I like Tom Toles' commentary, but, then again, there's a strong element of "So what?" in the air these days.
Not "So what? It doesn't matter," but "so what?" in the sense of "So what are you going to do about it now?" because, from the moment Bernie Sanders conceded the nomination to Hilary Clinton and urged his supporters to vote for her, the warning was voiced over and over again that the next president would get to appoint at least two and possibly three Supreme Court justices.
And the Russian trolls, I strongly believe, invented "Bernie Bros" while a lot of genuine, but genuinely naive, people went off prattling about Jill Stein and Gary Johnson. (Their wasted votes didn't change the outcome, but their wasted energy might have.)
And the nihilists, who believe they are smarter than any of us, and a lot of people so lacking in self-respect that they honestly don't believe their votes matter, stayed home.
It doesn't matter anymore, except for two lessons we might take from the debacle:
One is that we need to get the Russians out of our next elections, but it's hard enough to turn the tanker on a dime even when there isn't a fistfight on the bridge. And there is. Plus it's hard to grasp the wheel and cover your ass at the same time.
The other is that whoever wants to win the next set of elections needs to harness some shoe leather and get more people to the polls. That could happen.
What can't happen is changing the results of the 2016 election, and perhaps we should have grabbed people by both ears and screamed "SUPREME COURT" into their faces instead of simply telling them over and over, hundreds of times, but we didn't and what's done is done.
I said yesterday I wanted to see what cartoons would shake out and I'm really disappointed that so many right-wingers are drawing cartoons suggesting that Democrats are simply opposing Kavanaugh because he was nominated by Republicans, as if there weren't a short list that allowed them to evaluate the candidates and have their talking points ready by Monday night.
Which brings up this point: Somebody is already either lying or stupid, and I don't think you get into power by being stupid.
It is commonly known and widely reported that Trump was handed a list of potential nominees prepared by the Federalist Society, but, in accepting the nomination, Brett Kavanaugh said, "Throughout this process, I have witnessed firsthand your appreciation for the vital role of the American judiciary. No president has ever consulted more widely or talked with more people from more backgrounds to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination."
Presidential ass-kissing aside, this was about as wide a search as Dick Cheney conducted to find a vice-presidential candidate for W. Kavanaugh can't possibly be dumb enough to believe otherwise.
And his highly inappropriate ass-kissing brings us to our
Juxtaposition of the Day
Since there is already a lot of uninformed chatter about this, let's begin with the utterly futile task of finding out what Kavanaugh actually wrote in 2009, which you can read here. And don't be afraid to click on that: Unlike a lot of turgid, self-important legal bafflegab, his prose is quite plain and easily understood.
For instance, he admits he was wrong, in his days with Ken Starr, to think that Clinton should be held accountable at that moment for his sexual peccadillos. It's not "hypocrisy" to admit your errors.
Nor does he feel presidents should be above the law, and he specifically says they shouldn't.
Further, he does not believe the Court could rule that way without a new law to defer investigation and prosecution until after the president was out of office, with the exception of an actual impeachment process.
What he fails to specify, and what I would ask him about if I were on the Senate panel, is, first, whether you can defer investigation of a crime for four years and expect the evidence and witnesses to remain in place, and, second, since he also wants to see the Special Prosecutor law revoked, how you gather evidence for an impeachment?
I'm sure he could answer the latter. I consider the first to be more tricky.
Unlike asking his standing on Roe v Wade, you could expect him to answer these questions.
Though I'm sure he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single Republican vote.
The question that needed to be asked was the one many of us asked two years ago: Should we hand a temperamental, unqualified, semi-literate fascist the power to appoint Supreme Court justices?
Asked and answered.
Next question: Should we let him continue to have majority support in both houses?
Oh, we're on it, as Mike Smith points out. No worries.
Meanwhile, another juxtaposition
This latest excursion is like an extended version of "Don't Let The Pigeon Drive the Bus" except that we have decided we will. After all, he has dreams.
And, besides, he went and talked to Kim Jong Un and fixed everything so that North Korea will not have nuclear weapons except that it will so he sent Mike Pompeo to make sure they wouldn't and Pompeo came back with his tighty-whiteys yanked up over his head.
So now off to NATO and then a sit down with Vladimir Putin.
What could go wrong?
Like the old fellow in Rob Rogers' cartoon, I remember when we didn't like Commies. We still hate "socialists," but only the ones who do evil things like feed poor people and bandage their wounds.
People who murder their political opponents, jail journalists and invade other countries are "just fine."
Well, I remember marching against the war and people shouting, "If you don't like it here, why don't you move to Russia?"
You don't hear that much anymore.
Who needs to move?
Not that even grab-and-shout is a guaranteed fix, as this ancient Toles cartoon illustrates:
http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~mjackson/TToles_health_warning.png
Posted by: Mark Jackson | 07/11/2018 at 09:07 AM