Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Donald Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

When we show up, we win.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

Our messy unity will be our strength.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

You are here: Home / Politics / Activist Judges! / For the Record: Brett Kavanaugh Is *NOT* A Good Man

For the Record: Brett Kavanaugh Is *NOT* A Good Man

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I have my doubts about his skill as a lawyer, and Murphy the Trickster God knows how much harm he’s already done on the bench, if Thursday’s performance was a fair sample. But there’s no doubt whatsofeckingever that he’s a loyal little Repub partisan, and that might be enough at this moment in time.

People of varying political views are talking about an “1850s moment“. That’s when the Republican Party was founded, explicitly to fight the grossest civil injustice of the day; perhaps there is some narrative arc demanding that today’s debased GOP die fighting to defend the worst current crimes against the Constitution.


Reader Interactions

38Comments

  1. 1.

    Mezz

    Hopping on here to vent futilely. The whole spectacle yesterday and the fallout today has be glum and disappointed. I had felt like Team Good Guys + Constitution was getting some good traction and momentum – juicy guilty pleas, seemingly helpful information – and it felt like maybe we might all just survive this thing.

    But after yesterday, it seems no. Team Fascism is going to fucking pull it off. This entitled prick will get confirmed, the Court will slide far to the right, bye-bye Roe, dual sovereignty, and ANY oversight of the Executive branch, and we’re knocked back down the hill, behind where we even started in Jan. 2017.

    The first Democrat in a position of power that does NOT get us the scalps of ALL of these folks, joins them in the tumbrels. I really admire and love Obama, but his fucking leniency to the Bush Crime Syndicate is partly culpable here. Anyway, off to indoctrinate the minds of college youth.

  4. 4.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    Jennifer Rubin
    ‏Verified account @JRubinBlogger

    Watching him scream and interrupting senators I could imagine him putting his hand over someone’s mouth.

    5,022 replies 6,325 retweets 21,367 likes

  6. 6.

    Barb 2

    Wow – what an ugly face he has. I can imagine him drunk. He is the bully we all remember from high school. The rich kid who got away with being rude and nasty.

  9. 9.

    Shalimar

    If there was ever a time for a Joseph Welch moment, this vote is it. DiFi needs to give a short statement highlighting how far that hearing and Kavanaugh are from traditional conservative values, and then all the Democrats need to file out of the room. If they want to hold a sham 11-0 vote anyway. let them.

  10. 10.

    montanareddog

    There have been so many threads I am not sure if this has been highlighted elsewhere, but an important spot by the Post:

    Kavanaugh is pressed on the key July 1 entry in his calendar. But only to a point.

    tldr: the calendar’s July 1st get together after training at Timmy’s for “skis” appears to fit in with Dr Blasey Ford’s description of the party; and so does the timing vis-a-vis Judge’s Safeway job. It was immediately after Ms Mitchell started on that calendar entry that Graham changed the dynamic with his rant and Ms Mitchell was allowed to ask no more questions

    Journalist’s need to do an Ed Whelan and see if they can get the layout of this Timmy Gaudette’s then house

  12. 12.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    Susan Hennessey
    ‏Verified account @Susan_Hennessey

    I’m not someone who had knee jerk opposition to Kavanaugh. This is what I wrote when he was selected.

    Today it’s clear that to confirm him would be a grievous wrong. Even if you don’t believe the allegations against him, his conduct in the past two weeks has rendered him unfit.

    179 replies 2,301 retweets 7,126 likes

  13. 13.

    Waldo

    Not a lawyer but … It’s clear he lied under oath multiple times. Could he still be appointed if he’s disbarred?

  14. 14.

    The Moar You Know

    As I posted below, I have been playing music in bars for a long time. I know a bad drunk when I see one and this Kavanaugh asshole is as bad as they get. The difference between the 1980s, when I first started playing, and now, is that now a bouncer will see a guy like this and tell the bartender to get ready to dial 911. Because it’s not if, but when.

    if he wasn’t a rich kid with rich parents I guarantee you he’d have a rap sheet with multiple assaults.

  15. 15.

    sukabi

    Couldn’t watch it as it happened live yesterday, followed along via threaded comments. Caught parts of it via late night news & bits on The Late Show….

    Have you ever wanted to take a bat to someone?

  16. 16.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    Charles M. Blow
    ‏Verified account @CharlesMBlow

    I think that what I’m witnessing are the protestations of patriarchy and privilege. It whines and it rages when it is threatened with being denied that to which it is owed, as birthright and gender benefit. And how dare a woman be the impediment.

    937 replies 9,741 retweets 27,585 likes

    That’s why he was crying – outraged that his ruling class privilege was threatened by social/gender class he discounts.

