CommentsMY TURN--September 27, 2018 was another moment in our history that demonstrated that our country has not progressed past the gender bias that much of the rest of the world has accomplished.
Dr. Christine Blasey Ford came forward to accuse Brett Kavanaugh of a sexual assault and in her calm and intelligent demeanor, presented a credible case that had all that observed as completely believable.
Dr. Ford represented every woman (and men) had been assaulted. People around the country were watching as she made her case, all the while, people like Senator Grassley who was trying hard to not come across as a sexist, that he sounded like a sexist. Dr. Ford is a professional therapist, whose understanding of the brain and memory outweighed every member sitting in the room and yet she quietly explained in a gracious manner why people don’t often remember specific details during a traumatic event.
As with all women, Dr. Ford was required to be well-balanced and calm. When women become highly emotional, they are not taken seriously. On the other hand, the male members of the group were allowed to be loud, obnoxious, angry, irritable and accusatory. Once again this entire situation demonstrated the double standards that women are held to.
The Republicans have refused to accommodate the standard procedures of an FBI investigation to include the background and testimony of Kavanaugh and all witnesses. The Republicans themselves knew that this was their own setup for Dr. Ford, so they coordinated to have an outside interviewer, prosecutor Rachel Mitchell, who specializes in sexual crime situations. The Republicans did this so that they could appear that they were not going to drill Dr. Ford by a band of white males. However, if you notice, Mitchell disappeared once angry Kavanaugh made an appearance. While Mitchell’s questions to Dr. Ford were of the type that one might expect, the Republicans didn’t seem to think that she was harsh enough to their liking and made the decision to remove her for the Kavanaugh testimony.
While the temperament for interviewing and questioning during Dr. Ford’s questioning continued to be respectful, there was an underlying current of unexpected grimness from the Republican side as they realized that the people of the nation were recognizing that Dr. Ford’s accusations could, indeed be true. It was then that they instituted their “Plan B” to turn all of the blame to the Democrats and enact inflammatory allegations that this was all a conspiracy against them.
Dr. Ford Represents the Best of Us
Each person that has been sexually assaulted carries with them the social stigma that is very often hidden in shame and wrapped in self-loathing. As Dr. Ford so eloquently explained, trauma places the human brain in the fight-or-flight mode and in this condition we have a flood of hormones that help in survival tactics as well as specific memory situations that focus on the important areas and discard the rest. This is why we have selective memory for details.
The eloquence, patience and outright honest approach is something that many of us wonder if we could do. What she went through and has carried with her throughout her life has affected her life.
The mere fact that Dr. Ford could maintain integrity and logic during the question and answer process drew an incredible sense of pride in me and many others. The country was watching as this incredible woman offered herself up to those that could destroy her and yet, she persevered.
While there is no doubt that Kavanaugh and his family have experienced an incredible strain, it doesn’t compare with what Dr. Ford has gone through. When Mrs. Kavanaugh was delivering cupcakes to the various members of the press camped outside of her house, Dr. Ford and her family were relocating 3,000 miles due to death threats and fear for their lives. This is an example of the type of vile and disgusting behavior that people have against women that come forward to point to an accuser and a main reason why women usually remain silent.
Christine Blasey Ford is an icon for what Americans should be and can be. Brett Kavanaugh is an example of the sleazy, male dominated Neanderthals, wrapped in their desire for power and lying at every turn that the country has become.
A Day of Patriarchal Resentment
While Dr. Ford remained as authentic and real as many of us knew that she had to be, not so with Brett Kavanaugh and various members of the Republican Party. Kavanaugh entered his questioning angry and resentful, often snarling and accusatory. This was followed by emotional and tearful outbursts. None of this went unnoticed by many of us who knew that Dr. Ford would never have been allowed these types of moments. We also all knew that Kavanaugh had spent many hours being “schooled” at the White House and that he was trump’s pick and must comply with what trump sees as a powerful and strong male.
