The Times editorial board says, sarcastically, have sympathy for the poor Republicans who tried so hard to pretend they’d improved since the shitshow over Clarence Thomas.

Leave it to Donald Trump to strip away the mask and reveal the troglodyte beneath. Administration officials reportedly labored to keep him from going on the attack against Dr. Blasey, but after a few days, the presidential id once again rose up and overwhelmed them and their message. On Friday morning, Mr. Trump tweeted:

“I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with Local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!”

Because that’s how that works – if you’re raped or attempted-raped, then you instantly report it to Local Law Enforcement Authorities and they instantly file charges and that takes care of it. Done and dusted. Local Law Enforcement Authorities always believe the victim or her loving parents; Local Law Enforcement Authorities never treat the victim or her loving parents with suspicion or contempt; judges ditto; the perp’s lawyer ditto; the jury ditto. The victim’s life is never made hell by the whole process, and justice is always served, and everything works out. Because that’s the world we live in.

Dr. Blasey has already said that she did not tell anyone about the assault at the time, much less file charges — most victims don’t. So what Mr. Trump is charging here, complete with a snide slap at Dr. Blasey’s parents, is straightforward: The woman is lying.

Of course he is. Think of all the women who have “lied” about his assaults on them. The woman is always lying, and the man is always a tragically maligned Good Guy who simply likes to grab women by the pussy when he gets a chance.

Outside of Mr. Trump’s bubble, however, it is widely recognized as no longer acceptable to respond to a woman’s claims of sexual assault by calling her a liar. Doing so carries real political risks in the age of #MeToo.

Does it though? What about the rehabilitation of Louis CK and John Hockenberry and Jian Ghomeshi? What about the hand-wringing about the men who had their lives wrecked?

As insulting as this “she’s just a confused girl” defense may be, it is modestly less offensive than the snickering boys-will-be-boys excuses emanating from certain musty corners. Or the related contention that this was a case of teenage horseplay gone awry — an innocent misunderstanding, if you will. The most head-smacking defense thus far may have come from Franklin Graham, the evangelical leader turned Trump lackey, who spun the alleged attack as a portrait in chivalry: “Well, there wasn’t a crime committed. These are two teenagers and it’s obvious that she said no and he respected it and walked away.”

Hm, yes, pinning her down and covering her mouth and yanking at her clothes is obviously respecting her no and walking away. Unmistakably. Thank god for evangelicals, yeah?

Republicans have repeatedly made clear that, even as they go through the motions of responding to Dr. Blasey’s accusations, they have no intention of letting this nomination get derailed. On Friday, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, spoke at the Values Voter Summit, reassuring evangelical activists that the Senate was going to “plow right through” and, “In the very near future, Judge Kavanaugh will be on the United States Supreme Court.” Similarly, late Wednesday night, Mike Davis, a top Republican staffer for the Senate Judiciary Committee, tweeted, “Unfazed and determined. We will confirm Judge Kavanaugh.”

Which is pretty stunning if you think about it. They can’t know he didn’t do it, they have no good reason (bro loyalty doesn’t count as a good reason) to assume he didn’t do it, so clearly they don’t care whether he did it or not, they’re going to put him on the court to make sure women are forced to stay pregnant against their wills no matter what.

Archaeologist Ticia Verveer on Facebook:

These lovely glass birds contained cosmetics in powder form, to which access was gained by breaking the end of the bird’s tail. This type of powder container was made by glassblowing, a technique perfected circa 50 BC by Roman glassworkers in the eastern Mediterranean region.

Production of these small glass birds was particularly abundant during the reign of Emperor Augustus (27 BC-AD 14) and was still quite popular until circa AD 70.

Although many such birds have been found in Greece, Cyprus, and Syria, northern Italy (particularly Piedmont) and the canton of Ticino in modern Switzerland seem to have been the principal region for the production and distribution of this type of container.

H/t Vanina

How to keep up. An hour or two ago the Times published a story reporting that Rod Rosenstein was talking about invoking the 25th Amendment in 2017.