  18. 18.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    Paul Szoldra
    ‏Verified account @PaulSzoldra

    The @WSJ reports Kavanaugh watched Ford’s testimony, contradicting his later testimony that he did not.

    1,748 replies 8,351 retweets 13,288 likes

    pathological liar

  19. 19.

    bjacques

    @montanareddog: When asking Dr. Ford how she got home when it was too far to walk, Mitchell produced a map of the location, at the edge of a country club. It shouldn’t be too difficult to locate the house with Google Maps and cross-reference with property tax records. By the way, Kavanaugh was born Feb 12, 1965, so he was a minor halfway through his senior year, after that summer, as others have already noted.

  22. 22.

    MagdaInBlack

    Yesterday my boss and I had to take a vehicle to a vender, drove separately, rode back together. We had both listened to the hearings.
    My boss : Republican, NRA member……he believes her, thinks they need to pull him and investigate.
    Quite an interesting conversation we had.

  25. 25.

    John S.

    @MagdaInBlack:

    I had this same talk with my boss yesterday (also a Republican). He thinks it’s a shame our politics has come to this, and that good people won’t want to run for public office.

    I said the reason why we’re in this mess is because we already have a bunch of horrible people in public office, and maybe they will think twice before running for fear of being put under the microscope.

    Interesting conversations indeed.

  26. 26.

    Catfish N. Cod

    ”What goes around comes around.”

    Yes, Judge Kavanaugh. Like when you helped try to remove a President for lying about sex, as a cover for partisan gain. Now your job is under fire for that very reason.

    I am convinced beyond reasonable doubt that the Clintons had nothing to do with any of this. But if they had, I still would feel ambivalent about the fairness of doing so. After all, those were the rules Kavanaugh wanted.

    This may the logical consequence of Bork’s rejection, but Bork’s rejection was rooted in Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre and in the threat posed to civil rights — which were only in the Court’s hands in the first place because of longstanding state opposition to fair elections and equal protection.

    Roe v. Wade may be the flashpoint, but it’s Nixon v. United States, Bush v. Gore, and Citizens United that make it political war to the knife.

  27. 27.

    danielx

    @John S.:

    Maybe we can finally put paid to the whole Republican trope about how character counts, eh?

    Naaah, probably not. The Republican base doesn’t care about stuff like felonious assholes holding public office. They do seem to like their pols to be well up there on the asshole scale – 1 being Pope Francis, 10 being Tangerine Torquemada. The fact that Kavanaugh shows no signs whatsoever of having a judicial temperament and is well up there on that scale is a feature, not a bug.

    Bonus points: If confirmed, Kavanaugh will spend the rest of his career taking revenge on those bad people who made his cry – women, libs, Dems – the list is endless. He’ll have a lot of years to do it, too.

  28. 28.

    Scott

    I see it as the 1850s also. Here’s why:
    The country is being ruled and bullied by an entrenched minority. In 1850s, the political power structure was in the slave south while the richer, more populous North didn’t have it. The 3/5 counting of a huge slave population gave the south more representation. Today 50% of senators are controlled by 20% of the population.

    The South was relentless in it drive to expand slavery. Compromise of 1820, Compromise of 1850, Fugitive slave act, Dred Scott case (Supreme Court) all contributed to the growing rage of the North.

    When minorities rule, the country cannot stay together.

  30. 30.

    Dev Null

    @Mezz: Amen.

    To think that lying under oath is just taken as par for the course. Good times!

    For liars, anyway. ~sarcasm~

    Flake just voted to confirm Kavanaugh. Jeffrey Toobin describd him yesterday as a political coward.

    In other news, this is the guy Trump is looking at to replace Rosenstein:

    NYMag and Raw Story.

    And then I read articles like this (from only two days ago!) and I think, “Rarely is the question asked: Is our Democrats learning?”

    They are suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.

    And I can’t find the link on a quick search, but one of the front-pagers at dKos reports that the House Intel committee will hold an inquiry into a critical and timely national security issue next month …

    … Hillary’s emails!

    I shit you not. According to the essayist, they’ll be looking for an October Surprise.

    Good luck with that, fsckers … how many times have you been over this oh-so-fertile ground?

    […]

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I gotta pull out my checkbook and cut a bunch of checks to Dems. “Now more than ever!”

  31. 31.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Mess: This has been a hot issue here for several weeks, & you’re just now noticing it? JFC, even an occasional lurker would know that.

    I can’t be the only one here who despises posters who only show up at the odd moment when they feel the need to use a liberal Democratic blog as a spittoon.

  32. 32.

