One of the best things about the young new crop of Democrats coming of age and hopefully sweeping into power is that they are of the age that NONE of them were alive in the mythical age of a functional congress. These kids, at their oldest, were teens during the Clinton years, so when Chris Matthews gets has a couple drinks before his show and starts bloviating about how Tip O’Neill and Reagan were best buds they look at him like he is talking about iceboxes, carbon copies, clickers, or other shit from when gram and gramps were kids.
All they have ever seen is Republican fuckery, from Clinton being impeached for a blowjob to the Brooks Brothers riot in 2000 throughout the entire Obama Presidency and now the reign of Prince Clusterfuck. They are under no fucking illusion that you can reach across the aisle and deal with these shitheads.
Hopefully they will come to town and just burn shit down. The Republicans only understand brute force. Let’s give them some.
Major Major Major Major
Yay, I’m a kid!
Jeffro
It’s a good bad point, or a bad good point: it’s been over a generation since the country has seen anything like a functional Congress with the exception of 1992-1994 and 2008-2010.
Now, how to turn that into something that will motivate votes, I have NO idea…
Kay
It is different. You have to see it from their perspective. In 2008 when Republicans started saying Obama was “Jimmy Carter” the young’un’s were baffled. “The humanitarian who builds houses?….”
You don’t know what you don’t know, which sometimes is a good thing.
Spinoza Is My Co-Pilot
You left out weapons of mass destruction and all that during the Cheney administration. Worst Republican fuckery of all during that timeline (so far, cross your fingers and hang on…).
rikyrah
Show the Republicans no mercy??
TaMara (HFG)
Repeating from below, because…What.The.Actual. FUCK??
zhena gogolia
Yeah, the day after the 2016 election I had a student look at me and say, “I’m 20 years old, and there have been two presidential elections in my lifetime in which the loser of the popular vote became president.” I had never thought of it that way. Chilling.
Major Major Major Major
@TaMara (HFG): I saw that! Quite the nuclear take.
Chyron HR
@TaMara (HFG):
“I would be okay with a teen murderer getting a lifetime appointment to the supreme court, but not a known or suspected Democrat.”
Jeffro
@TaMara (HFG): Sometimes the mask drops, and sometimes it just plummets? Not quite sure she’d feel the same if it was a Democrat…actually, I KNOW she wouldn’t feel the same if it were a Democrat. But it’s just more fuel to pound on the WaPo with and get her off their real estate…
Dan B
My hunch is that today’s ctop of young Dems thought that Obama was a sign of solid progress. Uf you’re a P.O.C., LGBTQ, immigrant, undocumented, or any minority there have been almost no functional moments in D.C. Ever. Until 2008. Then the GOP, spurred on by the Koch bros accidental Tea Party success, started an undeclared war on minorities. (except the rich white minority) White elites have not been aware of this nit so silent war but minorities have been aware that the government was not aiding the attacks for a few years.
Unfortunately its all too easy to pit minorities against each other when they are in an existential crisis.
mad citizen
1,000% agree–good point John. Congress will only be functional again when the Dems are firmly in control of the House and have 60+ Senators. It will take a few cycles if the country wants that to happen.
Adam L Silverman
I’m sure this will be done in a classy, responsible, thoughtful manner!
The Dangerman
@TaMara (HFG):
Straight up bullshit.
A long time ago, in a place … ok, not far away … I had an EBI for my job. It’s basically a Top Secret with even more investigation on top of it (meaning, it’s a little harder to get than just a Top Secret). Anyway, ‘they” went back to my Scouting years to find out more about me. If I had Kavanaugh’s background, I’m not getting the EBI. This expunge stuff is bullshit. Oh, I said that already.
The sad thing is that after dropping around 60K and 6 months to clear me, I’ve had longer rounds of golf than the time I spent on this particular program. Ah, the Reagan years.
rikyrah
@TaMara (HFG):
The Everloving PHUCK!???
cain
Obama’s speech in Illinois was fantastic and had a similar theme. The powerful one was when he noted that Gen Zs/Gen Ys were ascendant and had the power to stop all this by simply showing up to vote.
Patricia Kayden
@TaMara (HFG): Megan is okay with a Republican rapist/murderer, just to make things clear.
schrodingers_cat
@Adam L Silverman: I am not surprised. Birds of a feather flock together.
Patricia Kayden
@Adam L Silverman: And that should flip some of the White women who voted for Trump in 2016. Or so we can hope.
B.B.A.
@Jeffro: Oh, the 2002-06 Congress was plenty functional. Pure unadulterated evil, but functionally evil.
raven
It took me three years in the green machine to expunge my teen crimes!
Patricia Kayden
@rikyrah: If Democrats get the White House and Congress in 2020, they need to push through every key policy re voting, civil rights, reproductive rights, immigration, the environment, unions, etc., right away. Pass laws with a simple majority and don’t worry about trying to get any Republican support. And pack the dang courts with progressive judges.
Boussinesque
I’m from the older end of the generation you described, John, and I absolutely agree. My first vote in an election, ever, was voting for Al Gore in 2000, and in high school all my friends and I thought the whole impeachment affair with Bill Clinton was horseshit. I’ve had my vote for president invalidated by Republican fuckery two times out of five, and it makes me livid any time I stop to dwell on it. I hope the rest of the people in my cohort show up to turf these bastards out in November–I know I’m doing what I can to facilitate that happening, and I really appreciate the community here and everything y’all do in support of the D side (fundraisers, volunteering, sharing articles/raising awareness). I feel really fortunate to have stumbled upon this blog during my grad school years.
Jay
@Patricia Kayden:
Rapists only stop raping when they suffer consequences for their actions, jail, beatings, death.
Meghan’s fine with an active rapist on the Court as long as they are a ReThug.
Felanius Kootea
@zhena gogolia: Many of my students were in tears after the 2016 election and for the reason your student gave, I couldn’t just say “It will all be okay.” Not everyone in tears bothered to vote but I believe that election changed some attitudes about the importance of voting.
Felanius Kootea
@Patricia Kayden: Amen. I think this younger generation is there already as Cole says.
Ruckus
@TaMara (HFG):
I would suspect that the perfect person doesn’t exist so some things in someones past might be less of an issue. If and it’s a big, glorious if, it wasn’t a capital crime.
