Party Boy

Just last year the Republican Party was trying on its new identity as The Party of Pedophiles.  This is how they ended up with Roy Moore as their candidate for the Senate in Alabama.  They nearly managed to elect him, too, because apparently if you’re conservative enough you get a free pass on having sex with children.  This is the same group that wants us to think they have “values.”

They also gave being The Party of Nazis a spin, which makes a certain amount of sense given the party’s increasingly overt embrace of white supremacism and its accelerating slide toward authoritarianism.  “Fine people,” said der Sturmtrumper about the Nazis in Virginia, and the right wing fell neatly into line behind him.  Think about that.  Only three generations after several hundred thousand patriotic Americans died in order to eradicate the grotesque evil of Nazism from the earth, the rodeo clown in the Oval Office was cheerleading as actual fucking Nazis paraded through the streets of the United States and killed an American citizen and his supporters, minions, enablers, and sycophants were cheering right along with him.  George S. Patton should rise from his grave and slap the lot of them silly.

Earlier this year they experimented with being The Party of Child Abuse, ripping toddlers from their parents, storing them in cages, forcing them to testify alone in court, and then deporting their parents.  There are still – more than two months after a federal court ordered it to happen – over a thousand children who have yet to be reunited with their parents after having been kidnapped by the US government.  I can’t tell you how appalling it was to see so many moral black holes pretending to be Americans who saw nothing wrong with this, and who even defended it.  Such people need to be wrapped in tin foil and exiled far from civilized society.

So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that as we head down the stretch toward the end of this year the Republican Party is reverting to its 2012 form and reinventing itself as The Party of Rape.

You remember 2012, right?

“Some girls, they rape so easy.”  (Roger Rivard, GOP-WI)

“Rape victims should make the best of a bad situation.”  (Rick Santorum, GOP Presidential candidate)

“Rape is kinda like the weather.  If it’s inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”  (Clayton Williams, GOP-TX)

“If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”  (Todd Akin, GOP-MO)

Yes, they actually said that – all that and more.  They truly thought these were acceptable things for grown-ups to say in civilized company, and maybe among the GOP base they were correct but that’s clearly not the same group of people.  It revealed a dark and tubercular stain on the x-ray of the right wing.

Which of course brings us to the current debacle surrounding der Sturmtrumper’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Mr. Brett “Party Boy” Kavanaugh.

It has to be said that even without the mounting and credible allegations of his rapeyness toward multiple women who have been brave enough to come forward – to risk the unhinged rage of the frustrated right-wing white male, to be doxxed and driven from their homes, to have their lives threatened, to have their names dragged through the mud by the feral children of the right-wing press – there was no way that Party Boy should be put on the nation’s highest court.

For one thing, that seat belongs to Merrick Garland.  The GOP, in an unprecedented display of hyperpartisan greed over Constitutional responsibilities and American values, refused even to meet with Garland when he was nominated and kept the Court seat vacant for more than a year on the grounds that Garland wasn’t a right-wing meat puppet and they weren’t about to allow anybody with an actual intellect or respect for the law to take Antonin Scalia’s seat.  So we ended up with Neil Gorsuch, a right-wing caricature who at the very least does not seem to have been a sexual predator, so we’ve got that going for us.

Garland is still out there waiting, by the way.

For another thing, this nomination has conducted with naked disregard for Constitutional safeguards, precedent, and transparency.  Despite stalling for over a year on Merrick Garland, the GOP is now in a panic to get him nominated quickly without releasing any information to the public or, more damningly, to the Senators who will have to vote on his confirmation.  Both of the justices appointed by Obama released over 90% of their documents on file to the public.  Party Boy has released less than 10%.  These are public documents, owned by the taxpayer.  The GOP has no moral, legal, or Constitutional right to withhold these documents, and the fact that they are doing so taints the process irredeemably and strongly suggests that their nominee has an awful lot to hide.

Finally, there is also the simple fact that Party Boy is an unadulterated partisan hack who has committed serious crimes in the pursuit of raw power for his masters.

There is now, for example, convincing evidence that he perjured himself before the Senate in 2004 and again in 2006.  He was deeply involved in the theft of private computer files from six Democratic Senators between 2001 and 2003, serving as a go-between linking the actual hands-on thieves (led by a GOP Senate staff member named Manny Miranda) and the Bush Administration’s office handling judicial nominations.

In all likelihood – experts disagree, and when experts are quibbling over the fine legal details of something you know that it happened, even if it might have fallen just outside the line of prosecutable – he also perjured himself during his testimony this year in front of the Senate.

The list goes on.

David Brock, who knew him well in the days before Brock turned his back on the shady world of right-wing agit-prop, is unequivocal: “I want to tell any senator who cares about our democracy: Vote no.”