Huge scoop by ⁦@adamgoldmanNYT⁩ and ⁦@nytmike⁩ on Rod Rosenstein talking about secretly recording Trump and raising 25th amendment in the Comey firing aftermath https://t.co/IJTpHUpkP4

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) September 21, 2018

Many many journalists and lawyers and such on Twitter pointed out that Trump is likely to see this as the perfect pretext to fire Rosenstein, and wondered if the Times had really thought this through. There were a lot of tweets of the infamous Times headline about the FBI’s finding no evidence of Russian interference some ten minutes before the election. The Post published a story disputing the Times version of what happened.

Seeing a lot of folks from the ride-or-die Trump crew seizing on NYT Rosenstein story to call for Ro to be fired.

— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) September 21, 2018

Trump and his allies are searching for a pretext to fire Rosenstein (and Sessions) so that they can end the Mueller probe. Here is the actual quote, which the NYT version lacks. https://t.co/5yeOypoXiJ

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) September 21, 2018

Andrew McCabe was suggesting that DOJ investigate the president, per @mattzap & @DevlinBarrett reporting. “What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?” Rosenstein responded. https://t.co/WqXCof3QZ2

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) September 21, 2018

SCHUMER: "This story must not be used as a pretext for the corrupt purpose of firing Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein in order install an official who will allow the president to interfere with the Special Counsel’s investigation." pic.twitter.com/zg5wzPpBrB

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) September 21, 2018

Frankly it’s all rather alarming.

In other news, it’s no longer August so here in the US the frenzy about Halloween is being whistled up by marketers. How about a sexy handmaid costume??!

An upsetting dystopian future has emerged where women no longer have a say. However, we say be bold and speak your mind in this exclusive Brave Red Maiden costume.

Oh yes, that’s the way to “be bold and speak your mind” – by wearing a tiny skirt to signal “this way to the important bit” and shoes you can’t walk a step in. Hahaha theocratic oppression of women, great, now spread your legs, bitch.

Republican Congressman Ralph Norman today:

“Did y’all hear this latest late-breaking news from the Kavanaugh hearings?” Norman said during his opening remarks of a debate against his Democratic challenger Thursdayin South Carolina,according to The Post and Courier. “Ruth Bader Ginsburg came out that she was groped by Abraham Lincoln.”

The congressman made the joke after telling the crowd that he almost had to miss the debate and travel back to Washington to address the accusation.

Haw haw haw haw – geddit? Abraham Lincoln, because Ginsburg is so old. Haw haw haw, sexual assault is so hilarious.

John Lundin on Facebook:

There’s something sick about ‘campaigning’ for a Supreme Court nomination to begin with, then this…

“When you rent a bus that seats 80 but only 6 women show up”

That’s just weird. A bus? With his face plastered on the side along with WOMEN FOR KAVANAUGH? Weird weird weird. But then it’s “Concerned Women for America” – concerned about all this scary talk of equal rights and abortion and stuff. More bible, less feminism, please.

Matthew Desmond on the vast number of the working poor in the US:

These days, we’re told that the American economy is strong. Unemployment is down, the Dow Jones industrial average is north of 25,000 and millions of jobs are going unfilled. But for people like Vanessa, the question is not, Can I land a job? (The answer is almost certainly, Yes, you can.) Instead the question is, What kinds of jobs are available to people without much education? By and large, the answer is: jobs that do not pay enough to live on.

In recent decades, the nation’s tremendous economic growth has not led to broad social uplift. Economists call it the “productivity-pay gap” — the fact that over the last 40 years, the economy has expanded and corporate profits have risen, but real wages have remained flat for workers without a college education. Since 1973, American productivity has increased by 77 percent, while hourly pay has grown by only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage tracked productivity, it would be more than $20 an hour, not today’s poverty wage of $7.25.

The economy has expanded and corporate profits have risen and housing costs have gone through the roof. Hourly pay has not come close to keeping pace.

American workers are being shut out of the profits they are helping to generate. The decline of unions is a big reason. During the 20th century, inequality in America decreased when unionization increased, but economic transformations and political attacks have crippled organized labor, emboldening corporate interests and disempowering the rank and file. This imbalanced economy explains why America’s poverty rate has remained consistent over the past several decades, even as per capita welfare spending has increased. It’s not that safety-net programs don’t help; on the contrary, they lift millions of families above the poverty line each year. But one of the most effective antipoverty solutions is a decent-paying job, and those have become scarce for people like Vanessa. Today, 41.7 million laborers — nearly a third of the American work force — earn less than $12 an hour, and almost none of their employers offer health insurance.

