Category: Senate

While Watching the #Kavanaugh Hearing

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Not going to live-blog today’s Senate Judiciary Committee, exactly, but I do want to have a thread to share a few of my thoughts and allow the commenters to provide their own feedback. When confronted with something like Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation, intelligent people must consider the possibility that it is either true or false. If she is telling the truth, not only did Brett Kavanaugh engage in bad — and perhaps criminal — behavior, but he is also lying in his denials. Yet this would also mean that all the other people named by Professor Ford as witnesses, but who instead denied any knowledge of the events she described, are also lying. The fact that these other witnesses failed to corroborate Professor Ford’s story, and that by her own admission she never told anyone about it until 2012, makes this story unverified although we cannot claim to know that she is lying. That is to say, it is still possible that Professor Ford’s story could be true even if no one else remembers the particular house party she described. This perplexes me, and it should bother everyone, for many reasons. Having called attention to this crucial aspect of the drama, however, I’ll leave off for now.

UPDATE: Observing the reaction on Twitter, it’s obvious that many people who have never watched a Senate committee hearing are watching this one. So at least this televised trainwreck will have some educational value. Lemons, lemonade, some assembly required.

UPDATE II: So, it’s five minutes of Democrats pontificating, alternating with five minutes of patient fact-based question from the lawyer chosen by the Republican side of the committee. Chairman Grassley occasionally makes a few points.

Via Stephen Green at Instapundit:

“Feinstein is paving the way to prohibit questions on Ford’s character yet in he/she said cases, it is one’s impression of character that is the determining factor. There’s nothing else to go by when you have to unsubstantiated claims.”
Feinstein is no dummy. She’s trying to rule out in advance the only meaningful questions.

UPDATE III: Can I mention that politics is a team sport? This is important to understand. When a waitress at a D.C. restaurant claimed that Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd tried to make a “sandwich” with her, Republicans were like, “Believe the survivors!” So you have to understand, in this particular situation, that the debunking of Professor Ford’s claim is a task undertaken by Republicans as a partisan duty, in the same way that defending Professor Ford as 100% credible is a partisan duty for Democrats. I don’t like this. It’s not my choice, but has been thrust upon me, to defend Judge Kavanaugh and to decry the tactics used by Democrat in their attempt to derail his nomination. We must fight the battles we are in, without regard to how we got into them. There is no use wishing things were some other way than they actually are.

UPDATE IV: This hearing is traumatizing me. Having to listen to pious lectures about “credibility” from, e.g., Senator Blumenthal? Recovering from this will require years of therapy. Or maybe a few beers. Readers are invited to contribute to the Trauma Recovery Fund.

UPDATE V: A Few Thoughts on Prosecutorial Discretion.

UPDATE VI: Watching Judge Kavanaugh’s opening statement. It’s gut-wrenching, and also makes me angry enough to chew through steel. As he recites all the evidence pointing toward his innocence, you get the sense of how wrong it was for him to have been falsely accused in such a manner, simply because the Democrats wanted to block his nomination.

UPDATE VII: Wow. Fireworks. CrazyTown.

FINAL UPDATE: Graham Emerges Heroic.



 

The Big Day: Avenatti Client Discredited, Ford’s Accusation Now Collapsing

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Wow, what an eventful 24 hours this has been! The client of the Creepy Porn Lawyer, Julie Swetnick, came forward with her wild “gang rape” tale and was almost immediately was discredited. First, we learned her ex-boyfriend had gotten a restraining order against her, then Lisa Miller (who partied with the Georgetown Prep football team back in the day) explained she never saw anything like what Swetnick described and, also, there was no way this trashy Gaithersburg girl was at those parties.

Possibly more consequential, at least two men have contacted Senate Judiciary Committee investigators to say that they believe that they, and not Kavanaugh, may have been the preppie boys Ford described having a drunken encounter with at a house party. This calls to mind the mistaken-identity scenario Ed Whelan discussed last week, and it certainly would explain why Ford was so certain it was Kavanaugh while Kavanaugh was certain it wasn’t him. Memory is tricky, and if you’ve seen one Irish Catholic prep-school jock, you’ve seen ’em all.

