Having finished up with everything he knows about the new trade agreement, Donald Trump opens up the floor and begins talking nonstop about Brett Kavanaugh and the perfidy of Democrats, including but not limited to Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, and Dianne Feinstein. Also, he's totally OK with the FBI doing any kind of investigation wants, as long as Senate Republicans approve of it.CNN
The indefatigable Daniel Dale, Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, has provided us with a detailed Twitter summary of Donald Trump’s Rose Garden speech about NAFTA 2.0, otherwise known as USMCA. This acronym, by the way, is going to be confusing for people who think Trump has concluded an agreement with the United States Marine Corps, but it turns out that USMC also stands for United States, Mexico, and Canada. Perhaps it should have been USCMA instead, which would have been easier to pronounce (oo-skee-ma) and less confusing.
Anyway, back to Daniel Dale. It would be copyright infringement for me to simply reproduce his entire tweetstorm, so instead I’m going to reproduce only the tweets about Trump’s lies. I think this will get me in just under the wire of fair use, but it’s a close call:
Trump repeats his regular false claim that Asian-American unemployment is at a record low. (Was in May, then went back up.) Trump repeats his regular false claim that the trade deficit was $800 billion last year. (It was $566 billion counting services trade too.)
Trump repeats his lie about U.S. farmers selling to the European Union: “Our farmers aren’t allowed to sell over there…most of them.” The EU is the fifth-largest market for US agriculture, purchasing more than $11 billion last year.
Trump repeats an egregious lie: “Japan would never negotiate with the United States…they told the previous administration, we’re not going to negotiate.” Japan negotiated the whole TPP with the Obama administration.
Trump repeats his lie that Obama said, “essentially,” that you’re “not going to have manufacturing jobs.” Obama said *some* jobs were gone for good, but boasted about how many the U.S. still had. pic.twitter.com/ny4iHGAgI7
Trump repeats his false claim that U.S. officials had claimed 250,000 jobs would be created in the U.S. with the trade deal with South Korea. Obama had said KORUS would “support at least 70,000 American jobs.”
Trump describes this as a “brand new deal to terminate and replace NAFTA.” Again, it makes incremental changes to NAFTA without using the termination clause.
Donald Trump's negotiating team won a smashing victory over these socialist cows last night.Li Haitao/Xinhua via ZUMA
We have reached a last-minute deal to revise NAFTA. It turns out that the last-minute deadline was kind of fake, and most of the big provisions were already part of the deal negotiated earlier with Mexico. But a deal’s a deal:
One of Canada’s last-minute concessions made to finalize the broader agreement was a pledge to curb protection for its dairy industry, a policy Mr. Trump has frequently criticized as unfairly restricting American exports. The U.S. in turn compromised by dropping its demands to scrap the original treaty’s Chapter 19 provisions, or the special Nafta courts allowing member states to challenge trade restrictions imposed by the others.
I have checked with the team of analysts I normally use to explain the Trump administration to me, and they say the key to a deal was pretty simple. Trump doesn’t know what Chapter 19 is, so he never really cared about that. But he does know what milk is, so he was totally fixated on it. The resulting compromise may or may not benefit America, but it gives Trump something nice and simple to boast about at his rallies, and that’s what really matters.
Normally I choose Friday catblogging from my enormous queue of cat photos taken over the past few months. But today you get a fresh new picture of Hilbert taken just this week! Here he is on the patio in front of our Chinese vase, currently in use as a seat that no one ever uses. But it provides a fine backdrop for a cat.
I just want to add a quick note to my essay about the culture of conservative grievance from this morning. It’s this: plenty of conservatives believe crazy conspiracy theories. It starts with simple ones like the idea that Democrats orchestrated a detailed, clockwork plan to accuse Brett Kavanaugh of teenage sexual assault in order to derail his Supreme Court nomination. But there are plenty of others. There’s the ever popular “stand down” order in Benghazi. There’s the IRS scandal. There’s the Jade Helm conspiracy theory, which suggested that a large military exercise in the southwest was actually Obama’s first step in getting people used to seeing armed soldiers on their streets. There was the FEMA concentration camp conspiracy theory. And of course there was Pizzagate—which, just to refresh your memory, was a claim that Hillary Clinton and her friends ran a pedophile ring from the basement of a pizza place in Washington DC.
