Once the Senate Republicans decided to countenance demagoguery, one step led to another.
.. Leland Keyser, a friend of Ford’s who does not remember being at such a party but has expressed her faith in Ford’s account, was also interviewed. A number of Yale classmates who offered portrayals of Kavanaugh as a belligerent drinker, and without whom, Democrats argued, the investigation was incomplete, were not. Neither were Blasey and Kavanaugh.
.. Republican senators, in the interest of getting a conservative nominee confirmed, discounted the apparent lies that he told about his role in Bush-era torture and detention policies and in judicial nominations. And it extends to their decision to tolerate the excesses of Donald Trump, in return for his promise to nominate a conservative. When you decide to countenance demagoguery, one step leads to another.
.. Last week, the Republicans had to put up with the President goading a crowd at a rally in Mississippi to laugh at Ford. Some of Kavanaugh’s supporters worried that this would make it harder for late-deciding Republicans to vote yes. In fact, Trump made the process more humiliating, not only for them but for the entire Republican Party.
.. Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, was the only Republican to say that she would not support Kavanaugh.
.. In contrast, the majority of the senators who had made their choice clear weeks ago were allowed to move, unperturbed, toward what was one of the most momentous votes of their careers. They made speeches if it was opportune, but not much else was expected of them, other than party loyalty.
.. Scott Pelley, of “60 Minutes,” asked him if he would have been willing to call for the postponement of the vote if he were running for reëlection. “No, not a chance,” he said. “There’s no value to reaching across the aisle. There’s no currency for that anymore.”
Kavanaugh is lying. His upbringing explains why.Kavanaugh is lying. His upbringing explains why.
The elite learn early that they’re special — and that they won’t face consequences.
Brett Kavanaugh is not telling the whole truth. When President George W. Bush nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2006, he told senators that he’d had nothing to do with the war on terror’s detention policies; that was not true.Kavanaugh also claimed under oath, that year and again this month, that he didn’t know that Democratic Party memos a GOP staffer showed him in 2003 were illegally obtained; his emails from that period reveal that these statements were probably false.And it cannot be possible that the Supreme Court nominee was both a well-behaved virgin who never lost control as a young man, as he toldFox News and the Senate Judiciary Committee this past week, and an often-drunk member of the “Keg City Club” and a “Renate Alumnius ,” as he seems to have bragged to many people and written into his high school yearbook. Then there are the sexual misconduct allegations against him, which he denies.
.. How could a man who appears to value honor and the integrity of the legal system explain this apparent mendacity? How could a man brought up in some of our nation’s most storied institutions — Georgetown Prep, Yale College, Yale Law School — dissemble with such ease? The answer lies in the privilege such institutions instill in their members, a privilege that suggests the rules that govern American society are for the common man, not the exceptional one.
.. What makes these schools elite is that so few can attend. In the mythologies they construct, only those who are truly exceptional are admitted — precisely because they are not like everyone else. Yale President Peter Salovey, for instance, has welcomed freshmen by telling them that they are “the very best students.” To attend these schools is to be told constantly: You’re special, you’re a member of the elect, you have been chosen because of your outstanding qualities and accomplishments.
.. Schools often quite openly affirm the idea that, because you are better, you are not governed by the same dynamics as everyone else. They celebrate their astonishingly low acceptance rates and broadcast lists of notable alumni who have earned their places within the nation’s highest institutions, such as the Supreme Court. Iheard these messages constantly when I attended St. Paul’s, one of the most exclusive New England boarding schools, where boys and girls broke rules with impunity, knowing that the school would protect them from the police and that their families would help ensure only the most trivial of consequences.
.. elites’ sense of their own exceptionalism helps instill within them a tendency to be less compassionate... Take drug use. While the poor are no more likely to use drugs (in fact, among young people, it’s the richer kids who are more likely to drink alcohol or smoke marijuana), they are far more likely to be imprisoned for it.. Kavanaugh’s privilege runs deep, and it shows. He grew up in a wealthy Washington suburb where his father spent three decades as CEO of a trade association. There has been a sense among his supporters that his place is deserved, which mirrors the climate of aristocratic inheritance he grew up around. His peers from the party of personal responsibility have largely rallied around him, seeking to protect his privilege... Ari Fleischer, put it: “How much in society should any of us be held liable today when we lived a good life, an upstanding life by all accounts, and then something that maybe is an arguable issue took place in high school? Should that deny us chances later in life?”American Conservative editor Rod Dreher wondered “why the loutish drunken behavior of a 17 year old high school boy has anything to tell us about the character of a 53 year old judge.”.. This collective agreement that accountability doesn’t apply to Kavanaugh (and, by extension, anybody in a similar position who was a youthful delinquent) may help explain why he seems to believe he can lie with impunity — a trend he continued Thursday, when he informed senators that he hadn’t seen the testimony of his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, even though a committee aide told the Wall Street Journal he’d been watching... servant leadership and privilege are often bedfellows. Both suggest not a commonality with the ordinary American, but instead a standing above Everyman. Both justify locating power within a small elite because this elite is better equipped to lead... Retired justice Anthony Kennedy, according to some reports, hand-picked Kavanaugh as his successor.. both allow space for lying in service of the greater good. Privilege means that things like perjury aren’t wrong under one’s own private law.