Missy has just finally lapsed into complete utter fucking moron if she thinks a USSC justice is OK to have murdered or raped someone. And now that a supporter of the shitgibbon has said that murder and sexual assault is OK, that confirms to me that he’s very, very likely guilty of both.
geg6
Well, Corker is now saying the vote should be put off until they can hear her testimomy. Of course, he’ll fold like he always does (but, having announced retirement, not actually having any real to). But maybe a delay. Any delay is a good thing. Anything can happen if it’s delayed.
Yutsano
@Major Major Major Major: I turned 20 in 1992.
.
DAMMIT!
zhena gogolia
@Felanius Kootea:
I couldn’t tell them it would all be okay either. It made me unutterably sad.
cliosfanboy
How did the Bethsda meetup go?
Gin & Tonic
@raven: See, you shoulda gone to Yale Law instead.
SiubhanDuinne, Badass Jackal
There’s been so much sadness and loss and awfulness and general fuck-up-edness recently that I am beyond thrilled to announce that a dear friend in Lewisporte, Newfoundland, just gave birth about 90 minutes ago to her first child, a beautiful gorgeous exquisite daughter, named Bridget Rose. So happy to welcome her, and I just hope we leave her a decent world to inherit when her time comes.
Ruckus
@The Dangerman:
And I had a Top Secret clearance 2 weeks after the navy applied for it. I never saw/heard one question about anything. I understand this was normal however, during Vietnam.
dmsilev
@Adam L Silverman: There Will Be Tweets.
MisterForkbeard
Apparently Collins has weighed in. She pronounced that she didn’t know much and would have to talk to her colleagues about it.
Has to get her marching orders from McConnell. Was she always this transparently fake?
TaMara (HFG)
@Adam L Silverman:
raven
@Gin & Tonic: More like Jale Law!
Ruckus
@SiubhanDuinne, Badass Jackal:
The receptionist/bookkeeper just became a grandma a couple of weeks ago. She’s pretty happy about it, it would be nice present to the moms/grands if the world was a better place as they grow up.
Chetan Murthy
@TaMara (HFG): Tamir Rice and Laquan McDonald, amongst a number of other children, would take exception to McMegan’s comments, if they could. GAH.
It is times like this, that I’m really, really glad I don’t have a Twitter account. B/c I’d end up raging out in tweets.
Mnemosyne
@Felanius Kootea:
@zhena gogolia:
I was doing an arts program with 5th graders. Several of them were inconsolable and there was no way for us to explain what had happened. One little girl spent the entire hour crying, because she was worried that her family was going to be deported.
raven
@Ruckus: I couldn’t even get a confidential!
SiubhanDuinne, Badass Jackal
@TaMara (HFG):
I cannot.
No, not even.
What the real, actual, blue-eyed FUCK? I mean c’mon, Megan. JESUS.
Ruckus
@Ruckus:
That’s the receptionist/bookkeeper, AT WORK…
Major Major Major Major
@MisterForkbeard:
She never does seem to.
MoxieM
@Major Major Major Major: Ha! I could be your mother.
To the point though, Lots of those kids (like mine) had parents (like me) who bitched endlessly about the evils of Nixon, Watergate, yadda yadda. And the connections to Cheney et al. All the things we lived through. So they don’t have literal memory, but they have the same kind of feel for intergenerational Repub corruption that I got from my folks about the McCarthy types.
tobie
@cliosfanboy: Meetup was fun and we have a surprising picture to post! (I will not let the secret out of the bag until the post goes up.) Anne Laurie, did you get my message through the BJ website? I’d like to send you the pictures but don’t know how.
Jeffro
@TaMara (HFG): Not EVERY man, thanks very much Donnie & Co.! Not every man!
Ruckus
@raven:
I was the lead in my work group, we were supposed to have an E6 or E7 but there wasn’t one assigned. We had equipment in a space that was considered TS because it could have nuclear weapons. We had to have someone able to go into the compartment. I drew the short straw. They decommissioned all of those type of weapons not long after I got out. And I never saw the inside of that compartment in 2 yrs.
MisterForkbeard
@Major Major Major Major: It does seem to be a pattern. What a mystery.
Yutsano
@MisterForkbeard:The best people. The best people dammit!
Kay
The worst political reporters in the country. It’s like they come to work each day with the goal of scolding Democrats. Which is particularly rich in this environment because Republicans control literally everything. But they must monitor the Democrats! Color in the lines, Democrats! Don’t get too mouthy!
We’re allowed to have a base. We’re allowed to be “partisan”. We can pick a side. Everyone knows the next one will be as bad or worse. No one cares. People want their opposition stated and represented. They’re permitted that. They don’t have to be silent and just sit back and watch while the far Right takes over the whole country. We object. To this one and the next one. They are going to have to work for this seat they stole. This one isn’t going to be handed to them.
Ryan
What’s a Chris Matthews?
Yutsano
@Kay: Who in the ever loving fuck said THAT? Maggie better name some names here.
hueyplong
@Kay: Jesus Fucking Christ, why does Maggie have to scream “VICHY” so loudly every time she opens her maw?
I demand an inquiry into whether her grandfather was Pierre Laval.
raven
@Ruckus: “Tactical Nukes”?
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: Is MAGA Habs quoting someone or is that her own advice? In which case she can go to hell.
Jay C
Well, last I read Sen. Angus (The Voice Of Reason) King has weighed in saying the Kavanaugh nomination should be delayed for a bit until these new allegations can be examined, so there’s another one (though I’m not sure King is on the relevant Committee), along with Bob Corker: so maybe there’s a glimmer of hope after all.
And one other good thing about the Kavanaugh nomination fight? It has put a dent in Sen. Susan Collins’ BS “reasonable moderate” facade: for all her hemming and hawing, she seems to have been taken quite aback by the virulent home-state reaction to her fakey “concerns” about Rapey Brett’s record and “philosophy” – she seems seriously upset that voters aren’t – this time – falling for her concern-trolling-but-vote-the-Party-line shtick. Like “how dare they”??
Major Major Major Major
@MisterForkbeard: indeed.