So the big televised showdown today in the Judiciary Committee may prove to be a complete debacle for the Democrats who put their faith in Ford as the weapon that would destroy Kavanaugh, and as for the Creepy Porn Lawyer’s client — wow, she had Crazy Eyes, didn’t she?

We are no longer living in a republic, and no longer governed by the rule of law, if Senate Democrats succeed in their dishonest smear campaign against Brett Kavanaugh. Abandoning every concept of justice and all standards of decency, Democrats have disgraced themselves in their desperate partisan effort to derail Judge Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court. And if the GOP majority in the Senate cannot summon the courage to stand firm against this stampede of flimsy accusations, what point is there in even having a Republican Party?
Democrats have turned the confirmation process into a surrealistic circus of smears that Judge Kavanaugh himself called the “Twilight Zone.”
“This process is a disgrace and is harming good people,” a group of Judge Kavanaugh’s high-school friends declared in a letter sent Wednesday to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley and the committee’s ranking minority member, Sen. Dianne Feinstein. These friends were reacting to the latest and most lurid of the accusations made against Judge Kavanaugh, this one by a woman named Julie Swetnick, who is represented by Michael Avenatti. Swetnick’s bizarre claim that Kavanaugh was a participant in gang rapes at house parties was denounced as false by those who knew him during his days at Georgetown Prep.
“Nonsense,” these 60 friends declared in their letter to Sens. Grassley and Feinstein. “We have never witnessed any behavior that even approaches what is described in this allegation. It is reprehensible. In the extensive amount of time we collectively spent with Brett, we do not recall having ever met someone named Julie Swetnick. Nor did we ever observe Brett engaging in any conduct resembling that described in Ms. Swetnick’s declaration.” . . .

You can read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.



 

The Democrats as Underpants Gnomes

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In a comment on last night’s post, Daniel Freeman described the Democrats’ strategy in the Kavanaugh confirmation process:

Step 1: Present a non-disprovable claim.
Step 2: Demand that it be disproven.
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!

It’s the “Underpants Gnomes” plan, you see.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a vote on the Kavanaugh nomination Friday morning. My brother Kirby suggests that Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser will find an excuse to skip Thursday’s hearing.

This does seem like the most likely scenario. Christine Blasey Ford never expected to be compelled to prove her accusation. As Oregon Muse said, she wanted to smear Judge Kavanaugh anonymously, like Eric Clanton wearing a mask and smashing Trump supporters in the head.

Democrats promote a worldview in which no one ever has to consider consequences of their actions or take responsibility for their own behavior, because there’s always a scapegoat to take the blame. Crime and poverty are attributed to racism, which means that white people who’ve never set foot in Baltimore or Chicago are somehow to blame for the misery that prevails in those Democrat-run cities. Women are never responsible for their own actions, because they’re victims of sexism, so we’re not allowed to question Professor Ford’s unsubstantiated claims.

Buying into that Democrat worldview creates a sort of paranoia, a persecution complex where people think of themselves as victims and are constantly looking for scapegoats to blame for their problems, and the political process breaks down into a series of witch hunts. The mob that stormed into a D.C. restaurant to harass Sen. Ted Cruz was a typical exercise of this mentality. Last night on Sean Hannity’s show, Newt Gingrich had some interesting comments about that:

 

“I mean, what has happened to America, when random left-wing totalitarians think they can violate private property, trespass in a restaurant, go in and intimidate a citizen who is simply trying to have dinner, and they think they’re heroes? . . . We’re watching a period where what we have to understand is this is about raw power, and if the left can stop Kavanaugh we will not get another conservative Justice in our lifetime on the Supreme Court.”

These “random left-wing totalitarians” are typical Democrat voters. They don’t care about facts. They couldn’t possibly defend their worldview in debate, and so they seek the kind of “raw power” that will enable them to silence anyone who disagrees with them. This is why your liberal cousin has “unfriended” you on Facebook. Their devotion to the Democrat Party is emotional and irrational, and the only reason they can think of to explain why someone might disagree with them is “hate.” Therefore, if you voted for Trump, you must be a racist sexist homophobe — a bad person, morally and intellectually inferior — and Democrats don’t want to hear any argument that might require them to consider alternative explanations. You can never hope to persuade such people that they’re wrong; the liberal is a type of religious fanatic, whose prejudices are a core element of their identity. It’s a cult, like Scientology.

Republicans have no choice but to beat the Democrats at this “raw power” game. Ram the Kavanaugh nomination through the Senate — damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, to quote Admiral Farragut — and then make Democrats pay for their circus in the midterm elections.

November 6 is coming. People need to wake the hell up.



 

Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It

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How many times have I repeated that sentence in the past three years? And how many times has this simple statement been dismissed as a joke? Well, I guess you’re not laughing now, as the Kavanaugh confirmation process has been degraded into a circus by . . . what? Feminism.

Many people have become alarmed at the accusation-equals-guilt ethos adopted by Democrats and their media allies in the 12 days since Dianne Feinstein went public with Professor Christine Braley Ford’s accusation. Although the partisan political motive was obvious, and despite the fact that Professor Ford’s accusation was denied by all four of the people she named as attending the 1982 house party in suburban Maryland where she claimed she was assaulted, the media insisted this was a “credible” accusation, and Democrats declared it was sufficient to bring the confirmation process to a halt. The normal standards of justice were reversed, the presumption of innocence discarded, and the burden of proof shifted from the accuser to the accused. Practitioners of journalism degraded their craft, publishing unsubstantiated accusations which they themselves admitted lacked any corroboration, justifying their shoddy work with the suggestion that, because Senate Democrats were interested in this baseless claim, it was therefore newsworthy.

Rod Dreher recoils from the horror of it all:

The left will stop at nothing to destroy this man. Three years ago, a friend who defected in the 1960s from Hungary told me that he and his wife, also a defector, are observing that our public culture reminds them more and more of Hungary at the advent of communism. I asked him to explain what he meant. He told me that the ideologically-driven eagerness to destroy people that the Left identifies as its enemies is the essence of it. He said that they will say anything they need to say, even if it’s untrue, to professionally and personally destroy people.
I wondered in 2015, when he told me that, if he was exaggerating. I don’t doubt it at all now. Not after this.
Tonight I had a business call with someone who lives in one of the bluest parts of America. She mentioned that this Kavanaugh business terrifies her for her sons. The idea that a man could be destroyed because of these accusations infuriates her and makes her afraid. I think that many on the Left are not thinking about the fact that women have daughters, yes, but they also have sons, brothers, and husbands.

Indeed, there is a whiff of Stalin-era “show trials” about this, with the media publishing propaganda to demonize the targets of the purge. The New York Times has decided that jocular entries in the Georgetown Prep 1984 school yearbook are “evidence” of . . . wrongthink?

 

Do you see how Judge Kavanaugh’s accusers are playing the part of Pavlik Morozov in this Soviet-style liquidation of the kulaks? And what is the ideological justification behind it all? Feminism.

We are nearing a destination toward which our culture has been traveling for more than 50 years, when women aligned with the 1960s New Left (many of them so-called “Red Diaper” babies, children of Communist Party members) became dissatisfied with their treatment by the male leaders of the radical anti-Vietnam War movement. Feminism was (and still is) directly influenced by Marxism, and the movement’s totalitarian tendencies were evident from the first formation of feminist “collectives” in the late 1960s. These groups were unstable and short-lived, as the obsession with equality within the collectives produced a hostility toward anyone identified as a leader. It was not until the feminist movement burrowed into academia, via the creation of university Women’s Studies programs, that it developed any real institutional authority. After two decades of building a campus-based movement, feminism burst forth into national headlines with the 1991 “high-tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas. When the next election brought the Clintons to Washington, it also brought about an institutionalization of feminism within the federal government. The Justice Department was led by Janet Reno and the Department of Health and Human Services was led by Donna Shalala. For eight years, these and other Clinton appointees worked to embed feminist ideology into federal policy. During the feminist movement’s “long march through the institutions,” conservatives developed the habit of treating feminism as a joke. Ridicule is a potent weapon in cultural warfare, but even as conservatives made derisive wisecracks about “feminazis,” this ideology was tightening its grip on politics, academia, entertainment and journalism. A pivotal moment came in 2005, when Harvard University President Larry Summers, a former Clinton administration official, made the mistake of suggesting that “innate differences” between men and women might explain the relative shortage of females in the top ranks of scientific researchers. Within a year, Summers had been driven from office and a woman became president of Harvard. That, my friends, is what ideological hegemony looks like.

We can look back over the past dozen years and see how feminist ideology has, with astonishing rapidity, emerged as the most powerful force in American culture, and this power is purely destructive. Feminism never creates anything, but rather its “success” involves destroying individual men, and depriving men generally of social, economic and political influence in a sort of zero-sum-game formula. Consider, for example, how the Democrats delivered their party’s nomination to Hillary Clinton in 2016, rigging the process in her favor, and insisted that anyone who opposed her was guilty of misogyny. When she was rejected by voters in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, which hadn’t been won by Republican in a presidential election in more than 25 years, suddenly a radical “resistance” movement flared up, and the 63 million Americans who had voted for Donald Trump were branded “fascists.” Major social media companies, intimidated by (or sympathetic to) this “resistance,” rushed to silence or suppress the voices of those identified as enemies of “social justice.” Google fired James Damore for daring to dissent from the official corporate ideology of “diversity.”

Now here we are, in late September 2018, and the character assassination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh demonstrates what should have been apparent all along: No man is safe from the destructive force of feminism.

Certainly, no Republican man is safe in the #MeToo age. Megan McArdle observes that Judge Kavanaugh is being treated as a symbol, “a stand-in for every privileged white man who ever got away with something he shouldn’t have . . . the distilled essence of the patriarchy,” a target in “the ritual scapegoating of members of a despised class.” He is like the Duke lacrosse team, who were smeared in one of those “ritual scapegoating” exercises that feminists routinely organize. The choice of targets for these rituals is often rather random, where the demonized symbols of “privilege” just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Consider, for example, the fate of Jack Montague at Yale University. He was the popular star of the basketball team, but it was 2016 and the feminist fever that accompanied Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was nearing its boiling point. Yale had previously been accused of being too lenient on males accused of sexual misconduct, so when one of Montague’s ex-girlfriends decided she was a victim, Yale brought the hammer down on him. Montague is one of more than 100 male college students who have sued their schools, claiming they were falsely accused of sexual assault, then denied due process by administrators in the campus kangaroo courts where such claims are adjudicated.

Now we are seeing that the anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology, which has wrecked the lives of so many college boys, is not limited to university campuses and, indeed, feminism recognizes no limits at all to its destructive power. A highly esteemed federal judge finds his reputation smeared because of uncorroborated claims dating back more than three decades, as Democrats and their media allies seek to deprive him of every protection of due process. What can be done?

The one thing we know about totalitarians is that it is folly to attempt to appease them, yet there is never any shortage of fools who have neglected to learn the lesson of Munich. David Solway has written an insightful examination of “feminism’s male enablers,” that Brotherhood of White Knights, the soi-disant “male feminists.” The three men Solway cites — Michael Kimmel, Steven Galloway and Jian Ghomeshi — were ultimately hoisted by their own petards, their careers blighted by accusations of sexual misconduct. Because feminist “success” is measured by how many men it destroys, there is no safety in being a “male ally” of the movement. On the contrary, such “allies” place themselves in peril by their proximity to feminists. A man is actually safer by declaring himself an enemy of feminists (and keeping his distance from them) than by attempting to befriend them. And it cannot be doubted that this is the lesson many men will learn from witnessing the attack on Brett Kavanaugh.

If nothing else, this confirmation fight has caused Republican leaders to discover their long-lost testicles. Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley sent Dianne Feinstein a blistering letter denouncing her smear tactics against Judge Kavanaugh, and Mitch McConnell told reporters today: “We’re going to be moving forward. I’m confident we’re going to win, confident that he’ll be confirmed in the very near future.”

The refusal of the GOP to retreat before this feminist onslaught may prove to be a turning point in the battle to save the American republic. Does that sound like hyperbole? Yes, I’m sure it does, in the same way it sounded crazy when I repeatedly said Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It.

Who’s crazy now, huh?



