Neither “believe the women” nor “believe the victims” is a valid form of decision-making
I’ve written about this subject before, and I’ll probably write about it again.
But apparently it requires repeating:
Anyone who says that members of a certain group always tell the truth is lying.
There is no such group on earth. I don’t care if it’s a group of Catholic nuns or Buddhist monks. There are liars in every group, at least potentially.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that I’d take the word of an ex-con in the same way I’d take the word of some upstanding citizen of the community. But it means that in any given circumstances—and in particular if that circumstance is a court of law—a person is only as good as the evidence behind him or her.
The difficulty lies when there is no evidence other than a person’s word. Sometimes with sexual harassment or assault claims there is some independent corroborative evidence: an emailed photo, for example. That’s the petard with which Weiner was hoisted. But harassers and abusers aren’t always so dumb as to leave evidence, and then we are left with a hesaid/shesaid scenario. In that case we look at demeanor, before and after behavior, and all sorts of other information that could help us come to a decision.
But never should we rely on something like “being a woman” or “being a man” to tell us whether a person is a truth-teller in each particular circumstance. Nor does membership in a certain race or religion or any other demographic group, including being a child. Even children lie about abuse, sometimes at the behest of a scheming parent and sometimes on their own. It happens, although how often it happens is a matter of some dispute.
In a court of law, charges must be specific to a particular act or set of acts by this particular defendant. Time and place are all not just important, but ultra-important, not only to determine the veracity of the accuser and the accuracy of his/her memory, but to allow the defendant a chance to construct a defense.
That’s what was so powerful about many of Kafka’s works, so much so that it earned him an adjective derived from his name: Kafkaesque. Here are some excerpts from the beginning chapter of his book The Trial:
Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested. Every day at eight in the morning he was brought his breakfast by Mrs. Grubach’s cook – Mrs. Grubach was his landlady – but today she didn’t come. That had never happened before. K. waited a little while, looked from his pillow at the old woman who lived opposite and who was watching him with an inquisitiveness quite unusual for her, and finally, both hungry and disconcerted, rang the bell. There was immediately a knock at the door and a man entered. He had never seen the man in this house before. He was slim but firmly built, his clothes were black and close-fitting, with many folds and pockets, buckles and buttons and a belt, all of which gave the impression of being very practical but without making it very clear what they were actually for. “Who are you?” asked K., sitting half upright in his bed. The man, however, ignored the question as if his arrival simply had to be accepted, and merely replied, “You rang?” “Anna should have brought me my breakfast,” said K. He tried to work out who the man actually was, first in silence, just through observation and by thinking about it, but the man didn’t stay still to be looked at for very long. Instead he went over to the door, opened it slightly, and said to someone who was clearly standing immediately behind it, “He wants Anna to bring him his breakfast.” There was a little laughter in the neighbouring room, it was not clear from the sound of it whether there were several people laughing…
“I want to see Mrs. Grubach … ,” said K., making a movement as if tearing himself away from the two men – even though they were standing well away from him – and wanted to go. “No,” said the man at the window, who threw his book down on a coffee table and stood up. “You can’t go away when you’re under arrest.” “That’s how it seems,” said K. “And why am I under arrest?” he then asked. “That’s something we’re not allowed to tell you. Go into your room and wait there. Proceedings are underway and you’ll learn about everything all in good time.”…
It was much more important to him to get a clear understanding of his position, but he could not think clearly while these people were here, the second policeman’s belly – and they could only be policemen – looked friendly enough, sticking out towards him, but when K. looked up and saw his dry, boney face it did not seem to fit with the body. His strong nose twisted to one side as if ignoring K. and sharing an understanding with the other policeman. What sort of people were these? What were they talking about? What office did they belong to? K. was living in a free country, after all, everywhere was at peace, all laws were decent and were upheld, who was it who dared accost him in his own home?
Of course, the court of public opinion is not the same as a courtroom, and does not have the same exact standards. But it should have standards nonetheless—and specificity, corroboration, and the ability to verify charges matter. So do character witnesses.
What should not matter and should never matter is the class to which a person belongs: man or woman, black or white, rich or poor. Each individual is an individual and must be evaluated on the strength of the details of his or her story, both accuser and the accused. We should be humble about it, too, and acknowledge the inherent difficulties in making a decision.
And, as with the author of this harrowing story of rape, we should take a middle way:
I cannot tell you if a person’s account of his or her assault is valid or not. I cannot tell you to believe all survivors. But I can tell you that there is a difference between sharing your story and naming a person in an accusation. The longer a person waits to do so, the more scrutiny and skepticism is warranted…
I do not believe we have immunity to accuse without consequence, and…I advocate due process and the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” more now than ever. Don’t blame a person for not reporting sooner, but don’t damn the accused to compensate for it.
Do I believe Ford? If I had to vote, I would say I strongly believe her story is untrue. I believe that she may believe she’s telling the truth, however. And I believe that it is at least possible that she is telling the truth, although highly unlikely.
