Queen for a day
The liberal media are unfairly contrasting the tone of Christine Blasey Ford's testimony with that of Judge Kavanaugh during last Thursday's Judiciary Committee hearing. They've concluded that because she was nice and he was angry, she must be telling the truth.
One account contrasts Kavanaugh's "angry, aggressive outbursts" with how Ford "remained even-keeled and 'pleasing,' as Sen. Orrin Hatch noted, throughout her testimony. Aside from some quiet tears and choking up during her opening statement, she was calm, collected and 'collegial.'"
She might well have afforded to be collegial. She and her legal and political team had spent a week negotiating just how comfy-cozy her reception would be by the committee, half of whom had already publicly committed to believe her no matter what she said, and the other half of whom were openly agonizing over how to let her tell her sketchy story in an environment sanitized of all toxic masculinity.
There was never one moment in which she was in danger of actually being cross-examined, and she never was. When she looked up at the dais, she saw no one brandishing torches or pitchforks. What did she have to be angry about?
Elsewhere, we learn about the difference in "the tone each took. Ford was polite and quiet in recounting her accusation against Kavanaugh; he was angry and loud in his denials of the allegations against him." Apparently, it's somehow odd that the tone of a person accused of multiple sexual felonies, in a proceeding with no standard of proof, is going to respond with the same "polite and quiet" tone as an accuser who's been promised in advance that every word she says is going to be treated as prima facie true by all sides. She can afford to be patient.
In Joan Walsh's treacly account in The Nation, "Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was patient, kind, deferential. She listened. She asked what was best for the senators questioning her. She wanted to be 'collegial.' Her sadness and grief were evident but tightly wrapped, behind an emotional burka."
An "emotional burka"?
The utter illogic of all this is imagining that you can fairly compare two parties in a proceeding who have dramatically unequal standing. At the most basic level, she's the accuser, and he's the accused. It's ludicrous to pretend there's no difference. She's not in jeopardy; he is. If she's not persuasive enough and Kavanaugh is confirmed, she goes home and writes a book, and she still gets to listen to leftists call Kavanaugh a rapist for the rest of her life. If he's not persuasive enough, then the rest of his life – the parts that haven't already been destroyed – will be. It's imaginable that that kind of pressure might cause someone's voice to get a little edge in it – especially when being goaded by the likes of Richard Blumenthal and Dick Durbin.
The lessons we're supposed to take from this? Anger equals guilt.
Innocent people don't get upset when wrongly accused.
Calm people, shedding "quiet tears," are never telling lies.
Before she ever took her seat, Ford had been sold to the nation as so scared and breakable she would probably need to be led her to her seat by both elbows like an elderly stroke victim. Both sides burbled over her victimhood, although whether she even is a victim has still never been seriously examined. Between them, both parties did everything but crown her Queen for a Day.
The left's gender studies experts write endless treatises on the disparities of power between men and women. Exactly who, Ford or Kavanaugh, held all the power last Thursday?
T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan. You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com.