Dazed and Confused
Posted on September 7, 2018
Dearest Reader:I am sorry that it has taken me all week to get my thoughts together to post something.
My excuse is simple: I am confused.
I was going to write something as a preview for the Supreme Court nomination fight, but I wanted to figure out first what the major Democratic attack lines were going to be.
I had thought that they were going to attack Brett Kavanagh’s Catholic faith, perhaps make some comments about how the dogma runs deep in him, so I jotted some notes about Catholicism and the strains it is under because of the sexual abuse scandal, juxtaposing that crisis with the example of the Judge and how he represented the best of Catholic education and of the Catholic laity.
But as I started watching the hearing, transfixed by the twin Presidential campaigns of Mr. Booker and Ms. Harris, it dawned on me that the Democrats had really no coherent game plan at all.
Yes, they were mad, angry, pissed off, frightened, blah, blah, blah, but it all had the unmistakable air of a bad professional wrestling match. The chief interrogator for the Democrats, Richard Blumenthal, almost lost his reelection bid to SBA Administrator Linda McMahon, who made hundreds of millions of dollars in that business, so I guess there is some Karmic reason for the cage match feel.
The Democrats were playing to the cameras, foaming at the mouth. They were joined by protestors in the crowd, who would erupt in some indecipherable non-sense before being hauled out by the Capitol police.
Funny story. Last night, a friend of mine went to watch the hearing because he wanted to be an eyewitness to history. Each public visitor gets a chance to go in for 20 minutes and they go in teams of four.
My friend is a loyal Republican and a Member of the Federalist Society. But as fate would have it, two of the folks he entered the Judiciary Committee hearing with were clandestinely two of the protestors. I guess you never know.
Because the Capitol police can’t waste time determining who is a protestor and who is a member of the Federalist society, my friend was ejected along with the rabble-rousers.
Talk about guilt by association.
And I guess that was one of the points made by the Democrats. Guilt by association.
Donald Trump is a bad guy. Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh. Ergo Brett Kavanaugh is a bad guy.
But watching the hearing, you get the overwhelming sense that Brett Kavanaugh is not a bad guy. He is a good guy. A smart guy. A normal guy.
The kind of guy you would want on the Supreme Court, if you were ok with guys in the first place.
And of course, these days, it is not fun being a guy in the Democratic Party, especially if you are a normal Catholic guy who likes baseball and is a coach for his daughter’s grade school basketball team
Just ask Mike Capuano or Joe Crowley.
One of the more strange protests came when a bunch of ladies dressed up like the women in the dystopian novel “A Handmaid’s Tale.”
I haven’t read the book or seen the movie, but I do know the movie stars the Scientologist who once starred in the television show “Mad Men.”
If they did a show about this Judiciary Committee hearing, I guess they would call “Man Men and Mad Women”.
It’s important to be mad in politics these days. And by mad, I mean both angry and crazy.
And that works for both sides of the aisle.
Talking about being both angry and crazy, Alex Jones made an appearance at another hearing at another Committee, this one focused on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist, got in the face of Jack Dorsey of Twitter and got himself banned forever from that platform. He then got in the face of Marco Rubio and almost got himself decked.
How cool would that have been.
But I digress. Back to the hearing.
The Democrats seemed most exercised about the fact that they couldn’t get access to millions of emails that Mr. Kavanaugh sent when he was the staff secretary to President George W. Bush. They kept accused the Trump Administration of not providing those emails, but Trump had nothing to do with it.
And in any event, all the Democrats had to do was asked to make some of those emails deemed “Committee Confidential” to be released to the public and they would be.
Committee Confidential sounds like a new television show on the Biography Channel.
Cory “Spartacus” Booker could star in the first episode. Hedared Republicans to kick him out of the Senate for releasing some of these emails classified as confidential, but then it was revealed that those emails were given approved for public consumption the night before.
Kirk Douglass would be so proud.
Booker was both angry and crazy, so he fit in to the general motif of the political moment.
And while we are talking about being crazy mad, we can’t leave this week without talking about President Trump.
Let’s face it, he should be pretty pissed off right now.
After all, he had some high-ranking jackass with a God complex write an anonymous op-ed in Mr. Trump’s favorite newspaper that basically accused the President of Captain Queeg of Caine Mutiny fame.
If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie, do yourself a favor and get up to speed.
Good luck to any of those Republicans who see a path forward to removing the President from office. It ain’t going to happen.
No matter how much the political establishment hates Donald Trump (and the hatred runs deep on both sides of aisle), he is the duly elected President of the United States of America.
And you really can’t argue with the results. The economy is booming, ISIS is doomed, peace is breaking out with North Korea and we have a trade deal with Mexico.
In many ways. Trump is like Bill Belichick. The press hates him, he has funny hair, he is always accused of cheating, and he keeps winning.
I hear that Tom Brady wants to go another five years. That means he will retire in year 7 of the Trump Administration.
I may not be tired of winning, but I am tired of weeks like this.