This just scratches the surface. But keep in mind that conspiracy theories are a symptom, not a root cause. After all, how could anyone possibly believe any of this crackpot stuff? It’s simple: these things become believable if you first believe that the opposition party is literally evil enough and well-funded enough to be capable of anything. If they are enemies of the state, dedicated to ruining everything good about America—and they have the power of Hollywood and universities and the press to provide cover—then weird conspiracy theories start to make a lot more sense.
That’s the root cause. The timeline goes something like this:
Starting in the early 60, liberals start up a culture war—and over the next 50 years they win it. We make huge strides in feminism, in civil rights, and LGBTQ rights At the same time, conservative lore insists that we banned prayer in public schools, we removed religious symbols from public buildings, we forced schools to hire gay teachers, we insisted on making buildings accessible to the disabled, we supported anti-white affirmative action in universities, we approved gay marriage, we sued everyone we can think of to make sure women made the same wages as men for the same job, and much more. At the same time, movies, TV, and universities pounded messages of over-the-top tolerance into our kids. Conservatives didn’t just lose the culture wars, they got their asses completely kicked.
For obvious reasons, white Republicans, especially older ones, are especially upset about this. And what makes it worse, they can’t get away from it. If they go to the movies, they see it. If they read a newspaper they see it. If they watch a TV show, they see it. It really does seem like it’s some kind omnipresent dark cloud of oppression engineered by smug liberal elites that can out-talk them and out-legislate them time and time again. They feel helpless.
Most of these changes seem inexplicable enough to ordinary people that it’s easy for them to be convinced that liberals are deliberately trying to weaken America. Women in the military? Black kids going to Harvard even if their SATs are 200 points too low? Hollywood movies that bash America and then get released abroad? And gay rights? That’s the final straw. Ordinary working-class folks—especially outside the cities—have grown up thinking that gay sex is degenerate, and now liberals want to advertise it far and wide. This is scary, morally decayed stuff, and in 2015 liberals actually persuaded the Supreme Court to legalize gay marriage nationwide! But what if your conscience doesn’t allow it? Tough luck. You issue the certificate or you’re out of a job. Ditto for hospitals and abortions. Ditto again for Obamacare and its individual mandate.
If it’s really true that liberals are deliberately trying to weaken America—and there seems to be plenty of evidence, doesn’t there?—then clearly this is a very powerful, very rich, very coordinated movement, most of which is probably hidden from view. And if they’ll do all the stuff you can see on the surface, God only knows what they’re trying to do beneath the surface in their shadowy meeting rooms in New York and Washington DC. It’s pretty plausible that they really do have control of the IRS. That they really did tell the Air Force to stand down and let the Benghazi tragedy unfold. That maybe FEMA really does have a plan for concentration camps. Or that liberals have the skill and power of a James Bond villain to construct a perfectly conceived and implemented plan to bring down Brett Kavanaugh in just a few days.
And of course, all of this is stimulated and encouraged by Fox News and Breitbart and Rush Limbaugh and the Drudge Report and Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. Evangelicals, who have been on the losing end of practically every aspect of the culture wars, and who are losing membership as their elder statesmen either retire or die, have been especially dispirited. In the middle aughts and during the Obama administration they were so distraught that many of them were ready to give up completely. But then, out of nowhere, came Donald Trump. Sure, he might not personally be the most religious guy in the world, but he brought them hope anyway. He was loud, he loved Christianity, and he promised to do everything they wanted. It was a miracle, and he was their savior. This is why evangelicals are his biggest supporters, all his faults notwithstanding.
Bottom line: if you believe the opposition is not just the opposition but the enemy, constantly working to destroy conservatism and weaken America, you’ll believe almost anything about them. None of these conspiracy theories make any sense at all without a belief in conservative victimization firmly lodged in your lizard brain. Get rid of that, and you get rid of (most) of the dumbest conspiracy theories.
POSTSCRIPT: The best evidence that liberals haven’t (yet) gone down the rabbit hole of treating Republicans as an enemy of the state is the fact that crazy conspiracy theories are so much less common on the left. They just can’t take root unless you believe that the opposition party is capable of pulling off such freakish (and well planned!) stuff.
Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous 7 degrees by the end of this century.
A rise of 7 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 4 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe. But the administration did not offer this dire forecast as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.
