Many Things Can Be True At Once

 

I was absolutely not interested in writing about a certain case which has been all over the news, but unfortunately, I get stuck in my writing if something like this goes by and I haven't commented. But I will not refer to anyone BY NAME because I know my readers will know what I'm talking about. And it feels like a nice blind item for a gossip column that way.

Sigh. So here goes...

It can be true that men can be abused. That does not give them a pass to also be abusive. Women can be abusers, but that does not mean that a woman has to be perfect to also be able to say that she has been harmed. The two people in this case both seem to have made each other thoroughly miserable and there was substance abuse involved. I hope for both of their sakes they are getting therapy. I'm not for the purposes of this post taking sides, but if you know what I've written about #MeToo and misogyny previously, you can probably imagine. 

That said, what I want to post about isn't this case per se, but the reaction to it--it's been weirdly personal, and despite getting more details than anyone ever could want and both of these people being famous--regardless, we don't know them. These are people underneath their celebrity and the roles they have performed. We know the cases their lawyers and PR professionals have made on their behalf.  Stories can have more than one side. 

But this case and its result should not affect anyone else's story, or anyone else's right to talk about their own abuse, and I think the reason in part this particular case became so riveting is because people wanted to fold it into some other narrative about cancel culture or whether men (all men, not this particular man) can now shrug off claims of abuse because women won't be believed, because this one woman wasn't believed. 

That doesn't seem right. 

But regardless, while I am not saying that all the people who sympathized with a certain nameless person are rotten people, it doesn't escape my attention that all the really rotten people are high-fiving each other over this jury's decision. And while I don't know the other nameless party personally, I know there are people who have suffered abuse and were not believed and can only imagine how gutting the gloating over this feels for them, because it's like their own predicament is being rubbed in their faces. It could have a dampening effect on other people trying to seek help or admit what has happened to them. 

That doesn't seem right, either.

So I want it clear that it really feels to me like there is some serious misogyny at play and while I'm not going to try to convince anyone about what happened in this case, I ask anyone who cares about domestic violence in general to take a good look around at who is supporting whom, and why. It can be eye-opening. 

OK, Bloomers

I've been noticing a silly argument on Twitter that I won't link to, because it is silly: whether "Bernie bros" will put people "on a list" if they support or work for former Republican NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Whatever that list might mean, I really don't think people in this country can get shut out of working for campaigns or commenting on politics based on their previous support. My goodness, Jill Stein supporters manage to get attached to Democratic campaigns today, don't they? And the mainstream media doesn't look like it will ever give up it's love affair with Republican-lite/moderate Democrat cross-overs. For the unity!

But let's get real, the country will not be unified over Mike Bloomberg. Sure, he's got a whole lot of money and his ads do nail Trump right in his vanities and failures. But that doesn't equal a plausible Democratic candidate against Trump (it may even have some drawbacks as an outside antagonist, as I hope to demonstrate). 

In the past, I've blogged about my support of the Occupy Wall Street movement, Black Lives Matter, and the Me Too movement. If a Democratic candidate does not have a good record with, or can't demonstrate fundamental understanding of, the impact of economic inequality, the wealth gap, the failures of the system to protect consumers against fraud and predation in ways that harm economic security and mobility (as well as the way it intersects with racial inequality); if a candidate does not have a good record with, or can't demonstrate fundamental understanding of, the impact of racial inequality especially as it has related to the tools of the criminal justice system being used as a weapon against black bodies especially; and if a candidate does not have a good record with, and can't demonstrate fundamental understanding of, the ways men in power deploy misogyny and exercise their privilege against both women and men in sexualized ways, then, this party should not want them. 

Hindsight is 50-50

How @alfranken got railroaded: my story here https://t.co/zNzRMPRoa2

— Jane Mayer (@JaneMayerNYer) July 22, 2019

While I really think Jane Mayer generally does great work, this piece does nothing for me. I felt like Tweeden's political bias was irrelevant to whether or not her claims should be taken seriously at the time, and still do. I think it was pretty clear at the time that conservative media was positively gleeful about reporting a liberal senator as having been accused of sexual harassment, and that dynamic, while interesting, isn't surprising to us after years of their paying attention to "but Bill Clinton's penis" (which was, in its day, somehow even more ubiquitous than "but Hillary Clinton's emails").

What remains the case is that there were more allegations, that numerous senators called on Franken to resign, that he made that decision himself, that once he resigned, no further investigation was going to happen (or would satisfy the right wing radio scandal-mongers) and that looking back in anger, regret, or anything else will simply never tell us "what might have been". Hindsight isn't 20/20, it's 50-50.

