McConnell in high dudgeon

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had himself a high-dudgeon shit-fit on Tuesday as he opened the Senate for business. His topic, unsurprisingly, was the fact that Brett Kavanaugh, the Yalie who put the bull in Bulldog, is not yet ensconced for life in a comfy chair in the Supreme Court. Mitch has been having these low-volume high-sterics every day for a week now, since Jeff Flake threw McConnell's well-designed railroad off the tracks last Friday.

  Charles P Pierce

Have I mentioned what a disgusting ass Mitch McConnell is?

Mitch is stoking up the boilers to get a running start on Friday.

"The floodgates of mud and muck opened entirely on Brett Kavanaugh and his family. Out of the woodwork came one uncorroborated allegation after another, each seemingly more outlandish than the last...This is not politics as usual.

" Merrick Garland, Mitch.

[...]

I believe most of what has been alleged about Brett Kavanaugh from the people who knew him back in the day. His demeanor before the committee last week made him look like every privileged lace-curtain Irish inebriate with whom I grew up. I believe everything Dr. Christine Blasey Ford said about him, not because I oppose his nomination, but because she was human and he was a wind-up rage doll. Those charges and that temperament are enough to keep him off the Supreme Court. Hell, they're enough to keep him out from behind the counter at Costco.

[...]

But, even if these most recent charges never emerged, I want him kept off the Supreme Court, even though his attitude last week is a damned good reason. [...] I want him kept off the Supreme Court because, up until C-Plus Augustus rammed him onto the bench in 2006, Kavanaugh's career was not that of a lawyer, but that of a partisan ratfcker. If he gets confirmed, we will have a vengeful partisan ratfcker on the Supreme Court for the rest of my lifetime, and that's not a legacy I want to leave behind.

[...]

In 2002 and 2003, when Kavanaugh was working in the White House counsel's office, nearly 5,000 documents were hacked and stolen from the computer files of the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. At the center of this scandal was Manuel Miranda, the Republican counsel to the committee who later was forced to resign behind the scandal. The stolen material related to what the Democratic senators were likely to ask prospective nominees put up by the Bush administration. At the time, Kavanaugh's role at the White House involved prepping nominees for their appearances before the committee. During Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings for the job he now holds, he was asked over 100 times about this affair and he replied that he'd received nothing from the thieves and that he never suspected that anything "untoward" was going on. He really said, "untoward."

[...]

Kavanaugh could have said, of course, I got this material. I was a political operative in a White House that was trying its damndest to get its judges confirmed. But since he seems completely and rigidly incapable of believing himself capable of doing anything "untoward," we got another easily disprovable categorical statement.

Well, I don't know if he is incapable of believing that, but he sure wants us to be.

This is the thing about ratfckers. The truth is always pliable. Even in categorical statements, it's pliable. The point of ratfcking is to win. This was true when Donald Segretti and all those GOP frat brothers at USC invented the marvelously descriptive term to describe how they messed with student elections in their college days—which, by Kavanaugh standards, of course, doesn't count because certainly what Segretti did in college had no bearing on his career as a lawyer in later life.

That's another thing. Brett Kavanaugh is a lawyer only because he went to law school and passed the bar. He's never tried a case, at least to my knowledge and, until he became a judge, he put his legal training at the service of high-end ratfcking, keeping the activities at least within sight of the traditional guard rails that stand between lawyers and 5-15 at Allenwood. [...] Kavanaugh's only experience as a prosecutor was as a drooling operative in Ken Starr's little shop of sanctified presidential porn—which was, in many ways, one of the great ratfcking operations of all time, and certainly the most expensive.

[...]

In short, there is a fine living to be made as a partisan lawyer specializing in high-end political ratfcking. It's an industry now. But a partisan ratfcking lawyer should not be able to hedge, and fudge, and prevaricate his way onto the Supreme Court.