Let’s go straight to the source to check this out. The new NTSA report estimates effects for nine different scenarios. Alternative 0 is the “do nothing” scenario: that is, we keep the Obama rules that were enacted a few years ago. Alternatives 1 through 8 kill off the Obama rules and replace them with a set of standards rising from 1 (don’t change mileage standards at all) to 8 (increase mileage standards by about 2-3 mpg). Here’s the effect on CO2 emissions:
The current Obama standard would decrease CO2 emissions from 1100 megatonnes per year to about 950 megatonnes per year. Not bad! That’s a decrease of 150 megatonnes. Alternative 1, the preferred alternative of the Trump administration would reduce CO2 emissions by only 30 megatonnes.
But wait! How does this affect actual CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere? According to the NTSA, every one of these alternatives has literally zero effect on global CO2 concentration. No matter which one we choose, we end up at 789.11 ppm by the year 2100:
That’s disappointing. How about temperatures?
Once again, there’s no change. Global mean temperatures will rise 3.48ºC by 2100 no matter what.
So what’s the deal? Aside from making some perhaps unwarranted assumptions, the NTSA is measuring global impacts from a smallish US program. This is a longtime conservative hobbyhorse: namely that any change the US makes by itself is necessarily so small that it has barely any global impact. And since climate change is a global problem, what’s the point of taking action by ourselves?
Presumably this could be addressed by taking coordinated action with the rest of the world, but Trump pulled out of the Paris Accord last year, so we can’t do that. Our only alternative is to take action on our own, and clearly that makes no difference at all. So there’s really no alternative left to us. Our best bet is to kill the Obama rules and do nothing:
Using the no-action scenario “is a textbook example of how to lie with statistics,” said MIT Sloan School of Management professor John Sterman. “First, the administration proposes vehicle efficiency policies that would do almost nothing [to fight climate change]. Then [the administration] makes their impact seem even smaller by comparing their proposals to what would happen if the entire world does nothing.”
I think we can expect a lot more “science” reports like this one about climate change in the future—and conservatives will cheer. After all, the whole thing is just a big hoax anyway. Haven’t you heard about the heat island effect and water vapor in the air and solar variability and the “tricks” climate scientists use to get the results they want? Don’t be a sap! Read up on all this stuff and you’ll learn that there’s no global warming at all. All those wildfires and droughts and hurricanes and shrinking ice caps are just totally normal occurrences. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Make no mistake: This was also a kind of cultural Pearl Harbor, a date — September 27, 2018 — which will live in infamy in the culture wars between a deeply entrenched patriarchy and a rising #MeToo movement of women telling their survivor stories of sexual abuse and harassment. That rising ride encouraged Dr. Ford to come forward with her long-repressed reckoning, and her courage in testifying on Thursday seemed to pay the #MeToo movement back with interest.
I think this is true, and I also think it’s something that Republicans simply don’t get. The surprise victory of an open misogynist like Donald Trump has blinded them to the way an awful lot of women have viewed the past couple of years. For their entire lives they’ve quietly put up with routine sexual abuse—and who knows? Maybe that would have continued, Harvey Weinstein or not. But the Weinstein revelations came just a few months after Republicans nominated a man who not only proudly assaults women but was caught admitting it on a videotape that was played to the whole country on national TV. And they voted for him anyway. Republicans just didn’t care.
Depending on how many people were watching the Kavanaugh hearing and how it plays in the press, it might well be the tipping point for #MeToo that Bunch suggests. I hope so. It’s going to be an ugly tipping point, but there was never any way it would be anything else.
But there’s something else about the Kavanaugh hearing that struck me pretty hard, possibly because I’m 60 years old and I’ve watched it unfold.¹ For starters, it didn’t change my mind. Quite the opposite. I think it’s obvious that Christine Blasey Ford was telling the truth and that Kavanaugh told a lot of lies. This almost certainly means he’s lying about the assault on Ford too. The funny thing is that I’m still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt about what really happened. Like a lot of people, I refer to his actions as “attempted rape,” but there’s a pretty good chance that this wasn’t his intent at all. At the time, he may well have thought of it as nothing more than horseplay, just a bit of fun and games with no intention of ever taking it past that. And intent matters. Being an infantile 17-year-old lout is way different than being a 17-year-old rapist.