Kay
Isn’t this an idle threat anyway? What’s the threat? That they will pick a far Right judge? Kavanaugh is far Right. They all are. What the hell’s the difference? The next one will, what? Gut the Voting Rights Act? Destroy labor unions? Gut environmental laws? Eradicate campaign finance laws and gun regulation? They already did all that.
They’re threatening us with a poorly written opinion overturning Roe instead of a well written one. Who gives a shit which far Right judge they pick?
Dorothy A. Winsor
I debated with myself how much to hold a teenager’s action against him as an adult because teenagers do stupid things, especially if they’re under the influence and have crappy peers. But her description of the behavior left me in no doubt. I thought back on what my son was like at that age, and it would be an insult to him to think of this as just one of those things.
Coincidentally, Backman’s book BEARTOWN has an incident in it like this. It’s tragic, but the author does not invite us to dismiss the act.
TS (the original)
@Kay: Whatever happened to Maggie deciding not to tweet any more? trump must have said he didn’t like that idea – he needs his nyt sycophant
Ruckus
@Jeffro:
Well that makes 2 of us.
I hope the club isn’t as small as it seems.
One thing I noticed is that most women have one or more stories of some sort of impropriety or actual rape. And the men never seem to have only one story if caught. Just running the math it seems that many men are serial sexual abusers/rapists. Of course it is difficult to stop them and/or change the culture, if they are just boys being boys, nothing to see here move on.
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
It’s the usual abuser’s schtick: Stop crying or I’ll really give you something to cry about!
TS (the original)
@Jay C: Sen Collins demanded Franken resign – she didn’t want to wait for more information.
MisterForkbeard
@Kay: Do… Haberman thinks we should let Kavanaugh is because the next Republican will probably be a serial murderer rather than just a teen rapist?
Does she even listen to herself?
hueyplong
@Kay: Totally agree. I’m sick of “knuckle under or the abuser will get mad.” Fuck the abuser. Period.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
Ever alert to the incipient radicalism of the Democratic Party base. How dare Democrats have a base? That privilege is reserved to Republicans. We should tell our people to shut up and sit down or it will be worse for them.
Worse than what? Kavanaugh is a far Right nutjob. So we get a dumber far Right nutjob? A far Right nutjob without a DC pedigree? Who cares? Our base doesn’t care if the opinion overturning Roe is elegantly crafted. They could submit it in crayon and it’d have the same effect.
Maybe she means a far Right judge who doesn’t carpool and coach basketball. Like, oh, Gorsuch. The other one.
Gravenstone
@TaMara (HFG): As if we didn’t already know that McAddled was a horrid excuse for a human being …
Suzanne
@TaMara (HFG): I’m sure some idiots will try to make me feel badly for Kavanaugh, reasonable doubt, long time ago, when do men get to go back to public life, blah blah blah. But no one is entitled to a Supreme Court job. We should care about finding the best person we can find. This schmuck is not even the best person in his house.
Ruckus
@raven:
Sounds about right. Torpedoes with rockets on them. Launch at a sub from long distance and it gets there real quick, unlike a normal one, and it’s in the air for most of the time it’s on it’s way so a sub can’t detect it until it enters the water. Which is a bit too late. The nuke rational was that you didn’t have to actually get that close to the sub, the nuke would/could break it’s back from some distance.
Bruuuuce
I may have missed discussion of it here, but the best article on the Kavanaugh situation I’ve seen yet is by Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:
Rejection should be a slam-dunk. But the crooks are railroading in a crooked protector.
Adam L Silverman
@geg6: You’re playing for time here. Time for this to be fully vetted. Time for others to come forward if this wasn’t just a drunken one off. Time for whatever it is Harris has regarding Kavanaugh’s contacts with an attorney at Kasowitz’s law firm to ripen.
Adam L Silverman
@TaMara (HFG): I’ve seen that. A lot of things can happen between now and Thursday.
Catfish N. Cod
I was in high school in the early-mid ‘90s. I remember the last moment the Republican delegation in Congress wasn’t 100% full of horse dung: Gingrich’s Contract with America. Remember that? Having used a firehose of filth to claw his way into the Speakership, the Newtron Bomber thought he could now turn around and be “statesmanlike”. Open committee meetings? Post bills on the Internet in a timely manner? Make sure Congresscritters don’t get to write their own exemptions?
Nothing went in the CwA that couldn’t poll 60%. That was back when people actually wanted to act like moderates mattered.
Of course, he who lives by the Sword, dies by the Sword. Within four years Newt was pulled down by the same forces he empowered, and the reigns of Tom DeLay and Dennis Hastert began with a pleasant little impeachment.
And none of that was to say he wasn’t a supply-siding, granny-starving, science-ignoring, war-on-anything-poor, smug unethical WASP servant of the 1%. He was all that and more. But he did actually have a sense of civics. No GOP Congressional leader since has had that.
I started an independent libertarian. Now I’m a market socialist and dedicated Democrat, and it’s all due to the GOP shoving me away at every opportunity with dishonor, disrespect, disdain for any rule that stands in the way of power; with abandonment of every principle I admired in their philosophy; and with the pervasive twin corruptions of Mammon and the Golden Calf of “social conservatism” / Christianism.
Ceci7
Haberman is quoting Akhil Reed Ajar, the Yale law prof who spoke in support of Kavanaugh during the hearing.
rikyrah
@Patricia Kayden:
Don’t even remember how to spell bi-partisan?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
just clicking around after being out for a while, am I right that Corker and Flake both got out ahead of Collins and Murkowski?
Mary G
Kavanaugh was bragging about being drunk all the time at Yale in a 2014 speech to the Federalist Society there: partial transcript attached to the tweet:
He speaks approvingly of a professor who interceded when a friend of his was cut off by a bartender for being too drunk and made the bartender give him more beers (plural).
It’s really striking how little substance there is in this speech, it’s just name dropping and “I was cool when I was your age” all the way down.
