“Credible”accusations
I think it’s time to revisit this post of mine.
Here’s another relevant post, about the vagaries of memory.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
I think it’s time to revisit this post of mine.
Here’s another relevant post, about the vagaries of memory.
I don’t care whether the accuser is credible, or her story is credible. I don’t care whether Kavanaugh is innocent of this accusation. In fact, I’d feel a heckuva lot better about Kavanaugh if he HAD once tried to feel a girl up at a party when they were both teenagers. This thing is so far down at the wrong end of the telescope, it’s impossible to do justice to its absurdity.
I do care about whether an outstanding jurist can be destroyed by unsupported allegations of misbehavior when he was a juvenile. So far, the woman’s story is not particularly credible. In Neo’s language, it could theoretically have happened, but nothing contemporaneous to the alleged offense has been produced to indicate that it did happen.
I have not read the WaPo’s story but many have quoted it; Vox, The Hill, and others.
Here’s a sample of the phrasing of the accusation:
So, if accurate, we are informed she was modestly wearing a one piece bathing suit. We are also informed she was wearing clothes over the suit.
But when it comes to the teen boy’s clumsy, drunken juvenile, attempt to supposedly disrobe her, he is somehow described first of all as attempting to pull off her one piece bathing suit. Which is under her clothes.
” clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it.”
It’s reading grammatically tortuous phrases, obviously designed for maximum polemical impact in suggesting more than is there, which renders this woman’s story completely unsympathetic, even if the event took place.
By her account, supposedly, 30 seconds of clothed groping by a drunken teenager 36 years before, have left this person so psychically scared and debilitated that her relationship with her husband was ruined and she is chronically anxious … or something.
She elsewhere has apparently stated that had the boy not been so drunk, she is sure she would have been raped. She is sure of that?
Now, I’m all for rapists receiving the death penalty by hanging. You can probably guess what would be similarly appropriate for those making wholly false accusations.
I’m not exactly sure what is appropriate for those who calculatedly construct reputation killing accounts which are so self-serving and misleading, that even if containing a kernel of truth, they are substantially false.
The curse comes with sharing a social space with morally unbalanced organisms like that is the first place: especially in a victim culture.
Yes, Katie, I care that this kind of nonsense could jeopardize a highly qualified man from serving the nation. But pretending this is not nonsense is also dangerous. Whether it happened or not makes no difference to me. What is the “it”? Two teenagers at a party did or didn’t — what? The sexual revolution has finally come to this? We are drowning in bluenoses, and giving them even 15 minutes of our time is a pointless surrender.
Kai Acker:
Please see my latest post.
Just speculation, but I don’t think the White House was blindsided here.
I base this on the fact that, at the drop of the hat, they were able to find 65 women who have known him for 35 years, who knew him while he was in high-school, despite the fact that he went to an all-boys one, and who were all willing to sign a letter stating, for all practical purposes, that he didn’t assault them.
Kellyanne Conway’s response was unusually smooth. Pror to that, there was a peculiar focus on Kavenaugh being a good guy, a good soccer dad, a guy who personally treated women well, etc.
There are alternative explanations for all this, to be fair. But taken all together, something’s amiss.
doesn’t matter if the accusation is credible, there is a high possibility that someone did something similar to what she described to her, but not Kavanaugh. In fact, what happened could be that one of Kavanaugh’s group of friends tried to force himself on her and Kavanaugh was the person who stopped him, which explains how a girl could fend off 4 football players and came out unscathed. Kavanaugh might even be her white knight.
Manju:
As usual, your logic is faulty.
Let’s see—it was known for years (probably since 2012) that Kavanaugh was on anyone’s short list of conservative justice appointees.
It’s also known—to anyone who hasn’t lived in a cave since 1991—that one of the major assaults on any conservative nominee to SCOTUS is likely to include allegations of sexual wrongdoing.
And lately, accusations (sexual and otherwise—a la Mitt Romney and the high school haircut) have been extended to include high school shenanigans. So any smart group would have this sort of thing prepared for all the major candidates for appointment to SCOTUS.
However, it’s absurd to say that such a group couldn’t also have been assembled on short notice. I could do it; all you’d have to do (through Facebook or other ways) would be to contact people who knew that person in high school. It’s simplicity itself, really, so don’t act like it’s some enormous and unbelievable feat.
And that’s exactly what the people involved have said—that they were contacted after the allegations were made public:
Ever hear of the internet? Or the telephone? Or texting? They all are ways to contact someone almost instantaneously, when last I checked.
Don’t you ever get tired of repeating talking points?