That’s a staggering little collection of facts right there – 41.7 million; nearly a third; less than $12 an hour; no health insurance. We’re a very rich country with a huge immiserated segment of the population.

Most working poor people are over 35, while fewer than five in 100 are between the ages of 16 and 19. In other words, the working poor are not primarily teenagers bagging groceries or scooping ice cream in paper hats. They are adults — and often parents — wiping down hotel showers and toilets, taking food orders and bussing tables, eviscerating chickens at meat-processing plants, minding children at 24-hour day care centers, picking berries, emptying trash cans, stacking grocery shelves at midnight, driving taxis and Ubers, answering customer-service hotlines, smoothing hot asphalt on freeways, teaching community-college students as adjunct professors and, yes, bagging groceries and scooping ice cream in paper hats.

America prides itself on being the country of economic mobility, a place where your station in life is limited only by your ambition and grit. But changes in the labor market have shrunk the already slim odds of launching yourself from the mailroom to the boardroom. For one, the job market has bifurcated, increasing the distance between good and bad jobs. Working harder and longer will not translate into a promotion if employers pull up the ladders and offer supervisory positions exclusively to people with college degrees. Because large companies now farm out many positions to independent contractors, those who buff the floors at Microsoft or wash the sheets at the Sheraton typically are not employed by Microsoft or Sheraton, thwarting any hope of advancing within the company. Plus, working harder and longer often isn’t even an option for those at the mercy of an unpredictable schedule. Nearly 40 percent of full-time hourly workers know their work schedules just a week or less in advance. And if you give it your all in a job you can land with a high-school diploma (or less), that job might not exist for very long: Half of all new positions are eliminated within the first year. According to the labor sociologist Arne Kalleberg, permanent terminations have become “a basic component of employers’ restructuring strategies.”

This is a country where the president both rages at immigrants, especially immigrants from poor countries, and hires immigrants from poor countries to work in his golf clubs because he pays such low wages.

There’s more; read the whole thing.

George Felis shared this post on Facebook and was inspired by comments to take a more extended look at the “why do people shrug off bullying when it’s only girls?” question. I got his permission to quote what he said.

Evidence that Kavanaugh was a high school bully would be generally taken to be a plausible indicator of his character, and even those who disagreed — those who rejected the idea that such youthful bad behavior could serve as a significant indication of the kind of person he is to this day — wouldn’t simply fail to understand why or how someone might think otherwise. But much of the conversation around the evidence that Kavanaugh committed sexual assault on a 15 year old girl is utterly point-missing in exactly that way: It’s not simply that Kavanaugh’s defenders don’t believe the accusation; they don’t seem to understand why anyone would think that might have any bearing on his character even if it were true. I mean, he was just a teenage boy who wanted sex, right? That’s like saying water is wet!

People are so thoroughly embedded in and emotionally committed to rape culture that they view sexual assault as not merely the deplorable but predictable behavior that some significant minority of adolescent boys and men engage in, but as normal and expected behavior for adolescent boys and men, so much so that they are quick to blame girls and women for “putting themselves in that situation.” Pretty much no one would hear the story of an adolescent boy physically assaulted and humiliated in a locker room and say, “Well, as a skinny geeky kid, he should known better than to go into that locker room.” But I’ll be damned if I didn’t see some asshole commenters discussing the swimwear 15 year old Christine Blasey Ford was purportedly wearing and her choice to attend a high school party with alcohol while just scrolling casually past a story on facebook today. That’s a pretty big damn difference.

