As anti-Brett Kavanaugh protesters waited outside in DC, senators were privileged to see the secret FBI investigation that failed to provide corroborating evidence for Christine Ford’s allegation of sexual assault. But there wasn’t much to the investigation in the first place.
The Report from On High
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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What’s not to like, Ted ? When push comes to shove, Mr Kavanaugh can merely mutatis mutandi repeat the reasoning of his illustrious predecessor, Roger Brooke Taney :
We all know how that worked out….
Henri
Yoko Ono correctly called women “Nigger of the world” without the necessity of a Taney-like declaration.
Actually, women were worse off than our black brethren in at least one respect: women were given the right to vote many decades after the freed black slaves could vote.
There actually were people in the USA, and here on this site,
who thought there would be
1) a valid investigation ???
2) a conclusion thereof supporting Ms Ford !!! ??? !!!
US politics long ago had become a recurrent Charlie Brown-Lucy-football ritual.
When do we collectively become smarter than a rather dense comic strip character?
I WILL concede that magical thinking perhaps saves on recreational drug costs.
Note the gyrations Murkowski went through to walk back her promised “no” vote when another Repub senator was going to be absent for the vote. That would have required the VP to break the then likely 49-49 tie vote. Presumably the GOP didn’t want video of Pence violently soiling himself as he cast the deciding vote.
This “recurrent Charlie Brown-Lucy-football ritual,”sums it up.
I keep noticing the absence of awareness around how the Democratic members basically threw Ford into the wood chipper.
If Kavanaugh had been blocked, what would the outcome have been? Trump would simply have gone to the next ultra-conservative nominee on the list. What the Dems wanted was something sexy to bring out the vote for the midterms. They’ve been using the boogeyman of Roe v. Wade for decades now. In the U.S., 43% of abortions are pill-induced. That’s a significant number. In Iowa, where the restrictions are laxer for getting the pills, it’s 64%.
You know what this means? The Dems stand to lose a significant cash cow. For decades, the Dems have been the default keep-abortion-safe-and-legal party. How many of their ads warn about how Roe v. Wade could end? How many point out that Roe v. Wade is becoming less relevant and that Roe v. Wade never “made” abortion legal; it was a determination that ruled a woman’s right to privacy outweighed the interest of the government up to a point. But that doesn’t make for donation-generating ad copy.
Roe v. Wade occurred at a time when FedEx, email and social media did not exist. The gay community had barely emerged as a political force. When did condoms finally become non-prescription? The idea that some version of “The Handmaiden’s Tale” is going to take place is ridiculous. It’s like waiting for X-ray machines to come back to the shoe stores.
But what else do the Dems have in the basket? The only thing even remotely close is universal single-payer health care, and that’s a one-time thing: once that gets into law, it’ll be there forever. “Gosh, I sure wish we had the old kind of healthcare system. You know, where you become uninsured as soon as you were laid off or fired, and you had to go to a doctor to get a referral to the doctor you needed to see, and god help you if one of them was out of network. And remember the excitement of paying a fortune for a 10-minute ambulance ride? And those goddamned co-pays that you had to fight over with the billing departments? Oh, for those wonderful days of neglect, anger, and fear!!!!!!!1!”
For the Dems, Ford was simply a useful little tool to get some voters to the polls.
You are correct, Alex. The Democrats win elections with their promises to do nothing.
But, there are too many obstacles to the recognized Constitutional right to an abortion.
Some states have only one clinic and laws that require counseling and a three day wait that places an undo burden of an expensive long commute and overnight stays on the least privileged of this nation.
The Constitution needs to be fixed because it is fixed.
The population of California and Illinois is approximately equal to that of the 25 least populous states, about 16%.
But the 25 least populous states send 50 Senators to Congress, while California and Illinois send only 4 Senators to Congress.
Conservative Hocus-Pocus will use any means, credible or not, to justify this inequality.
Eleven of the 25 least populous states sent 22 Republican Senators to this Congress, but they comprise only slightly more than 2% of the total US population.
Does anyone really think that this travesty of democracy serves the interest of the vast majority of people who passionately, but gullibly, continue to seek change by means of this unfair representation and elections as mandated by the Constitution?
I’m tired of assholes defending the constitutional right of this constitutionally mandated over-represented minority delegation from the nearly empty states to install the recent two Presidents and two Justices of the Supreme Court.
> The Constitution needs to be fixed
True, dat.
> Conservative Hocus-Pocus will use any means, credible or not, to justify this inequality.
[citation needed]
> But there wasn’t much to the investigation in the first place.
See? The system works!
Pf-f-f-ft. It was a foregone conclusion. I only hope I live long enough to see some truly liberal Justice appointed with 51% of the vote. Hell, at this point I’d settle for a true moderate.