    Dev Null

    The Spousal Unit points to this Josh Marshall analysis (at TPM, natch) which highlights part of the K testimony that went right by me:

    … Kavanaugh rested his aggressive defense on the claim that he and Blasey Ford weren’t even in the same social circles and that he didn’t even attend parties like the one she describes in the summer in question. But little discussed in the hearing was significant new evidence about what connected them and a party that seems to match it closely.

    Remember that wild Ed Whelan debacle where Kavanaugh’s close friend came up with this highly speculative theory which pointed the finger of blame at a classmate named Chris Garrett, now a middle school teacher in Georgia. It turns out he wasn’t some random guy from the yearbook. He was apparently one of Kavanaugh’s group of friends, seemingly a fairly good friend. He shows up with him in the yearbook and he’s referenced repeatedly in Kavanaugh’s calendar/diary under the nickname “Squi”. Both Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh identified him as such. It turns out that around this time he was also dating Christine Blasey. This is needless to say a pretty clear way the two social worlds came together.

    There is in fact a reference to a pre-party get together on July 1st, 1982 in that calendar that sounds a lot like the event Blasey Ford describes. It has Kavanaugh, Mark Judge and at least one (“PJ”) of the other boys Blasey Ford said in her initial letter were there.

    […]

    … there is actually more suggestive evidence. And the best walk through it comes in a series of article yesterday by the Post’s Philip Bump. Here is one on information in Mark Judge’s book which appears to confirm one element of Blasey Ford’s account. Here is a second one. And here is the one specifically about this party. As Bump notes, coincidentally or not, it was after Rachel Mitchell’s questioning on this party that her participation in the hearing abruptly ended.

    I don’t believe it is coincidental that the man Ed Whelan chose to publicly accuse, apparently working in concert Leonard Leo of The Federalist Society and quite possibly Kavanaugh himself, happened to be someone who was actually a good friend of Kavanaugh’s and happened to be dating Blasey Ford at around the same time. There is a connection here.

    The relevant point for us is not that this is necessarily the date that the incident happened or that we could get closer to corroboration or exoneration based on these details. It is that there is an obvious place to start for the FBI to review these details as part of a reopened background check.

    What seems like highly relevant information is sitting right there and they’re refusing to look at it. Senate Republicans are now rushing to a final floor vote on Monday. This needs to be examined and there is little no time to lose.

    I feel a bit of a naïf in having this reaction, but still: I am gob-smacked that with a deep bench of ultra-theo-con lunatic judges-in-waiting, Senate Republicans would have no compunction about putting a serial predator on the bench, to the point of refusing to call witnesses and refusing to kick off an FBI background investigation, even knowing that the worst that would happen would be a substitution of Amy Coney Barret (or whoever) for Kavanaugh.

    I’ve been calling the GOP apparat criminals for more than a decade, but this is moral depravity at a level that I find difficult to wrap my head around.

    Albert Burneko’s essay has been going around – probably been mentioned here already, perhaps multiple times, so apologies if I’m re-posting. This para says it all:

    Nobody, nobody, believes a single one of these defenses, most likely not even the people offering them. Believing any of them would defeat the point of the exercise, which is to demonstrate that it doesn’t matter, to put this son of a bitch across with a completely unhidden sneer, to say all but explicitly We know he did this, you know he did this, everyone knows he did this, and you couldn’t stop us anyway. The wild variety and complete inconsistency of all these defenses aren’t bugs; they’re features.

    Kavanaugh’s sneers at Amy Klobuchar yesterday illustrate Burneko’s point perfectly. Kavanaugh sneered at Klobuchar because he knew he could, and wanted her to know he could. He wanted her to know he was lying, and to know that he knew he could get away with lying, and that she couldn’t stop him.

    Indeed, SECupp (quoted by AL in her 5:48AM post) makes exactly this point:

    S.E. Cupp @secupp
    More S.E. Cupp Retweeted John Legend
    No, don’t be coy. That’s not your issue with him. I respect you. Just be honest, you don’t like his politics.

    John Legend @johnlegend
    The biggest problem with [Kavanaugh] is that he’s lied multiple times before the senate, sometimes about things he needn’t lie about.
    10:07 PM – 27 Sep 2018

    Lying under oath is a feature, not a bug. Dominance is what matters to them.

    “A boot stamping on a human face forever”, as many peeps on the InterToobz have noted.

  33. 33.

    Dev Null

    @Uncle Cosmo: Some of us are in shock.

    I expected K to go through … until Blasey Ford and Reminic came forward, and I began to hope that he could be blocked. And when Swetnick came forward, and Blasey Ford testified yesterday, I thought “NOW he’s in trouble.”