I believe that her story has been used by ruthless politicians who will stop at nothing to destroy the opposition. At the moment it looks as though they have been foiled, but that could change at any minute.
And that’s where we’re at now.
She may be telling the truth that someone at a get together once groped her. That doesn’t mean what she is saying is accurate. And there is something funny about her being traumatized after all these years. She put herself into the situation, and she wasn’t raped. She should have gotten over this. It would be interesting to hear how this affected her relationships with other guys as she proceeded through high school and college. It’s also possible that she was interested in Kavanaugh and he never noticed her.
It’s not “believe the woman” or “believe the victim”. It’s believe the Democrat. Powerline has reported on the complete lack of interest in numerous allegations of spousal abuse against Minnesota Democrat AG candidate Keith Ellison who is currently a US Representative and former vice-chairman of the national Democrats.
FOAF:
It’s true that there is a differential “believe the woman” mantra. But it’s also generational. For example, the younger generation of Democratic women is not very pro-Bill-Clinton (at least, that’s my understanding). It was an older generation of Democratic women who forgave him, and forgave Ted Kennedy. I’m not sure the younger women would do that, although they might because politics does reign supreme for many. But my guess is that if any Democratic women are believing the Ellison accuser or accusers, it would be the younger women. But perhaps there are none; I don’t know.
For that matter, I see differential belief systems on the right, too, depending on the politics of accuser and accused. I try to be equal in my beliefs. I tend to be skeptical of everyone.
There are two possible reasons for the timing of Feinstein’s disclosure. After sitting on it through the procedural opportunities to raise it, waiting until the process was closed gave the Democrats a second bite at the apple (apologies) in case all prior efforts to derail confirmation failed. The other possibility is that after six weeks of review (and you just KNOW that claim was thoroughly reviewed) it was obvious that Ford’s story would fall apart like wet tissue and the timing was designed to hamstring the gathering of evidence to support Kavanaugh.
The other stinky rat in all this is Ford’s vagary on the date and location. This is what a lying witness does in order to avoid being pinned down on a critical particular. If Ford proffered a date and location, those claims might well be wholly disproven – for example, if Kavanaugh were out of the area on a provable trip. If a girl is subjected to the described trauma, the details of the time and location would be indelibly in her memory. I suspect that Ford either imagined the event, in which case she is mentally ill, or that she manufactured the tale from whole cloth. I also believe that Feinstein and Schumer know this but are using Ford for their own cynical purposes.
In a way it’s a tempest in a teapot. Kavanaugh will be confirmed and, once on the bench he’s there for life. The leftists should be terrified because if Kavanaugh was center-right before last Friday, well, you can probably drop the “center” part now.
When I first came to Boston as a young man I was single and natually started looking around for women to date. It turned out that there were lots of them who were either social workers or psychologists. It took me about a year to figure it out, but it became clear that these women were driven by emotion far more than reason, which made them very tricky to deal with. You never knew what was a hidden mine that would set them off. Some of them didn’t even have the decency to do it in private, which, having been brought up to be a gentleman and to always treat women with respect, put me in some very uncomfortable situations. After a while I figured out where the rational ones were, nurses, doctors, and other professions where they had to be rational and couldn’t afford to be emotional head cases.
This woman is a definite nutcase driven by her emotions who never thought through the consequences to her of her actions,
And p.s. – If I ever in the future think about returning to the Democratic Party, this will thwart that impulse.
Some women lie, and some women tell the truth. Some men lie, and some men tell the truth. I always try to weigh the available evidence. Sometimes it means believing bad things about people I agree with.
In this case, there is no supporting evidence or specificity at all to the woman’s charges. All sorts of “truth for her” are possible, and it is not going to be possible to determine what objective truth is. There is no reason to believe her story more than his denial — in fact, his denial has more evidence for it, since he and two other men she has named say nothing like that happened.
Neo, I’m not convinced that many Democratic women, old or young, are even hearing about the Ellison accusations, since the MSM won’t run the story.
Kate:
Good point.
If a tree falls in the forest…and only Republicans hear it…
The more famous and richer the man the more likely the accusation is fake, especially if the man is politician belonging to the GOP. believe the woman only if there is no grudge between them and she has nothing to gain.
to the unhinge liberal resistance filing a false rape charge against GOP to stall their agenda is seen to be equivalent to rebels in star wars sacrificing their lives to destroy the death star.
Ellison’s accuser speaks.
The last person I would believe is a woman – any woman. Most of them are habitual liars, since the ability to lie convincingly often is their only defense: they are weak. So this ability must have been an evolutionary acquired trait, a part of a sexual dimorphism. Honesty, at least in the Western tradition, is a masculine virtue, just like chastity is a feminine virtue. Nobody expects or demands honesty from women, just as nobody expects or demand chastity from men. We reasonably forgive women for lies and men for promiscuity since these sins are part and parcel of their genetic makeup. I must know a woman personally and for a long enough time before I can trust her in some situations at least.
