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.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Prosecutors look for corroborating evidence.

I haven’t seen the apologists trot this one out yet, but based on discussions about Shermer, Krauss, et al, I’m sure it’s coming: “you can’t vote no on his nomination based on this unless there is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of his guilt!”

Bullshit. “Guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” is the legal standard used in criminal trials. There’s no good reason to apply that standard here.

First, there’s no need to “borrow” any particular legal standard at all. A Senate confirmation isn’t a legal trial at all, let alone a criminal one. Kavanaugh doesn’t have any real legal rights here whatsoever. He’s not entitled to due process on his Supreme Court nomination. (And if you think he is, I have two words for you: Merrick. Garland. He wasn’t even given a hearing or a vote, let alone a yes vote, based on no wrongdoing other than having been nominated by a black Democratic president.)

Second, even if you want to look to legal standards, the law has plenty of standards, of which “beyond a reasonable doubt” is the strictest. There’s “clear and convincing evidence,” there’s “preponderance of evidence” (which is sufficient to award a judgment against you even if it bankrupts you), there’s “probable cause” (which is enough to allow the police to show up at your home or place of business and tear the place apart looking for evidence — and you don’t even get a chance to argue the matter) and “reasonable suspicion” (which allows a cop to stop and frisk you).

The law uses a standard that corresponds to the stakes. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” is reserved for those instances where someone is potentially being deprived of life or liberty. As the old saying goes, better to let ten guilty men go free than to imprison one innocent man. But why would that standard apply to an appointment to one of the highest jobs in the land? Is it really “better to allow ten attempted rapists on the Supreme Court than to deny one innocent man the honor?” (I suspect that for many people, the answer is yes: the prospect of a man being denied something on the word of a woman is so horrifying that it outweighs any other harms.)

To put it another way: what standard would you apply if you found out that a babysitter you were considering had been accused of child molestation? How many parents would say “well, he/she hasn’t been convicted….” or “well, it was just a he said/she said situation”? Would you really insist that the evidence be overwhelming before you moved on to one of the many other candidates?

Yale churns out ~200 graduates a year; Harvard another ~500+, and rumor has it there are actually other law schools in the country capable of producing Supreme Court justices. Even if you limit yourself to the subset that is Federalist Society-approved, that’s still a lot of options. Even conservatives weren’t claiming that Kavanaugh was clearly the “best” candidate on the shortlist, whatever “best” means in this context. It shouldn’t require overwhelming evidence of his unfitness (and I think we had plenty even pre-rape allegations) to say, “no thanks. Next!”

Five prosecutors point out that prosecutors deal with conflicting claims all the time.

While some argue that the truth about this incident will come down to a “he said, she said” situation, that’s not how it looks to us. Prosecutors and investigators are confronted with these scenarios frequently and don’t just throw up their hands and say, “We can’t decide.” Instead, prosecutors look for corroborating evidence — and there are strong indications already that Ford is telling the truth about her attack. Here are some of those indicators:

First, there is corroboration. Ford’s therapist’s notes in 2012, provided to The Washington Post, generally record her account of the attack. To believe that this is a made-up tale to prevent Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Ford would have had to plant the seeds of this story in 2012. That makes no sense.

Second, while not determinative, the fact that Ford passed a polygraph administered by a former FBI agent lends credence to her claims. Polygraph exams are inadmissible in court because they are not always reliable, but the FBI and other law enforcement agencies frequently use polygraph tests to assess the credibility of witnesses and defendants.

In addition, consider the motives of Ford, who by all accounts is not a particularly politically active person, to go public with allegations of sexual assault. It appears that she did not want to speak publicly at all, but that reporters discovered her identity and pursued her. Ford knew that she would be personally attacked in front of her children, colleagues, students and friends. There is no reasonable explanation for why she would subject herself to such humiliation other than the reason she has given: that she felt she had a duty as a citizen to speak up.

A duty as a citizen with a particular kind of knowledge that should be very relevant when it comes to a Supreme Court candidate, especially one who will end abortion rights.