Jay
“Two sexual assault experts reported on 120 of 1,882 men whose self-reported sexual acts met legal definitions of rape or attempted rape but whose actions went undetected by the criminal justice system and found the following:
76 or 63.3% were recidivists, and reported committing additional rapes, either against multiple victims or the same victim, averaging 5.8 rapes per person. (Lisak and Miller, 2002)
70 or 58.3% admitted to other acts of interpersonal violence, including battery, sexual assault short of rape or attempted rape, child physical abuse, and child sexual abuse. (Lisak and Miller, 2002)
97 or 80.8% admitted to committing rapes against women who were intoxicated because of alcohol or drugs. (Lisak and Miller, 2002)
21 or 17.5% admitted to using threats of overt force in attempted rapes. (Lisak and Miller, 2002)”
https://sapac.umich.edu/article/198
Mike in NC
Republicans denounced Obama as the ‘black Jimmy Carter’ just as they previously denounced Bill Clinton as the ‘horndog Jimmy Carter’. The classics never go out of style.
Adam L Silverman
@Yutsano: Professor Akhil Reed Amar:
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Amar%20Testimony.pdf
Hitlesswonder
@Kay: Yeah – I was just going to say…it’s not like BK has a hidden streak of sympathy for the environment or LGBQT rights and will only be hard right on other subjects. That tweet is just ridiculously condescending. Where’s all the crap about compromise and reaching out to the other side that I had to read when Barack was President? The Times had a column suggesting he appoint Republican cabinet members in the spirit of bipartisanship. Such different times….
Schlemazel
@schrodingers_cat:
To be fair, she should go to hell no matter who said that
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: Professor Akhil Reed Amar:
https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Amar%20Testimony.pdf
Amir Khalid
@TaMara (HFG):
I too am baffled by this. Does McArdle believe that expunging a juvenile criminal record at 18 means the crime never happened?
Adam L Silverman
@Jay C: No, Senator Angus King announced last week that he was voting no on the nomination.
catclub
@TaMara (HFG): WTF indeed.
who did MM kill? and wants the world to forget?
second, I wonder how many black juvenile criminals she is agitating to apply this to. less than zero?
schrodingers_cat
@Ceci7: Why the need to be MAGA mouthpiece? Isn’t she a journalist or pretending to be one.
catclub
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Corker?? Another one, like Flake, that has not yet voted his opinions, but likes to be in the news.
patrick II
@Kay:
Bork is dead.
Ladyraxterinok
@SiubhanDuinne, Badass Jackal: Nfld is a fascinating place! My now-ex had a sabbatical at Memorial University ìn 76-77. We had a very interesting year based in St Johns.
I audited courses in folk lore and learned at lot about Nfld’s out-port culture. It was fascinatjng to be in a place where many had never had a car or tv. They had traveled by boat and had provided their own entertainment–singing the traditional songs, telling stories, doing the old dances.
Adam L Silverman
@Jay: That’s using Akers’ social learning implement. I was, until he came out of retirement for a bit, his last PhD. Anyhow, the survey is amazing as it asks the questions: “have you ever committed a rape?” and “have you ever committed a sexual assault?” and then comes back in later questions to ask the same questions again, expect this time without the label of the offense, but with a definition standardized from actual laws on the books. The numbers to the latter questions are always higher than to the former.
schrodingers_cat
@Adam L Silverman: OMG another fucking horrible person of Indian ancestry. I had no idea. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Meh. When is the last time he jumped out of a perfectly good airplane like Subaru Diane?
Ruckus
@Mary G:
There is a lot to dislike about BK. And I can’t think of one thing to like about him. I believe if I was a fence sitting repub, I’d still hate him. He’s scum that has played on the inside of the good ole boys club his entire life. Is he the scum we all think he is? I’d give it a resounding absolutely.
One thing in our favor is that the gop polling is not all that good. I’d bet their internal polling is horrible. So a few of them that might just want to have a future of any kind in politics may actually call for a delay on the vote and request hearings. They may not get them but if they do it may go very bad for BK. I may be beginning to come around to the side of the commenter on an earlier thread that I doubted.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: I do not know. I can submit an RFI for you if you like?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@patrick II: trump chose Kavanagh before all the others on the Heritage list, that means K was the worst person on that list.
Adam L Silverman
@schrodingers_cat: It is what it is.
Personally, I’m beginning to think we need to start building walls around Ivy League universities to keep the faculty and students in, which should keep the rest of us safe. Maybe also a travel ban prohibiting the faculty and students at Ivy League schools from traveling anywhere else. Just until we can 1) figure out what the hell is going on and 2) establish an extreme vetting program.
Ruckus
A question.
Is there one person who shitgibbon wanted for any administration job who hasn’t turned into just pure shit?
Shitgibbon isn’t going to spoil his record now is he?
catclub
@Ruckus: If Trump were really draining the DC swamp, kavanaugh would be the first to get dumped out.
Lifetime DC insider.
Adam L Silverman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Actually he wasn’t originally on the list. He was added specifically for this nomination.
Adam L Silverman
@Ruckus: Mattis. But that’s it as far as I can tell.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Some things are important.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Adam L Silverman: did you see the story today– Times or Post, my mind’s a blur from trump time warp– that trump is telling people that Mattis is a “secret Democrat” or some such?
zhena gogolia
@Mary G:
Man, he is guilty as hell.
Adam L Silverman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’ve seen the article. The article actually out the person that has been running the whispering campaign to dirty up and wrong foot Mattis with the President. It’s Mira Ricardel, who was the DOD advisor on the transition team. She wanted a high level political appointment at DOD and Mattis blocked her – he didn’t want her working for him. She’s now the Deputy National Security Advisor because Bolton brought her on. So this, the stories planted about Mattis having his own PAC and that he’s planning to either primary the President in 2020 or make an independent run against him, etc are all likely her trying to settle scores.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
Thought you’d go there. I wonder if you’ll get much support from the gang.
I will say that he at least seems to be not as bad as the rest of them. A stopped clock is right once in the AM?
Ladyraxterinok
@Bruuuuce: Thank you for this link to an excellent analysis!
Adam L Silverman
@Ruckus: It is what it is.
The Midnight Lurker
@SiubhanDuinne, Badass Jackal: Congratulations to the new parents. And take heart that a lot of good, decent people are working hard to make a better future for all our children.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
That might actually change my mind. He might just be the whisper of sanity. Of course in a hurricane of stupid shit a whisper may not be all that loud.
Ceci7
@schrodingers_cat: Beats me. I saw the tweet as posted here and remembered how hard my forehead smashed the desk when I heard Amar say those words during the hearing. I’d love for someone to ask him if he stands by that statement.
B.B.A.