Thanks, Neo. Democrats today definitely do not try to keep an open mind. Whom to believe is determined by politics and by nothing else. Ellison’s ex tells, in your terms, a credible story. That doesn’t necessarily mean she would win at trial, but she filed police reports and told people about the events AT THE TIME.
With Ellison’s background with Louis Farrakhan, about which he is not honest, and his history of support for a cop-killer, and now this personal stuff, it boggles my mind that he could be elected Attorney General of Minnesota.
Sergey:
I don’t know what kind of women you tend to be surrounded by, but the statement that “most of them are habitual liars” is wrong.
Maybe they are that way in Russia, and maybe people there don’t expect honesty from women and so they don’t deliver it. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, or maybe a remnant of Russia’s difficult history. Or maybe it’s just the subset of women you’ve had experience with.
But it is not generally that way here. I’ve been around women all my life, and I see no particular difference in the amount of lying that goes on among men and among women. They may lie about different things, of course. But most men and most women are not habitual liars—unless you count social “white” lies like, “I like your new haircut.”
I’m perfectly willing to believe that she was groped by someone. It was not uncommon in high school in those days; I hope it’s less common now but have no real way to tell. I’m puzzled as to why she doesn’t say whether SHE was drinking too.
OK, I’m not actually puzzled by that.
At this point in time, the only certain evidence comes from three people – the accuser, the accused, and the witness. The FBI could interview all three and report the results to the committee. Then the committee could vote. Beyond that I see no investigative process for determining the truth.
There is no substantive evidence. It’s he said, she said. In this case the accused, Judge Kavanaugh strongly denies the assault and says he doesn’t even know his accuser, Professor Ford.
The witness identified by Professor Ford, Mark Judge, says that he has no memory of such an incident and that such behavior would be out of character for Judge Kavanaugh. However, we know that Mark Judge is a self-described teen age alcoholic who could have been deeply intoxicated and blacked out the memory of the incident. On the other hand, from all the testimonies to Kavanaugh’s character by many people, both male and female. his claim about the assault being out of character for Kavanaugh rings true. Kavanaugh’s record of public service is extensive and well known. He has undergone six background checks by the FBI with no hint of such an incident in his past. If such an incident occurred in his teen age years, he has completely reformed as he matured.
We know little about Professor Ford except that she is a Democrat who gives small sums to Democrat causes. Is she an ideologue? Is she highly respected for her character and integrity by friends and colleagues? Has she been suffering from the psychic damage of the described incident for all these years? Why can’t she remember the exact date and the address of the encounter? Can she provide proof that she ever met Judge Kavanaugh at any other time? (How did she know who it was that assaulted her?) Did she have a reputation as a drinker or party girl as a teen? Many other questions come to mind that might be asked to determine who is telling the truth. Yet, even with all the extra information at hand, it’s still a judgment call. If a baby were involved, we could use Solomon’s example to determine the truth. As it is now, you weigh the preponderance of evidence and do the best you can.
IMO, from what I know up till now, Judge Kavanaugh should be confirmed.
I am not going to play the political correctness game and flat out claim that she is a liar. She gave a god’s perspective third person account on what happened like a third person narrative of fictions. She claimed she was drunk and forgot everything else that could help clarify the event, but have perfect vivid recollection on every detail of attack even including details that a woman with a man on top couldn’t possibly known.
She remembers who he was, his last name, what she wore, how he clumsily pull up her outer shirt to try to take off the swimsuit underneath, how he covered her mouth with his hand, who walks into the room, how many were in the room, how many were in the house, even down to who turn up the music to cover her scream, that is a lot of details a distressed drunk girl struggling against a man’s assault can perceive let alone remember after 30 years, especially given how she could remember absolutely nothing else.
Let’s put it this way: a girl who wants to hurt someone is not above telling the truth – if the truth is sufficiently humiliating or salacious to get the job done.
Do I “believe the women?” Not on your life. I am willing to believe the woman if evidence or even logic is on her side, but if there’s an accusation from nowhere, without evidence, that cannot be proven, I would not buy that story with someone else’s money.
I reserve the right to update my opinion should actual evidence emerge.
There is a certain amount of evidence. There is evidence that a bizarre accusation has been made against a man with a sterling reputation as an adult; and according to other testimony, as a teenager. This description of his character has been attested to publicly by numerous women who worked with, or for him. There is evidence that the woman who made the accusation tried to remain anonymous, at least to the public. There is evidence that the woman who made the accusation had reason to hold a grudge against the accused’s Mother, a Judge, who ruled against her family. There is evidence that she suddenly had a flash back some 12 years ago in some kind of couple’s counseling. Why counseling? We don’t know. There is evidence that the accuser present salacious details of the event, yet cannot state with specificity the time and place, or name witnesses. There is clear evidence that this accusation was timed–I would say staged–in a desperate attempt to stall, and ultimately defeat the confirmation of a man who would change the make-up of the Supreme Court. There is evidence that the woman who make the accusation is an “activist” in the opposing party. There is also evidence that the Senator, who brought the accusation to light was aware of it for months, and sat on it until formal hearings on the nomination were completed, and a vote–which was widely believed to be pro forma approval was imminent.