Ford’s delay in coming forward isn’t evidence that she’s lying, because there are other reasons for delaying, ones these prosecutors are familiar with.

If you are still inclined to believe that Ford is lying, ask yourself: Why would she create a defense witness by identifying Mark Judge, who was and still is indisputably a friend of Kavanaugh’s, as being present and participating in this attack? Why would she place at the scene an individual who could, because of loyalties to his friend, contradict her account if she were making this up? She wouldn’t.

…

Some have said that because these alleged acts occurred so long ago, when Kavanaugh was a teenager, they should not be disqualifying — even if true. We strongly disagree. In our criminal justice system, people 17 years old (and younger) are held accountable for acts they commit, sometimes in very harsh ways. It is simply not acceptable for one of the people tasked with overseeing that criminal justice system to not be held to the same standard.

Additionally, attempted rape is not simply an act of youthful recklessness, as some have cautioned. Few of us have such serious crimes in our pasts — and those who have committed them should not expect to easily be confirmed to posts like Supreme Court justice.

The five prosecutors are Mimi Rocah, Barbara McQuade, Jill Wine-Banks, Joyce White Vance and Maya Wiley.

Oh really.

Brett Kavanaugh talking about his high school in 2015: “What happens at Georgetown Prep, stays at Georgetown Prep.”

I can't imagine any parent accepting this view. Is this really what America wants in its next Supreme Court Justice? pic.twitter.com/WhL8YeZQ78

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) September 18, 2018

Jennifer Rubin on Trump’s latest move to obstruct justice:

The move is unprecedented. Never have we seen a president declassify documents in contravention of clear warnings from the intelligence community that doing so would harm national security. That this occurs in yet another effort to derail an investigation into his own wrongdoing, and to smear law enforcement officials, only underscores the degree to which Trump now puts his own political survival above the security of the American people.

I would omit that “now” – he’s done that all along.

“At best, a disgraceful distraction from the [Supreme Court nominee Brett M.] Kavanaugh matter; at worst, an abuse of power tantamount to obstruction of, and tampering with, the Russian investigation,” observes former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi. “People die when sources and methods are disclosed, this is not a game.”

That whole protect and defend the constitution thing? Pah, mere words.

Trump’s actions constitute such a grave violation of his oath to “take care” that laws are faithfully executed, his decision raises constitutional concerns. “Certainly, this is yet another action that triggers the threshold event of a House Judiciary Committee inquiry into abuse of power. Indeed, this is one of the more odious ones on the long and ever-growing list,” former White House ethics counsel Norman Eisen tells me. “To play political games with sensitive national security and law enforcement information is reprehensible. To use declassification as a pawn in his battles with his perceived adversaries is worse. It also weakens our national security and law enforcement, and so raises the danger to all of us.” Even if this issue alone does not constitute a singular impeachable offense, he says, if the declassification decision was “undertaken with corrupt intent, [it] certainly could form part of the mosaic of an obstruction case.”

Others see the abuse of presidential power regarding classification as a parallel, but distinct, issue. Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe argues, “Has this president repeatedly and dangerously abused his powers to classify and declassify information — risking our national security to punish his critics (as with [former CIA director] John Brennan), undermine the work of those investigating him and his family, and reward family members with access to sensitive information they would otherwise be unable to access? The answer appears to be “yes” and, at least, the question warrants systematic investigation by the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.”

“What will be disclosed is that there was no basis for these FISA Warrants, that the important information was kept from the court, there’s going to be a disproportionate influence of the (Fake) Dossier. Basically you have a counter terrorism tool used to spy on a presidential…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 18, 2018

….campaign, which is unprecedented in our history.” Congressman Peter King Really bad things were happening, but they are now being exposed. Big stuff!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 18, 2018

Ah the riches of the Intellectual Dark Web. Bari Weiss goes on tv to repeat the “who among us has not assaulted someone at 17, and should that really disqualify someone for a seat on the Supreme Court?” mantra.

