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:
