Democrats and Republicans Agree: Better to Lose Than to Shut Up

 “When you surround an army,” Sun Tzu counseled in The Art of War, “leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard.” Partisans on both sides of America’s everything-looks-like-a-hammer politics have forgotten this basic tenet of strategy—and are likely to pay for it.

            Donald Trump announced that he expects to be arrested in New York and indicted in connection with charges that media reports say are about to be filed by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Democrats greeted the news with characteristic gloating.

            “[Trump] cannot hide from his violations of the law, disrespect for our elections and incitements to violence,” tweeted former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The New York charges concern the allegation that he misappropriated campaign funds in order to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels, who says she had sex with the former president. They have nothing to do with denying the result of the 2000 election or the January 6th Capitol riot.

            Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann tweeted: “ARREST TRUMP TODAY! ARREST TRUMP TOMORROW! ARREST TRUMP FOREVER!”

            “I’ll throw a watch party when it happens,” Alyssa Farah Griffin said on ABC’s The View. “Lock him up! Lock him up!” Joy Behar responded, echoing the anti-Hillary chant at Trump’s rallies.

            Schadenfreude is wicked fun, but gleeful Trump-bashers might want to consider the consequences: Grievance-mongering is one of Trump’s main political schticks. Revel in the T-shirt of the presidential mugshot but remember, MAGA nation will use it to rile up the GOP base—and bring back some 2016 Trump voters who became Never Trumpers as well. In a Trump perp walk (I’d advise him to demand one), conservatives will see maddening injustice where liberals see just desserts.

            Indeed, even Trump’s primary challengers are coming to his defense. What doesn’t kill Trump makes him stronger; an arrest coupled with liberal gloating thereabout plays into his narrative that he receives unfair and disproportionate opprobrium while swampy mainstream pols get away with murder, hardens his supporters’ resolve, and increases his chances of being restored to power. “If this happens, Trump will be re-elected in a landslide victory,” Elon Musk predicted.

            Meanwhile, Republicans are overplaying their hand on abortion.

            Pro-lifers have launched a novel legal challenge to FDA authorization of the abortion drug mifepristone in a federal court in Texas, a case that will probably be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. Wyoming recently banned medication abortion. A South Carolina bill would define abortion as murder punishable by life in prison or capital punishment. Considering that 85% of voters favor legal abortion in all or some circumstances—a record high since 1976—they might ask themselves whether they’ve blown up a bridge too far.

            One-third of American women now live in a state where abortion is illegal due to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Most abortion-ban states have exceptions for rape, incest and the life of mother on their books, but in practice very few exceptions are ever granted. A lawsuit filed by five women in Texas who nearly died because they were denied abortions to which state law said they were entitled highlights that reality.

            When widespread demand encounters legal prohibition, people generally resort to a workaround—legally if possible, underground if not. There are roughly a million abortions annually. Medication abortions using mifepristone to block hormones that support pregnancy and misoprostol to empty the uterus accounted for 53% of U.S. pregnancy terminations in 2020, a portion that has almost certainly increased with the spread of telemedicine during the pandemic and the Dobbs decision.

            The mifepristone option has served as a socio-political pressure-release valve since Dobbs. Red-state women get still obtain abortions without traveling hundreds of miles. Red-state politicians can pander to pro-life voters, pointing out that abortion is far more difficult to obtain without looking like full-fledged Handmaid’s-Tale despots. The loser has been the pro-choice movement, which lacks the galvanizing effect of a 100% abortion ban.

            If SCOTUS overrules the FDA and kills mifepristone, the pressure-release valve gets closed—and not just in the 28 states that currently ban abortion. Medication abortion, the easiest and therefore most common type of abortion, vanishes in all 50 states. In an election year, the mere effort to ban mifepristone may be sufficient to enrage liberal voters. If it succeeds, watch out. Abortion rights aren’t currently a top issue for left-leaning voters, but an actual ban could spur even disgruntled progressives to turn out for Democrats about whom they otherwise might not have felt enthused.

            What should the two parties have done instead?

In an ideal world, Democratic prosecutors and investigators would have coordinated their efforts, bypassing novel legal theories like AG Bragg’s that are politically flimsy and unlikely to lead to conviction in favor of rock-solid charges like business fraud and instigating a riot. Now that an indictment appears to be forthcoming, Democrats could have assumed a sober mien, pointing out the sad necessity of having to book a former president like a common criminal. They shouldn’t be jumping up and down like overstimulated infants.

            Republicans, on the other hand, should have taken a breather on their fight against abortion. Had they waited a few years to let the new bifurcated legal normal to take hold, the pro-choice movement would have lost momentum as dispirited partisans drifted away having accepted defeat. Eventually, with Americans accustomed to abortion as less legal and rarer, they could have moved forward to ban all forms of abortion nationwide. Slow and steady, the same way economic conservatism was built up from the grass roots over decades following Goldwater’s 1964 rout, might have won this race.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

SYNDICATED COLUMN: How Brett Kavanaugh Framed Himself as a Martyr to the #MeToo Movement

Image result for kavanaugh #metoo protest

Innocent until proven guilty. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell floated a lot of arguments to defend Brett Kavanaugh, but that’s the one that carried the day: “We owe it to the American people to underscore that you’re innocent until proven guilty.”

The Kavanaugh confirmation battle was a grenade wrapped in an onion covered with more poisonous sexual politics than “The World According to Garp.” Yet in the end it was simple. Presumption of innocence was the argument that SWINO (SWing vote In Name Only) Senator Susan Collins used to justify treason to her gender.