WEISS: What about the deeper, moral, cultural, like, the ethical question here? Let’s say he did this exactly as she said. Should the fact that a 17 year old, presumably very drunk kid, did this, should this be disqualifying? That’s the question at the end of the day, isn’t it?

RUHLE: Wait, hold on. We’re not talking about should he be disqualified to be a dog catcher. We’re talking about to be a Supreme Court justice.

WEISS: I’m aware.

Cool, she’s aware, but why shouldn’t the standard for the Supreme Court be that high? It’s not even all that high, saying no assaulters thanks. The age cutoff is hardly an absolute. What if it’s a kid of 5? One who likes to kick dogs and cats, for instance? Do we just say “well, 5…” or do we recall that that can be a warning sign for psychopathy? The issue isn’t Kavanaugh breaking a window or smoking weed, it’s Kavanaugh assaulting a girl two years his junior. He looks to be a fairly beefy guy, and he had two years on her, and she was a girl. Yes this is something we should be taking seriously.

You know, if he’d done it to a boy two years his junior – jumped him, pinned him down, tried to drag his clothes off to humiliate him – I bet everyone would be taking that seriously. Everyone would grasp that that would show he was a bully as a teenager. But because it was a girl and the goal was sex, that somehow becomes not real violence any more. He didn’t want to hurt her, he just wanted to fuck her – and that’s totally understandable and forgivable and not something that should stand between him and ending abortion rights in the US for a generation.

What Dr. Ford describes is criminal conduct by Kavanaugh, such as battery. Voluntary intoxication is not a defense. Being 17 is also not a defense, but it may affect whether a defendant is tried as an adult.

The law has already settled this "ethical" question by Bari Weiss. https://t.co/JpHDWxp4j5

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) September 18, 2018

Alexandra Petri wrote this scorching parody yesterday, and I regret not reading it until just now. (A whole day lost!)

“If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.”
— A lawyer close to the White House, speaking to Politico

Look, who among us?

If, apparently, a single alleged assault at a single party decades ago is to be frowned upon, then no man is safe, right?

What’s next? You can’t harass a colleague and serve on the Supreme Court? You can’t pick up high schoolers outside custody hearings and serve in the Senate? You can’t have a meat locker full of female femurs and expect to breeze through your confirmation as interior secretary?

Right? Won’t somebody at last think of the men and boys before it’s too late?

I wonder if she too saw Tom Nichols’s tweets and was inspired by them.

This is a good point, but all I care about in this is whether we're establishing a new precedent that 35 year old accusations of things you did as a minor are now fair game as political weapons in DC. If so, okay, but no complaining when it happens again after this – as it will. https://t.co/T0LKE3HgiJ

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

“Things you did as a minor.” It’s funny (i.e. infuriating) how consistently he veiled it, how adamantly he refused to say “35 year old accusations of assaulting a teenage girl” in all that fretting about precedents.

Back to Petri:

This isn’t just my worry. This isn’t just something horrible I am now revealing about myself. This is an every-man problem.

If suddenly, as a country, we decide that violently attempting to assault someone is, like, bad, then that knocks out 98, maybe 99 percent of men, just going off the locker-room talk I’ve heard.

Look, which of us is 100 percent certain all his sexual encounters are consensual? That isn’t most people’s baseline, surely? You’re telling me I am supposed to encounter dozens, hundreds, thousands of women in my life, some drunk and some sober and some with really good legs and just … not assault any of them?

It’s funny, in a bitter way, but it’s also real.

I mean, it’s not as though they’re people, are they? At the moment of conception, yes, but then they come out Daughters, not people! They grow into objects; some become Wives or Mothers, others Hags or Crones. Then they die! If they were people, we would not expect dominion over their bodies, surely; if they were people, we would not feel entitled to their smiles. If they were people, I could read a novel with a female protagonist and not be instantly confused and alarmed.

No. They are an unintelligible something else. They are to be put on pedestals, as John Kelly urges, or groped, as the president urges. They are impervious to cold, capable of wearing a bikini on the most frigid day to please us; they can run great distances in heels without discomfort; they were created for us from a rib and designed as our companion. If they have wants of their own, there is really no way of knowing.

