But nothing happened. He’s still on air. It didn’t matter, seemingly, to anyone.
Do you think that would have been true 50 years ago? I don’t.
As far as the crazy Right, as I have been saying for some time, there is no point in a Constitution if there is to be no government. I will also underscore the arguments that Thomas Paine made in Common Sense that, although all governments are to be feared, they are in nearly all cases preferable to formally lawless societies.
On the Left, of course, you have moral suicide, suicide by government, suicide by creating and fanning the flames of an entity which will control your life from cradle to grave, which might impoverish you, which might even kill you, but which will never ask you to do any hard thinking.
As I see the current landscape, you have two competing sets of existential fears.
Within what I might term Moderate America, which is everything from the Far Left–aka currently “Mainstream Democrats”–on to the right, which includes all people who think the Constitution is a good thing, there is the fear that all our heritage, all our wealth and yes generalized privilege–which certainly includes blacks, as compared to the rest of the world– is under attack by lunatics. In my view this is a valid fear.
On the Left, you have the more subtle but more maddening fear that, in rejecting everything they have known, in rejecting their own culture, their own people, their own history, they have done it all for NOTHING. They sold their birthright, and did not even get a crust of bread.
That is the sort of angst which causes you to double down, to go harder, to get even crazier. And as the gap widens, so too does the difficulty of coming back home. It becomes much easier to leap from “one person alleged Kavanaugh held her down against her will, although the witnesses she alleged were there would not corroborate her account, and even though she contradicted herself, seems to have lied about some details, and was plainly partisan”, to KAVANAUGH IS A PROVEN RAPIST. Which, in fact, is what the Left has done. No boundaries remain, where Ideological Others are concerned.
Fear. It is fear which governs this whole thing. Fear of the future, fear of loneliness, fear of being wrong, fear of contradiction, fear of the violence they themselves carry in their hearts. Fear it is all for nothing. Fear even, perhaps, that everything conservatives–conservators–say about them is true after all. Fear they have wasted their lives. Fear the New Revelation isn’t. Fear that hucksters have sold them a bill of goods. Fear that the spirit of meanness resides in them. Fear of the darkness they project all around them.
Fear that the fear within them has made them small and ignoble.
Many people who were skeptics have reported, after spending time with him, that they have changed their minds.
And tactically and strategically, it would be brilliant to bring Rosenstein around. Rosenstein can order Mueller to bring this whole nonsense to an end without being seen as a naked Trump partisan. Hell, he allegedly tried to foment what would have amounted to a coup.
And obviously, Mueller’s work needs to end. The only evidence of wrong-doing points to the Democrats. Mueller needs to put an end to this, and Rosenstein or whatever that guys name is who in theory runs the Justice Department, then need to launch criminal probes into Fusion GPS and the Democrats.
And this would be a way for Mueller to get out with his reputation intact. It’s wins all around. Rosenstein keeps his job, and maybe even gets a promotion when Sessions steps down after the election, and nobody has to point out the whole thing was ridiculous.
Democrats lose, of course, but people who lie, cheat and steal SHOULD lose.
I think this is true. You can value your beer can collection, your antique cars, and you can value people in your life whose place and purpose you seek to define for them.
This is my problem: I lost the ability to look into my mothers eyes and feel seen long ago. What she sees, what she needs to see, what she demands of me emotionally to give her, is who I was when I was obedient, quiet, and when I belonged to her. I feel this pressure when I am with her. She has no idea she is doing it. Almost nothing she does is conscious. It’s all impulse, papered over with very soothing self conceits and deceptions.
Life is fragile, uncertain, risky. Not everyone can deal with this. Many people seek to make of everything a routine, a certainty, a known, a given, an integer between 1 and 7.
And people are the least certain, the most risky. The solution? Control them. Force them to be as they were, to not change, to not evolve, to “blossom”, if they are to do so, in ways which are material and not spiritual.
And as my own children grow, I realize that soon they will have full and rich lives quite apart from me. What was, will be no more. I need a new purpose.
Controlling others is a way of governing ones own unprocessed fear and uncertainty. It is a way of reducing the world to a box which is known.
The more fear in the world, the more certain this impulse is to take root and grow.
For me, this insight brings me comfort. It explains, in better language than I have yet been able to use, why things are the way they are.
It is rare to look into someone else’s eyes and feel seen. Most people hide, and then wonder why they feel alone. When you do feel seen, this is so rare you call it love.
Perhaps the Buddhist path is about making a friend of the world, and of all humanity, because you have nothing to hide, and so can be seen by everyone, and can see others as they are. You are nourished and nurtured everywhere you go, and everywhere you look.
I go out into the dark, and return with what I find.
Birds, when they are not flapping, are falling. Jet airplanes are always simultaneously falling and pushing forward. It is the combination which propels them.
