What a year this week has been.
And on Sunday’s edition of Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver attempted to tackle the most outrage-inducing events of the past seven days in under 30 minutes.
The biggest news, of course, was the harrowing testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford—a woman who says Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her as a teenager—and Kavanaugh’s confrontational, shouty rebuttal. Following their grillings, the committee voted to delay the Kavanaugh vote for one week while the FBI investigated several sexual-assault allegations against Kavanaugh—although the probe is reportedly very limited in scope.
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“We need to talk about Brett Kavanaugh, Supreme Court nominee and walking crushed beer can,” Oliver announced.
He then threw to a clip of Ford’s testimony, in which she alleged that Kavanaugh attacked her at a house party in 1982, that she felt he was “accidentally going to kill me,” and that she was “100 percent” certain that he was the culprit.
While Oliver called Ford’s testimony “brave and compelling,” he did not appear to feel the same way about Kavanaugh’s, which he characterized as “weird” and one that painted “a folksy image of his time in high school.”
“He’s crying at the memory of lifting weights at his friend Tobin’s house!” Oliver exclaimed. “I hate to say it, but I’m starting to think that men might be too emotional for the Supreme Court.” The HBO host also threw to a clip of Kavanaugh tearing up while naming his female friends in high school by their first names, saying, “That’s not testimony, though, is it? That’s a plaintiff’s spoken-word cover of ‘Mambo No. 5.’”
“When Kavanaugh was not choking back tears, he was starting to get noticeably angry, arguing that he was the victim of a giant conspiracy,” Oliver continued.
There was Kavanaugh repeatedly saying he “liked beer,” and how, when he was pressed on the extent and aggression of his drinking, Kavanaugh became “dismissive and outright hostile,” which gave you “a real sense of who this man really is,” according to Oliver.
When Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) asked Kavanaugh whether he had a tendency to black out while drinking, he replied, “You’re asking about blackout... I don’t know… Have you? I’m curious if you have?”
“OK, so first, aside from being deeply disrespectful, have you is just not the answer of an innocent person. If you ask someone if they ever blew a dog and they go, ‘I don’t know, have you?’ That person blew a dog! He blew a fucking dog—and in all likelihood not just one, either,” joked Oliver.
“That surly tone was emblematic of Kavanaugh’s demeanor throughout the hearing—not the tone of a man who hopes to one day have the honor of serving on the Supreme Court, but the tone of someone who feels entitled to be on it, and frankly can’t believe that you’re being such a dick about this,” added Oliver.
One of the biggest problems Oliver had with Kavanaugh’s testimony was his repeated assertion that “all four witnesses” who were allegedly at the house party where Ford says she was assaulted “said that it didn’t happen.”
“This 53-year-old frat pledge is actually significantly misstating the facts there, because in reality, three of those people merely said that they didn’t recall the party as described, and Ford’s friend Ms. Kaiser did specifically say ‘she believes Ford’s allegation,’ and the fourth person there is Kavanaugh himself,” Oliver argued. “So Kavanaugh just wildly mischaracterized evidence, and that is one thing a judge really should know not to do.”
There were also Kavanaugh’s far-fetched claims about his yearbook, where he claimed that a yearbook photo of several football players labeled “Renate Alumni” was meant to show “affection” to the young woman; that “boof” meant “flatulence”; and that “devil’s triangle” is a “drinking game,” instead of what its understood definition is: a sex act between two men and one woman.
Of course, most Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee had already made up their minds about Kavanaugh before Ford’s and Kavanaugh’s testimonies.
“This is a national disgrace, the way you’re being treated!” exclaimed Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), while Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), glassy-eyed, shouted, “This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics!”
“Lindsey Graham… is not technically wrong there. This process is deeply flawed, but that’s because he and the Republican majority designed it that way. If they wanted to avoid a he-said-she-said situation they absolutely could have, but instead they only called two people,” said Oliver. “A much fairer process would have been gathering evidence and hearing from others… but that is not how Republicans chose to set up the hearing.”
Oliver further argued that there were several “disqualifying” moments in Kavanaugh’s testimony—none more so than his allegation of a left-wing conspiracy that sounded “positively Trumpian.”
“This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger over President Trump and the 2016 election; fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record; revenge on behalf of the Clintons; and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”
“Now, that is absolutely horrifying, and it is worth taking a moment now to note the norm that has just been shattered, because I know that we’re all basically callous to people talking that way now, but we are supposed to have at least nine people left in America who do not talk that way, and yet Kavanaugh just all but came out and said he’s going to approach his entire tenure as one case of Me vs. The Libtard Cucks,” said Oliver.
The comedian concluded that, since Kavanaugh is not a particularly exceptional or different conservative Supreme Court candidate, the Republicans’ desire to ram through his nomination could only mean one thing: “a big fuck you to women.”
