Sometimes a trap sneaks up on you and before you know it you're inside looking out and wondering just how this could have occurred. But that's not what happened this time—not the last part, anyway.
Folks are in the trap all right, but they still don't know there's a trap.
I'm talking, of course, about the nomination hearings for Brett Kavanaugh. There was this hitch, see, and it came about slowly, creeping up on folks. Then it got bigger, easier to see—before the smoke machines started up.
A woman has come forward—and there appears to be another inching toward the light—to accuse the Supreme Court nominee of sexual assault. He denies it, adamantly. He practically denies knowing what sexual assault would even look like.
(It may be time for Kavanaugh to swear under oath he doesn't even have a penis.)
Lots of women from his past have stepped up to say he never assaulted them in any way, so there! Proof he's a gentleman, now and forever.
Sorry, but that's silly. Someone needs to ask those women how many of their interactions with Kavanaugh occurred while he was stumbling drunk. I get the feeling the answer would be "none."
Which means their input is virtually useless. Kavanaugh's accuser says the guy was wasted when the incident took place. Which might explain why he can say—without hesitation—he has no knowledge of the event.
Is it possible he means "no memory" of the event?
In the human brain, there is no knowledge without memory. The fun begins when memory of past knowledge surfaces to say, "Busted!"
(That apparently hasn't happened, yet.)
President Trump says he wants to hear the woman's story, which sounds fair on the surface. But he's gone on to impugn her yet to be given testimony. Why, he wants to know, did she not report the assault way back when? If the attack was so heinous and everything.
(Kavanaugh's problem: He wasn't famous enough to get away with grabbing a young woman by the pussy. Maybe he needed a fixer-type would-be lawyer to buy her off for maybe a buck ninety-eight and a 3-pack of yellow highlighters. Worth a try, right? If you wanna run with the Trump crowd, you gotta know the rules.)
Trump's statement in support of his nominee is consistent with his a-hole behavior all along, as president and before. Here's the cool thing: A-holes never know they're a-holes. I'm sure he sees his comment as perfectly reasonable. I expect he'll soon double-down on it, as he is wont to do.
Meanwhile, criticism is growing on Twitter, under the "why I didn't report" hashtag. In reality, reports of this sort are almost never made. As a consequence, absence of a report means NOTHING.
Senate Republicans have dived into a similar trap, suggesting the back and forth negotiations over how the woman will testify are nothing but delaying tactics. They know this because dragging their feet is exactly the sort of dodgy thing they would do, faced with a similar situation. They just naturally assume everybody is as corrupt as they are.
(Politicians are only a couple of notches above child molesters. Not that they know it. In fact, actual child molesters might object to the indignity of landing so close to congress critters on the list of the infamous.)
Too bad the comment about delaying the proceedings draws attention to the game they're playing. They need to get the man seated on the bench before the opening of the Supreme Court in October, so he can go right to work shoving Americans way to the right, where they allegedly belong. God forbid the Republicans can't get 'er done before the midterm elections. They need the stink of this thing to go away long before then.
Trump is also in a panic over the timing. If the Democrats take control of the House, it could mean a vote of impeachment. That could get ugly.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago (BAD PRESIDENT), to avoid catastrophe when impeaching the president, make it look like an accident. That was a joke, of course, but there's a kernel of truth in there.
The best way to impeach Trump is to trick (or trap) the man into doing something so bizarre, so beyond-the-pale, even his staunchest supporters would say, "Ah, hell no!"
Then let the Republicans lead the way to impeachment.
The Dems wouldn't even have to take the House to get that done.
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