Mike Huckabee continued his streak of conflating bigotry with (conservative) “humor” last night when he tried to fend off a sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh with a “joke” suggesting women and liberals are just too anti-men and too pro-trans. UPDATED: Kavanaugh accuser has now publicly come forward with her accusations.
As laid out by Jodi Jacobson in Rewire.News, Kavanaugh’s confirmation “has become an Anita Hill moment.” In addition to other serious concerns about Kavanaugh’s radical view of executive power and his disturbing comments about women’s sexual health rights, Jacobson notes his long, close relationship with accused sexual harasser Judge Alex Kozinski (about whose behavior Kavanaugh was evasive during his confirmation hearings). Now a woman has come forward and accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault when they were in high school. He has vehemently denied that claim.
The allegations are serious.
Kavanaugh physically pushed her into a bedroom, the accuser said. Along with another male, Kavanaugh locked the door from the inside and played loud music that the accuser said precluded successful attempts to yell for help.
Both men were drunk, she said, and Kavanaugh attempted to remove her clothes.
At one point, Kavanaugh was on top of her laughing as the other male in the room periodically jumped onto Kavanaugh.
Huckabee appeared as a pro-Kavanaugh guest on Fox News last night. Instead of calling for a hearing to get to the bottom of what Kavanaugh did or did not do, Huckabee wants us all to move along. That, in itself, is enough to make me suspicious that he's afraid of what might be found out. Also suspicious is his notion that the way to defend Kavanaugh is to attack his accuser and, by extension, those who think her allegations deserve investigation.
Speaking to Fox host Jeanine Pirro, Huckabee cited a letter sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee and signed by 65 women who attested to Kavanaugh's good character in high school. Let’s not forget that a slew of Fox News personalities came forward and defended Roger Ailes from accusations of sexual harassment, too. And while I certainly believe that Kavanaugh, like anyone, is innocent until proven guilty, a list of banks a bank robber has not held up is no proof he did not hold up a different bank.
First, Huckabee suggested that Kavanaugh’s accuser’s wish for anonymity was an indication of dishonesty:
HUCKABEE: The big difference, Judge, is that 65 women signed their names to it, they’re willing to be accountable for it. The one person who is unknown and completely anonymous with really, some pretty sketchy accusations – we don’t know who it is, we have no idea.
He concluded with his hideous humor:
HUCKABEE: I’ll tell you the one thing that the left would love him for. If he would wear a dress and hang out in women’s restrooms, that would be the one thing that they would suddenly applaud and say, “He’s fit for the court.”
Host Jeanine Pirro was once known for championing abused women and children. But she laughed heartily as Huckabee deliberately denigrated a possible victim of sexual assault with a bigoted joke about transgender bathrooms.
Clearly, if Huckabee has his way, it will be 1991 all over again.
Watch Huckabee try to hustle us away from looking further into the character of a lifetime appointee for the highest court in the country below, from the September 15, 2018 Justice with Judge Jeanine, via The Contemptor.
9/16/18 UPDATE: Kavanaugh's accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, has publicly told her allegations to The Washington Post:
While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.
“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”
Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling. She said she ran from the room, briefly locked herself in a bathroom and then fled the house.
So far, crickets from Huckabee.
Mike Huckabee defending Brett Kavanaugh: "I'll tell you the one thing that the left would love him for. If he would wear a dress and hang out in women's restrooms, that would be the one thing that they would suddenly applaud and say he's fit for the court." pic.twitter.com/QeiTBc3iQl
— Contemptor (@TheContemptor) September 16, 2018
I expect Lindsay Graham to pay some lip service to the claim and then for the GOP committee members to say that they regret that the Dems have politicized it. And then they’ll ram through the nomination to the Senate Floor and get Kavanaugh into his Supreme Court robes on schedule. The Dems will then campaign on this, but the damage will already have been done, sadly.
This isn’t about just getting a policy wonk onto the SC. It’s about picking the most extreme one they could find and ramming it down everyone else’s throat. It’s an in-your-face move, complete with an enthusiastic shove for good measure. They want you to know that they’re doing it BECAUSE THEY CAN. And because they know you know THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. It’s a big moment of “Suck it, liberals!”
