Brett Kavanaugh

Some hot water this week for Rep. Matt Gaetz. The Sunshine State Republican and adroit controversialist stands accused of everything from having sex with a 17-year-old girl to throwing orgies with underage prostitutes to showing his fellow lawmakers pictures of nude women on the House floor. He has yet to be caught chucking an alligator into a drive-thru window or attacking a Disney princess with a flamethrower, but even by Florida Man standards these are serious charges. The Justice Department has opened an investigation, while Gaetz himself has denied everything, claiming he’s being extorted. And certainly he deserves due process and the benefit of the doubt. Yet the allegations against him raise a thorny question: where do Republicans draw the line on sexual misconduct?

Attorney General William Barr’s seemingly interminable testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday demonstrated two things. First, AG Barr is the most patient and unflappable man in Alpha Centauri. Second, his would-be inquisitors in the Democratic party have succumbed to a virus far more toxic than the Wuhan flu. Political epidemiologists who identify the virus as Trump Derangement Syndrome are not quite right in their diagnosis. To be sure, TDS is a common comorbidity that renders this new infection more virulent and debilitating. But the nervous disorder on view yesterday, while it presupposes tertiary Trump Derangement Syndrome, is actually distinct from that malady. I am not sure that public health officials have yet settled on a name for the sickness.

Joe Biden finally went on the record Friday denying he sexually assaulted Tara Reade. It took 39 days and multiple media appearances before he finally addressed the allegation in an official statement and during a live interview with MSNBC's Morning Joe. Biden had over a month to get his story straight, but his response still left a lot to be desired. Biden's decision to address the allegations on Morning Joe was likely strategic, as the hosts of the program have been vocal about defending Democrats accused of sexual harassment and assault. Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough reportedly helped Mark Halperin rehabilitate his image after he was accused of groping multiple women. Mika also publicly supported Tom Brokaw, Sen.

Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer for Joe Biden, claimed in an interview last month that the former vice president had put his hand up her skirt and digitally penetrated her in 1993. Since the March 25 interview, new evidence has emerged that seems to corroborate Reade's story: her mother called into Larry King's radio show about the incident in 1993, and her brother, a friend, and a neighbor all recall being told the story by Reade. Nonetheless, despite making multiple media appearances in the month since the allegation, Biden has not addressed Reade's claim directly, though his spokespeople have denied it on his behalf. The former VP is nonetheless holding a 'Virtual Women’s Town Hall' on Tuesday.

Alyssa Milano has rebranded herself as a Twitter activist and Democratic party booster since her acting career peaked with the late 90s TV hit Charmed. Thanks in part no doubt to her husband’s powerful connections in the entertainment industry (he’s a managing partner at CAA, a top-tier rep agency in Los Angeles) she’s leveraged her voice onto cable news, podcasts and into political campaigns. She is the celebrity perhaps most responsible for the mainstreaming the #MeToo movement. Her zenith as an activist came in 2018, during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Milano was the most recognizable face behind the justice during the controversial confirmation hearings in which he faced thinly-sourced and circumstantial sexual assault allegations.

The symptoms of age-related cognitive decline include being unable to remember whether you’re in Vermont or New Hampshire, and what the talking points of your own presidential campaign are, but recalling exactly what you said nearly 60 years ago when you had a summer job as a lifeguard at a pool in Wilmington, Del. and a ‘bad dude’ called Corn Pop took umbrage when you ordered him to put on a shower cap so he looked like an old lady and then, to further emasculate him in front of his ‘boys’, called him ‘Esther’.

I guess that The New York Times didn’t get the memo. Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court last fall. He is sitting there (officially, I mean) right now, as I write. Despite the most disgusting, ad hominem, evidence-free effort at character assassination of a Supreme Court nominee in history, the combined forces of The New York Times and other cesspool media organs like The New Yorker, bottom-feeding Senate Democrats, feminazis of various stripes, and other woke constituencies on the left, Kavanaugh made it.

Tell me how you judge Brett Kavanaugh, and I’ll tell you who you vote for. In a divided polity, Kavanaugh cuts a Janus-faced figure. He’s that rarity, a Bushie who made good in the Trump era, but also he’s the favorite jurist of immigration restrictionists. He’s the almost too wholesome basketball dad, but he’s also the sex-predator threat to American womanhood. His swearing in was widely seen as a victory for conservatives, and raised fears of on the left that the bench was tipping right. But many on the right feared his triumph would be Pyrrhic: too much political capital had been spent on a justice with a record to the left of Antonin Scalia. ‘Trust the process,’ former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told me last year on Kavanaugh.

I can't actually believe that Democratic ‘It Girl’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a Republican mole, any more than I really believe that Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael What’s-his-name is. But is the idea really so far fetched? Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court seemed to be foundering, buffeted as it was by a tsunami of groundless charges reaching back into his high school days. None was ‘credible,’ pace the talking points of Senators Feinstein, Spartacus, et al. But what sent that narrative into a tail spin was the Julie Swetnick Show, brought to you by the latest casualty of the memory hole, Creepy Porn Lawyer Something Avenatti.

Teachers Scotch used to run an amusing ad that read ‘In life, experience is the great teacher. In Scotch, Teachers is the great experience.’ Droll, what? But is it true? Or was T. S. Eliot’s mournful observation that ‘we had the experience but missed the meaning’ more pertinent to our situation? What happens in the aftermath of Judge — as of a few minutes ago, make that ‘Justice’ — Brett Kavanaugh’s bizarre confirmation process will tell us a lot about whether we have learned anything from the horrible experience of the last weeks. When the Senate voted 50 to 48 to confirm Kavanaugh, they drew a line under a battle that was not just bitter but insane.

Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor spoke for more than an hour on Friday evening at Princeton University about the importance of neutrality for justices and the struggles women face in the workplace without once saying the name ‘Kavanaugh.’ ‘It’s an incredibly important thing for the court to guard, is this reputation of being fair, of being impartial, of being neutral,’ Kagan said. ‘This is a challenge.’ Both justices spoke at length about the necessity of preserving the Court’s reputation for fairness and neutrality. Kagan noted that having a swing vote, such as Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, has made the court seem more balanced.

The FBI’s additional background check on Brett Kavanaugh isn’t the only document regarding President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee being presented to the Senate today. On Wednesday night, the New York Times published online a letter headlined ‘The Senate Should Not Confirm Kavanaugh, Signed, 650 Law Professors.’ By Thursday, the number of signatories had jumped to more than 1,700. The letter comes as Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell set in motion events that will likely result in a final vote on Kavanaugh’s appointment early Saturday evening. Word had it that the FBI hadn’t found any additional evidence to corroborate Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her when they were high school students.