Finally, there is evidence that the accuser is, at best, playing coy when invited to make her statement in public, and presumably under oath.
There is plenty of evidence. There is simply no evidence that an assault, or whatever is alleged, actually took place over thirty years ago.
It is fair to say in general that neither the man nor the woman should be believed a priori in absence of supporting evidence. That is certainly true in a legal sense; on the other hand when opinions are formed, a certain level of credibility is required to buttress belief.
“At this point in time, the only certain evidence comes from three people – the accuser, the accused, and the witness.” J.J.
Apparently, there’s now a fourth ‘witness’.
“Third Accused Male – Patrick Smyth – Denies Far Left Activist Christine Ford’s Allegations of Abuse”
There’s also contradictory assertions in Ford’s letter to Feinstein;
“Here’s The Actual Letter Christine Blasey Ford Wrote to Feinstein Accusing Brett Kavanaugh”
Ford states:
Besides 3 out of the 4 kids Ford claims were present with her denying an attack happened, they also claim to have never even been at the party with Ford.
Then there’s Kavenaugh upstairs turning up loud music to preclude “any successful attempt to yell for help”. Especially back then, music systems were in or near the living room, which in this case was downstairs… plus, with loud music playing to mask the attack, what need to cover her mouth?
Then there’s her claim that “she ran outside of the house and went home” Unable to drive at 15, how exactly did she get home?
Her story’s full of holes and 3 out of the 4 people she claims were there categorically deny ever having been there. She’s a mentally unstable woman, an ‘activist’ leftist and surprise! George Soros is funding this slanderous travesty.
“Kavanaugh’s accuser and the curious George Soros links”
How did she find out who he was? Did she find out who her perpetrator was when she recognised kavanaugh in a newspaper many years after the incident? Teenagers usually are not aware of their friends last names unless they are classmates, they didn’t even go to the same school or belong to the same social circle that some third party mutual friends could corroborate that they know each other, how and when exactly did she find out her attackers last name was Kavanaugh, from a yearbook? I am already giving her a huge benefit of doubt that she was in fact attacked by someone instead making the whole thing up.
Her inability to provide a place or transportation to get to the place makes perfect sense If the allegation is a fake story she made up, because it spares her the duty to give accurate description of the place or the model and colour of the vehicle she rode in to get there. If she gives a name of the person who took her there, either she had to find someone who agrees to play along with her which increase the chances of having the story collapsed under questioning, or she had to say one of kavanaugh’s friends took her there, then she had to give descriptions of the vehicle which may be difficult for her to find out now.
Everything she has said about the event was calculated and what she omitted or included in her story made perfect sense if you look at it in the POV that she fabricated the story.
Pay attention how carefully she had planned the story, she gave absolutely no concrete details about the whole ordeal such as time, place and vehicle that could be proved or disproved except the names of the people, who were conveniently all kavanaugh’s buddies whose denial of the event would never be accepted as evidence because it will be seen as cover up for a friend. How convenient is it that everyone in the party she could remember were all his friends whose denial will never be accepted. Such calculation can also be found in her response to gop’s invitation to Monday’s testimony, she accepted to go, but only under an condition that is literally impossible to accomplish. In other words she pretty much rejected the invitation but provided the talking point to the democrat base media that she wanted to attend but gop’s denial of her demand made it impossible for her to go, how freaking sleazy these liberals could be.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/09/19/kavanaugh-accusers-lawyer-was-hillary-fundraiser-linked-to-top-obama-bundler-with-family-ties-to-michelle-obama/
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/09/19/showdown-dems-make-demands-against-rule-of-law-on-kavanaugh-and-fisa-declassification/
“Now Ford has stated, just on Tuesday, that she doesn’t want to speak to the committee until after the FBI has conducted an investigation.
This is an unreasonable and ill-founded demand, like that of the Democrats on the document declassification. It violates the rule-of-law point that Ford’s allegation is not something the FBI would investigate.
It would be up to the jurisdiction in the state of Maryland to investigate it, if the statute of limitations hasn’t run out. (It may have, since Kavanaugh was a minor at the time, going by the general timeframe of “1982.”)
There’s no federal crime for the FBI to look into. Christine Ford should make a complaint in a court in Maryland, and if she wants to delay testifying to the Senate while that process is underway, that would at least be a valid invocation of the law.
My guess is that she won’t do that. The point here is not to claim that she has suffered nothing; it’s to clarify that nothing is proven against Kavanaugh, and although we have a rule-of-law approach for trying to bring such proof, the accuser is not using it.
Instead, Ford, her lawyers, and their supporters among the Senate Democrats are proposing an arbitrary, extracurricular use of the FBI as a sort of taxpayer-funded PI agency for whatever they want investigated.
Think about the danger that portends, if we just stand by and allow it to be done. Would you want it done to you? To have the FBI sent to “investigate” you, based on allegations that haven’t even been lodged in the terms of a statutorily defined crime?