An article in The New Yorker says it all:
“There was, in this performance, not even a hint of the sagacity one expects from a potential Supreme Court Justice. More than presenting a convincing rebuttal to Ford’s extremely credible account, Kavanaugh — and Hatch, and Lindsey Graham — seemed to be exterminating, live, for an American audience, the faint notion that a massively successful white man could have his birthright questioned or his character held to the most basic type of scrutiny. In the course of Kavanaugh’s hearing, Mitchell basically disappeared. Republican senators apologized to the judge, incessantly, for what he had suffered. There was talk of his reputation being torpedoed and his life being destroyed. This is the nature of the conspiracy against white male power — the forces threatening it will always somehow be thwarted at the last minute.”
Where Dr. Ford made it quite clear that she was not involved in any political agenda but simply coming forward as a civic duty, the Republicans whipped into an angry frenzy, knowing that this appeals to their base as well as trump and creating nonexistent conspiracy theories against the Democrats. In essence, it was a lashing out against all women and people that have been sexually abused and assaulted and saying “how dare you question our white male authority?”
The Democrats were quick to respond to these accusations, but the damage had been done. Lindsey Graham, the now bought and paid for Republican, topped everything off with a snakelike vitriol ranting, quickly forgetting that the Republicans refused President Obama’s nomination without a single explanation.
Throughout this entire façade, it was very clear that the Republicans wanted to push this vote through, not include the standard FBI investigation with questions and answers from witnesses. Poorly done attempts were made to “hide” this as they explained to the attendees what an FBI investigation accomplishes and then, Kavanaugh finally put the nail in the coffin when he refused a ninth (or was it tenth) statement response to request an FBI investigation.
Some may have forgotten that it was Brett Kavanaugh that pushed through and demanded answers to some of the most intimate and specific sexual details during the investigation of President Bill Clinton. Kavanaugh bemoaned and whined against dirty politics, and yet this is a topic that he specializes in when it comes to treatment of others. In a Yahoo News article they remind us:
“The dirty politics Kavanaugh is alleging should be no surprise to him, since he spent part of his career in that world.
Kavanaugh cut his teeth in Washington working for what Democrats consider to be the most brazen and partisan crusade in modern politics: Ken Starr’s investigations into President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. He spent more than three years working for the independent counsel, who was looking into various scandals surrounding Clinton and his wife, Hillary.
Kavanaugh personally urged Starr to expand the Whitewater investigation to include looking at the death of White House staffer Vince Foster, a controversy that was a partisan attempt to use a man’s death to go after the Clintons. “
Talk about a setup! The Republicans knew that this was a last ditch effort and the only thing both Kavanaugh Lindsey Graham DIDN’T include in their accusations against the Democrats as well as Senator Diane Feinstein was that they were working with reptilian aliens! This attack was directly out of the conservative/Fox/Breitbart/Sinclair playbook and since nonsense outrage works so well for trump, why not use it?
This charade of idiocy has not gone unnoticed. The position that Brett Kavanaugh is being offered requires a nonpartisan, well-balanced sense of logic, decency and honor. This is NOT what Kavanaugh presented. Instead, we saw a man that was out of control.
After this day from hell was over, CNN reported American Bar Association: Delay Kavanaugh until FBI investigates assault allegations
“In a strongly worded letter obtained by CNN Thursday, the organization said it is making the extraordinary request ‘because of the ABA’s respect for the rule of law and due process under law,’ siding with concerns voiced by Senate Democrats since Christine Blasey Ford’s decades-old allegations became public.
‘The basic principles that underscore the Senate’s constitutional duty of advice and consent on federal judicial nominees require nothing less than a careful examination of the accusations and facts by the FBI,’ said Robert Carlson, president of the organization, in a Thursday night letter addressed to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein.”
Make No Mistake: Kavanaugh Will Devote His Career to Making Women Pay
For anyone that watched Brett Kavanaugh during the testimony process of Sept. 27, 2018, you viewed someone who tried to comply with the trump/Republican agenda. There was no comparison between the testimonies of Dr. Ford or Kavanaugh, because Kavanaugh was an embarrassment.
Just as Kavanaugh seemed to experience a sense of glee in forcing President Bill Clinton to cover the details of his sexual liaison with Monica Lewinski, he will expose his own sexual deviance if/when he is nominated for one of the highest positions in the country. His maleness has been ruffled and to prove his worth both he and the Republicans will hunker down to devote all of their time to making women suffer.
If we as a group had to pick someone to be on the Supreme Court that could handle decency, honesty and honor, it would be Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. She is our hero.
-cw
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