JOHN HARRIS - American Politics Is Boofed

The Kavanaugh-Ford hearing was a spectacle three decades in the making.  By JOHN F. HARRIS


There have been other days—lots of them, actually, when you stop to count—over the past generation when Washington has had the nation gaping at its screens, squirming at the sight of private lives sliced open for public judgment while simultaneously thrilling to the spectacle of it all. Those earlier are-you-watching-this?! moments, when politics and culture collided on live television amid revelations and recriminations, were inevitably accompanied by furrowed-brow commentary gravely asking, “Where will this all lead?”

Now we know: This all leads to a hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office building, where Brett Kavanaugh and senators of both parties over eight hallucinatory hours on Wednesday served up the distilled essence of a potion - a toxic mixture of foaming malice, self-righteousness and conspiracy theory - that has been brewing for nearly three decades. No single exchange broke new historical ground. Kavanaugh’s furious denials of sexual misconduct and denunciations of his Democratic accusers were no more florid than Clarence Thomas’s similar performance 27 years ago this autumn. Valley Girls would have found the discussion about gang rape and efforts to define 1980s vernacular like “ralphing” (to vomit) and “boofed” (“It refers to flatulence,” the nominee said solemnly, though the Urban Dictionary begs to differ) to be grody to the max. But the proceedings could hardly shock the sensibilities of anyone old enough to remember Bill Clinton’s cigar.

More notable was the casual fluency in which all the Washington actors- Kavanaugh very much among them - spoke in the language of contempt toward their adversaries. The insults and assertions of bad faith - Democrats manipulated the timing of Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation going public for political purposes; Republicans are purposefully stifling a full investigation - flowed like second nature. It was Bill Clinton who made famous the phrase “the politics of personal destruction.” His compromised sex life made him far from the ideal messenger but there was little denying his essential point. It was that his generation of baby boomers, who grew up arguing over sex, drugs and Vietnam and never stopped their rancid debate over every dimension of culture and ideology, had developed a style of politics in which the best way to defeat an argument was to say that it flowed from the defective character of the person making it. The opposition was wicked, deceitful—not just wrong-headed but wrong-hearted... read more:

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