As a lagniappe (cyber Easter egg), this blogger has embedded a link in Eags' essay below. (Hint use the search function in your browser to seek "laughingstock.") Today's essay title is an homage to Tom Wolfe's 1987 novel — The Bonfire of the Vanities which uses an account of greed and amorality on Wall Street, political savagery in the 1980s, and media dishonesty at the same time that led to the Crash of 1987. In this essay, Eags (Timothy Egan) sees a similar combination of amorality, political savagery, and media dishonesty bringing the unpleasant reality of the current occupant of the Oval Office since 2016. If this is (fair & balanced) righteous anger, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
Bonfire Of Republican Vanities
By Eags (Timothy Egan)
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
If you put a man in the White House who openly boasts of being a sexual predator, a president credibly accused by more than a dozen people of misconduct, you are no friend of women and the good men who love them.
If your rallies are highlighted by “lock her up” chants against a person who has never been charged with a crime, you cannot wrap yourself in due process or presumption of innocence.
If your men of God, led by the Reverend Mr. Franklin Graham, say attempted rape is not a crime because “if it was true, these are two teenagers, and she said no and he respected that,” you need a new faith in which to cover your hypocrisies.
Story follows character, as the Greeks knew, and what we’re seeing now with the Bonfire of Republican Vanities is the predictable outcome of those who enabled the amoral presidency of Donald Trump.
The bargain was simple: Republicans would get tax cuts for the well-connected and a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, and in turn would overlook every assault on decency, truth, our oldest allies and most venerable principles. They expected Trump to govern by grudges, lie eight times a day, call women dogs, act as a useful idiot for foreign adversaries, make himself a laughingstock to the world.
“I knew he was a shallow, lazy ignoramus,” as Ann Coulter said, “but I didn’t care.”
In the end, they would get what they wanted. In the end, they would get a court to return America to one imagined by the elites who put forth the lifetime protectors of the permanent class. They would get justices who came through a laboratory of privilege, someone “who was born for” a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court, as Trump said of Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Oh, but the price has gone up. Republicans are left with a roomful of men standing athwart the #MeToo movement and yelling, “Stop!” They are left with Trump, who outlined the game plan for sexual predation, saying women who remember atrocities from the past are part of a “con game.” And men better watch out. George Washington would lose his teeth if he were around today.
What they hadn’t bargained on was Christine Blasey Ford staring down a wall of men in power, a private woman in the most public moment on earth, recounting a horror that “drastically altered my life.”
She was not supposed to be on trial, any more than Kavanaugh. She’s a character witness for one of the most powerful jobs on earth. The last-minute cries for due process are a joke. If Republicans wanted the truth, they would have called Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge — a bro buddy, the author of Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk (1997). They would have asked for an FBI investigation 10 days ago.
Kavanaugh says he’s appalled that sordid details of one’s past are being used to destroy reputation. Is this the same Kavanaugh who once demanded that the most graphic details of another man’s private life, Bill Clinton, be made public “piece by painful piece”?
When Republicans made this pact with Trump, they did not expect that the lab for long-term governance — elite prep school, Ivy League college and law school, the right mentors, think tank promoters, lawyers and judges — would be shown as an incubator of social pathologies.
What they have now is an immolation of principle. A lifetime of Republican pieties, put forth by the bow-tied best and brightest, has gone up in a poof. Free trade? It’s been swamped by America First. Balanced budgets, living within our means? Get to love the trillion-dollar deficit, courtesy of those tax cuts.
How did the party of family values get behind a self-proclaimed “pussy grabber,” a Senate candidate from Alabama who hits on teenage girls, a Supreme Court nominee who, his friends say, was a mean, aggressive drunk? And how many Trump insiders are now wearing GPS ankle bracelets?
Mitch McConnell [R-KY], the Senate majority leader, complains about Democrats making a mockery of the court confirmation hearing. McConnell, of course, did them one better: he wouldn’t even give President Barack Obama’s nominee for the high court a hearing. That’s when the match was lit.
One good thing to come out of this debacle is the shining of a light on the policy shops promoting and protecting their own, the Ivy Leagues and fraternity of connected clerks. The gold standard.
God forbid we would ever look outside the bubble of entitlement — to someone who went to a public university, to someone from the Midwest or West, to a person with life experiences closer to that of average Americans.
Kavanaugh — teary, pouty and Trumpian — would have us believe this is about a simple misunderstanding. “I like beer,” he said. “I still like beer. But I did not drink beer to the point of blacking out.” He cried and cried and cried — for himself. Not enough tears to put out the fire. That will burn for some time. ###
[Timothy Egan writes now writes a semi-monthly column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a BA ( journalism), and was awarded a doctorate of humane letters (honoris causa) by Whitman College (WA) in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016). See all other books by Eags here.]
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