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You are here: Home / Politics / America / Not So Vast, Largely Conducted Out in the Open, Right Wing Conspiracy: Senate Judiciary Committee Edition

Not So Vast, Largely Conducted Out in the Open, Right Wing Conspiracy: Senate Judiciary Committee Edition

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This is Garrett Ventry:

(Image taken from Ventry’s twitter feed)

Garrett’s been a very naughty man…

At 4:39 PM on on Thursday 20 September 2018, Ventry in his capacity as the spokesperson/communications advisor for Senator Grassley’s and the GOP majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee for the Kavanaugh nomination tweeted the following:

There’s only one problem with this. As reported yesterday, Ed Whelan was coordinating with CRC Public Relations on his insane an attempt to exonerate Kavanaugh by implicating Kavanaugh’s classmate via tweetstorm. Do you know who worked for CRC Public Relations while Whelan was coordinating with them about committing a gross, public stupidity? Garrett Ventry. And do you know why CRC Public Relations sent him to work for Grassley to help shepherd the Kavanaugh nomination through? Because Leonard Leo, who controls the Federalist Society, as well as several related organizations like the Judicial Crisis Network through an opaque and largely unknown financing network, and who is a good friend of Ed Whelan’s – another senior Federalist Society member – asked CRC to send Ventry to work for Grassley on this.

But wait, there’s more!!!! Apparently among Ventry’s personal preferences was one for sexually mistreating women.

WASHINGTON — A press adviser helping lead the Senate Judiciary Committee’s response to a sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has stepped down amid evidence he was fired from a previous political job in part because of a sexual harassment allegation against him.

Garrett Ventry, 29, who served as a communications aide to the committee chaired by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, had been helping coordinate the majority party’s messaging in the wake of Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her 36 years ago at a high school party. In a response to NBC News, Ventry denied any past “allegations of misconduct.”

After NBC News raised questions about Ventry’s employment history and the sexual harassment allegation against him, Judiciary Committee Spokesman Taylor Foy replied in a statement: “While (Ventry) strongly denies allegations of wrongdoing, he decided to resign to avoid causing any distraction from the work of the committee.”

And if anyone was still wondering how Whelan got Ford’s name, apparently someone he was in contact at the White House (most likely rhymes with Shill Bine or Mon DcGahn) gave it to him.

If you’re going to conspire to do something dodgy, you should really establish a set of best practices so what you’re doing isn’t 1) SO FUCKING OBVIOUS!!!! and 2) easily detectable by anyone who can trace a simple set of social and professional connections.

Who knew that when Andrew Breitbart, who, like Antonin Scalia, is still dead – unlike Paul Manafort and Mariia Butina who are just still in jail, but will one day die in prison from old age – was caught on video screaming “STOP RAPING PEOPLE!!!!” over and over he was speaking to conservative legal and judicial professional?

Open thread!

Reader Interactions

91Comments

  1. 1.

    germy

    So even though Dr Ford is saying please stop, slow down, I’m not comfortable with the way this is going, the GOP is gonna plow through, ignore her telling them to stop and just take what they think is rightfully theirs?
    — Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) September 22, 2018

  2. 2.

    smintheus

    @germy: Well Grassley delivered her deadline to agree to his terms, so she’d better jump fast before he snatches back the offer to let her tell her story. Would be a shame if she didn’t understand it’s the only chance she’ll ever receive to speak her mind.

  4. 4.

    Adam L Silverman

    @smintheus: Grassley’s not actually running this. Grassley is just the figurehead. McConnell’s running this whole thing in conjunction with McGahn and Leo.

  5. 5.

    germy

    Why do these republican operatives look like wizened old men to me? Ventry, Stephen Miller, etc.

    Does the evil age them prematurely?

  6. 6.

    dmsilev

    @smintheus: That deadline seems to be a curiously elastic object; it’s been pushed back or extended three or four times now. One might get the sense that Grassley is floundering, except that that would be an undeserved insult to flatfish.

  11. 11.

    Adam L Silverman

    @germy: Ventry is 29, Miller is now 33. They’re burning through the skin suits they stole from the original owners.

