Beneath the bland headline of the New York Times’ long sole editorial Monday morning hid a corrosively partisan rant, “Women Are Watching,” that elided recent history to transform sexual harassment into solely a problem among Republican politicians (and never mind Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Keith Ellison, or Al Franken).
The editorial led off with the infamous confrontation by activists Maria Gallagher and Ana Maria Archila who confronted Senator Jeff Flake in a Capitol Hill elevator.
Mr. Flake did little more than awkwardly mumble that he had to go and that he had already issued a statement about this matter. Even so, a few hours later, as the Judiciary Committee gathered to vote on whether to recommend Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate, the lawmaker announced that he could support a floor vote only if there was first a weeklong delay to allow for a targeted investigation by the F.B.I....
After warning “Republican lawmakers ought to tread carefully,” the editorial reminded them “Women are watching,” and the rant kicked into high gear.
Many women have been eyeing the Republican Party with growing unease since it was taken over by Donald Trump, whose retrograde views on gender are straight out of the 1950s -- or maybe the 1590s. Confronted with serious and credible allegations against Judge Kavanaugh, Republican lawmakers could have seized the moment to reassure anxious women that they realized some issues transcend partisanship. Instead, they failed, quite spectacularly, to rise to the occasion -- turning their furious defense of the nominee into an illuminating microcosm of the disregard and disrespect for women that have become hallmarks of Mr. Trump’s Republican Party.
As the Kavanaugh nightmare took form, women watched in dismay as Republican lawmakers worked to discredit Dr. Blasey by suggesting that she was either hopelessly confused, a political pawn or a liar...
And women most definitely were watching on Thursday, when the Senate Judiciary Committee spent the day listening to the testimony of Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey. Women saw how the 11 Republican men brought in a female prosecutor to chip away at Dr. Blasey’s account, while showing little interest in the alleged attack itself. They saw how those same Republican men then tripped over themselves to assure Judge Kavanaugh that they felt his pain and were so very sorry that Democrats had, as Senator Lindsey Graham shrieked in a display of self-righteous hysteria, conspired to put the nominee “through hell.”
Those preceding paragraphs were hostile and misleading enough. But the next two paragraphs makeo one wonder what hearing the Times actually watched? The paper is either dishonestly conflating the Senate hearings with some invisible Republican “sneering disbelief,” or it's being flat-out dishonest.
Still, it’s hard to believe that they showed so little interest, especially in the face of the public turmoil this episode has stirred up. Dr. Blasey’s story, and the way it has been met with sneering disbelief, has resonated with women in a way that even many of the #MeToo horror stories did not. It feels as though everyone knows someone -- a friend, a neighbor, a daughter -- who has pulled them aside in recent weeks to share a similarly wrenching experience.
Galvanized by watching Dr. Blasey get ripped apart, women -- along with similarly outraged men -- have held walkouts and sit-ins and have flocked to Capitol Hill....
When did GOP senators on the Judiciary Committee “rip apart” Blasey? They barely addressed her -- a tactic dutifully and conveniently mocked by the same media who faulted the GOP’s Senate line-up of all white men -- and when they did they were carefully respectful. Amazingly, the editorial managed to completely skip the prominent presence at the hearing of the woman Rachel Mitchell, the veteran sex crimes prosecutor who led much of the questioning during the Republican's allotted time.
Concerns about the “character assassinations” of Kavanaugh were callously dismissed by the editorialists as “straight-up culture warfare, a message of fear, resentment and male victimhood being sold as sympathetic concern for all those mothers and wives who, as Republicans tell it, could soon see their beloved males torn down by political plots.”