You’re fooling yourself, to a tragic extent, if you think it couldn’t happen because you’ll never be a Supreme Court nominee, with the FBI doing national security background checks on you, and maybe sort-of being the agency senators would reach for if they wanted to do politically leveraged “background checks.”
No. If a precedent like this is established, it’s the millions of us who won’t be Supreme Court nominees who will have the least protection against unrestrained misuse of law enforcement agencies.
…
That brings us to the alarming implications in these moves by the Democratic leaders. Think about two things here. One, these demands are beyond the pale. They show that the Democrats and the activist lawyers making them do not act from a rule-of-law understanding in common with the expectations of American philosophy on government. And they’re prepared to turn it into a showdown, starting this week.
Two, this is who they are. It will not settle them down to win a majority back, or win back the White House. If they can regain a majority in Congress, they will do more of this, not less.
This is how you will be governed, if these folks have the power to do it. Constitutional restraints and rule-of-law expectations will be ignored at will. Instead of living within constitutional boundaries, we’ll be subject to the outcomes of arbitrary partisanship and naked power struggles.”
* * *
The latest from McCarthy:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-accuser-must-testify/
It’s a Set-up
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
September 19, 2018 10:53 AM
“My personal favorite part of the missive is the lawyers’ complaint that, based on published reports, it seems that some of the senators have already “made up their minds” about Professor Ford’s story. This takes some gumption, coming from Democratic activists who are working in tandem with Democratic senators who decided to vote against Judge Kavanaugh long before the hearing started. The lawyers utter this tripe while in the middle of a transparent gambit to block the nomination by delaying it interminably — or at least until after the November election.
What a crock.
…
Instead, the vote was delayed to provide Ford an opportunity to testify. This was wholly unnecessary under the circumstances, but the committee went the extra mile in order to exhibit sensitivity to Ford’s alleged trauma. Rather than accept, however, Ford’s partisan Democratic lawyers countered that there must be an investigation first — never mind that the committee hearing is an investigation of the only thing that matters: how the Senate should exercise its constitutional advice-and-consent duty.
Four points, to state the obvious….
…
It is fashionable throat-clearing at this point to offer some vertiginous, ostentatiously sympathetic twaddle about how Professor Ford is credible in the sense that she truly believes what she has claimed, yet mistaken about . . . well . . . everything that matters. Sorry, I’m a simple man. What’s happening here is pure BS.
I don’t know if something awful really happened to Ford when she was 15. None of us will ever know. Apparently, Ford herself does not know basic facts either, since she cannot tell us where and when the alleged assault happened, and what she did in the aftermath. Giving her the benefit of the doubt that it happened as she claims it happened, she hasn’t come close to establishing that Brett Kavanaugh, as opposed to some other kid she has forgotten, was her assailant; that is, she has not established that her memory of the assailant can be trusted when she cannot recall other rudimentary details. We can feel sympathy for her while nevertheless inferring that she does not want to testify because she cannot explain the oddities of her account. Or we can justifiably suspect that the whole thing is a partisan stunt.
…
When someone is accused of criminal conduct, the burden is not supposed to be on the accused to convince us that it didn’t happen. There must first be convincing evidence that it did happen before the accused is called on to answer the charge. Yet Judge Kavanaugh did not remain silent. He has insisted on answering, essentially proclaiming: “It is not just that I am not guilty; I am innocent. It is not just that this allegation hasn’t come close to being proved; I did not do it. And I am prepared to testify to that effect, publicly or in closed session, anytime, anyplace.”
As I argued yesterday, you are not going to have decent, meritorious people in law and politics if Democrats are permitted to mug Kavanaugh the way they mugged Judge Bork and Justice Thomas, the way they try to mug every Republican judicial candidate whose nomination threatens to close off the courts as an avenue of radical social change — i.e., whose confirmation makes it more likely that the Left will have to try to convince voters and lawmakers in the democratic process, rather than have unaccountable judges impose progressive pieties.
The long-term goal here is to make the judicial-confirmation process so notoriously savage and demeaning that no sensible, well-meaning conservative or moderate person would agree to put himself and his family through it. The idea is to stock the courts with nothing but progressives and mediocrities willing to roll over for progressives. It is a disgrace that this should happen in this republic, and in connection with the courts, which are not supposed to be political forces, but which have been converted into an uber-political institution that progressives are desperate to control.
The short-term goal is to delay Kavanaugh’s nomination. Democrats should not be allowed to get away with it.”
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/terence-p-jeffrey/third-alleged-party-attendee-denies-kavanaugh-accusers-story
“On Tuesday, Ford’s lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, sent a letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley in which they demurred on the question of whether she would testify before the committee about her allegations and asked instead that the FBI investigate the matter first.
“The hearing was scheduled for six short days from today and would include interrogation by Senators who appear to have made up their minds that she is ‘mistaken’ and ‘mixed up,'” the lawyers wrote. “While no sexual assault survivor should be subjected to such an ordeal, Dr. Ford wants to cooperate with the committee and law enforcement officials.”
