By the time the sunsets in the west tonight there will be many many more House races in play. Look for a surge for Democratic candidates in US Senate races across the country.
— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) September 27, 2018
Schmidt’s a professional Republican operative, albeit one who found his bottom with the current Oval Office Occupancy. Just saying.
I was old and politically conscious enough to be furious during the Clarence Thomas SCOTUS hearings. One of the things I remember most from those days was not just the rage of so many women, but the shock among men — decent & otherwise — who’d always assumed that the women in their lives hadn’t complained about stuff we were just beginning to call ‘sexual harrasment’ because such things hadn’t happened to the women they knew personally. Plenty of ordinary guys heard for the first time from their wives / mothers / daughters: I was too ashamed to tell you. I hoped if I never talked about it, I could forget. I needed that job too badly to quit. If I’d told you at the time, I thought you’d have tried to kill the guy, and why make you suffer the way I already was?…
And we didn’t have social media! This entire Kavanaugh shitshow has been Thomas Mk.2 — Revenge of the Unheard.
People are calling into CSPAN with their own rape stories.
— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) September 27, 2018
Silence on Wall Street. Tears in a retirement home. Yelling at the TV in a Milwaukee bar. The country watches, transfixed, as Ford testifies. https://t.co/70zFSPW1gE
— David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) September 27, 2018
[Trigger warning: Some of the details in this story made me tear up… and I’m one of the Lucky Ones, the ones who *don’t* have any horror stories to share]
… Thursday’s hearing of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee — called to investigate Ford’s allegations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court nominee — transfixed Americans like few events in recent history.
People listened on cellphone speakers in subway cars and doctors’ waiting rooms. The New York Stock Exchange got quiet. The Capitol’s hallways emptied. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, so many people watched Ford’s testimony from their desks that the IT department warned they could overwhelm the network.
What they saw was a drama in two vastly different parts.
The second part — Kavanaugh’s emotional defense of his innocence and his reputation — was highly unusual in the staid history of Supreme Court hearings. It could have helped save his nomination or helped derail it, depending on how a few GOP senators react.
The first part — Ford’s testimony about the alleged assault, and the shadow it cast on her life — had a different resonance. People cried in airplane seats. They called into C-SPAN to tell their own stories of sexual assault…
“16A: Crying. 14B: Crying. 17C: Weeping,” Ron Lieber, a New York Times columnist, wrote on Twitter from a flight headed from New York to Salt Lake City, listing the reactions as passengers watched the hearing on seat-back televisions. “I am one of the criers.”…
Chris Wallace on Fox says 2 of his daughters, in the wake of Kav allegations, have told him about things in high school they hadn't told him before. "There are teenage girls who don't tell stories to a lot of people, and then it comes up. I don't think we can disregard that"
— Betsy Woodruff (@woodruffbets) September 27, 2018
Don't try to rape people is an acceptable national norm, I'm thinking. https://t.co/J0y7TIjwWH
— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) September 27, 2018
GOP Stupid Venality / Venal Stupidity Open Thread: Doing Themselves No FavorsPost + Comments (189)