Kavanaugh’s crucible
Three days ago I wrote a post about the Kavanaugh fight called “Character and crucible.” Here’s an excerpt in which I define the word “crucible”:
Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch trials is called “The Crucible,” and the meaning of that word is this:
1 : a vessel of a very refractory material (such as porcelain) used for melting and calcining a substance that requires a high degree of heat
2 : a severe test
3 : a place or situation in which concentrated forces interact to cause or influence change or development
So we have a crisis that functions not only as a test, but as a formative experience enhancing character. Some pass it, some melt…
…I]t is possible that (although he’s been a federal judge) this is the first real crucible that [Kavanaugh’s] been through.
…at this point it would help if he had, if not [Clarence] Thomas’ history, at least the gravitas and fire that Thomas brought to his hearings because of his previous experiences that had helped to forge (that’s an appropriate word, too, in terms of the crucible metaphor) his steely character.
Prior to yesterday’s testimony by Kavanaugh, I had no idea if he would be able meet the test. I had my doubts. But I felt that if he failed to meet it the results could be disastrous, and I sensed that passing it might require a very different emotional presentation from that of the sober, calm judge that had been his previous public face.
Kavanaugh’s earlier interview on Fox News hadn’t been encouraging. It gave no hint of the kind of “gravitas and fire” I was hoping to see. He was Mr. Nice Guy. But when Kavanaugh came out yesterday to speak at the hearing, it quickly became clear that, although his style would be quite different from that of Clarence Thomas during his hearing, Brett Kavanaugh was coming through his own crucible with a steely determination and blazing with appropriate righteous anger.
Kavanaugh was criticized for that anger by the left, who not only had elicited it by their scurrilous charges but also would have criticized him just as much or more had he failed to demonstrate much emotion. But the left was not the important audience here. The important audience was the middle and the right. It’s the middle—particularly the small number of possible swing GOP and Democratic senators—who are the ones who can be swayed, and the middle who (like most of America) understands that sometimes anger is the only proper response for an innocent person falsely accused. The other important audience was the right, a right that has often been in despair about the lack of fighting spirit in the GOP, and who were fully expecting some sort of capitulating wimpiness yesterday.
That’s not what they saw, although it looked that way at first. But not only was Kavanaugh breathing fire, so was Lindsey Graham. I wrote about Graham last night, but after reading around the blogosphere today and seeing the praise heaped on him by conservatives who had previously despised him, I’ve come to think that, as inspiring and heartening as Brett Kavanaugh’s performance was, Lindsay Graham’s managed to upstage him.
But it was actually the one-two punch of these mild-mannered Clark-Kents-turned-Supermen that caused so much shock and sheer delight on the right. When the hearing seemed on the ropes, the GOP sitting in the corner in an apparent stupor, who should come out swinging but the two guys who had previously seemed the least pugnacious of all. The satisfaction was all the more sweet for that.
In other words, just as “only Nixon could have gone to China,” only Lindsey Graham could have given the foot-dragging RINOs a tongue-lashing that might genuinely shame and motivate some of them to confirm Kavanaugh.
Let us fervently hope, anyway.
[NOTE: So far today there have been some technical issues on the blog, resulting in a lot of people receiving “error” messages. My apologies. The host is working on it and I hope it will be resolved soon.]
>>But it was actually the one-two punch of these mild-mannered Clark-Kents-turned-Supermen that caused so much shock and sheer delight on the right. When the hearing seemed on the ropes, the GOP sitting in the corner in an apparent stupor, who should come out swinging but the two guys who had previously seemed the least pugnacious of all. The satisfaction was all the more sweet for that.
Somehow, a Senator I have had little to zero respect for a couple of decades …came out of the phone booth wearing a cape.
Indeed, breathing fire and righteousness.
As you note, I was, indeed, delighted (well, after the initial astonishment wore off at seeing Lindsay!damn!Graham filled with righteous zeal and tossing the tablets contemptuously at the Dems).
That finally turned a desultory day into an unexpectedly glorious one.
Don’t get me wrong: I already thought Kavanaugh may have turned the tide.
But Lindsay Graham you magnificent bastard, you held the centre.
