Opening Insights: Questioning
Are you grateful to or for President Trump? How do you see him? What do you see him doing or having done?
“For Once, I’m Grateful for Trump…” is an article published in the New York times. While there is clear evidence of satire and sarcasm there is also an undercurrent of insight and new found discovery.
When the New York Times runs a pro Trump article we need to stop and take note. Is this a joke? Is this real? Is this true?
Informational Insights
...I’m grateful because Trump has not backed down in the face of the slipperiness, hypocrisy and dangerous standard-setting deployed by opponents of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. I’m grateful because ferocious and even crass obstinacy has its uses in life, and never more so than in the face of sly moral bullying. I’m grateful because he’s a big fat hammer fending off a razor-sharp dagger.
[..]
The first moment was a remark by a friend. “I’d rather be accused of murder,” he said, “than of sexual assault.” I feel the same way. One can think of excuses for killing a man; none for assaulting a woman. But if that’s true, so is this: Falsely accusing a person of sexual assault is nearly as despicable as sexual assault itself. It inflicts psychic, familial, reputational and professional harms that can last a lifetime. This is nothing to sneer at.
The second moment, connected to the first: “Boo hoo hoo. Brett Kavanaugh is not a victim.” That’s the title of a column in the Los Angeles Times, which suggests that the possibility of Kavanaugh’s innocence is “infinitesimal.” Yet false allegations of rape, while relatively rare, are at least five times as common as false accusations of other types of crime, according to academic literature.
[..]
A third moment, connected to the second: Listening to Cory Booker explain on Tuesday that “ultimately” it doesn’t matter if Kavanaugh is “guilty or innocent,” because “enough questions” had been raised that it was time to “move on to another candidate.”
This is a rhetorical sleight of hand in three acts: Elide the one question that really matters; raise a secondary set of “questions” that are wholly the result of the question you’ve decided to ignore; call for “another candidate” because it will push confirmation hearings past the midterms, which was the Democratic objective long before most anyone had ever heard of Blasey’s allegation.
Fourth moment: Watching Julie Swetnick, the woman who accused Kavanaugh of attending parties decades earlier where women were gang raped, change key details of her story in an interview with NBC News.
Swetnick’s claims border on the preposterous. They are wholly uncorroborated. But that didn’t keep Kavanaugh’s opponents, in politics and the press, from seizing them as evidence of corroboration with Blasey’s allegation, which is not preposterous but is also largely uncorroborated, and with the allegation of Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez — uncorroborated again.
Uncorroborated plus uncorroborated plus largely uncorroborated is not the accumulation of questions, much less of evidence. It is the duplication of hearsay.
Fifth moment: Reading about a 1985 bar fight at Yale — a story that involved Kavanaugh throwing ice, resulted in no charges against him, and should never have been reported. Or reading a 1983 handwritten letter by Kavanaugh, in which he says of his gang of friends that “we’re loud, obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us” — adolescent boasting now being treated as if it is a crucial piece of incriminating evidence. Or hearing from Yale classmates who claim to have seen Kavanaugh drunk, which somehow is supposed to show that he’s a demonstrable perjurer and possible sex offender.
Will a full-bore investigation of adolescent behavior now become a standard part of the “job interview” for all senior office holders? I’m for it — provided we can start with your adolescent behavior, as it relates to your next job.
Sixth moment: Listening to Richard Blumenthal lecture Kavanaugh on the legal concept of falsus in omnibus — false in one thing, false in everything — when the senator from Connecticut lied shamelessly for years about his military service. And then feeling grateful to Trump for having the simple nerve to point out the naked hypocrisy.
Seventh moment: Listening to Dianne Feinstein denounce Kavanaugh for failing to reflect an “impartial temperament or the fairness and even-handedness one would see in a judge.” This lecture would have gone down more easily if Feinstein hadn’t gamed the process for her own partisan purposes, and at huge personal cost to Kavanaugh and Blasey alike.
Eighth moment: Being quizzed in recent days about my teenage years at a New England boarding school — the subtext being that I must know something about elite prep schools and the mentality of the boys who attend them.
I do. It was at boarding school where I first formed lasting friendships with kids of different races and economic backgrounds, and where liberal-leaning teachers showed us how to think critically, keep an open mind, and value tolerance and respect. I have no idea if Georgetown Prep was anything like that, but the facile stereotype of “white privilege” that keeps cropping up in discussions of Kavanaugh’s background is yet another ugly tactic in the battle to defeat him....
Source: Bret Stephen - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/04/opinion/trump-kavanaugh-ford-allegations.html
Possibilities for Consideration
- What are your thoughts on Bret Stephens' article referenced above?
- How many of these 8 things did you think of when you were tracking the Kavanaugh’s circus?
- How much of the article expert was new information?
- How much did you think about and question?
Add Your Insight: Be the Change...
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world;
indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
MARGARET MEAD