I hope the outrage towards Collins continues and haunts her in her next election. (If it doesn’t, she will feel that she was fully justified in playing her game exactly the way she has always played it.)
The irony is that if a female nominee had behaved the way Kavanaugh did last Thursday, those on the right would have labeled her “shrill, overly emotional, and hysterical.” Trump would have done demeaning impersonations.
So which 19 attorneys helped Collins go through the Kav’s record?
And saying that she, Collins, believes in the #MeToo movement is wrong. she only believes in it if it doesn’t hurt a Republican.
So here is the theme for the next Collin’s opponent, "Collins believes it’s OK to perjure one’s self in front of a Congressional Committee, or more than one Committee.
Did anyone tell Susan that this was a job interview and not a trial?
Would they have done so if she were their conservative nominee? I don’t know that this is a matter of gender as much as tribalism. (This may be a purely academic question since I doubt that any “mere woman” would be considered sufficiently reliable on the key issues to have earned a nomination under a conservative administration.)
Good for Murkowski and Collins can go to hell. That’s all there is to say about that.
But JFC AP, you’re mostly hopeless. Are you aware that people sometimes say things they don’t mean? They’re sometimes hypocritical? They sometimes lie? Are you aware you’re allowed to question the sincerity of what they say? That you don’t have to take everything at face value? Honest to God these pieces are pathetic and I’d suggest that TPM find some other news service or just do without. All these things do is make people assume there are no good journalists anywhere.
When Palin was at the height of her popularity and was consistently saying ridiculous things, her supporters would answer back that it was understandable, what with the stress of the liberals attacking her all the time. Tribalism is even stronger than sexism. Nothing is applied consistently, it’s doublethink all the way and intellectual incoherence is a feature, not a bug. In fact I’d say much that drives the nihilist right these days flows from the deep unpopularity of what they actually want to do. To argue in favor of it, they have to tie themselves in all kinds of illogical knots, so it’s impossible for them to be coherent or rational.
NO WHERE in this article do I see the fact that Collins did not take into account all of the lying done by Kavanaugh on the stand.
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, her longtime friend and fellow moderate Republican, spoke on the Senate floor for 45 minutes, explaining her support for Kavanaugh in detail.
Sadly Collins was never going to run again (for the Senate) anyway
Ah hell I am too bitter for my own good.
Collins is just another woman whose greatest worries about sexual assault center on the 5% of false accusations. The 95% don’t matter to her because, in reality, women don’t matter to her. The nonsense that Kavanaugh sees Roe v Wade as : “settled law” and that she swallowed hook, line, and sinker only shows her false attempts at being thoughtful. She’s nothing but another one of Trump’s turds.
Agree, I don’t view Collins as any form of hero, she caved to REPUG ideology, just as she commonly does each and every time.
The only way that Collins was ever going to vote against Kavanaugh was if he was going to lose anyway, or possibly if he was going to win anyway. As Reid wisely noted, Collins is always with us when she isn’t needed.
That’s the evil brilliance of the whole approach. There was never a serious consideration of the guy in the round. Everything came down to the straw man of did he provably attempt to rape Blasey Ford. They arranged it so the lies weren’t formally addressed. We’re seeing a series of crimes and suspected crimes that the authorities are looking the other way from. GOTV. GOTV. GOTV.
{AP} Some residents of Pennsylvania expressed their concern for the process, but not all.
I reviewed a lot of campaigns through web searches including listening to interviews, forums etc. During the course of this intense 2-3 week period, there has not been a lot of talk about Kavanaugh at the district level. The main issues: health care, checking Trump, tax cut, wages and localized issues (e.g., algae in FL, ECOT in OH, DACA).
From a pure political lens, the Kavanaugh debate angers and emboldens slices of Dem voters who are strategically distributed across the nation. I don’t think it does that much for the GOP. They were already pretty happy putting babies in jails. They’re kind of fat and happy. I would’ve preferred to have defeated Kavanaugh and have faced an angry GOP that nationalized the congressional races on a culture war issue, but frankly, if you’re looking at this from the dispassionate lens of a strategist for the Nov 2018 midterms, most would say that the Dems got what they needed out of this debate without fundamentally changing the trajectory or mix of issues that are driving this election cycle.
During these 3 weeks polls at the House level and Senate level were pretty strong for the Dems. Heitkamp’s polling is an exception, but to the extent one believes any major pollster trying to poll ND, that slip started well before the Kavanaugh issue heated up.
Phil Bredesen probably saved and may have won his race against Blackburn by coming out in favor of Kavanaugh (that is to say that if Bredesen does win, we’ll look back on that statement as a key event). I hate making that statement, but by doing what he did, he prevented Blackburn from nationalizing the race. She wins if this is about national GOP v national Dem. He wins if he keeps it local. His political antenna told him that Kavanaugh was not playing well for Dems in TN and he got out in front of it. The universe probably shifted us towards the right tactical position, even if we took a short term loss. Kavanaugh replaces Kennedy, who was voting GOP 80+% of the time anyway, so it’s not like the decisions will change much. We may get the added benefit of getting our voters to actually think about the court when they go into the ballot box. That would’ve been nice in 2000 and 2016.
Serious question: Do pollsters change their techniques for seriously low-population states such as North Dakota? Is that what you’re alluding to here?
This does sound, basically, like the defenses of Kavanugh. He was showing “righteous anger” because he was “falsely accused.” His entire act, and yes I think it was a conscious act, was as appealing to his side as it was obviously absurd to ours. (The same thing can be said of Trump. We are only going to win the final battle if there really are more of us, and we come out and vote sufficiently to overcome suppression, gerrymandering and other structural gamesmanship they have used to bolster their numbers.) It is only shrill if a Democrat does it, and if that Democrat is a women, then it is just a two-fer in application.
Jeez, that is perfect.
A while back Josh said the thing about Trump is he reveals the corruption in things. Collins could pretend to be moderate, and make the occasional pro-choice vote here and there because it was expedient, until he came along, and the entire party lurched into more and more extreme and ridiculous positions. When it came time to decide whether or not to put a Roe-wrecking rapist on the Supreme Court, she found a way to say yes. She was never a moderate, AP, you gullible tools.