 

Left-Wing Lawyer Accuses Republican Senators of Bullying Kavanaugh Accuser

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On the day in February 2017 when Jeff Sessions was confirmed as Attorney General, ABC News interviewed D.C. lawyer Debra Katz — identifying her only as a “protester” — as she declared: “We are going to fight back,. We are going to resist. We will not be silenced.” Debra Katz, whose enthusiasm for “LGBT Rights” is a matter of public record, is a member of the anti-Trump resistance and is also, perhaps not coincidentally, the attorney for Judge Brett Kavnaugh’s accuser. Friday, as a 10 p.m. deadline for Christine Blasey Ford to agree to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee neared, Katz became hysterical:

“Your cavalier treatment of a sexual assault survivor who has been doing her best to cooperate with the Committee is completely inappropriate,” Debra Katz, an attorney for Ford wrote to the committee leadership staff Friday evening. . . .
“The 10:00 p.m. deadline is arbitrary. Its sole purpose is to bully Dr. Ford and deprive her of the ability to make a considered decision that has life-altering implications for her and her family,” Katz wrote. “She has already been forced out of her home and continues to be subjected to harassment, hate mail, and death threats. Our modest request is that she be given an additional day to make her decision.”
Even with the extension granted, it appears the contentious back-and-forth could continue even spilling into next week, delaying Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote further.
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee and attorneys for Ford have for days discussed the terms of Ford’s testimony.
Ford offered a list of 10 demands, Grassley said, and the committee was willing to meet “halfway,” calling some of her demands “unreasonable.”

People who are beginning to suspect that Professor Ford’s accusation is “a flimsy smear-job,” to quote myself, will be inclined to ask, if this accusation is so “credible,” why does it seem the accuser is reluctant to testify? Doesn’t it appear that the whole point of this exercise is to obstruct the confirmation process? “We are going to resist,” Debra Katz promised at that February 2017 protest, and this is the #Resistance.

 

Late last night, committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley granted the anti-heterosexual #Resistance lawyer another 24 hours to agree to terms for her client’s testimony. Notice how, in her email to the committee, Katz asserted as a matter of fact that Professor Ford is “a sexual assault survivor,” and further asserted that Professor Ford is “doing her best to cooperate.” Many people are beginning to suspect that neither of these things is true, and that in fact Professor Ford never expected to be compelled to defend this flimsy smear-job in a public forum:

“Christine Blasey Ford is the Eric Clanton of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. You morons remember Clanton, don’t you? He was the antifa pussy who clubbed a Trump supporter with a bike lock, and I say pussy because just look at the video: He’s hanging in the back of the crowd, then suddenly bursts out in front, hits the guy when he isn’t looking, and disappears back into the crowd. Clanton obviously didn’t expect any consequences for his cowardly attack, but hadn’t counted on being tracked down and identified by 4chan. And it’s the same with Ford. She expected to just toss in a stink bomb and then disappear back into anonymity as just another #MeToo victim. And the Democrats expected the GOP to just flop like the Cleveland Browns late in the season and that would be that. . . .”

Far be it from me to call Professor Ford a liar, but the way she went about this — sending a letter to Dianne Feinstein, who said the accuser “strongly requested confidentiality [and] declined to come forward or press the matter further” — suggests that this was indeed a sneaky attack that Professor Ford hoped she could get away with behind the mask of anonymity. Just like Eric Clanton and his bike lock.

Eric Clanton attacked Trump supporters in Berkeley.

Some readers may remember that, after online activists ID’d Clanton as the bike-lock attacker, he claimed victimhood, saying people were “smearing and threatening me online,” which “created stress” for him. As if the Trump supporters who got bashed on the head with a heavy steel bike-lock suffered no stress? Quite similarly, Professor Ford says she is now suffering harassment because of her attack on Judge Kavanaugh, but who is responsible for this situation? Who decided it was a good idea to send this poison-pen letter to Sen. Feinstein? And who let this leak to the media? It wasn’t Republicans who did this. Feinstein was circulating this smear-job among Democrats on Capitol Hill, who were talking about it with their media buddies, long before she went public with it Sept. 13.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial about where this #MeToo approach to accusations of sexual misconduct is leading us:

The core tenet of Anglo-American law is that the burden of proof always rests with the person making the accusation. An accuser can’t doom someone’s freedom or career merely by making a charge.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) Any American with the least bit of common sense — a category that excludes Democrat voters — has to be horrified by what Professor Ford attempted to do to Judge Kavanaugh. Here was a man against whom no such accusation of sexual impropriety had ever been made, and yet all this woman had to do was to send a confidential letter to a Democrat Senator, and now everyone (including some so-called “conservatives”) is talking about how “credible” her accusation is. All it takes is one anonymous accuser, by this #MeToo standard, and a man’s reputation and career are destroyed, because of something that allegedly happened at a house party more than 35 years ago? Dear God!

