Will Brett Kavanaugh Be Confirmed?

He will be.

Unless the FBI finds a smoking gun, which I seriously doubt (and Mark Judge's ex-girlfriend's story will not cut it), Kavanaugh will be voted in before the end of this week.

Well, let me go all in. He will be confirmed even if the FBI finds a smoking gun.

This is what Mitch McConnell said yesterday:

"The goal posts keep shifting," he said as he accused Democrats of attempting to derail the nomination. "But the goal hasn't moved an inch. 

"The time for endless delay and obstruction has come to a close."

They need him on the bench and they need him badly.

Brett Kavanaugh is a partisan hack who was nominated not because he will overturn Roe v. Wade, which he will, but because, as a Supreme Court Justice, he will give his imprimatur to more deregulation and more restrictions of workers' and consumers' rights and he will acquiesce to anything on the Republican agenda, including extreme gerrymandering and voter suppression.

If Roe v Wade was as important as the corporate media claim, Trump would have nominated Amy Coney Barrett or someone like her.

What the Republicans want is a pro-business hack who will push the Koch brothers' agenda with gleeful abandon.

This is so important that they would happily risk a major short term defeat to get it done.

And now that they've paid the piper and alienated millions of women they cannot afford not to have Kavanaugh confirmed.

What about Jeff Flake and his courageous stand you say.

Well, I can tell you that it wasn't done because of Anna Maria Archilla's elevator tirade.

The investigation was introduced to provide cover to Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins for this week's confirmation vote.

Now they will all vote yes (plus the Democrat Joe Manchin) and point to the new investigation that uncovered no new evidence to defend their decision.

If you don't believe me check out the reports that FBI is refusing to interview people who came forward about Kavanaugh lying under oath.

According to a Sunday New Yorker article, multiple people have tried to go to the FBI with pertinent information about Kavanaugh, only to be stymied by seemingly unorganized and uninterested agents. (...)

Another is an unnamed Yale classmate who wanted to corroborate Deborah Ramirez’s accusation that Kavanaugh had exposed himself to her at a college party. “I thought it was going to be an investigation, but instead it seems it’s just an alibi for Republicans to vote for Kavanaugh,” the unnamed Yale classmate told the New Yorker. 

No kidding.

Moreover, throughout the process the so-called liberal media has been providing a helping hand to the Republicans and will continue to do the same.

Okay, you say, you are making very radical statements but where is your evidence?

I am glad you asked.

Let's start with my claim that Brett Kavanaugh is a partisan hack.

The History of Brett Kavanaugh's Partisan Hackery

Starr Pupil

At the young age of 33, Brett Kavanaugh was one of the main authors of the Starr Report that was used to impeach Bill Clinton for having oral sex with Monica Lewinsky.

That is fine.

But what is not fine is the fact that, in that capacity, he tried to link every nasty Clinton rumor to the final report, including the suicide of Vince Foster.

Recently opened National Archives records from the 1990s independent counsel probe reveal some of Kavanaugh's actions, including his aggressive pursuit of documents tied to Vince Foster, a top Clinton administration lawyer who committed suicide.

His work was driven by his hatred for Bill Clinton which was obvious in his memo to Ken Starr:

"The President has disgraced his Office, the legal system, and the American people by having sex with a 22-year-old intern and turning her life into shambles -- callous and disgusting behavior that has somehow gotten lost in the shuffle," Kavanaugh wrote in an August 15, 1998, memo to Starr and other lawyers. 

"He should be forced to account for all of that and to defend his actions. It may not be our job to impose sanctions on him, but it is our job to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear -- piece by painful piece," he wrote.

I'll leave it up to you to appreciate the irony.

Kavanaugh's next career move was to take on the representation of Elian Gonzalez in order to stop his Cuban father to gain the five-year-old's custody.  This was done at the urging of the then Florida governor Jeb Bush, who became his patron saint.

He then represented Jebster in his quest to set up a voucher program to support private religious schools in Florida.

Finally, he became a major figure in the GOP efforts to lobby the Supreme Court to stop the Florida recount paving the way to Bush presidency.