  12. 12.

    smintheus

    Also from the linked NBC story:

    “Chairman Grassley has led a very transparent process,” Ventry told Fox News on Wednesday, saying the committee was intent on providing a “comfortable setting” for Ford to come forward and testify.

    Nothing more comforting than an unapologetic conspiracy by means of a “transparent process” among known sexual harassers.

  15. 15.

    Doug R

    I hope Butina realizes any “help” she gets from Mother Russia will end up with her dead, at least while Putin’s still alive.

  16. 16.

    gene108

    @germy:

    Why would the Republicans give up the chance to thwart the will of the people by judicial fiat for a couple more generations, just because a silly lady had a bad time at a party in high school?

    **********************

    I wish the media would really lay out, as simply as possible, how the Republican Party has been willingly corrupted by the very wealthy that creates a superstructure of wing-nut welfare positions, friendly media outlets, etc that allow mediocre to incompetent people to hold office.

    Honestly, the only thing saving us from a fascist oligarchy is the stupidity and incompetence of the politicians the right-wing political complex enables by their coddling of them.

  17. 17.

    Betty Cracker

    Depraved minds think alike: I also thought of Breitbart’s insane screeching in connection with this very issue.

  20. 20.

    NotMax

    Andrew Breitbart, who, like Antonin Scalia, is still dead

    Playing three-handed bridge with Gen. Franco. Using asbestos cards.

  21. 21.

    smintheus

    @geg6: The weirdest aspect of this attempted bullying is that the GOP keeps strategerizing as if Ford is too dumb to realize that she doesn’t need their permission. She stated explicitly that she saw it as her civic duty to make the info public, and their entire defense continues to presume that she’ll be willing to let Republicans make a travesty of that revelation.

  22. 22.

    gene108

    @smintheus:

    The only question I have is when McConnell rams Kavanaugh’s nomination through, will Democrats be able to mobilize more people to vote for their Senate candidates? Because I can only seeing already pissed off Democratic voters getting more pissed off and energized.

  26. 26.

    West of the Rockies

    @Adam L Silverman:

    They have all the enraged energy of youth and absolutely zero sense of humility or compassion that comes with age.*

    *Comes with age in thoughtful humans anyway.

  27. 27.

    Ella in New Mexico

    Read a long Twitter thread by @WarfareNavel that made the extensive connections between all the players working for ,Grassley, Whelan, Garret, CRC and Kavanaugh’s other allies to push the ingenious “doppleganger” PR campaign and working to smear Christine Ford. None of them was anyone any American ever elected, by the way.

    What really alarms me about this little storyline is that apparently, right wing think tanks and PR firms pretty much run the work of the staff of some key Republican Senators–not the Senators, who are at least accountable to the voters. Or at least those of all the senile old fuckers like Grassley and Hatch who are already God-damn clueless they can’t find matching shoes anymore. And these people make a shitload of money doing it.

    Talk about “public-private partnership”. More than anything else this country needs to get serious about reforming money and it’s dirty tentacles in our politics. It’s killing us.

  29. 29.

    smintheus

    @dmsilev: You see it’s the principle that’s at stake, when you think about it. Grassley can’t allow a witness to negotiate with the committee about the terms of a committee hearing, because otherwise he’d have to coordinate with Kavanaugh and *that* certainly cannot be allowed to happen.

  30. 30.

    Adam L Silverman

    @gene108: Every Democratic campaign strategist, consultant, manager, and candidate had better be asking this question if that happens:

    Because those will be the voters who will be put even further into play as a result of ramming Kavanaugh’s nomination through.

  31. 31.

    Kay

    The scary part to me is how bad the plan was- they’re completely insane if they thought that would work- and they did! They all looked at it and said “yes, let’s go with that”.

  33. 33.

    Rand Careaga

    Krugzilla yesterday:

    A thought: the Kavanaugh mess has structural roots. Rs needed someone who was both ideologically reliable and at no risk of developing a conscience when it came to defending Trump against rule of law. So it had to be a bad person, which meant good odds of nasty stuff surfacing.

    Sounds reasonable to me.