Perhaps some will criticize me for describing Professor Ford’s attorney Debra Katz as “anti-heterosexual” merely because she seems so enthusiastic about “LGBT Rights,” with the implication that Ms. Katz’s interest in such issues is personal. Well, isn’t my suspicion “credible”? If we are expected to impose a verdict of guilt on Judge Kavanaugh based solely on this accusation made by Ms. Katz’s client, why aren’t we allowed to speculate about the motives of Ms. Katz’s role in the “resistance”?

Republican Senators play by the rules of decorum and civility, but I’m just a damned blogger, you see. Rules? We don’t need no stinkin’ rules.

You want a fight? We’re going to fight by street rules, and I’m not going to hesitate to use any weapons within reach. Smash my beer bottle on the bar and slash your neck with the jagged glass — that’s the way I’m fighting this bar-room brawl, and the responsibility for the bloodshed rests with those who chose to inaugurate hostilities.

“Talk thus to the marines, but not to me,” as Sherman replied to Hood.

War to knife, knife to the hilt — this is what you can expect, when you believe politics entitles you to do anything you please, including such a cruel and heinous libel as Ms. Katz’s client has committed.

In the absence of any corroborating evidence, we can only conclude that Professor Ford is a liar, whose unjust defamation of Judge Kavanaugh was motivated by the spiteful sentiments of partisan politics. Let the talking-heads on TV keep blathering on about how “credible” this accusation is, and how it needs to be taken seriously, but nobody can force me to play that “civility” game in the middle of bar-room brawl.

Democrats are desperate to stop Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and they’re desperate to win the midterm elections. Nov. 6 is coming.

Like I keep saying, people need to wake the hell up.



 

What Does ‘Credible’ Mean in 2018?

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Ever since Judge Kavanaugh’s accuser told her tale to the Washington Post, I’ve repeatedly seen the word “credible” used to describe her accusation. “It would hurt the legitimacy of the Supreme Court,” said Sarah Quinlan of Red State, “to force a confirmation through when there appears to be a serious and credible accusation without an attempt to investigate the claims.” And even Reason magazine editor Nick Gillespie — scarcely the kind of guy I’d expect to join a “we must believe the women” stampede — joined in on the lynch-mob rhetoric: “Following a late-breaking, credible accusation of a sexual assault that allegedly occurred in the early 1980s, when future Judge Kavanaugh was in high school, the outcome of his confirmation proceedings is far from clear.” It behooves us to ask, by what standard is it “credible”?

Or is “credible” now a synonym for suspicious and possibly partisan?

Prior to Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s decision to drop this stink-bomb into the Supreme Court confirmation process, there was not the slightest suggestion — not even by Judge Kavanaugh’s fiercest critics — that he was a man of lecherous reputation. While Democrats generally deplored Judge Kavanaugh’s conservative judicial philosophy, and made a lot of noise about the unavailability of his correspondence while he served as an aide to President George W. Bush, no one even hinted that there was any shadow over his personal life. So it would be contrary to his known character for the teenage Kavanaugh to have been “stumbling drunk” at a 1982 house party. as Christine Blasey Ford claims, and still more out of character for him to have sexually assaulted her.

Oh, but it’s a “credible accusation,” we’re told, although I can’t understand what aspect of it makes it “credible.” Was it widely known that Kavanaugh made a habit of heavy drinking while attending Georgetown Prep? Can someone point me to such a report, prior to Thursday, Sept. 13? Maybe I missed something, but I don’t remember reading any such story. Certainly, there was nothing — zero, zilch, nada — to suggest that Brett Kavanaugh has ever been regarded as a sexual predator, until Professor Ford made this accusation.

