The inconvenient accusers
For the “believe the women; Kavanaugh is guilty as the day is long” crowd on the left, there remain the inconvenient accusers.
These accusers are female, too, like Kavanaugh’s. In nearly all instances, their stories of sexual wrongdoing on the part of men are more well-documented and therefore more compelling. But the left wants to pretend they don’t exist, and/or to silence them and/or discredit them.
Why, if the mantra is to believe the women? It’s very simple: these women have accused Democrats.
Now, certain Democrats are expendable and therefore their accusers are believed. I bring you Exhibit A: Harvey Weinstein. He’s not a politician, and so he could go, and he was also part of an (ultimately failed) attempt to get Trump.
Others were not so expendable but, after much defense of their integrity by the Democrats, the evidence against them simply became incontrovertible and overwhelming. I bring you Exhibit B: Anthony Weiner.
Others, such as Ted Kennedy, could be contemporaneously ignored or rationalized because it was a long time ago and at this point he is deceased anyway.
But some Democrats, such as Keith Ellison, against whom complaints have been lodged, are men who are both important in the party and very much alive, and the charges are fairly recent. That article I just linked was from two months ago, for example.
Strange how the left has circled the wagons around him. Unfortunately for the Democrats, his accusing ex-girlfriend is still trying to point this out:
Karen Monahan, the woman accusing Minnesota Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison of domestic abuse, responded to a Twitter user on Monday who asked if Democrats believe Monahan’s allegations, saying they don’t, and that she’s been threatened and isolated from her own party.
And luckily for the Democrats, they have the cooperation of the usually-oh-so-woke MSM in trying to get people to ignore or disbelieve what she’s saying:
In response to a question on whether each voter believed the allegations leveled at Ellison are true, 5 percent of Democrats responded “yes,” 30 percent responded “no” and 65 percent were unsure…
The Democratic Party has largely ignored the allegations against Ellison, which he denies.
And, speaking of people who are “still trying to point this out,” we have Juanita Broaddrick:
Juanita Broaddrick has used Hillary Clinton’s own words against her by coming out and demanding that “it seems only fair” that if the FBI is going to investigate accusations against Brett Kavanaugh from three decades ago — as demanded by Hillary Clinton — then the FBI must also investigate her own credible rape allegations against Bill Clinton from the same period.
My own opinion is—as I’ve written many times, including yesterday—not to automatically “believe the women” or any class or group. I evaluate each individual story on its merits.
And I tend toward skepticism with unsubstantiated tales. I believe in innocent till proven guilty, and although it’s only in a court of law that I require a level of evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, even in the court of public opinion I require a pretty high level of evidence to believe a story—especially an old one. So you might call me generally a skeptic.
But I’m a skeptic about accusations towards members of either party, people I like or people I don’t like. That means I’ve long had doubts about Broaddrick’s claims, for example, too complex to go into in this post but for some examples of what I’m talking about see this.
I don’t require that people agree with me. But in order to respect their opinion on these matters, I do require at the very least consistency. Logic helps, too, but if people are going to apply illogical and unfair standards like “believe the women” they at least should be consistent in it.
For the most part, they are not.
There is no agreement whatsoever among experts as to the likely percentage of rape accusations which are falsely made; I have seen estimates ranging from 5% to considerably higher numbers, but no intelligent person can concur with the contemporary leftist/feminist dogma that all female accusers must be believed without evidence, unless, of course, the accused man happens to have more intersectional points (Ellison is both black and Muslim).
I believe the 2% to 8% number claimed by researchers consists cases where the false allegations were discovered in the middle of the investigation in which either the accuser confessed the fabrication or the falseness is determined to be indisputable. Many false accusations will not be accounted in this number if for example the cases were dropped due to insufficient evidence or refusal to corporate by the accuser, or the case ends up with an indictment due to the existence of probable causes, or simply the rape happened but they got the wrong guy. conviction rate for sexual assaults is 13%, which is way more telling that the bogus uninformative 2% to 8% claim.
the only thing that is certain is sexual assaults are notoriously difficult to prove or disprove as in most cases the constitution of the crime defends entirely on her state of mind, which the liberals argue that could not be accurately determined by her actions.
” unless, of course, the accused man happens to have more intersectional points” – j e
* * *
The Kafkaesque* part is that the assigning of points is a constantly changing kaleidoscope.
Or as Obama’s supporters put it, when over-turning the hitherto accepted calculus in 2008 against Hillary: Bros before hos.
*Philip on September 20, 2018 at 11:26 am at 11:26 am said:
“…
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 – “
Well, as Instapundit likes to say, if you consider journalists to be democrats with by-lines, you won’t go far wrong.
I think the approach you describe neo is a fair, balanced and common sense one. Where we disagree is on the veracity of Broadderick’s claim of rape. Though I agree that we don’t know and that it might indeed be a false allegation… what persuades me is her description of Clinton’s seizing her lower lip between his teeth and placing enough pressure on it to intimidate Broadderick with the implied threat. Followed by her relating that as he left the room, he stopped and told her she should get that lip looked after… Call me naive but I find those details highly persuasive. I don’t place much credence in her prior denial of the rape, at that point the Hillary intimidation factor had had plenty of time to manifest. Her adamant pursuit of Bill Clinton since then I also find persuasive as false accusations that don’t pay off are not pursued.
As for Ellison, I wish the son or mother would release the video he claims to have seen. If it exists, it would add great credibility to her accusation. Ellison is a real piece of work and a practitioner of taqiyya.
If the left didn’t have double standards they would have no standards at all. I am surprised anyone on the right would credit the hard left with any principles beyond doing whatever it takes to impose totalitarian rule. The democrat party is ruled by the whims and demands of the hard left as is the msm. Sugar daddy Soros plays a bigly part in this change.
Geoffrey Britain:
I think you way underestimate the creativity of liars.
One thing we know for certain is that Broaddrick is a liar. She swore it didn’t happen. Then she said it did. She’s lying one of those times.
No matter how anti-Trump that Kavanaughs’s activist Democrat accuser is, she is going to regret getting involved in the attempted political assassination of Kavanaugh, and by extension Trump.
To Leftists/Congressional Democrats she is just a tool, and when her usefulness is over, these Leftists/Congressional Democrats will discard her. See Cindy Sheehan.
She may already have an example of how she will be treated if Feinstein revealed her name despite apparent assurances that her name wouldn’t be revealed. Or perhaps that was all a charade.
Moreover, like a tool that has been reshaped by it’s heavy use, her life has been reshaped, and it will never be the same again.
She will always be associated with Kavanaugh and the battle over his nomination and–from now on–a whole army of people will be continually digging through,ransacking her life, actions, and statements to prove one political point or another.
In sacrificing her anonymity she has also sacrificed her future ability to have a life of peace and quiet. For her, from now on, it’s pretty likely that there will never be any anonymity, peace, or quiet.
I hope she thinks it’s worth it.
For me, Professor Ford has two strikes against her. First, she is a psychologist and second she is a biostatistician. When I was an undergrad the psych majors were notorious for being the most mentally screwed up kids on campus. We joked they were obviously here looking for help. Next, biostatistics is to statistics as astrology is to astronomy. Biostatisticians believe you can prove causality with statistics, and you can’t, they believe confidence intervals are significant, they are meaningless, and they believe you can extrapolate results from the study population to the entire population, but extrapolation is not a valid mathematical operation. If it weren’t for that I might tend to take her seriously.
One more strike, going to motivation for the slander:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2018/09/christine-blasey-ford-published-eight-studies-about-abortion-pill-and-worked-for-company-that-produces-it/