But when he was first asked about all this, he panicked and denied everything. He didn’t have to: he could have admitted what happened, apologized, confessed that he never had any idea how badly it had scarred Ford, and then explained that he’d tried to make up for it by being especially sensitive in his hiring and treatment of women ever since. I’m pretty sure that this would have cooled things down pretty quickly. But once he denied the incident entirely, he had no choice but to stick to his story. Everything that’s happened since has hinged on that one rash mistake.
And this is what explains his almost comically angry testimony. He knew he was guilty and he also knew he couldn’t admit that he’d lied about it. But the Republican playbook has a page for this. Even before his appearance, there were news reports about the advice Kavanaugh was getting: he needed to be passionate, angry, and vengeful against the Democrats who plainly orchestrated this entire witch hunt. And that’s what he did. Unlike Ford, his performance was highly rehearsed: his emotional tone was rehearsed; his lines were rehearsed (and then repeated ad nauseam); and more than anything, his angry insistence that he was the victim of a vicious liberal frame-up was rehearsed.
This has been the signature of the conservative movement ever since the start of the Gingrich era: a deep-rooted belief that conservatives are regular victims of liberal cabals who are out to destroy them and everything that America stands for. Sex and gender are at the core of much of this, but it goes beyond that, something that Kavanaugh knows very well. After all, he’s been a movement conservative spear carrier for years: author of the Starr Report; pro bono counsel in the Elián González affair; part of the Bush v. Gore legal team; and then staff secretary in the Bush White House. He knows what animates the base and he’s perfectly willing to play the role of aggrieved victim if that’s what’s called for.
Since my nomination in July, there’s been a frenzy on the left to come up with something, anything to block my confirmation…. When it was needed, this allegation was unleashed and publicly deployed over Dr. Ford’s wishes…. This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit…. pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election….revenge on behalf of the Clintons…. millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.
That was from Kavanaugh’s opening statement. Later, Republicans took his cue and gave speech after speech about the perfidy of Democrats who had planned this entire smear campaign. Lindsey Graham said bitterly that any Republican who voted against Kavanaugh was “legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics.” Ted Cruz directly blamed the whole affair on deliberate machinations by Dianne Feinstein: “The ranking member had these allegations on July 30th and for 60 days — that was 60 days ago — the ranking member did not refer it to the FBI for an investigation. The ranking member did not refer it to the full committee for an investigation.” John Cornyn said, “I can’t think of a more embarrassing scandal for the United States Senate since the McCarthy hearings.” Thom Tillis was all about the conspiracy theory from the word go: “I believe you’re the first major target of a new strategy that’s developed here….And maybe one of the best evidence of this is one of the websites — one of the groups that are out there, attacking you and trying to create fodder and all of these red herrings, has already acquired a URL for the next judge that they’re going to attack.”
Win Mcnamee/Pool/CNP via ZUMA
This sense of endless victimization by liberals didn’t start with Donald Trump, but it’s no surprise that it’s reached his peak during his presidency. He literally rode conservative victimization to the White House and taught Republicans that it was even more powerful than they thought. Now they’re using it as their best chance of persuading a few lone Republican holdouts to vote for Kavanaugh—not on the merits, but so that Democrats don’t have the satisfaction of seeing their contemptible plot work.
The problem here is not that Republicans were grandstanding over imagined liberal schemes to destroy anyone and anything that gets in the way of their poisonous schemes to crush everything good about America. The problem is that most of it wasn’t grandstanding. Conservatives believe this deeply and angrily. And it explains the lengths Republicans are willing to go to these days—even to the appalling extent of accepting a cretin like Donald Trump as a party leader. If you believe that your political opposites aren’t just opponents, but literally enemies of the country, then of course you’ll do almost anything to stop them. I would too if that’s what I thought.
There are some liberals who do think that—and more and more of them since Donald Trump was elected. But it’s still a relatively small part of the progressive movement. In the conservative movement it’s an animating principle. This is why it so desperately needs to be stopped—not by destroying Republicans, but by voting them out of office. We simply can’t afford to have a major party run for the benefit of fearful whites who are dedicated to a scorched-earth belief that liberals are betraying the nation. It has to end, and Republicans themselves are ultimately the only ones who can end it. We need a real conservative party again.