I just want to signal-boost Chetan Murthy’s post on another (dead) thread, and say as another man I agree with it 100%. All men are predators. I wish it weren’t so, but it is.
Adam L Silverman
@Ruckus: I guarantee he is more conservative than almost anyone here. But he’s the real deal. He’s highly educated, a critical and strategic thinker, highly principled, and highly self disciplined. He took the position to screen the DOD and the Services, as well as the Service Chiefs who are the President’s senior military advisors, as well as the geographic, major, and Service component commands from the President and his whims. He may not make every decision the way your or I would like, but he’s doing a tremendous service in a tremendously bad situation.
NotMax
Sort of on topic, this chart is sobering indeed.
Yutsano
@NotMax: Heja Sverige?
But that is a disturbing chart. And I don’t know how we correct something like that.
Omnes Omnibus
@B.B.A.: Troll. Men are perfectly capable of being decent. All we/they need to do is be decent. It turns out that lots of us can do it.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@B.B.A.:
I’m sorry, but I can’t agree with that. At least not all of it. It is true that a lot of men are raised with toxic masculinity and our culture sexualizes women. There are plenty of men who don’t rape, molest, assault, harass etc women their entire lives despite all of the above. So, no, not all men (I hate this phrase) are predators. I imagine that if the women were for whatever reason the dominant sex many would act in similar ways towards men. It’s just that they’re not in a position to do so and can’t get away with it. That and they’re culturally influenced not to.
The Midnight Lurker
@Omnes Omnibus: Here! Here!
p.a.
@Adam L Silverman: The ‘qualify and we’ll pay if your family can’t afford it’ programs are too new to have made much difference yet, and the legacy system is alive and well. Oh and of course co-optation and hegemony historically have a pretty good track record.
sukabi
@TaMara (HFG): She got kids?
Mary Green
@Adam L Silverman: Yes, he seems to be the one honest person who managed to get the president to nominate him for unselfish reasons. His nickname “Mad Dog” didn’t hurt either. Surprised he’s made it this long with all the slow-walking of orders that even Twitler must see now. I imagine he has used the awesome Command Presence that only a Marine general can exert to good use, so no one is willing to fire him for Trump.
Chetan Murthy
@Amir Khalid: She believes that white men can redeem themselves, and that we must (MUST) presume that they have, if we find them in positions of power, 30+ years later. Or, heck, are the son of wealth (cf. that “Affluenza” killer). Whereas, a black child is prima facie a killer-in-waiting, a superpredator-to-be, and the po-po are always, always in the right, to shoot them down.
That’s what she believes.
justawriter
A small hallelujah to the blog father. I don’t mind losing if we put up a good fight, but after all the years of being told I can’t offend Holy Joe L. or we need Zell Miller even after he spoke at the Republican hatefest, I mean national convention, and Cuomo’s coddling of the dems-who-luvs-nazis caucus in New York, after 40 years I am just tired. (and fuck Tweety with a baseball bat please) After all these years of Dems reaching across the aisle only to pull back a bloody stump, I am more than willing to see my elected representatives wage an uncivil war in the interests of our country.
JR
@B.B.A.: Jean Jacques Rousseau was wrong, after all these years!
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
I understand.
It’s a shit sandwich on all fronts, at least one front has the crusts cut off.
I just hope he keeps us out of war. We’ve seen enough of that this century and it doesn’t look like it’s gone that well at all.
GideonAB
Is there any chance that Cruz
could oppose Kavanaugh?
Chetan Murthy
@Omnes Omnibus: @B.B.A.: @??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: I just want to clarify. I didn’t say that all men are predators. I said that the drive to be the alpha male, taking what he wants, is deep inside all of us [evidence: the popularity of swords-and-boobs fantasy][1]. It is only our moral education that makes us decent men.
Perhaps you don’t believe that moral education is critical to the formation of decent men (and of course women). Perhaps you believe that the way that Alex in _A Clockwork Orange_ was *conditioned* to act morally, was different from the way babies and small children are taught by their parents to share, to not fight, to behave politely, etc. For myself, I remember vividly seeing the movie the first time, and as the final scene rolled, thinking to myself “he’s (Kubrick/Burgess) a master — he’s convinced us that amorality is a virtue!” Then (1985-ish) and now, I’m convinced that we’re “conditioned” to be moral beings by our parents and society.
Except, of course that some of us aren’t.
[1] I claim that there’s a difference between _Lolita_ and _Game of Thrones_. Even though rape is -explicit- in Martin’s books, lots of men read them and don’t turn away in disgust. I believe that that’s much less the case with Lolita. B/c even if many men have fantasies of being emperors with large harems, few have fantasies of raping little girls. There’s a difference.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: For instance (as I wrote over in that other thread) I was never able to finish Lolita. Stopped somewhere in the first half. B/c “children”. Whereas I finished Martin’s 5 books, and am an avid reader of SF&F, esp. of the old stuff (Dominic Flandry, Piers Anthony, and lots of Golden Age stuff).
Llelldorin
@GideonAB: I don’t think so. As far as I can tell, Cruz doesn’t play the sort of “I’m a sincere moderate despite my voting record” schtick of a Collins. His support seems to be based on a sort of “he’s an asshole, but he’s OUR asshole” feeling among Texas conservatives. Opposing Kavanaugh would cost him that without winning a single vote from a Beto supporter.
NotMax
@GideonAB
Greater chance of Saturn’s rings orbiting in a square.
MomSense
I wanted to share something positive that highlights young people doing something positive.
Speak About It teaches high school and college students about sexuality, consent, and healthy relationships.
It really is an amazing group of young people. I’m not sure how far from Maine they travel but I highly recommend them.
MomSense
@MomSense:
I miss the edit button! Going back to bed. I’m too tired to write.
Kay
I think the understated way he speaks is appealing. With the giant big mouth in the White House, especially.
Anyway, that’s why we were supposed to be scared to say anything before- it would harm red state Dems.
1. we’ll get more of a nut who will overturn, I don’t know, every precedent since 1865
2. the people who vote for red state Dems will punish them if they don’t rubber stamp this creep
Those don’t seem like good reasons to sit down and shut up.
divF
@SiubhanDuinne, Badass Jackal: Congratulations to the new addition!