They said an “FBI investigation of the incident should be the first step in addressing her allegations.”
Grassley sent his own letter to Ford’s attorneys on Wednesday, noting that committee staff had been reaching out to Ford hoping to discuss the matter and that the committee had invited her to testify either in a closed session or an open one, depending on her preference.
“The committee’s standard procedure for supplemental background investigations is to conduct phone or in-person interviews with the relevant parties to discuss the underlying issues,” Grassley said in his letter to Ford’s lawyers. “To that end, committee staff has attempted to contact you directly by phone and e-mail several times to schedule a call at a time convenient to you and your client. We thus far have not heard back from you with regard to that request.”
“As you know, I have reopened the hearing on Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination in light of Dr. Ford’s allegations,” Grassley said in his letter. “That hearing will begin again on Monday, Sept. 25, at 10:00 a.m. I have invited Dr. Ford to testify regarding her allegations against Judge Kavanaugh. And in recognition of how difficult it can be to discuss allegations of this kind in public, I have also offered her the choice of testifying in either a public or closed session of the hearing. In response to my invitation, however, you wrote yesterday that ‘an FBI investigation of the incident should be the first step in addressing her allegations.”
Grassley told Ford’s lawyer that that is not the FBI’s job.
“It is not the FBI’s role to investigate a matter such as this,” he wrote.
“The Constitution assigns the Senate, and the Senate only, with the task of advising the president on his nominee and consenting to the nomination if the circumstances merit,” wrote Grassley.
“We have no power to commandeer an Executive Branch agency into conducting our due diligence,” he said. “The job of assessing and investigating a nominee’s qualifications in order to decide whether to consent to the nomination is ours and ours alone.” “
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/brett-kavanaugh-accusers-classmate-backtracks-after-guilty-claim-goes-viral/
“A woman who says she attended high school with Christine Blasey Ford claimed Tuesday in a since-deleted tweet that she was certain of Kavanaugh’s guilt and remembered the alleged assault being spoken about in school in its aftermath.
..
Several journalists challenged Miranda’s claim that the assault was discussed in school, citing Ford’s claim that she believed the attack “occurred in the summer of 1982.” Ford also told the Washington Post that she told no one of the alleged assault for some 30 years before eventually telling her therapist in 2012.
…
In a subsequent tweet she admitted to having “no first hand knowledge” of the incident.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dianne-feinstein-brett-kavanaugh-accusation-tangled-web/
Victor Davis Hanson says:
“The only likely remedy for those lacunae in her narrative would be some sort of extraordinary memory “recovery” in the next few days that miraculously provides names, places, and dates, or more likely increased pressure on Senate Republicans to agree to a preposterous FBI “investigation” that would de facto brand her charges as credible enough for such efforts, or to demand private interviews — as if the accuser can adjudicate the conditions under which the government will investigate her charges. Imagine the jurisprudence precedent: “I accuse Mr. X, and these are my ground rules under which your government agency will pursue my charge.”
In sum, the ripples from Feinstein’s stunt are substantial and not good for progressives.
If we are to consider anyone in legal jeopardy due to an initially anonymous letter dealing with an allegation about something 36 years past, then surely we much more easily can damn without evidence far more recent accusations, whether concerning Keith Ellison’s alleged domestic violence, or Bill Clinton’s reported Lolita Express antics, or Joe Biden’s photographed creepy, too-long hugs and “reported” nude swimming in front of female Secret Service agents — and that would be the mere beginning of such a spiral.
At some point, realists in the Democratic party should wise up and cut their losses before they turn off too many more voters on the eve of the midterms, while exposing far more of their own to charges with a lot more credibility than Dr. Ford’s. ”
* * *
Note that we don’t have to imagine the jurisprudence where the accused dictates the terms of investigation to the FBI: that is exactly what Hillary and her team did.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/dont-believe-women-believe-evidence/
“The idea that all women and girls must be telling the truth at all times about sexual-assault allegations because they “have nothing to gain” is perilously detached from reality. Retired NYPD special-victims-squad detective John Savino, forensic scientist and criminal profiler of the Forensic Criminology Institute Brent Turvey, and forensic psychologist Aurelio Coronado Mares detail the myriad “prosocial” and “antisocial” lies people tell in their textbook False Allegations: Investigative and Forensic Issues in Fraudulent Reports of Crime.
“Prosocial deceptions” involve specific motives beneficial to both the deceiver and the deceived, including the incentives to “preserve the dignity of others”; to gain “financial benefit” for another; to protect a relationship; for “ego-boosting or image protection (of others)”; and for “protecting others from harm or consequence.”
“Antisocial” lies involve selfish motives to “further a personal agenda at some cost to others,” including “self-deception and rationalization to protect or boost self-esteem”; “enhance status or perception in the eyes of others”; “garner sympathy”; “avoid social stigma”; “conceal inadequacy, error, and culpability”; “avoid consequence”; and for “personal and/or material gain.”
