Mitch McConnell: Women protesting Kavanaugh Were "Clowns" and It Will "All Blow Over"

If one wants evidence of the contempt that today's Republican Party holds towards women, look no farther than GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the man who other than Donald Trump, has done more to destroy American constitutional government than anyone else.  McConnell in effect has labeled all survivors of sexual assault and women who are tired of GOP misogyny as "clowns" and has suggested that the whole Kavanaugh outrage as something that will "blow over," the inference being that women are shallow, gullible and of short memory capacity.  A piece in Daily Kos looks at McConnell's contempt for women and survivors of sexual assault.  Here are article highlights:

Nothing could exemplify the wholesale contempt the Republican Party has for women than the words of its own Senate Majority Leader, fresh off of successfully installing an accused attempted rapist and hard-right political operative onto the Supreme Court. . . . he considered them useful idiots too. “Harassing members at their homes, crowding the halls with people acting horribly, the effort to humiliate us really helped me unify my conference,” McConnell told the New York Times. “So I want to thank these clowns for all the help they provided.”

There used to be a time in this country when someone in as important a position as McConnell would, after a bitter political fight, attempt to mend fences with his opposition, particularly in a circumstance fraught with such a raw and emotional issue as rape.  There would be some act of simple grace in the acknowledgment of the validity of the other sides’ sentiments, even in defeat. That is the way the U.S. government worked for well over two hundred years, and it is in part what has kept us together as a nation.

More than anyone in the Congress and Senate, Mitch McConnell has worked to undermine those traditions, preferring instead to tear the fabric of this nation in two for the sake of imposing his party’s reactionary agenda on us all. So it’s not unexpected that rather than acknowledging their trauma, even in disagreement, he would instead belittle those rape victims, who protested and painfully told us their stories, as “clowns.”  Donald Trump has now made it acceptable to cruelly mock one’s political opponents, giving no quarter to the fact that they may represent the views of more than half the nation. McConnell’s remarks here simply signal that in the age of Trump the Republican Party has no decency left to spare . . . . .

Even here the undercurrent of misogyny is instructive. Demeaning and diminishing the victims of sexual assault, raising doubts about their truthfulness, was  the GOP’s tactic from the get-go in the Kavanaugh hearings. McConnell’s smug self-assurance that the anger and emotions poured out over the last two weeks will just “blow over” is simply another way of minimizing the experience of those who have had to deal with the trauma of sexual assault and its aftermath. It’s another way of saying that rape, in the end, is really not that big of a deal.

For those women and men who take a different view of sexual assault than that of the Republican Senate Majority leader, November 6 is now [less than] only thirty days away.