No, Brett Kavanaugh was a top student, ultimately a cum laude graduate of Yale University, and do we expect straight-A students to be “stumbling drunk” at parties, manhandling every girl within reach?

Meanwhile, the prep school young Miss Blasey attended was apparently a hotbed of drunkenness and degeneracy, and why are we supposed to believe she can perfectly remember everything that happened on a certain night in 1982, if she was boozing it up with the other girls from Holton-Arms School? But it’s a “credible accusation,” they say.

When the story broke last week, my initial reaction was to think, “Wow, Democrats are really desperate.” And then when Professor Ford told her story to the Post, my reaction was: “So what? Drunk teenage preppies gone wild.” Even if we stipulate, as a hypothetical, that some sort of encounter took place between a “stumbling drunk” 17-year-old Kavanaugh and a 15-year-old Miss Blasey, this was more than 35 years ago, and was probably not the sort of trauma-inducing incident it was portrayed as being. But that was a last-ditch defense — a fallback position — and the fighting on the front-line ramparts had barely just begun.

Judge Kavanaugh has flatly denied the accusation twice and, so far, we do not even have any evidence that young Kavanaugh and young Miss Blasey were ever simultaneously at any such party as she has described. Ed Whelan got himself into a mess this week with some very interesting speculation about how this could have been a case of mistaken identity. Yet while Whelan got spanked hard for that, the Wall Street Journal reported that Professor Ford “can’t recall in whose home the alleged assault took place, how she got there, or how she got home that evening.”

Why is everybody telling us that this is a “credible accusation”? Because, in the #MeToo age, it’s considered sexist to imply that a woman making such an accusation might not be credible. No matter how sketchy the story may be, or how obvious the possible motive to lie, you’re complicit in “rape culture” if you say, “Hey, this looks like a flimsy smear job.”

There’s a 10 p.m. ET deadline for Professor Ford to respond to the offer to testify next week, otherwise Mitch McConnell is prepared to bring the Kavanaugh nomination to a vote.

Mitch is all out of bubblegum, you see.



 

Can the GOP Win the Kavanaugh Fight?

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Whatever Happens To Kavanaugh,
Feinstein Got Exactly What She Wanted
— David Marcus, The Federalist

The drive to sink Kavanaugh
is liberal totalitarianism
— Sohrab Amari, New York Post

Kavanaugh Accuser Classmate:
‘That It Happened Or Not, I Have No Idea’
— Domenico Montenaro, NPR

‘We’re very confident:’
Trump, GOP growing more bullish
about Kavanaugh’s survival
— Nancy Cook, Politico

Media, ABC, PBS use Facebook
to beg other Kavanaugh accusers
to talk, ‘Truth will emerge’
— Paul Bedard, Washington Examiner

Whatever happened in 1982 — on an unspecified night, in an unknown location — what is happening to Judge Brett Kavanaugh now is grossly unfair and, if the Republican Party plays its cards right, the manifest unfairness of how Democrats have handled this sordid affair will redound to the GOP’s benefit in November.

The way in which this story made it to the top of the headlines, with Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein sitting on this letter from Christine Blasey Ford for six weeks before leaking it to the media, strikes many people as suspicious. Judge Kavanaugh sat for four days of hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Feinstein had this letter in her possession since July, but she didn’t think to ask him a single question about it? Has anyone gotten an explanation from Feinstein for this otherwise mysterious situation? But now that this ugly smear has gone public, Democrats say it would be wrong to expect Professor Ford to testify to the committee on Monday. So the Democrats just want to hurl this accusation out there, without anyone having the opportunity to cross-examine the accuser? This is blatantly unfair to Judge Kavanaugh, a man of hitherto impeccable reputation, and if Republicans can drive home this point — that Democrats are engaged in cheap partisan political trickery, unfairly tainting the reputation of a good man — this whole thing could blow up in the faces of the Democrats.

The committee chairman, Chuck Grassley, is a mild-mannered Midwesterner, but you can tell from his remarks about this situation that he’s angry as hell about how Democrats have turned the confirmation process into a disgraceful circus. One wit on Twitter invoked a line from an old science fiction movie: “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” Senator Grassley is all out of bubblegum, and Democrats will get an ass-kicking.

