Even before accuser Christine Blasey Ford finished testifying on Thursday in Washington, D.C., about sexual assault charges against Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a reporter with the Associated Press found a way to compare it to the Kennedy assassination.
Reporter Calvin Woodward wrote an article asking AP readers: “Will the Kavanaugh-Ford Hearing Be a Where-Were-You Moment?”
He began his post by asking:
Could it be, years from now, that you will remember where you were and what you were doing when Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford came to Washington to relive their conflicting high school memories?
Are we on the verge of one of those moments -- like, for those old enough, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated? Or when the space shuttle Challenger exploded? Or the twin towers fell?
“Do such indelible moments even happen anymore?” he asked.
The reporter then explained his view of the current debates regarding sexual assault and the Republican occupant of the White House.
“For more than two years,” he claimed, “American political life has been a rough and ugly storm of debate over gender, power, ego and truth. ‘#MeToo’ swept through the culture. ‘Me,’ says President Donald Trump. ‘Me.’”
However, for the next few hours, “all these crosscurrents will blow into a single, small hearing room on Capitol Hill where the fate of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee -- and much more -- is at stake.”
“The judge and the professor will endure the gaze of senators, the questions of a prosecutor and the court of public opinion,” the reporter continued.
“Their performances may tilt the outcome of November elections that will determine control of Congress,” he stated. “They could affect the direction of the high court for a generation.”
In addition, Woodward again laid bare his personal political viewpoints by describing the “agonizing history” that has taken place in those rooms, including Richard Nixon’s “corrupt manipulations” and Lyndon Johnson’s complaint that Vietnam was a “bitch of a war.”
He also pointed to Senator Joe McCarthy, who in 1954 “hunted for communists,” and Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment 27 years ago, before “salacious, deeply personal detail spilled into the public square” regarding Bill Clinton’s sexual encounters.
The reporter then noted that “while millions will watch the judge and his accuser, how many in this era of tribal politics will truly listen?”
That charge, he asserted, applies to Democrats who have “largely opposed Kavanaugh even before Ford’s allegations emerged” and Republicans “who have found rare unity and focus in their campaign to tilt the courts to the right.”
Woodward then noted: “Only a thin sliver in Washington is making the case for a truly open mind. … Neither side owns up to the base political calculation behind it all: Republicans want to expedite, the Democrats to delay past the election.”
Also on Thursday, David Rutz, managing editor of the Washington Free Beacon website, described the significance of the standoff by noting:
Ford, who has accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a high school party in the early 1980s, and Kavanaugh will testify about the charge.
The day will be critical to whether Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court, which appeared all but certain before Ford went public with her charge nearly two weeks ago.
Perhaps the most interesting response to the AP article and the day of testimony came from Willie Geist, co-anchor of MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, who tweeted simply: “Good Lord.”