  34. 34.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Ella in New Mexico:

    What really alarms me about this little storyline is that apparently, right wing think tanks and PR firms pretty much run the work of the staff of some key Republican Senators–not the Senators, who are at least accountable to the voters.

    This first started when Gingrich became Speaker of the House. He gutted the committee staffs and actual member staffs. Eventually the same tactics he used to break the House of Representatives were carried over to the Republicans in the Senate who replicated it, then, under McConnell perfected and expanded it.

  35. 35.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Kay: It’s what happens when you decide: “screw it, in addition to peddling this shit anymore, I’m gonna get high on my own supply”.

  36. 36.

    PJ

    I wonder if one of the reasons why GOP ratf**kery has gotten so sloppy is that for years, certainly all throughout the Clinton and W years, they could feed whatever BS story to the media, and the media would just print it, without vetting sources or checking for alternative sources, or doing, you know, basic journalism. But, aside from access reporters, like Maggie Haberman and Michael Schultz, who will print what they are fed without any context in order to keep getting these “scoops”, Trump and the GOP’s egregious behavior has forced reporters who were previously undistinguished in their desire to get at the truth (i.e., Jake Tapper) to actually question what they are being fed and who is feeding it to them. (And, as much as I dislike social media, Twitter has enabled non-Villagers to continue raising questions (many of them obvious, some not) that journalists are less likely to ignore.) In the W years, all of the bullshit they have been shoveling about Kavanaugh would probably have been accepted as a matter of course, and the party just hasn’t gotten the message that they need to be more professional in how they handle things. Perhaps Russia could send them some advisors?

  37. 37.

    smintheus

    @gene108: Doddering Republican leadership is shouting at their TV boxes.

    McConnell:

    “When did women get the right to vote?”

    Grassley:

    “When did women get the right to speak?”

  43. 43.

    Gozer

    @smintheus: What they forget is that Dr. Ford is a scientist.
    What I know from watching my own wife and some of her students go through the PhD/tenure process is that they encounter so many Grassleys through the process. They’ve been harassed, had their competency questioned, had their research questioned, etc. and usually by some decrepit dinosaur on their way out.

    About 15 years back when my wife was working on her dissertation, an emeritus prof was back in the dept for some reason (an award or something) and lamented at the number of women in the grad program and the number of women faculty.

    She has their number. Especially if she works in STEM or other highly technical field.

  44. 44.

    Kay

    @Adam L Silverman:

    The world of elite lawyers has needed to be brought down to size for a long time. They’re smart lawyers. There are a lot of smart lawyers. All of these people on Twitter describing floor plan conspiracy theorist guy as “brilliant”- they’re ALL “brilliant” supposedly. No one promotes the incredible brilliance of elite lawyers more than other elite lawyers. Enough. There are a hundred Kavanugh’s out there- he’s replaceable. We can get a better judge- one who doesn’t fucking LIE constantly would be nice.

  45. 45.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Kay: It is also a sign of just how badly McConnell’s success has effected his judgement. Remember what I wrote back in June:
    https://balloon-juice.com/2018/06/12/if-only-there-was-something-that-senators-corker-or-flake-or-collins-could-do/#comment-6905340

    Senate Majority Leader McConnell is only going to respond to these types of actions because he really isn’t a politician or like any politician who has ever served as Senate Majority or Minority Leader. Rather than view him as a politician, it is more appropriate to understand Senator McConnell as an insurgent, albeit a non-violent one. He recognizes no legitimacy but his own. When out of power he’ll do whatever is necessary using asymmetric, irregular, and/or unconventional means to achieve power. And once he achieves power he will do whatever he can to achieve his objectives to consolidate his gains as quickly as possible using any means necessary as he believes his actions are self justifying – that his achievement of power justifies his by any means necessary strategy. This is, by the way, the basic argument of the premier Italian fascist (national-syndicalist) theorist Sergio Panunzio, who delineated the fascist theories for the use of political violence and low intensity warfare in the 1920s. As a result, there is no law, rule, tradition, norm, ethic, promise, and/or deal he won’t violate or renege on. This also makes him an unreliable interlocutor and makes it impossible to negotiate with him in good faith as he doesn’t believe in good faith negotiations.

