As most of y’all can probably guess, I have not been watching the Kavanaugh hearings on TV, because even if I did watch other TV news (which I don’t, and haven’t since I first started reading the newspaper around age 12, recognizing even then that it was entertainment and not news) I would certainly not watch this ridiculous circus designed to further the popular “red-blue” myth in the minds of the hoi-polloi. I also have the word “Kavanaugh” muted on Twitter, but of course that doesn’t block tweets which don’t directly reference him. So I was able to see and comment on this very interesting observation by Phoenix Calida:
So you know Rachel Mitchell, the woman who is going to question Dr. Christine Ford? She’s a prosecutor with the special victims unit. From Maricopa county. You know, the place where sheriff Joe Arpaio worked?…The one who bragged about running concentration camps where guards tortured inmates? And then he was held in Contempt of court for racial profiling and pardoned by Trump?…And remember when Sheriff Joe refused to investigate rape cases? And cases where children were being sexually abused by adults? All Bc the victims were Latinas? That’s where this woman earned her credentials as a sex crimes prosecutor. Rachel Mitchell is about to question Dr. Ford, an alleged rape victim. And Mitchell earned her “credentials” working with cops who wouldn’t even investigate rape cases in their county. How do y’all see this really turning out?
Maricopa County is, of course, a cesspool of political corruption, especially where sex work is concerned. And Arpaio was a big Trump supporter, so one of his gang turning up in Washington to help Trump is not really a surprise. But Phoenix’s tweets got me thinking, so I wrote this after quoting hers:
You remember Arpaio, right? The guy who arrested newspapermen Lacey & Larkin for exposing his corruption? The same Lacey & Larkin who were persecuted as owners of Backpage, partly thanks to the efforts of Cindy McCain, whom they exposed as a drug addict who robbed her own charity? The same Cindy McCain, widow of John McCain, warmonger politician from AZ (where Maricopa County is) who has relentlessly demonized Backpage (owned by the men who exposed her crimes) for years? Arizona is also the site of ASU, home of Dominique Roe-Sepowitz (who says sex work is bad because “body fluids” cause brain damage), who is paid big bucks by the McCain Institute and government cronies to do bogus “studies” designed to “prove” that “sex trafficking” was rampant on Backpage? Funny how all of this shit begins to fit together when you follow the money and the trail of vendettas, alliances & favors, isn’t it?
And in case you hadn’t noticed, while this big show of “us vs them” was going on, Congress almost-unanimously passed the biggest war-advancing military spending bill in history, and the House passed a bill which expands the PATRIOT Act using “sex trafficking” as an excuse with solid support from both of these supposedly-deadly-enemy parties. But please keep watching the fireworks and pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