For me, the bigger picture was the accused sexual harasser/rapist in the White House, the accused pedophile Roy Moore, and the ability to take seriously claims that we believe and stand with women who report sexual harassment on the left. It couldn't be a "both sides" issue. Life isn't fair.

I think Franken was right to resign when he did instead of dragging it out, and I can totally understand his regret now, just as I can understand how his friends and supporters feel about that. I think it definitely is that case that right wing media cynically seized on it, and whether it was true or not never would have mattered, and the same people who wanted Franken's scalp, would go on to defend Kavanaugh or any other conservative figure under allegation of sexual wrongdoing. We don't know what would have happened had anything been just a little different.

And for what it's worth, people who want to blame any of this on Senator Gillibrand can pretty much stuff it.

When Did This Thing Go So Wrong?

Hey, all, long time, no post here, but I just wanted to check in to say I'm pretty good, even if the Republic seems a little weird. If you know my handle, you can follow me on Twitter, where I don't comment often, but retweet with a sure hand and a speed-reading eye. Or something like that. Don't bother emailing me. Email is like using the telegraph or a fax machine. 

Anyhoo, obviously I've got some thoughts to jot if I'm taking to ye olde longforms again, and this is about the whole Kavanaugh nomination. I have no idea if he's getting up or down-voted (even if I feel like, barring a bombshell in three minutes, McConnell is definitely on track to speed to a vote regardless of the optics because his programming on SCOTUs appointments is a legacy issue timed to elections and partisanship, and I also know that pretend-moderates like Collins can't be stupid enough to think we are all that stupid), but I do know that one of the delights of not blogging with the flow of the news cycle is getting some rudimentary sense of history back. I also think my regular readers know me regarding me esteem for the timeliness and need for the Me Too movement. Kavanaugh strikes me as a member of Team Bro--he (apparently) has ascribed since early manhood to a version of masculinity that talks shit and does dumb things. Does that mean he has for real and certain done things that disqualify him for the seat?

Well, I know he's a partisan hack and perjured himself during the hearing so far and not for the first time, and probably is a vote against Roe vs Wade, so, frankly, even if I didn't natively have enough to nail him as a sexual assault perpetrator as a larval popped-collar preppy young Republican, I can feel pretty sure that he's a big old nope-in-waiting in a world where just the facts pertained--he's a guy who wouldn't be at the top of your SCOTUS list unless you were a chief executive who really was hoping that some executive privilege shine would prevent you from getting indicted on a charge of potential light treason. (Can I briefly mention what a wondrous penumbra executive privilege would have to cast on such an occasion where written opinion would presume that other assumptions of rights bestowed by the white spaces in the law as opposed to the black were eclipsed? But I digress.)

And yet it's been quite clearly alleged that the hesitant claims of drunken sleaziness (by other people, not those admitted in his own yearbook or memorialized in an albeit fictionalized version of himself from a close high school companion) are a part of a "Vast Left Wing Conspiracy".  Great shades of the "vast right-wing conspiracy" commented upon by the 2016 presidential election popular vote-winner, back when Kavanaugh was a part of that brigade, who uselessly spent taxpayer money investigating the suicide of her good friend Vince Foster, despite the pain of that man's family, and who spared no feelings in encouraging the most salacious and hurtful lines of questioning re: Monica Lewinsky.

If Kellyanne Conway or Mitch McConnell think they can get my fucking sympathy for poor old disrespected Brett, they've got this whole thing badly wrong. But they don't want my sympathy, they want the pissed off RW base who needs to see whores give birth to their babies they didn't want to be overjoyed that Roe Vs Wade has finally fallen. (See: Everything Erick Erickson has been Tweeting, lately because, wow! Us bitches have just been killing our children, for a value of children for us feminazis that is mostly teaspoon-sized with tails and no possible threat of pain, and his version being angelic teacup-toddlers who have a hotline to babby Jesus.) Also payback for Robert Bork, I guess, because Merrick Garland never existed. And the base doesn't realize Bork was a fucking mess. Or maybe they do--their kind of fucking mess. 

See, the other thing I have gotten perspective about from my blogular absence was the sheer difference between the sides. I abstained from chiming in about the death of Senator John McCain because I wanted to abstain from his hallowing--the spectre of St. McCain threatened to dampen the urge to Resist, and this doesn't work in any way, shape or form. For us libs, McCain's actual progressive usefulness to our side was always more of a promise than a threat to the Republican establishment. And the touchy-feely niceness of bipartisan remembrance, like GWB sharing hard candies with former FLOTUS Michelle Obama, really doesn't change a thing. Kavanaugh worked for Bush, and those withheld docs from his time working for that administration mean something. Did he support torture? (Amnesty International never weighs in on court noms--but here, they have.) Bush is still supportive of this freaking guy.  He didn't suddenly morph into some resistance dude over Werther's Originals with our "going high" spokesperson. 