Let me repeat the themes of my work in this area for the past two years to counter the “Believe Women” baloney:
The role of the press should be verification, not validation.
Rape is a devastating crime. So is lying about it.
COMMENTS
It’s not victim-blaming to get to the bottom of the truth. It’s liar-shaming.
Don’t believe a gender. Believe evidence.”
https://nypost.com/2018/09/19/the-drive-to-sink-kavanaugh-is-liberal-totalitarianism/
“Senate Dems have settled on the ugliest means available, even by the standards of the body that added the verb “Borking” to our political vocabulary. The question is: Why have Republican high-court nominations brought out the worst from the left, going back to the Ronald Reagan era?
The short answer is that liberals fear their major cultural victories of the past half-century are democratically illegitimate. Not a single one was won at the ballot box, going back to the Supreme Court’s 1965 Griswold decision, which recognized a constitutional right to contraceptives. From abortion to gay marriage, plus a host of less titillating issues, modern liberalism has lived by the Court. And liberals fear their cause will die by the Court.
Unless, that is, they block conservative encroachments into the judiciary by all means necessary. Hence, Borking and Clarence Thomas-ing. And hence, too, the naked slandering of Mitt Romney in the course of the 2012 presidential campaign, to forestall his shifting the Court to the right.
I wish I could say that the way out of this impasse is for the right to double down on the gentle conservatism represented by Romney, the Bush dynasty, and the late John McCain. Perhaps that is the right course in the long term. But for now, it is imperative for the health of American democracy to resist the liberal ruthlessness that is on display in the halls of the Senate.
The verb “to Kavanaugh” must not be permitted to enter our lexicon, lest the step to unfreedom become irrevocable.”
http://thefederalist.com/2018/09/19/the-kavanaugh-allegation-process-is-a-miscarriage-of-justice-for-everyone/
“But even if she had handled the situation properly, and not as a political cudgel, the Senate is still an inappropriate place to litigate claims of sexual assault. Since Maryland apparently doesn’t have a statute of limitations on felony sex assault, charges could still be filed there if the case is strong enough to do so.
While the media and other Democratic institutions are currently disdainful of due process for sex assault claims, in America, we don’t say that murky allegations are the same as guilty convictions. We don’t even say that clear allegations are the same as guilty convictions. People have a constitutional right to face their accuser, and cases must be proven beyond the partisan court of punditry. If Kavanaugh, a husband and father of young girls, is an attempted rapist, the appropriate place to make that case is in a courtroom.
Society should encourage the use of legal proceedings where the accuser can get a measure of justice for wrongdoing and the accused faces a jury of peers instead of a jury of partisans, where representation can cross-examine witnesses. A society that instead encourages litigating murky claims of sexual assault in the kangaroo courts of the media and Senate hearings is an unhealthy society. A Senate star chamber full of grandstanding senators on both sides will not elucidate what happened four decades ago, when all people involved were minors, and the accuser is unclear on the details.
…
Feinstein’s behavior is not the behavior of someone who seeks justice for a victim of sex assault. It is the behavior of someone who seeks to prevent a Republican president from filling a vacancy with a qualified candidate. The American people have a right to elect a president who fills vacancies on the court. It is one thing to keep a precedent of not filling vacancies in the last few months of a presidency. It is entirely another to establish a precedent that unverifiable allegations can indefinitely prevent the filling of a seat.
The American people elected Donald Trump to fill these vacancies. Delaying tactics that are not about seeking or obtaining justice should not be rewarded, particularly when they involve the destruction of reputations and careers without sufficient compelling evidence.”
Something to be watching – it may get Ford out of hot water, but not the Dems as a whole.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/09/a-case-of-mistaken-identity.php
“Then, this morning, Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post wrote a column about how mistaken identity is not uncommon in cases like these. Was this column prompted by buzz that the Kavanaugh case is, indeed, one of mistaken identity?
Finally, there is this post by Ramesh Ponnuru. He cites Parker’s column and suggests that Kavanaugh “may be confident that new evidence will emerge that strongly tends to vindicate him.”
I still don’t have an opinion on whether the Kavanaugh case is one of mistaken identity. That’s a possibility, but it’s also possible that the incident didn’t occur at all or in anything like the way Ford describes. And it’s possible that Ford has gotten it right and is telling the truth.
However, some publicly known facts tend to support the mistaken identity theory. I’m thinking of (1) Ford’s failure to remember such details as where the alleged attack took place, (2) Sen. Feinstein’s seeming unwillingness to treat Ford’s story as tight enough to push forward with for months, (3) Ford’s reluctance to testify publicly (or maybe even privately) before the Judiciary Committee, (4) the reported absence of Kavanaugh’s name in the notes of the psychologist with whom she discussed the alleged incident some years back, and (5) Patrick J. Smyth’s denial of Ford’s claim that he was at the party where the assault allegedly took place.