Because of this trajectory, when W nominated him to the United States Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia Circus, during his confirmation hearings, Dick Durbin called him the “Forrest Gump of Republican politics … whether it’s Elian Gonzalez or the Starr Report, you are there.”

When Kavanaugh's confirmation stalled for three years, W made him his staff secretary between 2003-2006. It doesn't sound like an important job but it was:

[Kavanaugh] wielded extraordinary influence as the adviser responsible for screening, reviewing and editing documents delivered to Bush, interviews and documents show.
“Ultimately, the umpire was Brett,” said Karl Rove, a Bush adviser and one of the people Kavanaugh worked with closely as staff secretary.

He was behind every controversial decision, including Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), torture of enemy combatants and warrantless wiretapping.

Documents and interviews show that while Kavanaugh was not a policymaker, he was directly involved in helping the White House manage a wide array of sensitive matters, including the war on terrorism, the treatment of enemy combatants and warrantless wiretapping. 

“It put Kavanaugh at the center of every political and policy decision at the Bush White House,” said Peter Irons, professor emeritus at the University of California at San Diego and author of several books about the Supreme Court. “He is exactly the kind of person that the legal conservative movement wants on the court.”

His Appeals Court nomination was finally approved in 2006. His ideologically driven partisan approach was evident there as well.

An analysis found that Kavanaugh had the most or second-most conservative voting record on the D.C. Court, in every policy area, in period 2003 to 2018.

Koch brothers

This is why he is the Koch Brothers' wet dream.

In case you don't know who they are, this dynamic duo founded and funded the Tea Party and they are behind every conservative effort to bust unions and remove environmental regulations.

They are octogenarian billionaires who will leave behind a sinking planet without much oxygen to their coal-rich grandchildren.

In fact, Kavanaugh's record is so bad that the White House refused to release his emails and policy opinions even though it is the accepted practice to do so.

Picture of Judicial Temperament

In any event, even if Kavanaugh's history of far-right decision making and ideological hackery failed to convinced you, take a look at his partisan outburst during the Blasey Ford hearings.

In his angry tirade, he brought up conspiracy theories against Clintons, he insulted and belittled Democratic senators (he even accused one of blacking out for heavy drinking) and he lashed out at everyone who stood between him and the court chair he firmly believed he deserved.

And he issued a threat:

“You have replaced ‘advise and consent’ with ‘search and destroy,’” he chastised Democrats, warning moments later: “What goes around comes around.”

That's judicial temperament for you.

Not surprisingly, none of these facts made it into coherent pieces in the mainstream media.

There were a few bits here and there but to my knowledge, no one said, well, he is a thoroughly partisan hack and this is his history of hackery and look at the shameful playacting to defend his nomination.

Instead most media outlets praised (or made room for those who did) his judicial temperament and his oversized intellect.

Brett Kavanaugh The Brilliant Jurist and Carpool Dad

Ah yes.

From the beginning, we got interminable narratives about what a great guy he was.

And it wasn't just the usual suspects.

Lisa Blatt, a self-described ”liberal Democrat and feminist,” wrote a piece in Politico telling the Supreme Court to confirm Kavanaugh and even introduced him at his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing, giving him a boost of bipartisan credibility. 

Did I mention that he was a great guy:

“I don’t know Kavanaugh the judge. But Kavanaugh the carpool dad is one great guy,” read the headline for one Washington Post op-ed by Julie O’Brien, a woman who knows Kavanaugh through their daughters’ school. 

His impressive credentials were praised by moderate GOP senators like Murkowski and Collins.

Moreover,

Almost immediately after Kavanaugh’s nomination, nearly three dozen of his former law clerks (all of those, the clerks wrote, who are “not prohibited by their current or pending employment from signing”) sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee in which they praised his intellectual rigor but also described him as “unfailingly warm and gracious with his colleagues no matter how strongly they disagree about a case.” 

There were more letters.

Eighty students who had Kavanaugh as a professor at Harvard Law School signed a letter saying he was an ”inspiring professor.”