And while I do hope that the Democrats manage to overcome the massive gerrymandering around the country to get a small majority in the House, we must remember that this is not a guarantee, no matter what people think after skimming Nate Silver’s projections. (And Silver isn’t saying that the Dems are a lock – he’s saying they have a better chance than not. But there is still a solid chance for the GOP voters to hold the Dems to a small enough gain (say 15-20 seats) that the majority doesn’t change.) I have not seen any indications that the aggregators (Silver, Sabato, etc) have really calculated in the full effect of the 2010 gerrymanders. I need to remind people here that these gerrymanders, including in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, are considered some of the most extreme partisan tilts ever inflicted in US history, and that they will continue to be active through the 2020 election. In the Wisconsin example, multiple districts were rebuilt to make a small number of overwhelming Dem slots, usually in inner cities, while the other districts saw the Dem populations diluted to a much smaller percentage of the electorate. For the Dems to win a heavily gerrymandered district, it means they must ALL show up, and that a good number of the GOP voters must stay home or switch parties. I’ll be the first to say that’s great if it happens, but I would not spend too much time or breath waiting for it.
And even if the Dems manage to get a small majority in the House, that will not change the body that deals with the judiciary – the Senate. I have repeatedly stated that the Senate is the body that the Dems absolutely MUST focus on – if they don’t prevail in the Senate, you’ll see MANY more terrible judges getting long-term appointments to lower courts over the next two years. And that’s the one we really can thank Harry Reid for. He was able to get some judges through for a brief time in 2013, but as soon as the Hard Right took over the White House as well as the Senate, we were due for a major payback – and here it is.
There isn’t going to be any “Anita Hill moment” here. The GOP has a solid majority ready to ram this appointment through to the floor of the Senate and then through to confirmation within the next 10 days or so. When the Supreme Court assembles in two weeks, Brett Kavanaugh will happily be sworn in and will take his seat, ready to begin overturning and destroying the last 60 years of jurisprudence as quickly as he can.
I do have to wonder why the Dems sat on this allegation throughout the process when they’ve had it for so long. Waiting until the last second to bring it up is simply childish on their part. If the GOP had tried this tactic with Elena Kagan, people would have been up in arms about it. This should have been immediately raised the moment Kavanaugh was named, and in fact should have been raised when he was rammed onto the lower court over a decade ago. By waiting until now, the Dems have made sure that it would have no actual effect – and perhaps that was on purpose. They may simply have wanted to taint him and be able to campaign that the GOP doesn’t care – but everyone already knows that and GOP voters have made clear that they like the fact that their congresspeople don’t care about this stuff.
This doesn’t change the seriousness of the allegation or the reality of what Kavanaugh is. The allegation is consistent with the man who happily worked as a Right Wing political operative for years, including his gleeful drafting of sexually explicit interrogatories to President Clinton so he could get the most sordid stuff on the record 20 years ago. This is the same man who regularly consorted with people known for vicious behavior without having any issues – until he needed to present himself as a squeaky clean happy Soccer Dad to America. This is the same man who coldly and cruelly refused to take the hand of the father of one of the shooting victims at Parkland just two weeks ago. We shouldn’t be surprised that he has a history of this kind of thing.
But that doesn’t change that Kavanaugh is going to be confirmed, and that there is not a thing that the Dems can do about it. I would further argue that sending negative and some cases openly offensive material to Susan Collins is a ridiculous tactic by whoever did it. Collins doesn’t care – she only needed Kavanaugh to utter the code words “settled law” to allow her to weasel out of any commitment to upholding women’s reproductive rights. Sending that kind of stuff to her only gives angry Right Wingers something to wave to rally their own base.
Elections have consequences. The angry Right Wingers won this round the moment the Dems in the swing states stayed home two years ago. We must hope that people have learned their lesson and will allow the Dems to provide some kind of a check in the Senate for the next two years, or we’ll almost certainly be watching Clarence Thomas step down in the next 18 months, and THAT will be the ballgame for the next 30+ years.
perjury. Don’t be suprised when Kavanaugh’s other problems like receiving stolen documents and attempted rape to bother them one iota either.
Watching (admittedly liberal) MSNBC, a conservative there was confronted with hypocrisy of the party who used to boast being the “moral majority” abandoning morality in the era of Trump. He unsurprisingly fumbled around a lot trying to rationalize putting right-wing ideology and party politics before morality but he never backed down.
I don’t get their sudden disinterest in morality. Because they don’t need a scumbag like Trump or a scumbag like Kavanaugh to ram right-wing policies down our throats. Kavanaugh is easily replaceable with any number of candidates they could quickly confirm before they lose the House. Fear of Trump?