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Open thread Aug. 3, 2018

Dan Crawford | August 3, 2018 11:47 am

Comments (1) | Digg Facebook Twitter |
1 Comment
  • EMichael says:
    August 4, 2018 at 11:34 am

    Any Democrat that votes for this guy(whether or not the GOP vote is unanimous putting him on the court) has to be run out of the Democratic Party. This thought process that if the gop puts him in certain senators could benefit in the elections by voting for him seems absurd to me.

    “Brett Kavanaugh Was Involved in 3 Different Crises of Democracy

    All of which he used to benefit himself.

    Of all the perilous nonsense involved in the Great Penis Hunt of 1998, the most singularly indecent episode was the relentless fishing expedition into the suicide of Vincent Foster, the first White House counsel of the Clinton administration. On July 23, 1993, Foster shot himself to death under a tree in Fort Marcy Park in Virginia. Prior to taking his own life, Foster told friends that he was being overwhelmed by depression in the wake of the uproar over the firings of certain press corps pets in the White House Travel Office, which was another early chapter in the By-Any-Means-Necessary pursuit of the Clintons that continues in certain feverish quarters even today.

    (In the note he left behind, Foster specifically mentioned The Wall Street Journal, the editorial page of which was at the time run by a conspiratorial nutball named Robert Bartley. I wonder if they have a copy of that note hanging on the wall of the editorial offices, next to Paul Gigot’s Pulitzer.)

    However, over the next couple years, the Republicans in the Congress, and their media allies in newspapers and on radio and TV, heedless of the pain endured by Foster’s family, and by his colleagues in the White House, kept digging up Foster’s corpse and flogging the Clinton Administration with it. The late charlatan Jerry Falwell promoted a bit of political porn called The Clinton Chronicles, which argued that Foster was merely another person that the Clintons had murdered. Various rightwing journalists excavated the open wound with promiscuous glee; one of these was Christopher Ruddy, who has re-emerged as a Trump Whisperer over the past two years when he should have been mowing the Foster family’s lawn for the rest of his life. Congressman Dan Burton, who had current Trump aide David Bossie on his staff, famously shot a melon in his backyard to “prove” that Foster couldn’t have killed himself.
    Brett Kavanaugh With Ken Starr
    Kavanaugh with Ken Starr
    Getty ImagesDavid Hume Kennerly

    Subsequent investigations failed to stop the onslaught. The autopsy concluded that Foster had committed suicide, so did a ludicrous Senate Banking Committee investigation headed by the ridiculous Al D’Amato. And, most important, so did Robert Fiske, the original Whitewater special prosecutor. In fact, it was this conclusion that was partly responsible for Fiske’s being replaced by Kenneth Starr, who, because he is Kenneth Starr and a hack, opened the investigation again and handed it off to an ambitious lawyer in his office named…Brett Kavanaugh…

    To me, the Post story is overly generous to Kavanaugh, using his involvement in the Foster investigation, and his subsequent statements asserting that presidents should not be pestered by special prosecutors while in office, as being indicative of an “evolution” in Kavanaugh’s legal thinking. Me? I think it marks him as a jumped-up hack with a nice CV who will do whatever he’s told. There were three crises in democracy immediately prior to the current one, and all of them benefitted Kavanaugh’s political mentors and helped him build his career: the Great Penis Hunt, the burglary of the 2000 election, and the Bush administration’s descent into the dark side. Brett Kavanaugh was involved in all three of them. That would be a no, then, on his nomination.”

    https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a22638554/brett-kavanaugh-vince-foster-investigation/

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