October 10. 2018
After the bruising fight over Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, watching his jovial, backslapping, ceremonial swearing in at The White House was jarring indeed. It was a stark reminder of how politicized and diminished The Supreme Court is in the wake of McConnell’s ruthless manipulation of the confirmation process. McConnell didn’t hesitate to steal a seat from President Obama or to conceal Kavanaugh’s record, suborn his perjury, and whitewash an investigation into possible sexual assault in order to ram him through. To the contrary, McConnell is proud of his accomplishment- a partisan, conservative Supreme Court majority to enshrine minority rule for a generation.
At the same time that Kavanaugh was being feted, we were learning anew of the consequence of installing a cruel charlatan in the Oval Office. The fate of Washington Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, is a horrifying case in point. Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian national, was an outspoken critic of the authoritarian Saudi regime.
On October 2nd, Khashoggi went into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents he needed for his upcoming wedding. He has not been seen since. Turkish officials now say that a Saudi Arabian death squad arrived at the consulate shortly after Khashoggi, tortured and murdered him and then dismembered his body so that they could take it out of the consulate and escape undetected, (Source: “Turkey: Saudi Arabia not cooperating in Khashoggi probe,” by Loveday Morris, Souad Mekhennet and Shane Harris, The Washington Post, 10/10/18).
To make matters worse, there is evidence that U.S. intelligence officials “intercepted communications of Saudi officials discussing a plan to capture” Khashoggi, but said nothing (Source: ibid). This failure is a violation of intelligence community’s “‘duty to warn’ potential victims of impending threats,(Source: @NedPrice, Twitter.com 10/9/18, 10:02 p.m.). In the face of this, Trump has only issued the mildest murmurs of disapproval.
Make no mistake, murderous regimes around the world are emboldened because, rather than being a moral leader, Trump is an insecure fanboy who wants nothing more than to fill the gaping hole where his soul and his intellect should be with the unfettered power to murder his loudest critics and thereby intimidate all the rest.
That is why Republicans have taken to echoing Trump’s characterization of protestors as an angry, lawless mob, in the hope that it will make the public willing to accept a violent crackdown on dissent. The good news is, by and large, the American people are not buying it. Political forecasters not only predict that Democrats will win the House, but they project that Democrats will pick up between six and twelve governorships and between 400 and 650 state legislative seats, (Source: “The Real Blue Wave Could Come In The States,” by Charles E. Cook, Jr., The Cook Political Report, 10/9/18).
What this means is that the one two punch of Republicans’ poisonous contempt for women and the country’s headlong gallop into authoritarianism have awakened us like never before. As they say, “You never miss the water ‘til the well runs dry.” Stay thirsty.
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