My mother’s family was from an outport settlement in Placentia Bay, and was resettled in the 1960’s (Mom emigrated to the U.S. after WW II). Bridget Rose is a name that would have turned up in our family tree (my great-grandmother was a Bridget).
MomSense
@SiubhanDuinne, Badass Jackal:
Lovely name. Congratulations to your friend.
GideonAB
So Texas Conservatives would not care about having an out-and-out criminal on the supreme court?
Chetan Murthy
@GideonAB: They didn’t care about having a rapist[1] in the White House — why would they care about an attempted rapist on SCOTUS?
[1] amongst many other crimes; but on rape, he was arguably hung by his own words.
Llelldorin
@GideonAB: They didn’t care about having an out and out criminal in the White House. Why would they suddenly quail at the USSC?
And that’s only the ones you could convince that an attempted rape of a date at a party is actually a crime.
Mnemosyne
@Chetan Murthy:
I dunno. There are lots of things I like to read about that I have no interest in actually doing in real life.
I do think that teenage boys are prone to dreaming about grandiose power fantasies. I think most adult men mature out of that and are happy to read about/watch movies about things they wouldn’t do IRL, but some are never able to mature past that.
And I think power becomes addictive in itself, and sociopaths who are given power seek more and more of it. But I think that’s a separate thing since most people are not sociopaths.
Llelldorin
@Chetan Murthy: On this one we’re apparently on the same page.
I mildly disagree with your earlier post, but my earlier consultations with my learned colleague Mr. Laphroaig Quarter-Cask are making it hard to articulate exactly why. Maybe I’ll put it together tomorrow.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Chetan Murthy:
I believe that empathy is inherent to the human condition as well as our evolutionary relatives. The Golden Rule is the foundation of all human morality since we are all fundamentally the same deep down as humans. We all want similar things: we don’t want to be treated like shit. Everyone wants to at minimum be able to survive and live comfortably. Problems primarily happen when we don’t consider others deserving of the same considerations we feel we should have. For example, when we deny the humanity of others and dehumanize them.
NotMax
@Kay
1865 B.C.E.
Mnemosyne
@Chetan Murthy:
Also, given recent research that babies as young as 15 months old prefer fairness and altruism, I think it’s more likely that our society and their bad parents ruin some people’s moral sense rather than the other way around. For some reason, this is reminding me of white commenters who were raised in the South pre-Civil Rights saying that they were punished by their parebts if they called an older Black person “sir” or “ma’am.” Their particular society taught them to disrespect Black people on pain of physical punishment.
The babies study from UW:
http://www.washington.edu/news/2011/10/07/babies-show-sense-of-fairness-altruism-as-early-as-15-months/
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Mnemosyne:
This makes me wonder; can sociopaths convince themselves that what they’re doing is morally correct and necessary by circumstance?
B.B.A.
@Chetan Murthy: I wish I could share your starry-eyed optimism about human nature.
Chetan Murthy
@Mnemosyne: I could be mistaken, but it seems to me it comes down to beliefs about how much of our morality is -taught-, and how much is -innate-. Clearly I believe that almost all of it is -taught-, from such a young age that we don’t consciously remember being taught. Mnem, I think you believe that it’s more innate, for instance when you refer to men “maturing” and growing out of teenage tendencies.
I wasn’t raised in a religion, but my best friend in college was. He took me once to his Catholic church service, and I got to watch the call-and-response of the congregation and the priest. It was pretty impressive, and gave the impression that the congregants were pretty committed Catholics. Afterwards, I told my friend this. He remarked that “if you’re taught to do this 1-2 times a week from age 4, I assure you, you would also give the impression of great commitment, no matter what your actual level of belief was”. The Jesuits say “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man”. I think we underestimate what lifelong training in certain behaviours can produce.
I’m not a big believer in “innate moral tendencies”. Sure, there are neurological outliers (probably all psychopaths, from what I have read). But there are *so many* rapists and harassers, that it can’t be they’re all neurological outliers.
Felanius Kootea
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Except for sociopaths, who are literally able to switch off their ability to empathize – default mode is off where for most people it is on. I read a book, either The Psycopath Test or The Sociopath Next Door which claims that societies that place a higher value on individualism tend to have a higher proportion of sociopaths. And these sociopaths are usually very intelligent, gravitate to certain fields (finance being one of them, not sure about law) and mostly don’t end up being serial killers (the typical image of a psychopath). It’s frightening to me that there’s a political party in the US that actively dismisses empathy and sneers when it is brought up as a good quality for a politician or leader to have.
Felanius Kootea
I use sociopathy and psychopathy interchangeably above but psychopaths are born with a brain structure (smaller amygdala, etc.) that can be identified on an fMRI scan as different from the average person’s. Psychopathy must have served an evolutionary purpose, horrible as that sounds. Sociopaths are “made” through trauma and their brain scans may seem normal even though they may behave like a psychopath.
Raoul
Just stopping by kinda late to say, Amen, Cole.
Also think this is apropos:
“Beto, Gillum, & Stacey are incredible candidates. But they didn’t appear out of thin air! In 2005, Beto was one of the youngest people ever elected to El Paso City Council. At 23, Andrew was the youngest Tallahassee commissioner. Stacey was elected to the GA state leg at 34.” – Amanda Litman
Chetan Murthy
@Felanius Kootea: Brad Delong once posted a quote from a description of a knight during one of the Crusades who was lord of some castle in Palestine. It was manifestly clear from the quote that the man was a psychopathic madman who would throw down at the slightest provocation. I remember reading _The Three Musketeers_, and the same thing came thru: they were basically near-psychopathic in their level of proclivity to murder.
I think until the modern era of complex societies with critically important yet easy-to-break systems (both social and mechanical/electronic), it’s always been HIGHLY adaptive to be crazier than your neighbors AS LONG AS you were MUCH, MUCH better at the violence. Otherwise you’d get killed-off. But if you were really good at violence, then being a psychopath was your path to power and reproductive success.
Brad was pretty clear (and correct) that he’s glad that that time is past, so that today the guy would be in either prison, or an asylum for the criminally insane. So that “beta males” like him (and me, and many others) can produce a society full of precisely those complex and fragile mechanisms that support our population.
