Have they no shame?

It’s somewhat rare that North Dakota makes the national news. It used to happen only once in a blue moon—say, when the windchill dropped to a billion degrees below zero or, more recently, during the long standoff around the Dakota Access pipeline. Lately, though, it’s been happening whenever Kevin Cramer opens his mouth. Thanks to Kevin, the nation’s been made aware that North Dakota’s sole Representative to the House—the same man who proudly boasted that he votes the way Trump wants him to 100 percent of the time—apparently thinks that teenagers can’t commit sexual assault. Or that drunk teenagers can’t. Or that it’s not sexual assault if whatever happened didn’t include intercourse.

A few months earlier, Cramer said that voting against Trump’s wishes was like cheating on your spouse. An interesting comparison—but to make it a fair one, we’d have to say it was like cheating on your spouse who’s been credibly accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen people, not including the porn star who your spouse had a lawyer pay $130,000 to stay quiet about it.

We’ve also learned quite recently that Cramer helped introduce a bill to Congress that would allow insurance companies to charge enormous premiums to customers with pre-existing conditions and to eliminate many of the protections—many of them meant to protect elderly patients—that our current laws provide. I reached out to Cramer’s office—the phone, as usual, went straight to a machine, but I tracked down Cramer’s press representative and emailed a list of questions. The representative promptly passed the buck to “the campaign”—which promptly ignored the questions entirely.

Cramer’s idiotic comments about sexual assault came, of course, when he was defending Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Given the timing of newspaper deadlines it’s very possible that the Senate has already voted to confirm —or to reject Kavanaugh. Or to let his nomination twist in the wind for a few more days. The Republican-controlled Senate has been trying to steamroll him through for his lifetime appointment because Kavanaugh has essentially been groomed for his entire life to serve as a partisan warrior on the Court, rather than a supposedly impartial justice. The Senate used to care about such things, but not lately. Now, everything’s a partisan battle. So what if the guy’s got a few women who say he sexually assaulted them, or that he was a blackout drunk in high school—or that, by any standard of evidence already in front of us, he lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee when asked about the details of all of this? The Republicans need him on the bench to fight their agenda for them. Full speed ahead.

Which brought us to last week’s spectacle when Kavanaugh and his wife appeared on Fox News to try to clear his name. To be clear: This appearance was coordinated by Bill Shine, the White House communications director, who not long ago was forced to resign from Fox News for covering up multiple sexual misconduct cases. The Fox News anchor that Shine chose to conduct the softball interview, Martha MacCallum, was the number-one cheerleader and defender of the various Fox News personalities that were forced to resign in shame, particularly Bill O’Reilly. In turn, MacCallum lobbed easy questions at Kavanaugh, who has been accused of multiple instances of sexual assault, and who was nominated by a president accused of multiple instances of sexual assault.

You know something else funny? Lately, in the wake of the Kavanaugh allegations, Trump and other Republicans have been reminding us, relentlessly, about the notion enshrined in our laws that an American citizen is innocent until proven guilty. Unless you’re Hillary Clinton, in which case it’s “Lock her up!” They’ll go on and on about this meritless smearing of a good man’s reputation.  Never mind the fact that a few short years ago they were demanding that President Obama prove he wasn’t born to a Muslim father in Kenya. They’ll talk about Democrats playing politics and being obstructive—conveniently ignoring the fact that, ignoring the Constitution, they wouldn’t even let President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court proceed to an actual vote.

As I’m writing this column right now, on Tuesday night, I’m watching Trump at yet another of his ridiculous rallies. This time, he’s not talking about how he and Kim Jong Un “fell in love” after the North Korean dictator—who’s known for brutally murdering citizens and even his own family, sometimes with anti-aircraft guns, and who has a team of officials scout the country for young teenage girls to be brought to his palace for sexual exploitation—wrote him a “beautiful, beautiful letter.” No. Tonight he openly mocked and ridiculed Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who testified in front of the Senate about what she says was a sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh. The crowd, thankfully—shocked that a sitting American President would stoop so low as to ridicule the notion that a sexual assault survivor might dare to tell her story in front of the United States Senate, with virtually nothing to gain for the experience other than death threats and more ridicule—booed Trump resoundingly.

Sorry. Just kidding. The crowd laughed themselves silly. They thought Trump’s impression of a sexual assault survivor trying to tell her story was hilarious.

Sick of the clown show? Vote. Get your friends to vote. Get everyone of voting age in your whole family to vote. Never voted before? Even better. Start now.