    Since Senators Corker, Flake, and Collins, let alone anyone else, cannot negotiate with Senator McConnell in good faith, because Senator McConnell doesn’t do anything in good faith, if they want to get anything done, then they need to rely on their leverage as senators in a very slim Senate majority caucus to force their initiatives through. This means threatening to and/or actually caucusing with the Democrats. The last thing that Senator McConnell wants is to lose control of the Senate. Whether now because of the defections of a pair of his retiring members using it as leverage to achieve their own objectives or in the mid terms because enough voters want a check on the President to override the partisan Republican advantage in this senatorial election cycle. It is why he’s ground everything in the chamber other than handling nominations, specifically judicial nominations, to a halt. It is why he doesn’t want to do the legally required annual budgetary resolution so he can avoid having his members take tough votes before the midterms. And it is why he’s cancelled most of the August recess under the pretense that it is the only way he can move judicial nominees because of what he alleges is Democratic obstruction. Nominations that only exist because he prevented President Obama from seating almost any judicial nominees during his final two years in office. The Democratic minority has no tools to stop these nominations, regardless of what Senator McConnell says because Senator McConnell in conjunction with Senator Grassley has gotten rid of the blue slip rule and refuses to recognize Democratic Senators holds on nominees. Senator McConnell’s cancellation of the August recess is really just a thinly veiled attempt to keep incumbent Democratic senators up for reelection off the campaign trail. Every Senate rule, tradition, norm, ethic, and even law (Congressional Budget Act) has been bent or stretched to breaking or just outright ignored by Senator McConnell in his quest to consolidate his power and achieve his revanchist and reactionary objectives. As an insurgent, albeit a non-violent one, Senator McConnell only understands and recognizes the application of leverage and force. Senators Corker, Flake, and Collins have the ability to apply significant leverage and force. The question is whether or not they have the will to do so. The sad reality is the answer is almost certainly not.

    McConnell is a natural fascist in the most essential and radical (as in placed under the radical to reach the square root) definition of the term, which is fascism is at it’s root the belief that might makes right. McConnell is convinced that he has the might, therefore whatever he does is right. He is Panunzio’s theories given human form.

  46. 46.

    Another Scott

    @Gozer: Bingo.

    J had a prof tell her, “You’re not really cut out for this. You should go into technical writing…” Grr…

    The women who make though a US STEM program and get a PhD are some of the toughest people you’d ever encounter. The vast majority of them experienced stuff like this for decades in grade school, college, and especially grad school. They’re tough cookies.

    Grassley and the rest are right to be worried about what happens when she appears before the committee.

    A lot of eyes are going to be opened…

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  47. 47.

    Ella in New Mexico

    @Adam L Silverman: which is why they increasingly don’t even pretend to give a fuck if the people they put in office have any qualifications whatsoever–they’re not really doing anything anyway except be figureheads.

    And 90% of their voter have no clue, do they?

  48. 48.

    Duane

    This crap is exactly what democrats have been talking about. The republican party is nothing but crooks, con-artists, and assorted sociopaths willing to do anything for power. CRC is a perfect example. Kavenaugh is the culmination, the poster boy, for their evil.

  49. 49.

    smintheus

    @Kay: Kavanaugh doesn’t strike me as terribly bright, for someone who is so brilliant. For starters, the guy announced he wasn’t even at the party that Ford had not specifically described.

    Then there was the time he claimed he’d just gotten home after a 10 hour drive, but his car hood wasn’t even warm to the touch.

  50. 50.

    Kay

    Judge Kavanaugh doesn’t have a RIGHT to take this seat. It’s an incredibly prestigious and powerful job. We’re not standing in the way of him getting his due. I get that he was raised since birth to lead the masses but we don’t owe him this.

    No one is talking about shuffling him off to prison. They’re asking if he has the baseline FITNESS for this incredibly sought-after job. I mean, my God, he literally has some of the most powerful people in the WORLD in his corner along with this whole army of paid hacks. They put him on third base. We’re supposed to spot him the home run or we’ve somehow cheated him?

