The allegations escalate

The New Neo Posted on by

Now we have the promised gang-rape allegations from a woman who went to Avenatti (Stormy Daniels’ lawyer) with allegations that Kavanaugh and Mark Judge ran or were participants in a gang rape ring in high school. Drudge has the link; you can read it yourself.

This woman didn’t see fit to report it till now, despite the extreme seriousness of the charges. Nor did anyone else, strangely enough. She says there were tons of people involved (but names no one except Kavanaugh and Judge), and lines of young men waiting to rape the inebriated women. And yet, crickets until now. And none of this, of course, was uncovered during Kavanaugh’s long previous career or in the FBI background checks. But that’s a mere detail, right? Surely this woman is telling the truth?

That was sarcasm on my part, of course. I also wonder whether many people on the left will believe this one, or whether they’ll just use it as a tool to try to shame the GOP into delaying the vote or Kavanaugh into withdrawing. Or perhaps they just want some of their voters to believe it, to help the Democratic masses get all fired up to take control of Congress from those gang-rapist-protecting Republicans.

The more outrageous the charges the better, for those purposes. Once you establish your sacred assumptions—for example, that women never lie, or that all Republicans are scum—any accusation is not only credible but true.

Needless to say, this is a pernicious, destructive, vile game. But the left sees it as a winning one. It’s been played before, in different forms. The Salem witth trials keep being mentioned, but I think that’s an insult to those who participated in that sad and terrible episode in American history for the simple reason that I think that in Salem the accusers were hysterical girls who believed in the apparitions they imagined to be bewitching them. It was a form of mass hysteria, although the consequences were extremely grave and included execution for those they accused.

This, on the other hand, is more akin to the blood libel, and even more to the Soviet show trials (minus the “trials” part, because none of this would ever support a court case). It is a test of our entire society. I hope we don’t fail that test.

[ADDENDUM: John Kass agrees:

But look deeper and you’ll see something else.

The sweeping away of traditions that have been carefully nurtured from the founding of this nation, to protect individual liberty and shield us from the passions of the mob.

Without these principles, we are no longer a republic.

And Kass wrote that before this latest accuser came out.]

[NOTE: This essay is worth reading, as well, as is this one by Victor Davis Hanson, who says we are in Orwell’s dystopia.

I also recommend this essay.]

Ramirez, Mayer, and the Yale alum network

The New Neo Posted on by

In one of yesterday’s posts I pointed out that Ronan Farrow has made the following statement about Kavanaugh accuser Deborah Ramirez:

She came forward because Senate Democrats came looking for this claim. She did not flag this. This came to the attention of people on the Hill independently, and it has cornered her into an awkward position.

In response, commenter Yancey Ward asked a good question:

How exactly did the Democrats “find” Ramirez? Didn’t Ramirez have to float this story somewhere in the last 3 months to catch the attention of the Democrats?

There’s actually quite a bit of information out there about that. For example, one of the authors of the New Yorker article that broke the story, Jane Mayer, gave an interview in which she said the following:

We found classmates had been talking about this for weeks and months since July. There’d been an email chain of Yale classmates of Kavanaugh talking about will this thing come out long before Christine Blasey Ford came forward.

So we know that Yale alums, probably from the classes who attended Yale around the time Kavanaugh attended, have had an email thread going since July. Kavanaugh was nominated by President Trump on July 9th, so it’s pretty clear by the timing that this discussion in the email thread began around the time of his nomination and in reaction to it (or in strong anticipation of it).

We don’t know their identities, or how many people were involved, or what relation Ramirez had to the email chain (was she part of it? and if so, was that from the start?). We don’t know how much exposure she had to the rumors in the email chain. For that matter, we have no idea how or when the rumors started in the first place. Was it back when the incident is alleged to have occurred? Was it more recently?

And why would we give much credence to a rumor, particularly one about which we know virtually nothing in terms of its development, except that we know that the main character—Ramirez—doubts her own memory of it, and admits to having been completely inebriated at the time the alleged incident occurred?

We don’t know if the email thread’s original participants were limited to members of Kavanaugh’s Yale class (’87) only, or if they included (or grew to include) people from other classes who were in attendance during all of the years Kavanaugh was there, or if additional Yale alums from still other years had or gained access to the thread. And certainly, the information exchanged on the thread would not necessarily be limited to Yale alums at all—people with access could inform spouses, friends, members of Congress, and the press, at any point in the process. Obviously, Mayer learned about it very early on.

So, how did Senate Democrats get involved, as Mayer’s co-author Ronan Farrow has claimed? Farrow didn’t name the Senate Democrats or describe the process, or explain how those Democrats got the news from the Yale alums, or whether it was the Democrats first and the alums later. But there are many Democrat senators who went to Yale and might have had access, either directly or indirectly, to the emails, although I could find no Democratic senator Yale alums who were in Kavanaugh’s class (you can search here, as I did). The closest I came to finding a classmate was Democrat Amy Klobuchar, senator from Minnesota and Yale Class of 1982, which means she left Yale a year before Kavanaugh entered and would therefore not have been there at the same time.

I think it’s also interesting that Mayer herself is a Yale graduate, Class of ’77, which may have helped her get access to the thread because of Yale alum connections in general, although she certainly was at the school way before Kavanaugh ever got there. And just to round things off, it turns out that Ronan Farrow received a JD from Yale in 2009, although that almost certainly didn’t help him in terms of connections to anyone in Kavanaugh’s class at the college.