And even if they do have wants of their own, those wants are rudimentary and shallow, and forgotten in an instant. They may seem to struggle and resist when we throw them onto beds and jump on top of them, cover their screaming mouths with our hands, and drag their clothes off, but actually it’s just a reflex, with no connection to anything going on in their tiny smooth brains.

If assault renders a man unfit to serve on the Supreme Court, then how are we to discern the Founders’ intent? I mean, Jefferson, hello? And what is going to become of the presidency? Who wants to live in that world?

Every man should be worried. If boys cannot be boys, then how can boys be men who rise to the highest offices in the land? If this stops being something you can get away with, then will anyone still be above the law?

Yeah, I don’t see this whole move getting anywhere.

Trump’s vile spawn was quick to sneer at the woman who dared to report that Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her years ago.

Donald Trump, Jr., son of President Donald Trump, posted an image to his Instagram account on Sunday appearing to mock the woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

The image shows a piece of scrap paper with childish handwriting reading: “Hi Cindy, will you be my girlfriend,” followed by two boxes marked “yes” and “no.” “Love, Bret [sic]” the note ended.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BnwjBsVnSN1/?utm_source=ig_embed

Hur hur; such a funny guy.

Megan Garber at the Atlantic on this whole “all teenage boys try to rape girls, let’s have a little charity here” thing:

Ford’s account of the event has been corroborated by her husband; by a therapist, with whom she discussed the alleged event in 2012; by the notes of a 2013 therapy session, which refer to a “rape attempt” Ford survived as a teenager; and by a polygraph test Ford took on the advice of a lawyer who knows the doubt with which the world, still, reflexively responds to the recollections of women. What the professor describes, in her letter to her Congressional representatives and again to the Post, is by no means the typical stuff of mere youthful indiscretion. What Ford is talking about—what she has been talking about, for years—is not the behavior of kids simply being kids, boys simply being boys. What she is alleging, instead, is cruelty; it is entitlement; it is violence; it is assault.

And it’s not the case that all boys do it or that it’s just a normal part of being a testosterone-addled kid.

The White House—which of course has multidimensional interests in downplaying negative claims about Kavanaugh, particularly those involving sexual misconduct—has thus far defended its nominee in the broadest of terms, claiming its support for Kavanaugh and otherwise offering “no additional comment.” (Donald Trump’s evergreen advice on countering allegations of misconduct: “You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women. If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead.”) A lawyer close to the White House, interviewed by Politico, reiterated the idea that, regardless of Ford’s claims, Kavanaugh’s nomination would not be withdrawn. On the contrary: “If anything, it’s the opposite,” the lawyer told the reporter Burgess Everett, suggesting that the White House has been, actually, galvanized by the allegations against its nominee. “If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something.”

Really. Saying all males are that violent and entitled? That’s their defense?

And here is the deeper venality of the boys-being-boys defense: It normalizes. It erases the specific details of Christine Blasey Ford’s stated recollections with the soggy mop of generalized male entitlement. What red-blooded guy, after all, its logic assumes, hasn’t done, in some way, the kinds of things Ford has described? Who, as a younger version of himself, hasn’t gotten stumble-drunk, pinned down a woman, groped her, tried to undress her, and then, when she resisted, held his hand over her mouth to muffle her screams? (“It was drunk teenagers playing seven minutes of heaven,” the Fox News columnist Stephen Miller tweeted, derisively.)

Once again, in much of the public discussion, the empathy settles on the man accused. There but for the grace, etc.: If youthful indiscretions like that are allowed to affect the fate of a basketball-coaching, soup-kitchen-volunteering, daughter-nurturing, carpool-driving Supreme Court nominee, whose fortunes wouldn’t be affected? “We’ve now gone from ‘he did this terrible thing at 17’ to ‘he’s a man who treated a woman like that,’” the professor and author Tom Nichols tweeted on Sunday. “Man, I hope all the people who are making this case had spotless lives at 17, because I sure as hell didn’t.”