  52. 52.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Kay: The conservative legal world is not made up of smart lawyers. It is made up of ideologues. They may be personally intelligent, but that isn’t the same thing. Despite having them thrust, via the Federalist Society and McConnell’s plan to fill as many vacancies (that McConnell held open/forced to be kept open for 8 years under Obama), out into the public eye, there aren’t actually that many of them. They all live in their own, legal/constitutional scholarship/conservative and GOP think tank and staffer, hermetically sealed information and news bundle. They basically are all speaking to each other in their own dialect and code switch when they have to speak to anyone outside their own (sub) tribe. Moreover, the information they ingest – news, scholarship, professional education, gossip, etc – is part of this closes epistemic loop. A lot of them are not even actually conservatives or originalists, they just quickly figured out either as undergrads or in law school that this was not a large group, but it had a lot of political power and connections, so they hid their own views, signed up, got premier Federal clerkships, think tank jobs, staff positions with Republican elected and appointed officials. Basically they decided they want money, access, and if possible power more than they wanted to be true to their own personal beliefs. And the result is you get crappy legal scholarship, crappy legal arguments, crappy legal justifications for elected and appointed officials decisions, and, ultimately, crappy jurisprudence.

  54. 54.

    smintheus

    @Gozer: All of these Republican pols are the assh0les who sat in the back of the class smirking because they hadn’t done any of the readings and they were just totally pulling the wool over the prof’s eyes. Those dummies! Absolutely smoking their whole spending-tens-of-thousands-on-tuition-and-barfing-for-4-years life plan.

  55. 55.

    germy

    thread:

    Let’s talk about the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Who could disagree with Ethics and Public Policy?

    From 1996 to 2001, the President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center was Elliott Abrams, who had perviously been convicted of felony for lying to Congress during the Iran/Contra scandal.

    Abrams, former President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, also played a key role in helping cover the El Mozote massacre in El Savador in 1981, which saw death squads kill 800 civilians.

    Testifying before congress Abrams, later President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, denied the El Mozote massacre took place, saying it was communist propaganda. In fact, death squads killed almost an entire village: men, women & children.

    The current president of the Ethics and Policy Center is of course Ed Whelan, recently seen trying to smear a classmate of Brett Kavanaugh as the true attempted rapist.

    The founder of the Ethics and Public Policy Center was Ernest Lefever who was rejected for a Reagan administration nomination in 1981 because of testimony of 2 of his brothers, one who said he was incompetent, the other who said he was a racist.

    (Jeet Heer)

  56. 56.

    Kay

    @smintheus:

    You know, they’re smart. They’re smarter than I am. But they’re not inventing penicillin up there. Let’s tone down the elite lawyer worship. It’s gross. And self-serving. Because it’s always promoted by other elite lawyers.

    I used to just cringe in law school when they’d start with this- how Scalia was the smartest man alive or whatever. I thought it reached caricature stage with Roberts. Christ, the fawning over his “intellect”. I felt sorry for Alito. Roberts was already crowned World’s Smartest Lawyer- there was no where to go after that.

  57. 57.

    Nora

    @Kay: THIS.

    We’re not taking anything away from him that he actually had, or had a right to have. We can’t help it if his entitlement disorder made him THINK this was already his, or that he deserved it.

    It’s not a right, it’s a privilege, and you can be deprived of privileges for bad behavior. Ask any parent.

  59. 59.

    scav

    @Kay: Well of course the world is to acquiesce! The world, the position, the political victory, the woman cries “No no” but really means “Yes yes!” because a) one is so special and b) that’s how it works in the movies! It’s just the blocking movement that makes for the stirring drama before the predetermined hero inevitably wins and rides off into the sunset! The world/posion/victory/woman is theirs because they desire them. Everything (including the nation) is just the object of and the context / backdrop for their desires and personal saga.

  60. 60.

    smintheus

    @Kay: They’re not smarter than most PhDs. To get a doctorate in a legit field of scholarship, you have know your stuff. In my field, you also have to know at least half a dozen languages well.