It’s true. Even though feminism has been pointing out for at least two generations that rape is bad, and violent, and damaging, and subordinating, and a very serious issue, there is still this huge segment of the population and the culture that sees it and treats it as just natural male sex-seeking behavior. The Kavanaugh train wreck is letting us know that all over again – as did Jian Ghomeshi’s NYRB whine, as did Ian Buruma’s indifference to Ghomeshi’s victims, as did the election of the self-described pussy-grabber. On the one hand this knowledge – that rape is not a cute joke – is well available and conspicuous, on the other hand powerful lawyers who pick clerks for even more powerful lawyers still want the women to look like models. We learn and learn and learn the lesson; every time there are columnists and reporters saying now finally this is getting through to people, and then along comes a Kavanaugh and it becomes painfully obvious that a lot of people have not learned one.fucking.thing.

Dick Polman at the Atlantic collects some of the ways Republicans are displaying their settled, instinctive indifference (or outright hostility) to women:

After Christine Blasey Ford, a clinical-psychology professor, put her name to the accusation, announcing publicly that she’d passed a polygraph and had shared her story in a 2012 therapy session, Senator Orrin Hatch, a longtime member of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s all-male Republican contingent, told the cameras: “This woman, whoever she is, is mixed up.” He also said that even if the assault accusation were true, the past wouldn’t matter so much: “It would be hard for senators not to consider who he is today.”

His Republican colleague Bob Corker voiced sympathy for Kavanaugh, but none for his accuser: “I mean, I can’t imagine the horror of being accused of something like this.” Donald Trump Jr. joked on Instagram that Kavanaugh had merely had a schoolyard crush. And an unnamed lawyer close to the White House said that the alpha gender is under assault: “If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.”

It’s all about him, and she is either irrelevant or a lying monster.

In a sense that’s inevitable, since he’s the one up for the Supreme Court seat…but in a more important sense it’s not, because if he can’t get to that seat except via all these manly dismissals of his alleged assault on a younger female person…then why are they so hell-bent? Why doesn’t this matter to them? Why hasn’t it put them off him? Self-evidently they don’t care about it enough to slow down the process, so that means they don’t care about it any significant amount at all. Senate to women: you don’t matter. We knew that, but it’s galling to watch it played out so publicly and emphatically by the people who govern us.

Now, the exodus of women to the Democratic Party appears to be accelerating, and for a more profound cultural reason than policy differences: the belief that Trump and his male allies refuse to fully see them as equal human beings. Trump lost the female electorate by 12 percentage points (although he won among white women). Meanwhile, a solid majority of men clearly didn’t care much that Trump had allegedly abused, harassed, or groped almost 20 women, or that Trump responded by calling the women liars and threatening to sue them. The president was similarly hostile last winter to the multiple women who came forward to accuse the Republican senatorial candidate Roy Moore of molesting them as minors.

Yet they apparently can’t stop themselves displaying their contempt for women as if it were normal and only to be expected.

Lili Loofbourow has a scorching analysis of the whole “never mind the women what about the poor men” phenomenon at Slate. I saw it via about 14 people at Facebook and they nearly all quoted a different passage, which shows how good it is.

The “locker room” once invoked to normalize Trump’s language (every man talks this way behind closed doors!) has expanded into a locked American bedroom with a woman trapped inside. It’s all in good fun, defenders declare. Horseplay.

Kids having fun!

This group has opted instead to defend male impunity for sexual assault and frame a woman’s story of coping with years of trauma as a true crisis … for men. A White House lawyer was quoted saying, “If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.” Similar things were voiced by Ari Fleischer and Joe Walsh. Per this dark vision of the future, any consequence for committing assault—even being unable to move from one lifetime appointment to another lifetime appointment—is the beginning of the end of a just society.

Meanwhile in another part of the forest Ian Buruma has left the NYRB. Steps forward, steps back, all crosshatching each other.

“Boys will be boys” is a nostrum with the designated purpose of chalking male malfeasance up to innocent high spirits. It’s a saying that meant to exonerate, but here’s the funny thing: It only works on the agreed-upon assumption that boys do shitty things, the gravity of which we’re supposed to ignore or dismiss. The message isn’t that the boys don’t know that the things they do are bad; it’s rather that the rest of us should forgive, understand, and love them anyway, without their needing to ask for it.

Is it any surprise that an incentive structure like this one breeds entitled indifference to girls and women in the coddled party, and in the system that coddles them? Is it any surprise that men would panic at the realization that the system that they could depend on to look the other way is fast eroding?

