"The Character Assassination of Brett Kavanaugh," shouts a headline at National Review. But the bill of particulars, by staffer David French, doesn't change my view, which is that Trump's Supreme Court nominee is an unctuous, sniveling ideologue who has--I admit it--all his life performed admirably on standardized tests. The accompanying picture shows Kavanaugh and Fred Guttenberg, hand extended, during a break in the hearing. One can judge for oneself whether the picture is consistent with French's assessment:
[Democratic] activists claimed that Kavanaugh actively refused to shake Fred Guttenberg's hand. Guttenberg is the father of a student murdered in February's Parkland, Fla. school shooting, and he approached Kavanaugh in the scrum following a break in the hearing. Just as Guttenberg, a complete stranger to Kavanaugh, stuck out his hand, security arrived and ushered Kavanaugh away. This was then cravenly spun into an outrage by the progressive Internet.
I guess the picture was taken at a convenient microsecond, because the hand is out there, and neither the "scrum" nor "security" appears to be on the scene. For context, consider this youtube video of the brief encounter--I think it pretty clearly shows that Kavanaugh decided not to shake Guttenberg's hand before anyone arrived to usher him away.
Big deal, right? It's a kerfuffle, not an outrage. So instead of, um, misrepresenting what happened, French could have said only that Kavanaugh didn't shake Guttenberg's hand because he was confused, which is a plausible interpretation of the evidence. If he's really determined to create liberal bogeymen, he could have further speculated that Guttenberg was put up to initiating the encounter by people whose view of the Second Amendment diverges from Kavanaugh's and who wanted to endow their side of the argument with the emotional force that accrues to a grieving parent. That would be so manipulative and underhanded--in a way, kind of like calling on members of the girls' basketball teams you've coached over the years to show up and sit in the front row at your confirmation hearing. I had a personal reaction against that ooze of smarm, because I myself have coached a girls' basketball team, only it was my stepdaughter's, not my daughter's, which arguably elevates my character above even Kavanaugh's. (Does his selflessness extend only to vessels possessing his kind of DNA?) Yet it would never have occurred to me to round up my stepdaughter and her teammates for my next job interview.
Moreover, our team was not all white. Where, in the D.C. area, have Mr and Mrs Kavanaugh found a school for their kids where even the basketball team looks like the Republican party?
There is more to French's article. For example, to those who say that Kavanaugh perjured himself, he reminds us that the Venn diagram of perjurious statements is not coterminous with the one for false statements under oath. So, yeah, a great guy.
Comments