any Etta Hulme cartoons on the topic, but I did turn up this interesting quote:

“She was a very liberal cartoonist, but she was a very excellent cartoonist,” former Star-Telegram Publisher Wes Turner said in 2014.

Which kind of reminds me of the interchange between Phil Ochs and Judge Julius Hoffman at the Chicago Seven trial:

You are a singer but you are a smart fellow, I am sure.
Thank you very much. You are a judge and you are a smart fellow.

But I digress, or I would be if conservative publishers hadn’t recently been leaning a lot harder on excellent liberal cartoonists.

In any case, a couple of those cartoonists are still around, and have turned in similar cartoons this time, with Bill Day once more wishing the system were less prurient, and Steve Benson again adding a jocular touch to a more serious doubt over the nominee.

But, of course, there are more women cartooning today than there were in 1991.

 

However, as this Lisa Benson panel shows, having more women in the game doesn’t necessarily add up to automatic outrage over gender-related character issues, and it should be noted that Trump had a large number of white women supporters in 2016 and apparently still does.

The idea that female outrage is going to propel the Blue Wave on its own could turn out to be an unwarranted assumption.

Whatever happens in November will be the result of a battle between money and shoe leather, between those who hold the keys and those who want them, and the more both sides get stirred up, the less certain the outcome becomes.

Meanwhile, a seat on the Supreme Court is a lifetime appointment, as many people said before the last election, and, like Cassandra, the prophecies were real but went unheard, which makes them as useless as if they’d never been said.

So here we are now, and the bottom line at the moment is that the Senators will read a hurried, incomplete FBI report that, from what has been leaked by the White House, corroborates only the fact that only Dr. Ford says the event happened but that she has no proof, and does not deal with the truth or falsity of Kavanaugh’s other sworn testimony.

And then the Senate will vote, and, whatever is in the report, whatever they take from it, however open they are to its implications, whatever they think of what they’ve already seen and heard, they have only two choices:

Yes or No, Aye or Nay.

Either the Reichstag is on fire or it’s not.

And then we’ll see who shows up on November 6, and whether they’re bringing water or gasoline.