Ruckus
@Felanius Kootea:
People with empathy are able to compromise, able to see the other side of an issue. People without are not. And current (and in my mind all previous) conservatives who want to do the things that they want to do can not have empathy. Look at Cruz, Manafort and BK. They have no empathy. It’s so obvious in Cruz’s and Manafort’s cases that even their families don’t want them.
hitchhiker
In response to John’s original thought, yes. Yes, let’s for once display our anger. Let’s not pretend that there’s a good faith opposition partner waiting to negotiate on the other side.
There are sharks over there.
I want to decimate them. I want to win the Senate in 50 days and hold a 70-seat majority in the House. I want all the state houses and all the governor’s mansions. I want the school boards. I want all of it, and when we have it, I want to just ROLL through whatever’s left of them with policy that is clearly fair and thoughtful.
In the Woodward book, there’s a bit clearly narrated by Lindsay Graham where Graham is sucking up to Trump and trying to get him to negotiate on immigration. He tells Trump to go ahead and work with Democrats, because “they can be had cheaply.” That’s how much they disrespect us … in their private conversations, they tell each other we’ll be happy to lick up the slop they choose to spill in our direction. Fuckthemallforever.
Amir Khalid
@Mnemosyne:
They are indeed, being at that time of life when they are most powerless, and most conscious of it. This is where comic book superheroes come from.
Doug R
@Kay:
A Kennedy instead of a Gorsuch? Thomas instead of Bork? Thomas did stumble into a few good decisions the other way ’round.
The Court in 1974 ruled UNANIMOUSLY that Nixon had to obey a subpoena. Kavanaugh think’s that’s wrong.
Ruckus
@Chetan Murthy:
In times well past one had to be strong to survive. Supermarkets? Paychecks? Time clocks? Sit down labor? These things had not even been thought of, let alone exist. It wasn’t every day but kill or be killed was part of the structure of life. It still is for some but not for anywhere near the majority. We have organization, government, jobs and can purchase things with our earnings. This is relatively new in human culture. The conservative way is to go back to a time when that was still the prevalent context of life. Because that is what a lot of them understand. Think about racism, and cultural identity in this vein and it really does make some sense as to why conservatives are having a push around the world. Deep down they see that the life that they think we should all be leading is going away. They know no other way of thinking, or acting. We have world wide trade. That opens up a huge change in the way and the who we do work with. Our might used to be steel and coal, and we were for the most part OK in petroleum, up till about 30 yrs ago. Now we make little metals but still a lot of things out of them. Others want our food stuffs because they can’t grow enough. Our world is changing from kill or be killed to 8 hr work days and sit down or at least relatively non heavy work jobs. And people who don’t have the skills for that are the losers, they want those jobs back. They aren’t coming back but that’s what the relics want.
Amir Khalid
It seems to be the most obvious consequence of decades of Republican fuckery in government has been widespread belief that government should be run by fuckers.
Chetan Murthy
@Ruckus: Yep. Yep. That was Brad’s point. Yep. As some wags say about survivalists and their burying gold: if they were -serious-, they’d be stockpiling antibiotics. Idiots.
scott alloway
@MisterForkbeard: Yes. She’s a sad replacement for Bill Cohen or George Mitchell. Shame on fellow Mainers (I moved since then).
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
From their standpoint it has been working for the last 40+ yrs. Slowly but look where they are today. One of the throwbacks to Neanderthal man is in the WH. Those free ride immigrants are being rounded up. The world is starting to make sense to them again. It will still leave them behind, because time doesn’t have a reverse gear. Like it or not, understand it or not it only rolls forward. There will be hiccups of course, this is one, in the big picture sense, that we are in right now. But it will roll over them, it always does. We may suffer collateral damage as well, that often happens along the way.
Mnemosyne
@Chetan Murthy:
Ah, I see where our disconnect is:
I’m not saying that rapists and harassers (and abusers) are neurological outliers. I’m saying that they were trained to be that way by our society and, often, by their parents. That’s what “rape culture” means — we, as a culture, teach young men that they should be rapists and harassers, and that there’s something wrong (unmanly about them if they don’t rape or harass people weaker than they are.
Where we disagree is on the influence of culture. You think our culture discourages young men from becoming rapists or harassers. I think it’s 180 degrees the other direction — our culture encourages and rewards that behavior, and provides tons of reinforcement to convince men that it’s normal.
Chetan Murthy
@Mnemosyne: Aren’t we discussing whether the cup is half-full, or half-empty? If one stipulates that education can impart either morality or immorality (which I certainly do, and I think you do also) then it comes down to whether we believe that children have an inherent moral sense or not, no? You believe they do, and that education can erase it; I believe they mostly do not, and it is nearly-wholly due to education, that children grown into decent people.
BTW, I clicked-thru and read the page about that study of babies. I’d have to see what developmental psychologists say about that study today, and whether and how many replications there have been. I dated an HDFS grad student “back in the day”, and she was pretty clear on how noisy their data was. I’m not saying it was unscientific — just that, it was pretty weak data, and would require a lot such data to produce conclusions worth relying on. And this study was of 47 babies.
GideonAB
@Mnemosyne.
And you think that Cruz thinks it is unmanly to avoid violence?
Mnemosyne
@Chetan Murthy:
To be clear, I’m not a Rousseauian who thinks we should leave all children in a state of nature because civilization will ruin them. A certain amount of training in cultural expectations is necessary no matter what, but I think that humans are social animals who evolved to live in groups, and things like having a sense of fairness and empathy make living in groups easier for everyone, so it makes sense that we would evolve to have those qualities. There has also been testing in other primates that shows very similar behavior within groups.
I do think that you’re vastly underestimating the cultural messages you’ve been receiving your whole life telling you that women are lesser than men, “real men” take what they want without asking, etc. Even if you consciously reject those messages, you still received them and they still affect you subconsciously.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: Oh, interesting, here’s a CNN article about the subject of innateness of morality: https://www.cnn.com/2014/02/12/us/baby-lab-morals-ac360/index.html
Ruckus
@GideonAB:
Can’t answer for Mnems but I’d guess the answer would be not that he thinks it’s unmanly, but that he’s a chickenshit.
Mnemosyne
@GideonAB:
I think Cruz does think it’s unmanly to avoid violence, which is why he’s so desperate to project that avoidance onto Democrats, especially Democratic men. Cruz likes to think of himself as a badass who could totally win a fistfight even though, deep down, he knows he never could, which only leads him to project harder onto everyone else.