Now you find it odd—something “amiss”—for Kavanaugh to be characterized as “a good guy, a good soccer dad, a guy who personally treated women well, etc.”? I think something’s “amiss” with you if you can find that suspicious.
And Kelly Ann Conway nearly always speaks very smoothly. So no, nothing was “unusually smooth” about anything she said.
The comments to your post pretty much predicted this stunt by Feinstein.
Well, since 1991 we’ve had Ailito, Roberts, and Gorsuch. I don’t recall them being assaulted in such a manner, so this would be a first.
Manju makes what could have been a good point: what were the major arguments against those three? Why didn’t the Dems go to the mat with them by alleging sexual wrongdoing?
Well, when the tactic was tried against Justice Thomas, it didn’t work.
So one rebuttal to Manju is the timing: the other three predate the success with Roy Moore and the #MeToo avalanche that demonstrated the newly created value of such allegations.
(all quotes from Wikipedia)
“On July 1, 1991, President George H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court of the United States to replace Thurgood Marshall, who had announced his retirement.[1] ”
“The Senate hearings on the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, began on September 12, 2005, with U.S. Senators posing questions to Roberts, who was nominated by President George W. Bush to fill the vacancy of Chief Justice of the United States.”
“On October 31, 2005, Samuel Alito was nominated by President George W. Bush for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States to replace the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor. ”
“After hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the nomination was sent to the Senate floor on April 4, 2017. … Democratic Senators then proceeded to filibuster Gorsuch’s nomination, after which Republicans invoked the “nuclear option”, eliminating the filibuster with respect to Supreme Court nominees.”
BUT
“In November 2017, nine women accused Roy Moore — a United States Senate candidate and a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama — “.
IMO the tell was DiFi’s timing. She says she got the letter from the accuser in July, but she waits until the hearings are over as the committee is set to vote in few days. How does that scan as authentic? How does that pass the smell test?
Waiting for some ‘journalist’ to ask DiFi how she decided to hire a Chinese driver who for 20 years was moonlighting as a spy, while her husband was doing business with China. Crickets.
Forgot to add this one in the timeline:
“The Me Too movement (or #MeToo movement) with many local/international alternatives is a movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault.[1][2] #MeToo spread virally in October 2017 as a hashtag used on social media in an attempt to demonstrate the widespread prevalence of sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace.[3] It followed soon after the sexual misconduct allegations against Harvey Weinstein.”
Of course, the target here & with Moore was really President Trump, and it took out a lot of Democrats before the Media quit running with it, but that doesn’t invalidate it’s success as a weapon against Republicans.
No they went after Roberts for having adopted children who were blond and not disabled.
Manju:
Clarence Thomas (1991) should have put them on notice forever to the possibility of a sexual charge surfacing, plus more recently the addition of the #MeToo movement and the Roy Moore allegations. If they weren’t prepared for this against Kavanaugh with some character witnesses from every era of his past, they certainly should have been. But as I wrote earlier, the character witnesses were not marshaled in advance; they came forward as a result of the charges, and people who claim otherwise (such as yourself) do so with zero evidence.
Now, by the way, it’s 200 women vouching for Kavanaugh’s character.
There’s also the precedent of allegations of sexual misconduct against GOP politicians Herman Cain, Donald Trump, and John McCain.
On the other hand, Roberts’ confirmation occurred when the GOP held the Senate rather strongly, 55 to 45. Right now, the margin in the Senate is much closer, and they feel they have a chance, a good chance, if they can just peel off a couple of Republicans in the Senate.
Same situation for Alito as for Roberts: 55 Republicans in the Senate. And yet the Democrats tried to block the vote with a filibuster, but they couldn’t get enough votes for that. Also, this was one of the accusations against Alito:
Gorsuch was accused of plagiarism, unsuccessfully, and Democrats tried to block him with a filibuster. That’s when the nuclear option was activated.
In addition, it was clear from the start that the Kavanaugh nomination activated the Democrats to what amounted to a no-hold-barred frenzy, compared to previous nominations (except Clarence Thomas). That is probably because Alito, Roberts, and Gorsuch replaced basically conservative justices, and their becoming SCOTUS justices did not change the court’s balance. Clarence Thomas, on the other hand, was nominated to replace liberal icon Thurgood Marshall, and although that also didn’t change the court’s liberal majority, it was quite threatening to the left, more so than Alito and Roberts and Gorsuch. Kavanaugh is replacing the swing justice Kennedy, which is far more threatening to the left, so anyone could have seen they would be pulling out all the stops, and that that could easily include old sexual allegations if they could find someone to make them.
It’s really not rocket science.
Well, paying attention to manju is like paying attention to micheal morre is paying attention to a dying chicken. Dead end street.