“Brett and I were part of a close circle of cold, cynical and ambitious hard-right operatives being groomed by GOP elders for much bigger roles in politics, government and media,” Brock said.  “… Kavanaugh was not a dispassionate finder of fact but rather an engineer of a political smear campaign.  And after decades of that, he expects people to believe he’s changed his stripes.  … I can promise you that any pretense of simply being a fair arbiter of the constitutionality of any policy regardless of politics is simply a pretense.  He made up his mind nearly a generation ago.”

For any normal nominee in any halfway competent administration, this would have been more than enough to have his nomination withdrawn.  He’d be a forgettable footnote in a world that has moved on to better things.  Does anyone really remember Harriet Miers?  But this isn’t a normal nominee and der Sturmtrumper’s circle of insanity is literally the laughing stock of the world these days, and so Party Boy soldiers on.

Which brings us back to The Party of Rape.

The allegations made by California professor Christine Blasey Ford are disturbing, disqualifying, and utterly credible.  She told all this to her husband and her therapist years ago, so it’s not something that was suddenly created for the occasion as the soulless right wing wants you to believe.  She’s taken an FBI-administered polygraph test and passed, and you can argue all you want about the value of those tests but the fact is that she was willing to do it.  As Lawrence O’Donnell points out, lying to the FBI is a crime.  She’s already spoken to them.  She would like to speak to them again.  Party Boy does not want to speak to them, nor does his friend and, according to Ford, the witness to Kavanaugh’s attack.  “They all know lying to the FBI is a crime,” notes O’Donnell.

There have since been several more women coming forward to tell their stories of being sexually assaulted by Party Boy over the years – five now in all.  That number puts him roughly a quarter of the way toward the total number of credible accusers who have reported being sexually assaulted by der Sturmtrumper.  You can see why he picked the guy.  Birds of a feather.

Imagine!  A president who openly bragged about sexually assaulting women has chosen a sexual predator to put on the Supreme Court specifically to strip women of control over their own bodies.  Who saw that coming, right?  I know!

Now it’s one thing for a nominee to be an asshole, a criminal, and an altogether reprehensible waste of space, time, and oxygen.  That happens sometimes.  The normal human response to this is to withdraw from the criminal in dismayed horror and begin prosecution immediately.  It’s not like the Federalist Society hasn’t got a dozen more Kavanaugh clones – many of whom are not sexual predators! probably! – waiting in the wings should either der Sturmtrumper or the Senate take the hint and deep six this guy.

This has not happened.  And that’s the real problem here.

The real crime here has been the reaction of the GOP.  They see nothing wrong with his long history of sexual assaults.  They don’t understand why anybody else finds it horrifying.  They certainly don’t see why a history like that should disqualify him from advancing their partisan agenda under the guise of jurisprudence.  They can’t imagine why sexual assault is a problem.

Rod Dreher, who writes for the American Conservative, complained that he didn’t understand why attempted rape at 17 would disqualify a man from the Supreme Court.  Former GOP Congressman Joe Walsh added that if that was the standard “every male politician in Washington DC would fail.”  They get all worked up about how this would ruin Party Boy’s life, as if he hadn’t already done that to others.  And on and on.

I swear if I hear one more Republican tell me anything along the lines of “boys will be boys” I will go full nuclear.  I was a teenaged male once, at roughly the same time as Party Boy too.  I went to an elite private college, just as he did – at least once, in fact, I was probably visiting a friend on Yale’s campus at the same time that Party Boy was there.  I don’t recall sexual assault as being something that was considered normal.  Nobody I knew – not even the people I actively disliked – thought that was acceptable.  Even way back in the 80s, even at bastions of privilege, we all knew that this was beyond the pale.  What unshriven barbarian didn’t know this?  What moral failure still doesn’t?

The guy’s a thug.  He should be standing in front of a judge’s bench awaiting trial, not sitting on it passing judgment.  And his supporters – the people who look at his actions and say, “Yeah, I can live with that in a Supreme Court Justice” – are worse.

The GOP Senate remains poised to ram Party Boy’s nomination down America’s throat regardless.  They have made it crystal clear that they don’t want an actual investigation into these crimes.  They don’t want us to know.  They’ve known that there were multiple accusations for a long time now – even as they were trying to paint Ford as a lone crazy person with a vendetta, they knew that this was a lie.  They continue to lie.  They will have a committee of white men – many of whom voted against the Violence Against Women Act the last time it came up for renewal – sit in judgment to render a verdict they’ve already written out, one that protects their boy and advances their political agenda.

“Don’t get rattled by all of this,” said Mitch McConnell, the Least Honorable Man in Washington.  “We’re gonna plow right through it and do our job.”

As Senator Doug Jones (D-Alabama, the guy who sent the pedophile off to retirement) responded, “I’m a former US attorney.  If a judge/juror made a public statement that their mind was made up before all testimony was in, the trial would be prejudiced & I’d move for mistrial & have the judge removed.”

The Party of Rape will have its predator, though.  They’re going to shove him through the process, civilization be damned.

Rape.  Pedophilia.  Child abuse.  Nazis. 

Evil fuckers, the lot of them.