    And then Kavanaugh put on a show of such surpassing arrogance and condescension, I was sure his nomination was dead.

    But I was wrong … unless two Republican senators discover a sense of moral outrage between now and Monday, Kavanaugh will be our next SCOTUS justice.

    Speaking only for myself, I haven’t commented much here in the past few weeks, partly because I haven’t felt I had much to contribute (I imagine most jackals would be surprised to hear that I feel that I have ever had anything to contribute), but partly because I figured that – being an old white straight male – perhaps I should listen to women and non-whites for a change.

    We’re all bummed. Having a boot stamp on your face repeatedly is no fun.

    Suggesting that a wake might be not the time and place to dump on peeps who were blind-slided by the outcome.

  34. 34.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Dev Null: One is entitled to presume that anyone “Hopping on here to vent furiously” would at least be conversant enough with the blog to realize that half the jackaltariat has been beaching & moehning about the loss of edit capability for weeks now. “Mezz” clearly was not – s/he might as well have vented on a blog for, jeez I dunno, raising rhododendrons. Which is TBH irksome.

  35. 35.

    MagdaInBlack

    @Dev Null:
    Well……that certainly is sobering, frightening, infuriating and probably not far off the mark.
    ….and more fuel for my expletive filled rants. ?

  36. 36.

    Dev Null

    @Uncle Cosmo: OK, I’ll give you the edit function…. but if one is mostly a lurker, you might not grok that the edit function isn’t working and hasn’t been working for a month or two. (In the Trump Error, time flies!)

    As regards rhodies, perhaps [s]?he’s been following Esteemed Blog Father’s wisteria cultivations?

    […]

    Yeah, I know … I have an inordinate fondness for weak jokes, but seriously, this is a multi-function blog. You know: dogs, cats, castles, wisteria, houses … er, and occasionally politics.

    Come for the dogs, cats, and wisteria … stay for the politics when you’re shocked out of your gourd and desperately looking for like-minded souls.

    To paraphrase Adlai Stevenson’s apocryphal riff, “[All right-thinking people] is not enough. I need a majority.”

    My thoughts … worth every penny you paid for them.

  38. 38.

    Dev Null

    @MagdaInBlack: And Adam Serwer’s essay today is also very good:

    Where even Thomas’s supporters in 1991 stood stone-faced before his anger, several Republicans on the committee were moved to tears as Kavanaugh emotionally denied the charges against him. That’s unsurprising. Kavanaugh is one of them: a conservative white man whose comfortable life and Ivy League education has smoothed his way to one of the most important jobs in the country. He is what they want their children to be, what they want their grandchildren to be. These senators’ hearts were cold to the Muslim families trapped in airports by Trump’s travel ban, the thousands who died in Puerto Rico, the millions of black parents who fear that their children’s chance encounters with law enforcement will end in death, and the woman who had testified only hours earlier that Kavanaugh had laughed while he had attempted to rape her. But Kavanaugh’s suffering? That they understood.

    Senate Republicans are poised to confirm a man credibly accused of sexual assault with a mere cursory attempt to investigate the charges. With Thomas, at least, many of the facts emerged only after his confirmation. But today’s senators are moving ahead with their eyes open, knowing of Kavanaugh’s dishonesty, his devotion to partisan vengeance over the rule of law, and the possibility that he is a sexual predator.

    They will do so because they have not paid a political price for the president’s bigotry, corruption, and incompetence, and the feebleness of the opposition they face has led them to believe they never will. The Republican Party has surrendered itself to a Trumpian agenda of the restoration of America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender, and of vengeance against those who would threaten those hierarchies. The accusations against Kavanaugh—and his angry, defiant response—have made him a fitting champion for the party of Trump.

    […]

    The Democrats, as in Thomas’s day, are weak and feckless. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has, as of yet, been unable to unite his caucus against Kavanaugh’s confirmation. His minority whip, Dick Durbin, has publicly lamented the removal of chamber rules that, had they not been changed, would have granted Trump even more judicial vacancies to fill than he has today. The successful Republican effort to block the appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, and their elevation of Kavanaugh, shows that the GOP views the Supreme Court as simply another vehicle for partisan interests. The Republican Party feels no need to serve any civil obligations, only to pursue its own ideological objectives. Until Democrats view the Court in similar terms, they will continue to lose.

    The lesson of the Trump era, since his nomination for president, has been that Republicans will pay no political price for the shattering of rules or norms, or for disregarding common decency, because the Democrats are unwilling or unable to extract one. As long as this is the case, Republicans have no reason to respect any of those things. If Republicans pay a price for confirming Kavanaugh, it will only be because the American electorate has had enough.

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