Exactly. I spent much of yesterday afternoon, as you saw if you were around, disputing that tweet and a string of others defending the basic idea, from Tom Nichols. All his empathy was for the man, and the woman simply disappeared. Many people pointed this out to him, and still he kept on doing it. He can’t grasp that women actually exist even when people are saying it right to him.

The salient question about Ford’s allegations became, in some quarters, not whether they are true, but rather whether they count as allegations at all. The cruelties she describes—the alleged acts of dehumanization that left her traumatized, she says, as a 15-year-old and, still, as an adult—might be “terrible,” yes, but they are also … simply part of the natural order of things. Boys, figuring out how to be men. Locker-room talk, made manifest. “Drunk teenagers playing seven minutes of heaven.” Who wouldn’t be implicated in that? Who doesn’t see himself, in some way, in this age-old story? If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.Americans talk a lot, these days, about norms. What will be preserved, in the tumult and chaos of today’s politics; what is worth preserving; what will fall away. Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was already, in the profoundest of ways, a matter of norms: It will determine, almost inevitably, whether the women of America maintain autonomy over their bodies. Here, though, in Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that a young Brett Kavanaugh compromised her autonomy in another way, another norm is being litigated: the way we talk about sexual violence. Whether such violence will be considered an outrage, or simply a sad inevitability. Whether it will be treated as morally intolerable … or as something that, boys being boys and men being men, just happens.

Tom Nichols repeatedly described it that way – as just a thing that happened between two teenagers. Denial is a powerful force.

The New Yorker has a long piece on Sarah Sanders as Trump’s battering ram.

Trump needed a stronger link to evangelicals and women, and Sanders was happy to provide one. Despite the differences in their family backgrounds—Mike and Janet Huckabee grew up poor; Trump didn’t—the candidate felt familiar to her. Huckabee was an economic populist; Trump claimed to be one, too. Huckabee had campaigned on a promise to “restore America’s greatness”; Trump’s slogan was “Make America Great Again.” Huckabee wanted to ban abortion; Trump had vowed to appoint pro-life advocates to the bench. Like Huckabee, Trump enjoyed ad-libbing while giving speeches.

Sanders relished the idea of helping an outsider like Trump defeat the people she viewed as the ultimate Washington insiders: the Clintons. She appreciated Hillary Clinton for advancing the cause of female candidates, but loathed her politics. “She has shown her utter contempt for anyone that doesn’t support her and doesn’t think like her, and I think that’s a really scary thing to have in a President,” Sanders said, on a talk-radio show.

So she works for Trump, who is such a contrast to Clinton that way: he of course never shows his utter contempt for anyone who doesn’t support him and doesn’t think like him.

No but seriously. If Clinton were president now we can be absolutely sure she would not be issuing multiple tweets every day insulting people who don’t support her or agree with her. We can be sure she wouldn’t be issuing any tweets of that kind at all, because that’s not an intelligent responsible adult thing for a president to do. So Sanders loathes the “basket of deplorables” but is fine with “Pocahontas” and “Cryin’ Chuck” and “a very low-IQ individual” and “you can grab them by the pussy” and all the rest of it.

Maybe what she said is not what she really meant. Maybe the problem is just that Clinton is obviously both intelligent and informed.

Officially, the White House press secretary’s job is to represent the President and the executive branch before the press and the public, and to relay media inquiries to the White House. Acrimony among these various parties isn’t unusual: Ronald Reagan once muttered, “Sons of bitches,” after reporters questioned him. But the Trump Administration’s relationship with the press transcends ordinary discord. The President’s toxic relationship with the media demands that a press secretary behave, at least publicly, less as a source of information than as a battering ram—especially during a moment of crisis, like now.

“Like now” being in the wake of the publication of Woodward’s book and the anonymous op-ed.

