By Hank Beckman –
Is it just me, or are our liberal friends not handling the Kavanaugh confirmation quite as well as they might?
They completely infested our nation’s capital. Some dressed up in ridiculous Handmaid’s Tale costumes to signal their resistance to the Patriarchy. They progressed from merely acting like demented, spoiled children interrupting the Senate confirmation hearings to beating on the doors of the hearing room, chasing down Republicans in the hallways, shrieking about “believing all women,” and demanding an FBI investigation.
When two of them cornered the hapless Jeff Flake in an elevator, they bellowed in his face until he agreed to call for the Feds to review the case.
Hillary Clinton has intimated that civility can only return to our political process once the Democrats have regained control of Congress; feminist Jill Filipovic tweeted a call for women to divorce their Republican husbands, on the grounds that men who allow abuse of women don’t deserve wives; the outright threats to Maine Republican Susan Collins were so unhinged—one even calling for the rape of a female Collins staffer—that The New York Times actually noticed.
They’ve even appealed to the supernatural, with a group, or should I say coven, of witches convening to cast a series of “binding spells” to prevent Kavanaugh from doing the evil he was no doubt sent to do by the Patriarchy.
And the left has held fast to the timeless political tactic employed by most of the politicians of my lifetime—find your enemy and hold him close. They’ve taken every opportunity to flog the villain that never fails to fire up their increasingly radical base—white people, white males in particular.
Demonizing people of pallor has become as common to our national political conversation as debates, fund-raising and party caucuses; especially the dreaded white male of the species. To find examples during the Kavanaugh dustup, one doesn’t have to look very hard.
Even before Christine Blasey Ford claimed, without any corroborating evidence, that Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her at a teenage party more than three decades ago, the Twitter mob did it best to convince everyone that one of Judge Kavanaugh’s former law clerks, Zina Bash, was making a white supremacy hand signal behind Kavanaugh while he was before the Senate Judicial Committee.
None of these accusations sought to explain why a person as sophisticated as Ms. Bash—she’s a senior counsel for the Texas Attorney General—would be so oblivious to the implications of making so crass a gesture on national television, and few had even heard that the “OK” signal she was thought to making with her hand had anything to do with white supremacy, but CBS ran with it as a legitimate news story anyway.
After Ms. Ford came forward, either reluctantly or as a cynical, pre-planned attempt to derail Kavanaugh’s nomination, depending on which narrative you believe, the race-baiting began in earnest.
The Huffington Post, second only to Salon magazine in its obsession with all things racial, ran a piece by Bryce Covert claiming that Kavanaugh had a feeling of privilege, and not just any old sense of entitlement, but that special kind of privilege only available to a certain gender and a certain race. “Such power, such prestige, is his birthright as a white man,” she wrote.
Erika D. Smith’s article in the Sacramento Bee was titled, “This is what white male privilege looks like.” On the web site of Religious News Service, Keri Day tried to answer conservatives invoking the due process argument by making absurd comparisons between the Kavanaugh hearings and the murder of Emmitt Till and the killing of the thug Michael Brown by police. “Conservative voices want to give Kavanaugh a pass because he is a white male who will represent their interests.”
In the New Yorker, Michael Lista babbled on for several graphs about men’s propensity to shed tears throughout history as some sort of explanation of why Kavanaugh got emotional in his defense. Then he got to the point, which was anything but original. “If a white man doesn’t get what he wants it was nothing short of a constitutional crisis, in his body and his body politic.”
Charles Jaco wrote in the St. Louis American, “The entire Kavanaugh process has been one of the most blatant examples of minority rule since Apartheid fell.”
Dispensing with the subtleties and abandoning its reputation as a well-written journal, Esquire’s headline jumped straight into the heart of the matter. “This Was the Hour of White Male Rage.”
White women didn’t escape the judgement of the political left.
In a New York Times piece titled “White Women, Come Get Your People,” Alexis Grenell explained that white women would defend their privilege to the death, writing “We’re talking about white women who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class status.”
If I included all the race-baiting from the cable news talking heads and Hollywood actors I could go on forever, but past a certain point it’s a little rude to go on paying attention to most of them, so I won’t.
And it’s not as if Democratic politicians have been shy about playing the race card in modern times.
Remember, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama used a negative story about his dying grandmother to deflect criticism about worshipping in the church of a racist lunatic for twenty years. He attributed his grandmother’s fearful reaction to being harassed by a black street thug to her being a “typical white person.” Leave aside the nonsensical nature of the comment; whatever a typical white person is, it doesn’t sound good.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s contribution to racial harmony was to criticize Republican-backed voter ID legislation as an attempt to “literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws,” that were commonly used in the old South to keep blacks from voting. She apologized, but later could be seen denying on video that she said what she clearly said.
And who can forget Joe Biden telling a predominantly black audience that Republican candidates Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were “going to put y’all back in chains?” Real racial harmony there.
And let’s be honest; what else are liberal Democrats going to say to retain their grip on the African American vote, their most important constituency?
Vote for us because we’re going to keep your kids stuck in failing, inner city schools to keep the cash rolling in from the teacher’s unions? Support our party because we’re going to eliminate ICE and leave you vulnerable to foreign-born gangsters? Stay Democratic so we can support male transvestites sharing a locker room at the gym with your 6-year-old daughter? Vote for us and we’ll import millions of low-skill workers to take your jobs?
I can’t imagine any of those approaches being very tempting, even though they would possess a quality so rare in politics—honesty.
So it’s just easier to continue with the race-baiting.
