When it comes to Brett Kavanaugh, there are three camps. The first believes it’s a travesty that he was confirmed. The second believes it’s a travesty that he was smeared. The third believes it’s a travesty that the process was so divisive. …
Brett Kavanaugh’s defenders have offered four main arguments for confirming him despite the allegations of Christine Blasey Ford and two other women who have accused him of sexual misdeeds. …
“The only consensus,” declared The Washington Post about Thursday’s Judiciary Committee hearings, “was that the Senate—and the nation—had hit a new low.” In The Weekly Standard, Jonathan Last added, “It’s impossible to look at the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings and not see America as a nation in decline.” A lot of respectable people believe that. It’s the kind of sentiment you hear from nonpartisan journalists and anti-Trump conservatives, the people who represent the ...
The question is no longer whether Republicans have lost the fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. It’s how. The answer is that they lost by allowing Christine Blasey Ford to speak. Yes, they didn’t subpoena Mark Judge; yes, they didn’t request an FBI investigation, as they should have done. But ultimately, it didn’t matter, because they made a far greater concession: They ...
It’s remarkable: The more women accuse of Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, the more committed to his confirmation conservatives become. On Monday, after Deborah Ramirez became the second woman to accuse Kavanaugh of wrongdoing, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat noted that among conservatives, the belief that Kavanaugh is innocent “actually gained momentum and support on the basis of the second allegation.” Over the course of ...
Donald Trump and Jared Kushner do not represent something entirely new in the American government’s approach to Israel and Palestine. Rather, they represent the grotesque exaggeration of features that have long been present. They are the Clinton, Bush and Obama Middle East teams as seen through a funhouse mirror. They constitute the reductio ad absurdum, the end of the line. …
In the year since the #MeToo movement began, Americans have relearned one old truth and learned one new one. The old truth is that, when it comes to perpetrators of sexual harassment, politics doesn’t matter. Liberal men and conservative men, socialist men and fascist men, anti-feminist men and avowedly feminist men—some percentage of all these subspecies prey on women. For every Clarence Thomas, there’s a ...
Amid all the talk about the democratic party’s move to the left, a contrary phenomenon has gone comparatively unnoticed: On foreign policy, Washington Democrats keep attacking Donald Trump from the right. They’re not criticizing him merely for his lackluster response to Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections. They’re criticizing him for seeking a rapprochement with key American adversaries and for potentially reducing America’s military footprint overseas. ...
We don’t yet know which senior administration official authored today’s astounding New York Times op-ed suggesting that President Donald Trump’s aides are actively thwarting him in an attempt to protect the country. But in a sense, it doesn’t matter. Indirectly, the op-ed’s real authors are the Republicans of the United States Congress. …
Last night, in one of the most remarkable upsets of this remarkable political season, Boston City Councilwoman Ayanna Pressley clobbered longtime incumbent Representative Michael Capuano in the Seventh District of Massachusetts. It made me feel old. …