Lack of clarity by Ford about who really attacked her would tend to explain all of the above. I emphasize, however, that such lack of clarity is not the only possible explanation.
For now, let’s just say of the mistaken identity theory: Developing. Maybe.”
This shows why all allegations must be treated with all due process protections and more, because even acquittal isn’t enough to satisfy the Left.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/09/breaking-himtoo-at-the-nyrb.php
Ian Buruma, the editor of The New York Review of Books, left his position on Wednesday amid an uproar over the magazine’s publication of an essay by a disgraced Canadian radio broadcaster who had been accused of sexually assaulting and battering women.
“I can confirm that Ian Buruma is no longer the editor of The New York Review of Books,” Nicholas During, a publicist for the magazine, wrote in an email. It was unclear if Mr. Buruma resigned or was fired. He did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment.
The essay’s author, Jian Ghomeshi, who was acquitted of sexual assault charges in 2016, lamented his status as a pariah, “constantly competing with a villainous version of myself online.”
Why do conservatives have to play this “may be she is telling the truth I can’t say 1 am 100% sure it didn’t happen because I wasn’t there” game along with liberals, why do we have to give room to liars to thrive just because you want the liberals to think you are fair? You know who else wasn’t there? Kavanaugh. A lie is a lie is a lie, a thing that didn’t happen doesn’t magically become a thing that has a 0.000001% change that it might had happened and we can’t no longer call it a lie since there still a chance that it could be true just because an unhinged liberal with zero credibility and corroboration said so. The burden to prove its true is on her, not him. If I say I believe obama touched me does that mean now there is a slim chance obama touched me and you cannot say I am a liar just bc I said so?
What I am trying to say is why do we have to always reserve benefit of doubt for everyone no matter how blatant their lie is? At what point can we be 100% sure that we can someone a liar? Just because we weren’t there liars can make up whatever lies they want?
As to the Kafka reference, the thing about that novel of his, _The Trial_, is that it really was not about whether Josef K. did or did not do anything wrong or criminal, nor was it a critique of totalitarian philosophies of government or jurisprudence or something – the point was more that one often does not know whether one is guilty of something in a general sense – sin? – or not. It was K’s presumption of his own innocence on a moral, not just legal, plane that ended up making life hard for him. This becomes evident when one compares his behavior throughout most of the book to that of the other accused person whom he meets in a later chapter, who has been conducting himself with more humility, even to the point of abjectness, but who is at least likely to survive the whole process, unlike K. in the end. This, at least, is (was) my reading of the story.
I came to dislike the use of the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ because it never really meant what most people think it means. Kafka’s point of view, as comes out in his short fiction as well, seemed to be that there is a fundamental absurdity to life, inescapable through mere human wit or logic – indeed, most of his characters seem befuddled by what happens to them in the critical moments of their lives, acting in weirdly irrational ways when confronted with some ultimate revelation, which itself is often expressed in a really crazy form.
I think of the son who is condemned by his father to death by drowning in a mad fit, whereupon said son immediately runs out of the house – can’t help himself; I think the story spoke of him being driven out by a kind of force that he could not resist – and over to the bridge and goes and tosses himself over the side, more or less. That was in one of Kafka’s short stories. But that whole situation, in a sense, came out of nowhere – the world just turned upside down in an instant and all the son can do is just stand there flailing with his jaw on the floor, so to speak – he can’t deal with the new situation in any constructive way.
So if by ‘Kafkaesque’ we understand a fundamentally topsy-turvy, absurd situation with moral dimensions of innocence and guilt in which a whole life is at stake, but in which the standard tools to evaluate and act on moral situations seem no longer to apply, then I think this definition works. I don’t know if the latest Kavanaugh brouhaha is like this, but possibly. To me, not quite, since we know who is stirring all this up and why; so there is a level of transparency to this case that wouldn’t really have fit into Kafka’s preferred scenarios.
I offer this in consideration of the fact that I fancied myself a bit of a Kafka expert in my youth. (I remember trying to find the house in Prague where he lived.)
Philip:
Well, I have little doubt that you’re more of a Kafka expert than I am. I’ve read quite a few of his stories, and Metamorphosis, as well as his letter to his father.
Neo, of course, my perspective on these things was formed entirely on Russian experience, since I did not live in any other country. And I found quite believable that in USA there is another moral code and different expectations. But USA is an enormous anomaly among all Western countries: Americanism is Protestantism on steroids, the most puritanical country on the earth. Things are quite different in Europe, especially in Catholic and Orthodox countries, and even from literature it is evident that there are two different moral standards applicable to men and women. This American obsession with gender equality (and all other “equalities” as well) is a relatively recent form of counter-factual nonsense denying innate differences between sexes, races, cultures and people in general. And, of course, when people are routinely meet no censure for some type of behavior, it became more widespread. Simply compare Northern Europe with Southern: German and Scandinavian people are generally honest and responsible, while Italians, Spaniards and Greeks … not so much. I often met in discussions this all-American illusion that all people in the world are essentially the same, only with different music and culinary. No, no and no.