GOP RAGE OVERRIDES DESIRE TO SEEK TRUTH
In the 1976 movie “Network,” Howard Beale is a dyspeptic TV anchorman with a high-decibel mantra: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” If Beale were alive today, he would feel right at home in the Republican Party. The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court showed that, among Republicans, rage has triumphed over reason.
Republicans don’t care what the evidence says about the possibility that Kavanaugh may be guilty of sexual assault charges. All that matters is sticking it to the “libtards.”
Kavanaugh channeled this vibe perfectly in the most acerbic and abusive appearance of any nominee I have ever seen before any Senate committee. His face contorted in anger, he blasted Senate Democrats for replacing “advise and consent with search and destroy,” and turning the confirmation process into “a national disgrace.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, showing that he is bereft of the adult supervision once provided by former Senate colleague John McCain, matched Kavanaugh outburst-for-outburst. He snarled that “this is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics.” He had a point about the failure of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., to investigate the charges promptly. Yet he and the rest of the Republicans showed little interest in investigating them, either.
Predictably, Kavanaugh and Graham are now heroes to the Howard Beale Republicans — who, just as predictably, don’t care about all of the flaws in the nominee’s testimony.
There was, for example, the fact, almost forgotten by day’s end, of the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford. She was utterly believable in proclaiming Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her and that she was “100 percent” certain it was him. The GOP’s chosen questioner, Arizona prosecutor Rachel Mitchell, did not lay a glove on Ford, as even a Fox News talking head acknowledged.
In trying to defend himself, Kavanaugh was evasive and deceptive. He later apologized for his rudeness, but this was typical of his failure to answer questions forthrightly.
Most damning of all for Kavanaugh is that he had numerous opportunities to ask for an FBI investigation, as Ford has done, and refused to do so. Why, if Kavanaugh is telling the truth, would he resist involving the nation’s premier investigative agency? Wouldn’t an innocent man want his name cleared?
Instead, Kavanaugh has gone along with the Republicans’ sham investigation, which does not include testimony from his friend Mark Judge, or from the other women who have accused him of sexual misconduct. Kavanaugh may well be wrongly accused, but how, at this rate, will we ever know? He has a massive incentive to lie, and Ford does not.
Kavanaugh’s defenders nevertheless claim vindication, as if his very indignation is proof of his innocence. Have they forgotten that President Bill Clinton said, just as convincingly, “I never had sexual relations with that woman”? Perhaps Kavanaugh is upset he is accused of doing something he didn’t do or, more likely, can’t remember doing. Or perhaps he is upset because he doesn’t think that anything he did decades ago, no matter how objectionable, should interrupt his inexorable rise to the top.
Instead of seeking the truth, the Howard Beale Republicans prefer to holler and hate. The likely result will be to confirm an injudicious justice, and to further politicize an institution that is supposed to be above politics.
Max Boot is the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a global affairs analyst for CNN. He is the author of the forthcoming “The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right.”