The Kavanaugh hearing really went off the rails when Republicans ditched prosecutor Rachel Mitchell, giving Lindsey Graham the opportunity to deliver an epic rant about the malignancy of the Democratic Party's assault on Kavanaugh. This photo is a pretty accurate representation of what Graham looked and sounded like.Win Mcnamee/Pool/CNP via ZUMA
I have no idea how this is all going to work out. Ford’s testimony was very credible. Kavanaugh’s was too in some senses, but it was also obvious that he was lying about certain things. For example, there’s not much question that he was a pretty heavy drinker in his teens. There’s not much question that “boofing” doesn’t refer to farting. There’s not much question that “Renate Alumni” was not an affectionate reference to a girl that everyone liked. There’s also not much question that Kavanaugh’s scorched-earth outrage was, at least to some extent, rehearsed.
At the same time, I don’t think there’s any question that Republicans are really and truly furious about this whole affair. They’ve convinced themselves that the entire affair is some kind of coordinated operation that was planned and executed in minute detail by Democrats and shadowy liberal groups. I’d be happy to suspend disbelief and believe this in, say, a Mission Impossible movie, but not in real life.
At this point, I suspect the only thing that matters is what Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski thought about the hearing. If they believed Kavanaugh, he’ll be our newest Supreme Court justice. If not, he won’t.
Isn’t this over yet? I guess not. Let me tell you, this was not how I was planning to spend my day. I figured I’d have the hearing on in the background while I mostly blogged about other stuff. That plan lasted about five minutes.
5:30 — OK, we’re starting up again. Kavanaugh is apologizing to Amy Klobuchar for his glib behavior toward the end of her questioning. The apology is accepted.
5:40 — Chris Coons is asking again about why the hearing shouldn’t be delayed to allow an FBI investigation. Kavanaugh, as usual, simply refuses to answer.
5:42 — Now Kavanaugh is whining. Coons wants to delay for a week, but Kavanaugh, almost through tears, asks Coons if he knows how long the past ten days have been. “Every day has been a lifetime,” he says. Please. Judges and prosecutors put people through this kind of thing all the time.
Again, the GOP held the Scalia seat vacant for over a year. Now a week is an unacceptable delay.
5:48 — Mike Lee is picking up on Chuck Grassley’s weird rant about how the FBI doesn’t come to conclusions. I have no idea what point they think they’re making with this. The FBI would presumably interview people under penalty of perjury and then produce a bunch of new facts. Or not. Either way, that would help the committee come to conclusions. Everyone knows this.
5:50 — Oh hell, let’s take a cat break. We could all use one. This is my mother’s cat, Tillamook. He is glued to the hearing.
5:55 — Ah. Richard Blumenthal finally brings up Kavanaugh’s claim that this entire affair is driven by revenge from the Clintons and funded by shadowy left-wing organizations. Personally, I’d like to hear a lot more about that, but Kavanaugh failed to respond in any meaningful way. In the end, I guess, it always comes back to the Clintons, doesn’t it?
6:00 — It’s absolutely true that Democrats would like to delay the confirmation process. The odds are small but nonzero that it could somehow end up with no Trump nominee being confirmed. It’s also true that there’s a very good reason for delaying the confirmation process and asking the FBI to conduct an investigation. Two things can both be true at once.
6:15 — Mazie Hirono pressing Kavanaugh hard on whether he was a heavy drinker in high school and college. It’s pretty obvious he was, like lots of other college kids. But Kavanaugh just won’t admit to it and has once again filibustered without having to answer any of Hirono’s questions.
I like how they just got rid of Rachel Mitchell asking questions. No one has said a thing, she’s just disappeared.
6:20 — Thom Tillis insists that the Judiciary Committee is conducting a rigorous investigation. I’ll believe that right after they have a long conversation—under oath—with Mark Judge.
6:25 — Oh no. Not Ted Cruz. Even Ashley Kavanaugh looks like she wishes Cruz would just shut up.
6:27 — Has it beeen five minutes yet? Please say yes. Please, please, please. No? Only two? Fuck.
6:30 — Dianne Feinstein has finally had enough. She’s explaining the obvious: she kept Ford’s letter confidential because Ford asked her too, not because she wanted to spring it at the last second. So how did the letter become public? Cornyn asks Feinstein if anyone on her staff leaked Ford’s letter. Feinstein says no. Somehow I can just smell that this is going to end up with an FBI investigation after all—except that it’s going to be an FBI investigation into Feinstein’s office.