So yeah, I think Patton smiled down too, briefly.
As pleased as I am by Kavanaugh’s and Graham’s hard-hitting, epic responses, I wonder how much they moved the needle.
As far as Kavanaugh being confirmed, who knows how much it is just horse-trading behind the scenes.
The NYT printed an editorial (possibly based on Anita Hill’s statement, or maybe vice versa) that said because Kavanaugh was angry, that proves he’s guilty!
Every time I think they’ve reached the bottom, they prove me wrong. There is no bottom!
What a vile and poisonous creature the Democrats have transformed the Senate Confirmation process into.
Having experienced first hand and very directly what a snake pit Washington and current day politics have become, and how Leftist hatred, immorality, lack of decency, and total disregard for justice and the truth infests current day politics, I’d imagine that if Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court, he will—as a result of his confirmation experience—be a much different, a tougher judge, more aware of the dark political currents of our degenerate times, with a much changed perspective—and perhaps a different vote—on the cases that come before him.
@Snow on Pine Excellent point, it is unimaginable that Judge Kavanaugh wont be changed by his experience. Not the canniest move to put a judge through a show trial and fail to destroy him. My own impression is that the Democrats and their ‘running dogs’ in the media were openly using their proven formula of perfectly timed accusations to take Kavanaugh out not recognising that they are making it impossible for more and more people to unsee them for what they are. Off course, if Flake succeeds in stopping the confirmation it will be impossible to unsee what Republicans are.
Several points on the developments today September 28, 2018, in the ongoing soap opera / defenestration of Judge Kavanaugh. (links omitted because there are simply too many; available on request ;))
Neo: “Kavanaugh’s earlier interview on Fox News hadn’t been encouraging. It gave no hint of the kind of “gravitas and fire” I was hoping to see. He was Mr. Nice Guy. But when Kavanaugh came out yesterday to speak at the hearing, it quickly became clear that, although his style would be quite different from that of Clarence Thomas during his hearing, Brett Kavanaugh was coming through his own crucible with a steely determination and blazing with appropriate righteous anger.”
At all of the Judge’s previous hearings, Senatorial and media interviews, and one-on-one discussions, he was still in the position of having a “job interview,” so it was appropriate for him to be restrained, polite, calm, somewhat staid, and definitely sober.
On Thursday, despite the protests of the Democrats that it was “just another job interview, not a trial” Senator Cornyn was right when he said this, “…I know we’re not in a court; I’ve told my colleagues that, if we were in court, half of them would be in contempt of court. But you have been accused of a crime…”
On Thursday, Judge Kavanaugh — like Justice Thomas before him — finally recognized the transformation of his situation from applicant to defendant; and, like Justice Thomas, rightly determined that he was no longer there to apply for a job, but to fight for his integrity: that was the fight he vowed to continue by refusing to retreat from his nomination.
This hearing was the final scene, the last battle: he had nothing to lose by putting everything he had on the line, and that is what he did. If the Senate did not see fit to hire him, he didn’t care anymore, but it would be on their heads, not on his.
* * *
Although most of the allegories to Judge Kavanaugh’s trial (and it was a trial) have centered on the Salem witch hunts, I think his situation is beginning to look very much like that of Sir Thomas More, especially as mediated by Robert Bolt’s play, “A Man for All Seasons.”
The relevance of More’s scathing rebuke to his prospective son-in-law Roper, who wished to cut down all the laws in the kingdom to get at the Devil, has been quoted often by Neo and others, and certainly applies to Kavanaugh (and to the witch hunts), with the howling mob of partisan officials and citizens in the role of the impassioned young man (although none of the Senators have the excuse of youth and passion; rather, of old age and treachery).
Kavanaugh is an individual who has been subjected to multiple hearings, interviews, and finally a full trial, exactly as happened with More; whereas the accused witches were many, and suffered various degrees of investigation, if one can call it that.
More was tried for refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy, ratifying the King as Head of the Christian Church in England; this was true, but it was also a pretext, because his objection was first to cause that brought forth the Oath, that being the King’s divorce from his first wife to marry a second woman contrary to the church laws to which they both had heretofore pledged allegiance. No pretexts were used in accusing the Salem citizens: they were condemned as witches from the start.