And Yale University, where he went to undergraduate and law school, issued a glowing press release with five distinguished professors and faculty members congratulating him and extolling his intellectual talent. 

And do you know what happened after the Dr. Ford allegations surfaced?

The day after those allegations came out, 65 women who knew Kavanaugh in high school were still willing to issue a letter attesting to his character and his treatment of women. 

The guy went to an all boys high school. How do you get 65 women testify to your character 24 hours after you were accused of a horrible crime?

Do you even know 65 women from your own high school?

Think about it.

And think about how many "liberal" media outlets mentioned this fact?

Well, at least one of these women thought differently after signing the letter. She was Renate Schroeder Dolphin who was mentioned by Kavanaugh and his football teammates in their yearbook as someone they had sex with (making them Renate alumnus).

Nice, isn't it?

He truly is a great guy.

Media Cover

Speaking of corporate media, they did a wonderful job supporting Kavanaugh's nomination.

Besides introducing him as the brilliant jurist without really touching upon his Florida recount efforts or the three long years that took for him to be confirmed to the District of Columbia Appeals Court or his extremely conservative record, they also helped the confirmation process by sucking the oxygen out of such points.

New York Times came up with a third hand sourced story about Rod Rosenstein trying to overthrow Donald Trump using the 25th Amendment. Michael Schmidt's piece drew categorical denials but no one cared.

Fox News and Sean Hannity were happy to just run with it.

Let me make a prediction right here and right now: When Kavanaugh is confirmed, Trump will first fire Rosenstein or force him to resign. Then he will fire Mueller.

You read it here first.

And we'll have the "liberal" New York Times to thank for this.

Another interesting thing is how the media outlets regurgitated GOP talking points without raising any questions. For instance, when they report the above-mentioned McConnell quote about delays and delaying tactics they never remind us that the same cynical senator delayed Merrick Garland's confirmation hearing for over a year.

And his argument was based on the need to wait for the will of the people to be expressed in the upcoming elections which were more than a year away at the time. Now there are elections in a few weeks time and somehow the entire corporate media could not recall McConnell's previous claim.

The same media folks also maintain that the new situation is very different from the Anita Hill hearings 27 years ago because of the #MeToo movement.

It is not, because IOKIYAR trumps #MeToo any time.

Here is what a female Trumpkin said about Blasey Ford:

"As a woman, a mother, and a former victim of assault myself, how any of you feminazis out there are buying this is completely beyond me."

At a Trump rally, the Guardian reporter could not find a single person who believed Christine Blasey Ford:

Tammy DeWitt, a 52-year-old state employee from Shinnston, West Virginia, also thought Ford was lying. 

“It’s kind of obvious,” she said. “Thirty-some years later, right when he was getting the nomination, that she all the sudden remembers it.” She suggested “maybe she was paid by the Democrats”, and repeated: “They are crucifying that poor man.”

But that is mostly because of the corporate media coverage.

Sure Trumpkins get their talking points from Fox News where they are told about a doppelganger who assaulted Dr Ford. But that is because there is no consistent counter narrative from the likes of New York Times.

Case in point, when the mainstream media made a lot of noise about Roy Moore he lost to a Democrat in Alabama.

But usually, the corporate media is more interested in highlighting Democratic sins.

When Bill Clinton was accused by Gennifer Flowers or Paula Jones GOP operatives turned his private life a 24/7 circus throughout his presidency and the liberal media outlets covered every single one of them.

The current president is accused of sexual assault by 19 women and his is on tape with his proud pussy grabbing anecdote. Yet, we never see them mentioned with the same regularity.

One last thing.

Corporate media mentions the evangelical fixation with Roe v. Wade all the time.

As I documented previously, abortion was a Catholic issue prior to 1979 and the evangelical Christians couldn't care less about it. It was Pat Buchanan and GOP strategists Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich who made the issue an important part of Nixon's Southern Strategy.

But everyone is now pretending that abortion has always been the most important factor in evangelical voting when it was just an execrable GOP manipulation with no basis in religion.