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Christine Blasey Ford
Thursday, September 27 2018
It was hard to focus on work-related tasks in the workplace today. Part of the problem was that I didn't really have any work. I'd asked my boss to assign me tasks, but he never got around to it. So I piddled around with Angular some more, getting to a point where I needed to be able to fire Javascript events from HTML outside of Angular while referring to classes inside Angular. It was a tricky problem, one I never managed to solve (at least not today). And how could I? One of the most important news events of my lifetime was unfolding: Christine Blasey Ford had been grudgingly called before the Senate to testify about her accusations of sexual assault against Bret Kavanaugh, Donald Trump's second nominee for the Supreme Court. I had CNN.com opened in a small Chrome window mostly off-screen so I could listen along in real time. Ford's opening bit was riveting and truely felt like the stuff of which history is made. Gretchen soon started a Facebook thread for her friends to talk about it in real time. Though terrified, she was serene and collegial, occasionally breaking into mild crying.
Then in the afternoon it was Kavanaugh's turn. He came in a bit hot, though this was tempered by a occasional humiliating breaks to sob. It was pretty affecting stuff. The difference, though, came in the questioning. Whereas Ford had been straightforward in her responses, occasionally apologizing for failures of memory or taking opportunities to make small corrections of things she'd said, Kavanaugh was evasive, prone to filibuster, and kept falling back on talking points. Initially the Republicans, afraid of the optics of their all-male caucus interrogating a sympathetic woman, outsourced all their questioning to Rachel Mitchell, a female prosecutor from Arizona. This plan was evidently supposed to continue into Kananaugh's interrogation, but when Mitchell managed to get Kavanaugh to say some things unhelpful to his case, Mitchell was fired on the spot and the Republican senators used their time to hysterically hammer home their talking points, which mostly blamed Dianne Feinstein for springing the Ford accusations on them at the last minute n hopes of derailing Kavanaugh.
The freakshow wasn't over when I left work at about 5:00pm. On the drive home, I was heartened by the fact the check engine light hadn't come on. I kept checking it every mile, and when I rolled home it had been over 120 miles since it had last come on. Clearly my two 100 microfarad capacitors and 330 kilohm resistor were successfully tricking the onboard computer.
Back at home, Gretchen was glued to the teevee, watching Democratic senators asked Kavanaugh tough questions and Republicans lobbed softballs and apologized for the hell he was going through. I joined the watch party carrying a partial bottle of white wine leftover from Tuesday's Pat Strong event at the Golden Notebook. When history is being made on this level, drinking is definitely appropriate. At this point in the hearing, Kavanaugh was showing himself to be supremely evasive. He was repeatedly distorting statements made by the people Ford had named as being at the party where Kavanaugh assaulted her, claiming they'd denied it had happened when in fact all they'd said was they couldn't recollect it. Tellingly, he kept falling back on the same filibuster, which was to talk about his sterling resume. Christine Blasey Ford had never felt the need to take any evasive action.
The hearing ended with two softball Republican questions, one of which (from Senator Kennedy of Louisiana) was to ask Brett Kavanaugh if he believed in God. He said, unsurprisingly, that he did. Then he was asked if he would swear before God Almighty that he hadn't done what Ford had accused him of. He said that he would. It seemed like a cheap stunt to me (were we really to expect that he would fear a lightning bolt?) but Gretchen thought it might be effective for the stupid masses that change the country's oil and bag the country's groceries.
Tonight in the diaspora happy hour, I was delighted when nearly the whole crew showed up. This was probably in response to some drunken grousing I'd done in the diaspora Slack about being abandoned by our former co-workers. The only no-shows were Cameron (who is still in rehab) and Luke (I forget what his excuse was). For the first time in weeks, it wasn't just me, Dan, and Allison. Brittany, Nicole, and David were also there. For some reason we spent a large amount of time talking about Burning Man. After Dan (the only "burner" there) went on at great length about how awesome it was, I think we all pretty much agreed to get together for a big Mercy For Animals IT Department rendezvous at the next one.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?180927 feedback
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