Judge Kavanaugh is ostensibly being tried for sexual assault, but his real transgression (it is not yet a crime) was refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy to the sacrament of abortion, and to all the other leftist positions that function as conditions for political favor, the Democrats having long since crowned themselves Head of the Government in America.
Judge Kavanaugh surely assent to More’s belief, that “When a man takes an oath, he’s holding his own self in his own hands like water, and if he opens his fingers then, he needn’t hope to find himself again.”
The cast is nearly complete.
We have the Lawyer, More, in the person of the Judge, Kavanaugh.
We have the duplicitous King, in the fractured person of the haughty Nobles of the Democrat Party.
We have the law-destroying fire-brand Roper, multiplied by the hundreds in the Media and thousands in the Mobs, crying to cut down the Devil Kavanaugh by any means they can.
We have the supposed friends, like the Duke of Norfolk, who importuned More to take the Oath as they all had, for fellowship; More rebuked him, saying, “And when we die, and you are sent to heaven for doing your conscience, and I am sent to hell for not doing mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?”
All we are lacking now is the final actor: Sir Richard Rich, the one-time friend and student of More’s, whose perjured testimony sealed his mentor’s fate at the end of the trial.
And now Senator Flake and the Judiciary Committee have allowed the mob another week to bring him — or in the current case, her — forth from obscurity.
“For Wales? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Wales!”
I have earlier on Neo’s blog quoted More’s closing statements to the court which condemned him, although I did not then know that Judge Kavanaugh’s affirmation that he “held no ill-will for Dr. Ford” would so closely echo More’s “I do none harm. I say none harm. I think none harm.”
More continued, “And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, then in good faith I long not to live.”
Surely Judge Kavanaugh, after this latest betrayal by the Senate Judiciary Committee, is entitled to add that heart-felt declaration.
And Judge Kavanaugh can also add, in suitable contemporary words, the thundering assertion, parallel to More’s, “Nevertheless, it is not for the Supremacy that you have sought my blood, but because I would not bend to the marriage!”
I notice that now Democrat Senator Kirsten Gilibrand is echoing Schumer, in saying that Kavanaugh deserves no “presumption of innocence.”
Their adoption of and advocating this position should send a chill down the backs of every American.
For, if none of us have a presumption of innocence before the law, than we are all presumed “guilty,” and in any legal proceeding we would now have to somehow claw our way out of that pit this lack of presumption of innocence dumps us in.
It is important to remember that Sir Thomas More, much as we applaud his stand for justice, lost his head on the block anyway.
They won’t happen to Judge Kavanaugh, but if the Democrats are really out to get him, he will be, at best, left under a cloud of “inconclusive” evidence, which would torpedo his confirmation.
When the Committee says “FBI investigation” they suggest, as the public will envision, something on the order of a TV show like “NCIS” or “CSI” or, for their and my generation, “The Untouchables.”
What they know will happen is more along the example of the Scooter Libby travesty, and the Russian Collusion cabal: the manipulation of procedure and evidence behind the locked doors of the Bureau.
Is there any agent in the organization willing to bet his career on a clean and unbiased investigation, when the Senators in both parties have signaled that they really don’t want one?
Because a fair investigation would also look into Dr. Blasey Ford’s history, and not with the kid gloves worn by Prosecutor Mitchell. The swing-vote Republicans don’t want that to happen, and the Democrats dare not let it happen. An investigation by the Bureau will concentrate on breaking the testimony of Kavanaugh and the three witnesses who have repudiated Ford’s allegations.
At worst — because a false witness can be countered — they will charge the Judge, and possibly others, for a process crime, a situation that threatens everyone questioned by the FBI, as we have learned at great cost — unless you are Hillary Clinton and her staff, of course.
Or Dr. Blasey Ford.
I’m beginning to think that a more apt parallel is The Book of Job.
Crucibles burn away dross.
Regardless of the confirmation results, Judge Kavanaugh will never look at plaintiffs and defendants again without knowing what it means to subvert justice and to withhold mercy.