Sanders has labelled “Fear” a work of “fiction,” and attempted to trivialize its celebrated author by noting that she hadn’t read his books. The day that the Op-Ed appeared, she convened her staff, then launched a counterattack questioning the mystery author’s honor, deploying such Trumpian keywords as “pathetic” and “coward.” On Twitter, she urged Americans to call the “failing NYT”— Trump’s favorite (and erroneous) characterization of the newspaper—and demand the unmasking of the “gutless loser” who’d written the piece. Her tweet included the paper’s main phone number.

Two former White House ethics chiefs declared that Sanders’s tweet had violated federal law. One of them, Richard Painter, who worked in the Bush Administration, told Newsweek that Sanders was “using her official position to interfere with the freedom of the press.” This wasn’t the first abuse-of-power complaint. In June, Sanders was accused of employing the @PressSec account to target the Red Hen—a restaurant in Virginia that, when she went to dine there, asked her to leave.

It’s what a battering ram does.

Perhaps Sanders’s greatest asset at the podium is her embodiment of the Trump voter. The supposedly populist President is tremendously wealthy, as are many top Administration figures: Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Steve Mnuchin, and Kellyanne Conway. Like Sanders, Vice-President Mike Pence is also a heartland Christian, but he’s rarely on TV, and he lacks the combative instinct that she shares with Trump. Sanders’s briefings offer repeated confirmation to Trump’s base that the U.S. government is being run by Christians standing up to condescending Beltway insiders. In a characteristic flourish, Sanders defended immigrant-family separations by noting that “it is very Biblical to enforce the law.”

It may be biblical, but is it specifically Christian? It’s not very “if they take your coat, give them your shirt too,” now is it.

In the Obama Administration, press briefings happened almost daily, and regularly exceeded an hour. Sanders’s have become sporadic and typically last about twenty minutes. (Olivier Knox, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, has complained to Sanders about the infrequency of briefings.) According to the Washington Post, Sanders “manufactures urgency”—exuding a righteous impatience that simultaneously limits her exposure to difficult questions and makes her appear determined to keep reporters in their place. In previous Administrations, most press briefings were low-key affairs in which journalists downloaded policy details; reporters were allowed many follow-ups, and sometimes asked dozens of them. Sanders grumbles if someone asks more than two questions. A Post analysis showed that, in her first year, she spent less time informing the public than Spicer had done in half that time. When C-span asked Sanders why her briefings were so short, she said, “I don’t think I take as long to get to the point.”

This gets back to that point about being intelligent and informed, and being threatened by that. A normal adult presidency, however annoying it may find critical reporters, understands that it owes it to the public to keep reporters informed. This one has contempt for the very idea.

Reporters complain that Sanders’s briefings almost never involve substantive disclosures. Instead, she deflects questions and returns to the same talking points: “stock market, at an all-time high”; “isis, on the run.” A White House reporter told me, “I’ve never learned a single thing in that briefing room that’s been helpful to me. It’s the part of my job that I dread most. You’re either being spun or gaslit.” Mike McCurry, a press secretary under Bill Clinton, has lamented that, in the Trump era, live briefings have devolved into an “entertainment product.” More and more, Sanders presents a televised reënactment of Trump’s Twitter feed.

And what is that useful for?

When McCurry chastised a reporter, he generally did so off camera. But Trump thrives on bullying antagonists in public, and has urged his staff to “fight” the press. In Sanders, he has found an eager pugilist. After Trump tweeted that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand used to beg him for contributions at Trump Tower—and “would do anything for them”—a reporter asked Sanders if this had a sexual implication. “Only if your mind was in the gutter would you have read it that way,” she retorted. Sanders prefers short, tough interviews to “soft,” one-on-one encounters in which she might drop her guard and say something that she will regret. In public, she tends to handle reporters with the sort of eye-rolling derision that Fox News’ Tucker Carlson levies against liberal guests. In one notorious exchange, Sanders told CNN’s Jim Acosta, who she thinks performs for the cameras, “I know it’s hard for you to understand even short sentences.”

So basically what Sanders does has nothing to do with informing reporters, but is instead just a branch of Trump’s Permanent Mass Rally.