I didn't expect to find the hearings with Ford and Kavanaugh to be so riveting. They reminded me somewhat of the Hiss/Chambers hearings, when originally no one believed Chambers. Ford, of course, was not the disreputable character Chambers was at the time but she is still a woman and everyone remembered how Anita Hill was treated. The hearings on Thursday were like a horrible/funny scene from a Dickens novel, though with real lives and careers at stake, as doddering old men with names like Crapo, Grassley and Flake handed over the questioning of Christine Blasey Ford to Arizona prosecutor Rachel Mitchell because of the fear of being labeled misogynistic, though they had no problem sucking up to nominee Brett Kavanaugh, a privileged white man. Kavanaugh played the victim of the Clintons and an orchestrated left-wing conspiracy in order to deflect attention from himself and his behavior. Kavanaugh's performance was eerily similar to Clarence Thomas's deflection of Anita Hill's accusations as "a high-tech lynching" in 1991.
Kavanaugh dissembled left and right, from saying the drinking age was 18 in Maryland when he got drunk in high school (it was actually changed to 21 even before he even reached 18) and misleading Senators on what "the Devil's Triangle" was (he claimed it was a drinking game, though his friends said it referred to sexual activity; Democratic Senators did not follow up to ask the rules of this "drinking game."). To me it seemed that Kavanaugh had been drinking during the hearing, as he was blustery and aggressive, even saying to one Senator, "Yes, I like beer; do you like beer, Senator?" Kavanaugh even mocked Dr. Ford for attending Holton-Arms school while he had attended the more prestigious Georgetown Prep and Kavanaugh said constantly "I went to Yale" and therefore he had no time for drinking, though several of his classmates said they had seen him stumbling drunk.
Dr. Ford's testimony was forthright and honest, even testifying to how the brain processes traumatic information (she is a psychologist). She did not testify about what she thought of Kavanaugh being on the Supreme Court but about what happened, to the extent that she remembered the details of what was a traumatic experience. Prosecutor Rachel Mitchell found no holes in her
story.
A brief personal note: Kavanaugh reminded me of some the privileged boys with whom I went to prep school, who thought it amusing to have sex with women who they thought socially and intellectually beneath them -- Ford's description of the laughter while she was being assaulted was chilling --and I will add that regardless of Kavanaugh's crude behavior in prep school and college he should not be on the Supreme Court for many other reasons, including his Roman Catholicism that causes him to define birth control methods as "abortion-inducing drugs."