Flying is not the cessation of the demands of gravity, but rather the skillful use of them.
I think this is clear. I was thinking about this early this morning in bed. There is something interesting about this observation I can’t quite put my finger on.
If love is easily had, that child will not be driven. That child might be “lazy”.
If love is sparse, that child will grow up keenly aware of duties and obligations, failing to meet which will make them unlovable.
And of course, when dealing with emotionally defective parents, the guilt is there, but not the remedy.
But the point I wanted to make is that much of our anxiety in America, at least–although I think this can be generalized to many nations–is related to our felt need to protect an internal image of ourselves, which makes much of our emotional pain an abstract response to possible criticisms. Put another way, we beat ourselves up because we feel that if we don’t, we will lose the right to be loved.
This emotional contingency is what drives the modern world. It is what is propelling this mad rush for more, more, more, while we enjoy what we have less and less, and come to consider the voices arising from unconscious sensations within us as more important than the actual people in our lives.
Put still another way, fear drives our world.
Ford herself did not even call him a rapist, and the other women were not credible.
Kavanaugh probably lied about some things. He was likely a prep school frat boy who got shit faced drunk at times and chased women. He probably grabbed a few asses or boobs at the hairiest parties, probably of women who were so drunk they did not remember. He probably woke up in bed a few times with women he did not remember taking there.
This is the experience of many, if not most college men, especially in that era. Hell, I woke up one time after passing out with a woman on top of ME. It was a rape of sorts, I suppose, but I figured that was not a bad way to wake up. That is one important difference between men and women. I can only guess how she sorted out the preliminaries.
And all the Democrats know this. They did it themselves. They watched it. The whole game is ridiculous and utterly and disgustingly hypocritical. Kavanaugh was combative and a bit disingenuous because that is how they set the rules of the game.
What I think all conservatives need to understand is that an essential element of the Alinskyan game is to get us to play by one set of rules while the Left plays by another.
They want us to value consistency, goodness, fairness, justice, honesty and all the other noble virtues which make America work.
But they themselves could give a flying fuck if they elect a racist serial killing rapist, if he is able to easily win reelection and support the Party. There are no standards. There is no morality.
And you can see easily how they win this game, over and over and over. They are not wrong in pointing out our imperfections, which they are able to do with a reliably partisan media. But they ARE wrong in using a double standard.
Who is OBVIOUSLY the worse person: Kavanaugh, who may or may not have done some stupid drunk teenage boy stuff, or Keith Ellison who, RECENTLY and documentably, beat up his woman, and terrified and threatened her? Who is in the news?
Republicans have been slow to reject our standards. We continue to believe in nobility, fair play, honor, consistency and the like, but it is hard to know how to win this game while retaining them. The Democrats likely forced Kavanaugh into some mild lies under oath.
The whole thing is very demonic. I don’t know the answer, other than that those few among them who retain some residual decency rejecting their game, rejecting their methods, and rejecting their party. I only see massive and continuing electoral gains by the Republicans as a way of eroding, gradually, this abusive system built up carefully over so many decades, and which was put in place as a national standard by Obama, who by all accounts was and remains one of the most ardent students of Alinsky, and best practitioners of his methods.
Self evidently, this is a laudable sentiment, but it neglects the obvious fact that not all people, male or female, always speak the truth.
X is human.
Humans sometimes lie.
Ergo it is possible X is lying.
This is all pretty simple. This is why we evolved formal methods of inquiry, why we grant the accused the right to confront their accusers, and why we demand evidence if we are to be persuaded of a claim which calls for punishment.
“Always believe survivors” is sentimental nonsense. Yes, of course we can and should do a better job of creating the emotional space for women to speak of things which terrify them. But this does not require abdicating the duty to protect the innocent.
Why did Ford delete her social media history?
Why won’t she release her polygraph or her therapists notes? She wants to enter them into evidence, which is her choice, but wants to enter them into evidence based on her DESCRIPTION of them. That is not evidence.
Why did she, apparently, lie both about her experience with polygraphs, and when why she built her second door?
Does she REALLY use that little girl voice all the time. Many women doubt it.
Why can’t she find one corroborating witness, when Kavanaugh has 70 women vouching for his character?
And I was watching her testimony, a small fraction, when she was talking about the door. The man with the beard next to her was smiling–really, suppressing a smile, ineffrctivrly–and there was a period his eyes went up and he seemed to be reciting the story they had rehearsed with her.
This whole thing was traumatizing for a lot of people, and I really hope it wakes a lot of people up to the clear and present danger Democrats represent to the rule of law, to civility, and to ALL aspects of American progress.
Everything Trump has accomplished has een done despite the opposition of Democrats, who would be HAPPY to see a major downturn or war, if it meant they could get.back in control.