It is a bit, yes, because the unfairness and asymmetry of the whole thing seems so obvious.

We knew this would happen, she writes, but we didn’t know it would be this explicit.

I never thought I would see a group that has spent years laughing at the very idea of anything like “rape culture” suddenly not just admitting that it exists but arguing that it should—nothing should be done about it; male malfeasance is an unstoppable cocktail of culture and biology. The subtext—stripped of all chivalric pretense thanks to the recent panic—is that victims don’t matter. They’re invisible because they’re unimportant, and women’s pain is irrelevant.

This was brought to our notice of course by the little (yet so noisy) spate of abusive men taking to the quality mags to whine about having been rebuked for abusing women.

What they share—besides a history of inflicting their sexual attentions on the less powerful because they felt like it—is an itch to be famous once again. They want their timeouts to be over. They have suffered, they believe, and they wish us to know it. This should be laughable: Anyone who assaulted or harassed someone and escaped without a record should be thanking their lucky stars. Their minimal privation mostly consists of being economically comfortable and doing without attention for 10 or 11 months. But it’s not laughable! They mean it. They grew up in a world that taught them they “get to” do the things they did. They feel, accordingly, that they have been unjustly penalized. They believe they’re suffering greatly.

They believe their suffering matters, and women’s does not. Not even a little.

It’s almost funny. Almost. Imagine Harper’s and the NYRB running angst-fests by people who violently attack strangers on the street in order to steal their wallets – angst fests about how sad it is for the violent attackers, with nary a word about the smashed noses and broken teeth of the people they attacked. Wouldn’t happen, but when it’s specifically women…that changes everything.

It’s as if men and women have different pain scales emotionally as well as physically. Of course men believe they suffer more, and many women—having spent their lives accustomed to men’s feelings mattering more than everyone else’s—will agree with them. Most of us have been socialized to sympathize with men, the troubled geniuses, the heroes and antiheroes.

Women don’t get to be the troubled geniuses, the heroes and antiheroes; women are the boring empty trivial people who serve the troubled geniuses. Women are flat, like paper dolls.

It’s useful to have naked misogyny out in the open. It is now clear, and no exaggeration at all, that a significant percentage of men—most of them Republicans—believe that a guy’s right to a few minutes of “action” justifies causing people who happen to be women physical pain, lifelong trauma, or any combination of the two. They’ve decided—at a moment when they could easily have accepted Kavanaugh’s denial—that something larger was at stake: namely, the right to do as they please, freely, regardless of who gets hurt. Rather than deny male malfeasance, they’ll defend it.

Trump again sides with the man. In other news, flies swarm rotting meat.

President Trump said on Wednesday that he found a sexual assault allegation against Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, his Supreme Court nominee, difficult to believe and described the furor surrounding it as “very unfair” to the judge.

He somehow managed to refrain from trashing the woman directly, but…

But he expressed sympathy for his nominee.

“Really, they’re hurting somebody’s life,” he said of the senators considering Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination. “Justice Kavanaugh has been treated very, very tough, and his family. I think it’s a very unfair thing what’s going on.”

Him. Him him him. Never mind her, she doesn’t count. Yes if it’s true then he was the aggressor and she was the aggressee, but never mind that, all sympathy goes to the man, who is a man.

During his seven-minute encounter with reporters, Mr. Trump referred to his nominee as “Justice Kavanaugh” three times.

Spoiler: he’s not a justice.

“Look, if she shows up and makes a credible showing, that will be very interesting and we’ll have to make a decision,” Mr. Trump said. “But I can only say this: He is such an outstanding man. Very hard for me to imagine that anything happened.”

Well sure; we know that. It’s very hard for him to imagine anything he doesn’t like, and especially that any bitch of a woman has the right to get a man in trouble just for assaulting her. Women don’t matter; only men matter. Women are there to be slots for men’s penises, and no other purpose. Men are there to run the world. You do the math.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican committee member from South Carolina and ally of the president who was traveling with him on Wednesday, said that requiring an F.B.I. investigation before a hearing would not be “about finding the truth but delaying the process until after the midterm elections,” when Democrats hope to win control of the Senate.