Cosby's Series Finale

Bill Cosby got the book thrown at him at his sentencing for sexual assault - three to ten years in prison, which, at his age, is tantamount to a life sentence.  The judge doubts that Cosby will be paroled  when he is eligible in 2021, because he believes Cosby has a mental disorder that makes it impossible for him to stop assaulting women - 59 according to one count, though some have reported a higher number.  And it's twice and halved again the number of victims who had come forward when the revered and much-loved fashion model Beverly Johnson added her name to the list - at which point I stopped believing Cosby's  denials, for reasons I explained back in December 2014.   

In the years before comedian Hannibal Burris put rape allegations against Cosby - heretofore whispered but not talked about in public - out in the open and exposed Bill's hypocrisy in lecturing inner-city blacks on how to live their lives, Cosby was regarded as a comic genius.  Sophocles once said that you have to wait until a man reaches old age to see how well he lived his life, right?  His legacy looks a whole lot less admirable even without the now-confirmed rape charges, as his namesake 1980s sitcom, which started out as a realistic depiction of domestic life, quickly became a black version of "The Brady Bunch," and many of his movies - particularly any movie he did after he stopped working with Sidney Poitier in the late seventies - are among some of the worst films ever made.  I read one of his books; it was mostly a rewrite of his stand-up routine, which was the same stand-up routine from the concert movie Bill Cosby: Himself.   Mark Twain he ain't.  The late cultural critic Paul Fussell noted how Cosby was "a master of overstatement," an appraisal no doubt prompted by Cosby's halting vocal delivery and his over-reliance on his fleshy facial muscles.  Whatever charm Cosby once had, he managed to lose long before his sexual-assault history was revealed.  

Yesterday, at the United Nations, the world laughed at Donald Trump, another American known for his dubious personal life.  The world, in fact, had been laughing at us long before Trump hijacked the White House, and Bill Cosby, a symbol of our popular culture for worse and for even worse, is just one more regrettable element of our national fabric. Good riddance.

Ford Tempo

Here's how the issue of Christine Blasey Ford's attempt to testify against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh  stand at this point.  After Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley set an arbitrary deadline for Mrs. Ford to agree to a time to testify and she and her attorney held out for demands to benefit her ability to present her case, the chairman kept setting the deadline further back.  And further back,.  And further back.  And so on and so on, until Mrs. Ford finally agreed to testify, and now she and her attorney are in the process of negotiating the particulars. 

What caused Grassley to be more accommodating? Probably Donald Trump's tweet in which he wanted to know why the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which would investigate Mrs. Ford's claims of sexual assault against Kavanaugh, didn't hear from the accuser in the early 1980s, when the assault was supposed to have taken place.  Once reminded that the FBI doesn't involve itself in sexual-assault cases involving people who have not been appointed to the judiciary due to the fact that they are teenagers, Trump then asked in a follow-up tweet why she and her "loving parents"  (his words) didn't report the assault to local authorities in Maryland, where Kavanaugh and Mrs. Ford lived.  Well - thousands if not millions have people who had been sexually assaulted took to Twitter to explain why they never reported cases of assault - because they involved family members, a star student, an employer . . . and fear of retribution was a common factor in all of these cases.  They feared not being believed or having the blame deflected to them if they were believed.

Nevertheless, the Senate Republican caucus seems hell-bent on getting Kavanaugh confirmed, and with a couple of renegade Democrats, they're likely to pull it off.  But Christine Blasey Ford can still pursue a case against Kavanaugh even if he makes it onto the Court, and what might ultimately happen is that Democrats can "Fortas" him.  I refer to what happened to former Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas. who in 1969 was shown to have accepted a $20,000 retainer and was believed to have entered into a tax evasion scheme with other judges.  Fortas resigned from the Court under pressure, rather than face lengthy impeachment proceedings, to save his family grief.  If Kavanaugh is confirmed and the charges against him don't go way, he could be forced off the Court like Fortas was, resigning to spare his wife and daughters further grief.

But then he'll have more time to devote to charity.

I've been led to understand that the Senate Judiciary Committee didn't do a good job the last time it looked into a sex scandal, when many of its members didn't take seriously Anita Hill's charges of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas in 1991.  The full Senate did a better job of that. Thomas was confirmed by a vote of 52-48 - the highest negative vote ever received by a confirmed Supreme Court justice.