    Legal training is not much more onerous than learning how to run a large machine that comes with a long, detailed operator’s manual. Yes, some people are better at running the machine than others, and some didn’t read the manual very carefully, but it’s not hugely taxing intellectually.

  61. 61.

    Kay

    @Adam L Silverman:

    And, Adam, as much as conservatives made fun of it when Obama said it, judges ARE better when they have a moral sense of “fairness”. That’s better than not having one. It’s a plus. Go read Justice Kennedy’s voting rights opinions- he has no sense at all of what low income people deal with in their daily lives. He needs that. That’s information he needs. He is LESS without it.

    People have to navigate these legal schemes. They have to function within them. They’re no use to anyone if they’re not informed by the actual reality of how people live. These idiots with this “you need ID to board an airplane!” They;re not boarding airplanes! People who make minimum wage don’t do a lot of air travel! They never go anywhere. How can he not know this?

  62. 62.

    bemused

    @Kay:

    I don’t think I’d want to be a fly on the wall listening to these rightwing cabals plot their dirty tricks. It’s bad enough to read about what they’ve done and how. Amoral degenerates.

  63. 63.

    germy

    @Kay: Since these republican operative judges have no moral center, I wonder if it puts them at more risk of eventual impeachment (because of various rattling closet skeletons)?

    I mean, look at Kavanaugh.

  64. 64.

    Chetan Murthy

    @smintheus: It has been -widely- reported that conservative-leaning law students have, in aggregate, lower LSAT scores than liberal-leaning ones. I forget where I read that: I think it was LG&M, but it could have been here.

  66. 66.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Mike in DC: It’s funny though. I’ve watched a lot of non-lawyers on this site mock Cohen’s degree from Cooley. Cohen isn’t a shitty lawyer because he went to Cooley (good and bad lawyers come out every law school); he is a shitty lawyer because he isn’t any good at what he does.

  67. 67.

    Ruckus

    @Ella in New Mexico:

    More than anything else this country needs to get serious about reforming money and it’s dirty tentacles in our politics. It’s killing us.

    It isn’t the money itself, it’s the desire to hoard so much of it, like a den that’s the biggest room in the house, with wild animal heads mounted on every square inch of the walls. It’s a dick measuring contest and the biggest dicks win.

  69. 69.

    Mnemosyne

    @smintheus:

    If you’ve ever seen Catch Me If You Can, with Leonardo di Caprio and Tom Hanks, one of the plot points is FBI agent Hanks trying to figure out how con artiat Di Caprio cheated to pass the Louisiana bar exam. It’s eventually revealed that he didn’t cheat — he just studied really hard.

    (Apparently Louisiana state law is a bit of an odd duck because much of it is still based on the Napoleonic Code, not English common law, so in some ways it’s easier to learn because it’s more cohesive.)

  71. 71.

    Ruckus

    @Kay:
    When your back is against the wall and you are standing in 2 feet of ice cold water, it’s 3am and the storm is getting bigger by the minute, you grab at any plan that comes to mind.
    This level of desperation and flop sweat is actually telling. They know they are going to lose in 6 weeks and lose big. They hope that whomever/whatever might be done, legally or illegally to thwart that, works. But they are in panic mode. Except for drumpf. They keep putting on rallies and paying people to be there to keep him from doing anything extremely stupid, which is of course his only strength, doing exactly the wrong thing, at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons.
    And if we are lucky, extremely lucky, we will win overwhelmingly in November and a portion of this nightmare might be a little bit better. I’m not holding my breath.

  74. 74.

    Ruckus

    @Adam L Silverman:
    You do understand that you’ve just described a cult don’t you?
    They speak in their own code, they have their own basic rules of behavior and they dramatically guard their ideals as perfect, no matter who they hurt. The concept is if you don’t want to suffer, join us. This is no different than scientology.

  76. 76.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Kay: That’s what I think about CEOs and other execs who are paid enormous sums. Admittedly not everyone, but a whole lot of people could do that job equally well for less money. They get that kind of money because the decision is made by people like them who believe that’s what people like them should make.