Mnemosyne
@Ruckus:
Also, this. Cruz can have internalized a cultural expectation that it’s unmanly to avoid violence while being a chickenshit, so he runs around accusing his enemies of being chickenshit and pretending he’s a badass.
PIGL
@Jay: i like the sound of “beatings”. … Perhaps you have a newsletter to which one could subscribe?
PIGL
@Major Major Major Major: she’s not aware of too many things.
Mnemosyne
@Chetan Murthy:
I dunno, that seems to support my contention that we are born with a sense of morality that our society and family then influences for good and ill.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
I think this is true.
I did not get them at home but those messages have been clear to me for my entire life. Two things worked in my favor. I had a mentor when I was 13-14 yrs old who was extremely good at that. I didn’t recognize what this man taught me till I got quite a bit older but the message was clear. Richard was (and may still be, he was 15-20 yrs older than me) a black man built like an NFL lineman. Yet he was not in the least a person who pushed power, although as I said he was physically very powerful. He worked for my father and he saw that I was basically rudderless at that point in my life. I will always have him to thank for giving me direction that I didn’t get at home. And I’m not saying bad about my parents, they weren’t abusive or dismissive, just not really clued in. He didn’t look like me, wasn’t related to me, had nothing to lose by just ignoring me and he taught me that none of that matters. What matters is actually thinking about the person you want to be and making it so. Richard quit because he said he found a better closer job to home. He was a happy, satisfied black man, comfortable in his own skin and I’ve always hoped that his life reflected that. The second part was those parents. They didn’t teach that life is a boxing match where it’s you against the world and everyone in it. Something along those lines is what you are talking about I believe. Hit hard and take what you want before someone does that to you. That was life at some point in fast receding history. But that concept will be around for generations because not everyone has a Richard. Or parents with a work ethic rather than a grab and steal ethic. BTW, my parents, life long democrats.
Chetan Murthy
@Mnemosyne: The (admittedly insufficiently detailed, mass-market) article cites a pretty weak moral sense, and points out many limitations. Maybe there’s more in the source research articles.
It seems to me, your argument was *not* merely that children are born with some rudiments of morality, and they’re either improved or worsened by education (by society/parents). It was that they were born with most of the morality they need (e.g. that hurting other persons is bad) and that education can subtract from that. That’s not at all clear (from the (again, pretty weak)) CNN article.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
That’s him pretending he’s a bad ass? He comes across as a candy ass. And a massive asshole. A good turn around boo in his face and I’d bet he dirties his undies. If he offered to fight all one would have to do is fall down laughing at him and he’d run away.
He should never give up his day job for acting. He’s fucking terrible.
See I know the talk. I’ve heard it all my life.
Ruckus
@Chetan Murthy:
We, like most species are born helpless. But many learn the rudiments fairly early. Most 4 legged animals can walk within a short time, we take about a year or more. Etc, etc. Think about our lives without any education. Could we exist? The answer is of course, we have been for thousands of years and most didn’t receive any formal education up until maybe a few hundred years ago. So what was it that we needed to become adults? Survival mainly. How to grow or catch food, how to use tools to build shelter. What about the mental side of things. Survival mainly, how to get what you need, how to keep what you need from others trying to do the same thing. Money has been around for quite a while but a lot of things were not paid for but bartered. Until we made standards for money, what a denomination is worth. And that didn’t really work across societies until there was a strong government, chosen, or forced.
I’m going to stop here this could go on for a while. But you should get the message. We need a number of things to survive while we are young. Once past that point, we needed strength. That was the lesson we were taught. Look past the type of life we have now, that has only been a very short time historically.
Jay
@PIGL:
Not with out legal repercussions.
GideonAB
@Mnemosyne.
Has Cruz attacked Beto for being a coward in this campaign?
Llelldorin
@Chetan Murthy: I think my problem is entirely your insistence on trying to split “nature” from “nurture.” Humans are by nature social creatures; our societies aren’t grafted on to some more natural state but _are _ our natural state.
I think the disconnect that you’re seeing isn’t between a natural state and societal pressures, but between multiple conflicting societal pressures. Our societal views on sex are a mishmash between the rape culture that Mnemosyne describes, the “personal honor” sense of manhood that used to stand both against it and (in a much uglier way) alongside it, and the feminist critiques that are (hopefully) slowly supplanting both. Men growing up are exposed to all three to varying extents, and end up synthesizing some form of personal morality out of that mess.
Barry
@Ruckus: “Is there one person who shitgibbon wanted for any administration job who hasn’t turned into just pure shit?”
IMHO, all of them, because they didn’t ‘turn into..’; they already were pure sh*t.
Trump is not The Corrupter; he’s The Revealer.
WaterGirl
@Kay: “Don’t make Daddy mad or he will beat us.”
The thing is, abusive Daddy will beat you no matter how good you are or how careful you are not to make Daddy mad.
WaterGirl
@Suzanne: Hand over her mouth, turning the music up. Buddy yelling both “go for it” and “stop” while K. is trying to rape this 15-year-old girl.
Sorry. there’s no excuse for that.
gorram
@Yutsano: Someone may have gotten to this first, but it’s from this extremely strange document, that she saw fit to tweet because… I don’t know why (we know why)
DavidTC
You know, there are unacceptable behaviors we should be willing to ignore in children. If Kavanaugh was accused, I don’t know, stalking a girl in a way he didn’t understand was a problem but scared her, or being on a date with a girl and misunderstanding the situation and grabbing her breasts or something…teenage boys often have pretty bad understandings of boundaries, and maybe we don’t hold it against them forever. I’m not saying ‘let them get away with it’, but make sure they understand it’s not acceptable and punish them to some level, and we don’t hold it against them once they become adults.
Locking someone in a room and holding them down is _way_ past that sort of thing. That’s not any sort of misunderstanding. The story, is basically them trying to rape someone, and failing at it because they’re too disorgansized and drunk.
(This is, of course, pretending we should treat 17 year-olds as children, which…the Rpeublican party almost never seems to want to do when they are rich white kids.)
On top of that…this isn’t a trial, hell, we’re not even suggesting firing him. We’re suggesting not giving him a lifetime appointment to the highest court in he land.