Politics

“But why don’t women just say something when it happens? Why not speak up? Why stay silent?”

This is why, you self-centered, short-sighted, unempathetic, thundering idiots.

Christine Blasey Ford was hesitant to come forward with allegations of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh because she feared facing public attacks. “Why suffer through the annihilation if it’s not going to matter?” she said in an interview with the Washington Post.

Her fears were not unfounded. Within hours of revealing her identity, personal attacks were launched against Ford. Some Senators expressed their doubts about the truthfulness of Ford’s statements. Sen. Orrin Hatch asserted that Ford was “mixed up.”

Now, the New York Times is reporting that Ford is being sent death threats.

The NYT “Part of the Resistance ” piece is strategic conservative propaganda, not self-promotion.

This strikes me as an astute analysis of the letter (thinking about tone and intended audience). So much about this letter has been bothering me, and this is a chunk of it.

(Another chunk is that the letter author is describing a shadow/puppet government, which further abandons the in-built checks and balances in a dangerous undermining of our system, putting the underlying health of our country even more at risk than it already was.)

This is NOT the administration falling apart. It’s A+, live action storytelling with a controlled demolition, and it’s actually really dangerous. Behind the structure of the NYT piece lies the strategy for how the republican party plans to catch the pieces as they start falling.

Now is the time we need to get ahead of this. Instead of sitting back and watching the pieces fall, or flipping out and calling for the writer to resign, in the next few days we need to pre-empt this new narrative and have conversations with the significant voters in our lives now.

“Impeachment is a constitutional mechanism. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a constitutional mechanism. Mass resignations followed by voluntary testimony to congressional committees are a constitutional mechanism. Overt defiance of presidential authority by the president’s own appointees—now that’s a constitutional crisis.

“If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand. That duty may be risky to their careers in government or afterward. But on their first day at work, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution—and there were no ‘riskiness’ exemptions in the text of that oath.”