6:37 — Feinstein thinks that Ford’s allegations leaked before her letter was published in the Intercept. She also says she doesn’t think the letter itself was ever leaked. It is not clear to me what this means.
6:40 — Kamala Harris asks repeatedly: “Are you willing to ask the White House to authorize an FBI investigation?” Kavanaugh refuses to answer.
6:44 — Hearing adjourned. Praise the Lord. Our next order of business is to pretend to discuss whether to hold a vote tomorrow.
4:30 — Kavanaugh is tap dancing badly around Patrick Leahy’s question about whether he’d like Mark Judge to testify. He refuses to say that he’d favor having Judge appear under oath before the committee, instead banging on about how it should have been done weeks ago etc. etc.
4:35 — Kavanaugh refused to answer any of Leahy’s questions. It was just five minutes of filibusters about what a great person he was in high school.
4:45 — Uh oh. Chuck Grassley is doing his angry old man thing again. He’s mad at Dick Durbin for suggesting that Kavanaugh ask the committee to suspend its hearings until the FBI can complete an investigation. But Durbin persists. “Why would you resist [an FBI] investigation?” he asks, over and over. “Do you think it’s the best course of action?” Kavanaugh flatly refuses to answer.
4:50 — Wait. Lindsey Graham is asking questions. I thought Mitchell was asking questions for the Republicans?
4:51 — Graham is going completely batshit crazy. He’s going to get lots of cable news time tonight.
4:52 — Even Kavanaugh didn’t quite seem to know what to make of Graham’s eruption.
4:55 — Whitehouse asks why he was the biggest contributor to the “Beach Week Ralph Club.” Answer: “I’m known for having a weak stomach.”
4:56 — Kavanaugh says “boofing” is slang for farting.
4:57 — Kavanaugh repeats his contention that “FFFFFFFourth of July” was a reference to a friend who always sniffed before he said the word fuck.
4:58 — John Cornyn is joining the Lindsey Graham club. It looks like the Republican line coming out of this hearing is going to be a unanimous assertion that this is the biggest, most loathsome character assassination in the history of the Senate.
5:01 — Where is Rachel Mitchell? Did Republicans decide to just ditch her?
5:05 — Amy Klobuchar is going back to the FBI well. But Kavanaugh is resolutely refusing to say that he thinks a further FBI investigation would be a good idea.
5:10 — Listening to Grassley rant about an FBI investigation, you’d think the FBI has no use whatsoever. I guess we might as well just defund the whole agency.
Hoo boy. Brett Kavanaugh is going all-in on the “coordinated conspiracy by Democrats” defense. That’s good red meat for the base, but will it work on anyone else?
A few minutes later, Kavanaugh breaks down while telling a story about his daughter praying for Dr. Ford. “Such wisdom from a ten-year-old,” he stammered. I’m pretty bad at reading emotions, so it’s hard for me to tell how credible his emotional display was. It seemed genuine to me, but then again, he obviously made a decision from the start to come out with guns blazing, a man who’s legitimately outraged at the false allegations being leveled at him.
3:35 — Kavanaugh is in a nearly continual state of emotional breakdown now. He’s sniffing and his voice is breaking, even when he’s talking about something as banal as football camp or why he kept calendars. This is a little puzzling, isn’t it? Or not?
The possibility hangs over all of this, one I return to over and over, that Blasey Ford’s account is absolutely true and that Kavanaugh has absolutely no memory of it and thinks he has been falsely accused.
Yeah, this is not credible. It’s just not how teenage boys act.
3:55 — Another few shots at Democrats. “Thanks to what you on this side of the aisle have unleashed” I may never be able to coach again. Jesus. Can Kavanaugh even be any kind of judge after these repeated and brutal attacks on Democrats?
3:58 — Ah. Rachel Mitchell will be handling the Republican questioning of Brett Kavanaugh too. I guess I didn’t realize that.
4:05 — Kavanaugh responds angrily to Dianne Feinstein’s question about an FBI investigation. But this time the anger seems forced and fake. There’s also something else going on with Kavanaugh. It’s not just that he’s still just short of tears as he testifies, it’s the odd facial tics, the tongue in his cheek, the oddly pursed lips, and so forth. There’s something weird going on here.
4:10 — Is Kavanaugh’s anger and emotional breakdown for real? Or is this a carefully rehearsed persona because his handlers told him this is what a falsely accused man should sound like? I really, genuinely don’t know.
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