Three Things: Kavanaughhh
It’s absolutely ridiculous Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court. It’s only more clear over time that he shouldn’t have been. Were Congress not under #MoscowMitch McConnell’s stranglehold as senate majority leader, Kavanaugh would be impeached — his lies alone are adequate reason.
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We’re revisiting this dreadful wretch because The New York Times published an article this weekend about him.
[Screenshot: The New York Times]
The piece, written by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, contains new reported content validating Deborah Ramirez’s claim that the now-seated Supreme Court jurist Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her while she was a student at Yale.
Of course the NYT can’t publish this to the front page where it belongs; it filed it under ‘News Analysis’ as you can see in the screenshot above, in their Opinion section of the Sunday Review.
A report of sexual assault on a woman, validated by multiple witnesses, is just an opinion. Entertaining reading on a Sunday morning over coffee in bed.
What utter goddamn bullshit.
Of course the NYT can’t leave that insult on its own. They must further buff this turd by turning this reported piece about a man who has serially assaulted women and lied repeatedly into a diversity piece, making the focus about Ramirez fitting into an Ivy League school.
Ramirez fit in just fine. Yale, however, should answer why it allowed abusive liars like Kavanaugh roam its halls, undermining the scholarship of women around him. The headline on this story should have reflected this problem which is comparable to MIT’s Epstein problem.
Why have highly-ranked universities allowed predators anywhere near students for decades?
And then the pièce de résistance: the tweet promoting this “opinion” piece.
Whoever drafted this now-deleted tweet needs to be interviewed by NYT’s management. They should be worried about an employee who so easily characterizes a form of sexual assault as “harmless fun.” A tweeted apology will only gloss over a deeper problem.
That it made it onto Twitter and wasn’t removed until there was an outcry may explain why NYT has done such a crappy job covering Kavanaugh up to this piece. The paper could have done the legwork Pogrebin and Kelly did to validate Ramirez’s and other accusers’ claims but they didn’t. But NYT didn’t because it’s the kind of news organization which only sees a drunken frat boy’s sexual assaults as “harmless fun.”
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And then the storm troopers came out to defend their poor little Kavanaugh now that the public has been reminded he’s serially assaulted women and lied repeatedly, meriting impeachment.
Last evening The Federalist’s Sean Davis attacked a witness who validated Ramirez’s claim.
Los Angeles Times’ Jackie Calmes rebutted this morning:
Following Davis, The Federalist’s MZHemingway came out to play character assassination:
Note the time — that’s 11:58 p.m. EDT *. What’s so important that The Federalist’s editors are tweeting on a Saturday evening after the NYT published an Opinion piece in the Sunday Review section?
One might wonder if this wrecking crew had a head’s up this piece might be published over the weekend; they published an article last week attacking Kavanaugh’s accuser Christine Blasey Ford.
Although a piece on/related to Kavanaugh in The Federalist isn’t much of a surprise; they’ve published 371 articles mentioning him or about him to date.
If they were paid by the piece they made some bank on Kavanaugh.
But The Federalist still does not publish information about its funding. The public can’t determine if there is a conflict of interest in whatever this conservative outlet produces on Kavanaugh and the jurist himself.
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While partisan volleys over the NYT’s piece, witness bashing, and victim blaming continues, we still don’t know who paid off Kavanaugh’s massive credit card debt.
We have no idea if any case in front of this current Supreme Court has been decided to the benefit of whoever bought Kavanaugh.
We can’t trust Kavanaugh’s filings about his personal finances because he hasn’t the receipts and he’s lied repeatedly.
Kavanaugh needs to go for these reasons alone. But there is one more extremely important reason he needs to be removed from the SCOTUS.
He’s the single biggest reason current House Democrats cannot rely on bringing any of the unsatisfied subpoenas before the SCOTUS.
The unanimous Supreme Court decision in United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974), by which Richard Nixon was forced comply with a Congressional subpoena to give up damning audio tapes, was the most critical point of the impeachment process against Nixon. The court said there was no “absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances.”
In essence, the president is not above the law. They cannot withhold materials responsive to a subpoena because of a general interest in confidentiality.
Kavanaugh has said he believes United States v. Nixon was wrongly decided, however, in spite of a unanimous decision.
If he believes the SCOTUS can’t weigh in on a dispute between two co-equal branches, he’s allowing the president to run unchecked — above the law.
We can’t trust the logic of a serial liar, ostensibly owned by some unknown party, with a habit of ignoring a lack of consent.
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Treat this as an open thread.
(* I’m not sharing a link because I’m not driving traffic to any of The Federalist’s team. Attention = money and I’m not giving them any more than I have to.)