And I'm not for going high, myself anymore. I am entirely down with hitting these fuckers right in the nuts.  Mitch McConnell, Russia's dubiously-useful idiot Donald Trump, and yep, even pore ole alleged incel until he was shockingly past high school Brett Kavanaugh, who somehow thinks talking about the activity of his junk post secondary school absolves him of any weirdness (as if penetration was the only kind of abuse!) all probably need some down-low smacking where it will hurt and count. 

And that down-low smack goes to anybody who wants to know where this thing went so wrong and why people are talking about their personal business (protesters of Kavanaugh are telling Congressional aides the stories of their assaults, the time they also realized they were Me Too) while they protest this latest outrageous degradation of norms and propriety. 

Trump and McConnell and any number of RW spokesfolks can claim Kavanaugh is a "fine man". I don't know what their definition of fine man is, though. Copacetic? Role-knowing? See, I remember the 2004 election, when John Kerry was what many of us libs would call a fine man, and he was Swift-boated by the same folks who called Obama a Kenyan and a Muslim. And he mentioned Dick Cheney's daughter in what all of us would have considered an off-hand way as being lesbian--which isn't a smear for Dems. It isn't. And yet--this mention was a big deal for Republicans.  It was completely true--she was lesbian, and mentioning it was beyond the pale. Even if things said contemporaneously about Kerry were fucking lies. And Dick Cheney was and is a proponent of torture. 

The right wing and the left in this country seem to have totally different ideas of what is even good. There isn't a great overlap of ideals anymore from what I can tell, and if that is the case, I'm just for fucking the Pro-Trumpists side right the hell up.

I don't know or care where this thing went wrong. I just know I stay resolutely on the side that isn't pro-torture and pro-infinite executive stay out of jail cards, and I'm pro-women aren't the sum total of their reproductive parts and pro-rubbing Mitch McConnell's Stepford Senator jowls into not delivering this particular Bro Keggernaugh to the SCOTUS.

Here I stand, I can do no other.  

The White House Shielded a Domestic Abuser

The resignation of Rob Porter after allegations that he has been a serial domestic abuser come to light with a sickening side-note: The White House knew about the abuse allegations, and the impact that those allegations had on his ability to do his job (relating to his security clearance and the potential for blackmail) and they wanted him to stay. This put White House communications director Hope Hicks in the uncomfortable situation of crafting a statement about a person who is allegedly her current romantic partner (a thing I feel almost gossipy about relating, but really--this point is constructive).

The #metoo movement is alleged to go too far, and to appear to be going after people whose shitty behavior towards women is within some kind of acceptable level of shitty, for some value of the importance of their work. This guy, right here, working hand in glove with the White House Chief of Staff, is the exact reason why I don't find that argument at all acceptable. One of these women Porter is alleged to have abused  got told that the reason she should rethink her allegations regarding his mistreatment and violence was a consideration of his political ambitions. 

In her blog post, Willoughby wrote, “When I tried to get help, I was counseled to consider carefully how what I said might affect his career.” She told The Intercept that she had described Porter’s anger issues to a lay official in the Mormon church. She said the official had told her to think carefully about what she said publicly about Porter’s behavior. “Keep in mind, Rob has career ambitions,” she recalled the official saying. (The press office at the Mormon church’s headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, declined to comment for this story.)

The career ambitions of an abusive person should have no relevance upon whether the suffering of that person's partner should be given credence or whether that person deserves a reckoning. But this is how this got played. There are two women this guy was married to who can present a story with some credibility, that this is a privately violent human, He might clean up great and do a nice job at the office--but he deep-down sides with dehumanizing his intimate partners. That needs to matter.

It doesn't seem to matter to this White House.

I worry still for this guy's ex-spouses, because at least one had been reached out by him for the purpose of trying to mitigate this story, and she said no. We know intimate partners and former intimate partners of abusive men can be in real danger.

This White House never did take the claims against this person seriously, anymore than his former employer did.

Women's lives matter. Domestic abuse is an indicator of this guy's bent regarding the value of human lives--including immigrants, a critical population this guy delivered stories to the president about. One who dehumanizes his own intimate partners doesn't strike me as the best spokesperson regarding anything at all.  I am glad he resigned, and appalled that he was defended from the White House. As if in some way, they sort of did think abuse was quite all right.