“This is not a criminal trial, and I do not believe that claims such as these need to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt,” Collins said, announcing her crucial support for the controversial Supreme Court nominee. “Nevertheless, fairness would dictate that the claims at least should meet a threshold of more likely than not as our standard.”

Once again Democrats asked themselves: what the hell happened? Why did we lose a fight we should have won?

Trump’s defeat of Clinton, Bush v. Gore, the 1940 Fall of France — those were perfect storms with numerous contributing factors. Not this one. Kavanaugh made it to the Supreme Court because his allies framed #MeToo as an out-of-control mob of man-haters.

Remember when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation that Kavanaugh tried to rape her in high school first hit the news? Republicans were on their heels at first. Polls showed that a plurality of voters didn’t want him confirmed, the worst showing of any high court nominee since they began asking the question. Then came the one-two punch: Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez said Kavanaugh exposed himself and tried to force her to give him oral sex. Even with a Republican Senate, Kavanaugh was in real trouble.

Anti-Kavanaugh sentiment peaked after the marathon nine-hour hearing in which Ford and Judge Kavanaugh testified about her allegations. A PBS/NPR/Marist poll found that 45% of Americans believed her. Only 33% believed him. If that’s where things had remained nine days later when the Senate voted, Collins and other wobbly GOP senators might have voted nay.

#MeToo came to their rescue.

Nothing unites a party like a common enemy. That goes double when the adversary allows itself to be framed as scary and unreasonable.

As the Kavanaugh vote drew nearer #MeToo activists became increasingly aggressive. They chased senators down hallways, cornered them in elevators, doxxed them and picketed their homes. Ted Cruz was confronted at a restaurant. “We Believe Survivors!” activists shouted as he fled.

Direct tactics hold politicians accountable for their sins. Confronting right-wing senators, none of whom gave a damn about the possibility that they were about to put an attempted rapist on the Supreme Court, going after them one-on-one was empowering for victims of rape and sexual assault and the millions of victims they represented. It was more than fair; it was justified.

But it didn’t turn out to be smart.

The optics and audio of all that yelling were ugly, particularly to Republican-leaning voters. Shouting incoherently — you couldn’t hear what they were saying on TV — during hearings looked rude and hostile. Screaming at elderly senators as they ran down capitol corridors exuded chaos.

They shouted and carried signs bearing the mottos of #MeToo:

Believe survivors.

Believe women.

Such powerful words. Also sloppy. “We are worried as mobs chant, ‘We believe survivors!’ (What if Ford is not truly a ‘survivor’? Don’t we have to establish whether she’s a survivor first?),” Stephanie Gutmann, a Republican, wrote in USA Today.

#MeToo is a kind of revolution. Because revolutions follow years of resentment piled upon eons of abuse, their imperative to destroy what’s broken and evil necessarily leads to intemperance. Nowhere is the revolutionary impulse toward careless imprecision more evident than in rhetoric. So it is with #MeToo — what began with an uprising no reasonable person could oppose, against bonafide monsters like Harvey Weinstein, inevitably cast its net wider into the gray area of Aziz Ansari.

As the targets of #MeToo expanded from the undeniably disgusting to garden-variety piggishness, the slogans of the movement became more militant, more thoughtless, further out on a limb.

Official policy at HR and the local PD had always been “ignore women.” A rational corrective to “ignore women” would be “listen to women.” Accusers deserve respect, to be taken seriously. So do the accused. But revolutions don’t reform the old order. They destroy it.

“Believe women” doesn’t make sense to a society whose core judicial fiction is the presumption of innocence. In America no one, neither men nor women, neither accusers nor the accused, earns the right to be believed by virtue of their gender. Being believed is a zero-sum right, one that inherently comes at the expense of another person and so must be earned by a combination of corroborating evidence, witnesses and the intangible social currency of credibility.

Sensing that #MeToo had overreached, yelling too loudly and deploying slogans that reeked of overcorrection, McConnell and his fellow Republican leaders rallied their party’s base in two steps.

A Supreme Court confirmation hearing usually feels like a job interview. Despite Susan Collins’ denials the Republicans did everything they could to frame Kavanaugh’s as a trial instead, complete with a hired-gun prosecutor from Arizona to provide a veneer of legalishness.

After they’d made the spectacle look and feel like a trial it was easy to convince fence-sitting moderate Republican viewers that to be denied his seat Dr. Ford and her Democratic allies would have to follow the familiar rules of a criminal proceeding: establishing guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, adhering to sharing of evidence (which is why they attacked Dianne Feinstein for withholding Ford’s letter), the burden of proof on her, not him.

Of course, the fix was in. Ford was the one really on trial; she fended off the questions of the rent-a-DA whereas Kavanaugh didn’t have to. It was all so clever. Once Democrats allowed Republicans to set the bar at beyond-a-reasonable-doubt guilt — something the he-said-she-said nature of the 36-year-old allegation made impossible — Kavanaugh was in like Flynn.

Shaunna Thomas of the women’s group UltraViolet Action, said: “This doesn’t end [on Saturday],” she said. “It ends in November.” But not, perhaps, the way she would like. Polls show that Republicans are so energized by their win on Kavanaugh that the Dems’ chance of recapturing the Senate are dropping in part because they’re buying the argument that the #MeToo movement is dangerous. “It’s a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something you may not be guilty of,” President Trump said in his memorably illiterate way.

Fair or not, right or wrong, the perception of many men is that #MeToo is willing to sacrifice 100 innocent men in order to end the career of one guilty one. In the same way that the civil rights movement needed white allies in order to succeed, #MeToo needs men not to fear them but to support them.

Whatever happens in the midterm elections, the #MeToo movement has arrived at a tactical crossroads. Should we Believe Women? Or Listen to Everyone?

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope.” You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

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