Why did Democrats think they could pull this off? Have they made the same miscalculation they made in 2016, when they expected the Access Hollywood recordings to destroy Donald Trump? As the election results proved, Americans are sick and tired of this kind of media smear-job “gotcha” game, and there is no reason to believe that Democrats can win the midterm elections by repeating a tactic that produced defeat two years ago. And there is a larger point to be made about this:

If you’re raped, call that cops. This is what sensible people have been saying for years about the situation that has emerged on American college campuses, where claims of sexual assault have been removed from the criminal justice system and handed over to administrative panels. Universities conduct secretive hearings where students accused of sexual misconduct are systematically deprived of the due-process protections that would be their constitutional right, had their accusers simply called 911 to report these alleged crimes. Centuries of Anglo-American common-law precedent have been discarded in favor of star-chamber tribunals operating under the putative authority of federal Title IX legislation. . . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.



 

Memories Light the Corners of My Mind

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In the 24 hours since I last wrote about the Brett Kavanaugh nomination (“Democrats Pull the Sleaziest Smear in Their Long History of Sleazy Smears”), further details have emerged including (a) the name of the accuser and (b) the name of Kavanaugh’s prep-school buddy on the night of the alleged incident in 1982. According to the tale, the future Supreme Court nominee was with Mark Judge, now a conservative journalist, on the night that 17-year-old Kavanaugh allegedly . . . uh, molested then-15-year-old Christine Blasey, who is now Professor Christine Ford:

Speaking publicly for the first time, Ford said that one summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.
While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.
“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”

Well, what do you expect a “stumbling drunk” 17-year-old to do?

The hazards of mixing alcohol and teenagers were as well-known in 1982 as they are today. All kinds of bad things happen as a result of such a combination, and this tale, if true, certainly wouldn’t be the worst thing a drunk teenager ever did. This alleged incident was originally reported as “attempted rape,” although the details do not seem to justify such a description. Getting groped by a drunk preppie “clumsily” attempting to undress you would be unpleasant, but it’s probably not a felony. Professor Ford’s claim that this alleged incident inflicted permanent psychological trauma on her strikes me as dubious. At times in my youth I was the victim of rather serious violence and I’ve seen guns drawn in anger, which is an adrenaline-pumping experience, but trauma? No, I sleep peacefully at night, and I find it difficult to believe that Professor Ford has spent the past 36 years in a state of emotional suffering due to this alleged incident at a house party in the summer of 1982.

It is not necessary to say Professor Ford is lying to say that her claim should have no bearing on Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation. There are probably sitting justices on the Supreme Court who did bad things as drunk teenagers, but there was no #MeToo movement in 1994, so senators did not grill Stephen Breyer about his adolescent behavior which, for all we know, was much more shocking and sordid than groping a girl at a party. This whole business of reaching into the distant past to dig up dirt on one’s political enemies has gotten completely out of hand when a 53-year-old federal judge, against whom no other similar accusation has ever been made, can be required to answer for what he may or may not have done as a “stumbling drunk” 17-year-old. Brett Kavanaugh never drowned a campaign aide in an Oldsmobile, did he?

Excuse me for being cynical about Serious Journalists devoting themselves to reporting what sounds like a scene from a screenplay for Prep School Boys Gone Wild, as if it were the most important news in the world. If the American people’s opinion of our political class sinks any lower, the Senate might become even less popular than the media.

That’s all this is, really — a political hit-job, promoted by partisan propagandists engaged in character assassination.

Mike Cernovich says that Professor Ford is a “far left wing activist” who recently scrubbed her social-media accounts to delete evidence of her political radicalism. Chuck Schumer is using Professor Ford’s accusation as an excuse to delay the vote on Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation. My hunch, however, is that Mitch McConnell will ram this through come hell or high water, and won’t waste any time doing so.

UPDATE: In the time it took me to write this post, Sen. Jeff Flake has announced that he is “not comfortable” voting for Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Senator Flake, a Republican from Arizona, is comfortable with a lot of things most people wouldn’t find comfortable, if you catch my drift, but he can’t vote for Kavanaugh? How about we start asking around about what young Jeff Flake was doing when he was 17, huh?