  77. 77.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Sam Seder made the point on one of the MSNBC shows last week that Gorsuch didn’t get the warm and fuzzy roll out that Kavanaugh did, the should-be infamous car pool oped (WTF, WaPo?), the woman doing the ad where she says, I don’t know much about your fancy Beltway politics and law, but Brett’s the kind of nice guy we want on the Supreme Court. It made me think of John Kennedy’s weird harping on BK’s teenage years, “tell me what kind of spirited hijinks you got up to as a young rapscallion”– almost as if they knew questions about the kegger club and the yale club and Georgetown Prep were going to come up.

  78. 78.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    Why do all of these sorry-assed conservative losers look so fucking old? This Ventry dude is 29? For fuck’s sake, what are these people doing to themselves? Is this why they become conservatives to begin with, because they all got unlucky enough to look old before their times, and they’re bitter about it? Shit. Beto O’Rourke is 20 years older than this dude, and he looks 20 years younger.

  79. 79.

    Mnemosyne

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    My dad went to John Marshall in Chicago, because he was already married and had a kid, so he needed that flexibility. Plus he had no intention of becoming a trial lawyer, so he didn’t need those kinds of connections.

  80. 80.

    Redshift

    @Omnes Omnibus: I suppose. I interpreted that mockery more in the vein that he’s obviously an idiot, and the only reason he’s an idiot lawyer is because the worst law school existed for him to get into.

    Whole it’s certainly true that there are good and bad graduates in every field from every school, it’s also true that there are people who wouldn’t have a degree in that field at all if there weren’t schools with low standards; schools with higher standards aren’t part of that problem.

  81. 81.

    Ruckus

    @smintheus:
    I like your description of the work required.
    I’ve seen people with advanced degrees that remind me of the drumpf family. All of them have parchments, how many of them are morons, with the sense of flat rocks?

  83. 83.

    geoboy

    @Kay: Excuse me! What’s this “Nobody is talking about sending Kavanaugh off to prison”? That man is under oath, which means he’s committed perjury numerous times. The last time I checked, conviction for perjury includes the option of jail time. So, repeat after me, “Lock him up!!! Lock him up!!!” Besides it will be a good start at getting all the members of this administration (Jeff Sessions, Jared Kushner, et al) who lied on their security forms and/or in testimony the same destination.

  84. 84.

    Redshift

    Earlier today, I was remembering Very Serious commentators (probably in the Shrub era, can’t recall) bemoaning how Supreme Court nominations have become “so politicized” that nominees have to try to hide their actual views to get through their hearings.

    And I got to thinking, have Democratic nominees ever done that? Remind me if I’m forgetting, but I think it’s only Republicans who know their views are so unpopular that they’ll never get confirmed unless they pretend they are blank slates.

  85. 85.

    Mike in DC

    For the record, a handful of law schools permit you to pursue a Ph.D. in legal studies, as distinguishable from a JD. You do have to produce a work of original scholarship to do so.

  86. 86.

    Dan B

    @gene108: CRC outlined their communication strategy as corporate comms. Rapid response is a key part. I’m regularly stunned at the failure of the Dems to be ready with a rapid response to attacks. The Dem candidate in WA 8 is a partner in a top tier hospital, Virginia Mason. The GOP have an ad that she personally turned away poor Medicaid kids because they would have bankrupted “her” practice. Virginia Mason’s policy was to limit the number of Medicaid patients. The good Dr. has little influence in this policy which is common among medical practices.

    The ads have been running for several weeks, including on PBS. There’s been no counter ad just a vaguely positive ad about her desire to improve access to healthcare. There is an opportunity to point out the GOP candidate’s smear. But there does not seem to be any rapid response.

  87. 87.

    Dan B

    @Adam L Silverman: It also seems like the underlying weakness of corporate media strategy. It’s a solid method of improving the appearance of good players and improving the appearance of bad players. What it can’t achieve is making bad actors better. It more often does the opposite, making the bad sloppy and less likely to root out rot.

    Corporate comm overcomes its deficits when there is inadequate sunlight. In a high profile case it has to work fast before the bloodhounds get to the scene. We’ll soon see if our MSM can put together a story about the CRC, White House, Grassley, Federalist Society web of conspiracy.

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