Coordinated outrage

Suddenly it is the common tar brush of the GOP: “mob rule.” I cannot offer an exhaustive count of those lately employing the phrase, but it is clearly the majority’s cynically deployed tactical label. One imagines a private caucus to coordinate their remarks. They want citizens and voters to fear, not just despise, those who oppose Judge Kavanaugh.

In a single interview, Senator Cotton wishes us to see a likeness of the Kavanaugh resistance to Stalinist show trials (communist) and to the McCarthy hearings (virulently and dementedly anti-communist). Surely the senator, or those paraphrasing his remarks, knows that both comparisons are absurd, hysterically overstated. No one in Washington has been disappeared or shot over this court nomination, and even the judge, whose reputation has certainly suffered some dents, has not been blacklisted with the devastating effects visited upon Joseph McCarthy’s targets.

It is vitally important for the majority party to admit that dissent is an inalienable right of the American people, and that the abridgment of this right will not stand the people’s objection, just as it cannot stand constitutional examination. The judge’s life has left its record, which has not even now been deeply explored, and the American people are within their rights to question that record.

With conscious encouragement by “conservative” forces, civil rights and anti-war protesters were once subject to hate and fear, but the nation is certainly better for their efforts. The same can be said of abolitionists and supporters of suffrage. There must always be freedom to protest.

Karl Kimball’s letter offers a pun alluding to the confrontation of Jeff Flake in the Senate elevator, but it seems to me a hysterical shriek to characterize two or three women in an elevator door as “an outraged victim mob.” Like Republican senators’ indignation, this is too studied, too shrill, and too much.

SHEARLE FURNISH

Little Rock