Have you heard much of or from Christine Blasey Ford lately? Don’t be surprised if the name escapes you. She’s been dropped down the memory hole by her friends in the press and her ex-friends the Democrats, since she stopped being useful when Brett Kavanaugh, much to their fury, was confirmed as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Do you wonder if the Democrats in the Senate or the Judiciary Committee give her a call now and then to ask how she’s feeling, now that she’s home — if she is home, as she and Kavanaugh both received death threats, and needed protection after her name was leaked to the press.
But there’s no reason for them to stay in touch now. It wouldn’t be televised, and attention has moved on to newer sensations — hurricanes, killings, and whether or not the epithet ‘Horseface’ is an appropriate label for our duly elected national leader to apply to his alleged escort flame.
To be fair, politicians’ sympathy for women making complaints about men have always depended on the politics of the women complaining, and those of the male public figures about whom the charges are made. Anita Hill was a liberal complaining about a Supreme Court nominee who was a movement conservative, so the Left assumed she was truthful. Likewise, the Left assumed that Paula Jones was trailer park trash who was seeking a settlement, and that Monica Lewinsky and Kathleen Willey were crazed stalkers, disturbed and unstable, or out of their weak little minds.
It was Gloria Steinem, NOW, Hill’s supporters, and the women elected in the Year of the Woman (Feinstein among them) who had saved Bill Clinton’s bacon; and it was Clinton’s foes in the Moral Majority, who were apoplectic with rage when he was acquitted, who would save Donald Trump’s bacon 18 years later, when he ran for president against none other than Bill Clinton’s wife and chief protector, with a record of abuse and predation as lurid as Clinton’s himself.
Suddenly, adultery wasn’t a sin anymore, but rather a link to King David, who himself wasn’t perfect. Suddenly, private sins dimmed in importance with what he could do to advance their agenda (which had been the real interest of Clinton’s defenders). When was the last time a case of abuse or harassment was brought by someone who did not plan to gain by its prosecution? There isn’t one, as it hasn’t yet happened, and won’t.
Which leads to the sad part of the Ford disappearance. She stopped being a person of utility. She still rouses and works up the feminist base, but it was worked up already. But since the hearing, she really works up the conservative voters, passive and listless before the commotion, who were aroused and then brought to a boil by enraged attacks on their man.
Not much by her — she had been inoffensive, and was seen by the Right as confused, but not vicious — but by the mobs who claimed to defend her. They screamed at the hearings, sent death threats to senators, formed roving bands who confronted conservatives, stalked them in restaurants and in public places, and threatened their safety and lives. This went to produce the”‘Kavanaugh bump,” used to define the uptick in the fortunes of the Republican Party which has occurred in the weeks since the hearing.
No wonder the Democrats want Ford out of the picture. “Her Lasting Impact,” was the headline for a cover story in Time that portrayed her as a Joan of Arc figure. But her real impact may be a much more Republican Senate than we might have had otherwise. That was never the intention.