More about the Yale emails here:

Robert VerBruggen raises a very obvious possibility: “These emails would appear to be important evidence regarding how this ball got rolling. They also may bear on the question of whether Ramirez’s memory closely matches the anonymous source’s simply because they’re both the account that was circulating while Ramirez was putting her memories together and contacting her former classmates. Let’s see them.” Yeah, let’s. Let’s see if it was Ramirez or someone else who first identified Kavanaugh as the person who assaulted her. Let’s see just how many gaps in Ramirez’s memory required filling in by others, seemingly not one of whom actually witnessed the incident. Let’s find out how many second-hand or even third-hand “witnesses” were needed to help the victim herself “remember.”…

This sure sounds like a case of someone’s hazy memory being reshaped after the fact through the power of suggestion.

People are free to email any person or any group of people they wish. But this sort of gossip chain—in which people discuss rumors (no witness to the purported event has ever been located, except for Ramirez) and have plenty of time to develop the story and make the descriptions match—can easily influence a person’s memory and/or description of events, sometimes without the person even realizing how much. The resulting story told is either a conscious lie (that would be a case of #7 on my list from yesterday), or an unconscious distortion in which the person relating the event thinks it is a real memory they’re accessing (numbers 5 or 6 on that same list), but it is not.

Either way, in a court of law this sort of chain of events would make the story and in particular its details highly suspect. But Mayer and company know that they don’t have to deal with a court of law when accusing Kavanaugh. They can just put the story out there and hope that it has its desired effect in the court of public opinion. They can rely on their previous reputations—in the Weinstein revelations, for example—and hope that will give them extra clout in taking down Kavanaugh.

Ronan Farrow says that Democrats found Ramirez

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan”]

My my my:

Check out what Ronan Farrow said on Good Morning America earlier today:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Why did [Deborah Ramirez] come forward?

FARROW: She came forward because Senate Democrats came looking for this claim. She did not flag this. This came to the attention of people on the Hill independently, and it has cornered her into an awkward position. She said, point-blank, I don’t want to ruin anyone’s life, but she feels this is a serious claim. She considers her own memories credible and she felt it was important to tell her own story before others did for her.

Now, that should have been Farrow’s story. Maybe he’d have retained some of the respect people had for him till now as an investigative reporter.

This is confirmation of what we all already suspected (as I wrote in previous posts here and here):

Not only was it inevitable that the left would find someone else to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, however vague the accusation and however deeply they had to dig—but it is also fairly obvious that they’ve known about this second person for some time (it took a while to interview her and write the story). I think it’s highly likely that all those negotiations with the Senate over the first accuser’s testimony had one basic goal: to postpone the vote till this second story could be published.

Not only did the Democrats find her, but they kept her existence a secret till the accusation was rolled out in The New Yorker at just the right monent.

I also made this previous prediction:

Another point that occurs to me is that, not only was the campaign to delay the confirmation vote and let Ford testify before the Senate based on the knowledge that this New Yorker article was in the hopper, and the delay was precisely timed to make sure it was published shortly beforehand, but now Ford really doesn’t have to testify at all. Maybe she will, but maybe she won’t. But the negotiations and delay to get to this second accuser were the point. And if Ramirez wants to testify—or temporarily claims she does—the idea would be to effect another delay until, if possible, the rollout of another accuser.

The third accuser certainly wasn’t long in coming, although there are some indications that the promised revelation may be in the process of fizzling out. But even if it never fully emerges, the story already served its purpose by just being out there, even in extremely vague form. It’s the old pig-f***ing thing all over again.

By the way, Ramirez seems to be refusing to testify. Surprise, surprise.

But none of that really matters. The only thing that matters is what how the GOP Gang of Four is going to vote. By my count, two one can defect, but no more. I make no predictions on that at this point, whatever their public utterances.

Character and crucible: Thomas and Kavanaugh

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I put up a short clip of Clarence Thomas excoriating the Senate Democrats at his 1991 hearing. I want to highlight it now:

Thomas speaks with great eloquence, but it’s his affect that is especially arresting. You can feel his outraged dignity in every word and every glint of his eye. It is all the more powerful for being under control.

You know that this is a man who’s been through the fire before. And if you know Thomas’ personal history, you know that he had a great many early struggles with poverty and discrimination, and triumphed over them all by dint of hard work and determination.

Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch trials is called “The Crucible,” and the meaning of that word is this:

1 : a vessel of a very refractory material (such as porcelain) used for melting and calcining a substance that requires a high degree of heat

2 : a severe test

3 : a place or situation in which concentrated forces interact to cause or influence change or development

So we have a crisis that functions not only as a test, but as a formative experience enhancing character. Some pass it, some melt.

Clarence Thomas’ speech had special force because of the element of race it contained. His listeners knew it, too. When Thomas said he was facing “a high-tech lynching,” the word “lynching” had a very specific meaning which he emphasized by following it up with this:

…it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas. And it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you: you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured, by a committee of the US Senate rather than hung from a tree.

What Thomas is doing there, among other things, is taking the Democrats’ cloak of “we are the party of civil rights” rectitude and ripping it away, exposing the corollary “only if you toe our party line; otherwise we will destroy you with every trick in our nasty book.” Now that nearly thirty years have passed since that hearing, we’ve seen that play out time and again. It is open season on conservative blacks, not just Clarence Thomas (who has continued to be disrespected and excoriated by the left) but on all blacks who “think for themselves, do for themselves, have different ideas.” It’s true for women, too; Republican women aren’t real women, as someone like Sarah Palin learned all too well, and as the rest of us observed.

Fast forward to the Kavanuagh situation, in which Kavanaugh is also being lynched. Jimmy Kimmel’s light little joke last night (Kimmel’s “’compromise’ to the battle of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination is to chop off the judge’s ‘pesky penis,’ should he be confirmed”) was not really funny and was in obvious bad taste, but what Kimmel may or may not have realized is that it harks back to some exceptionally vile body desecrations that sometimes occurred during lynchings.

Even so, of course, Kavanaugh doesn’t have the option of saying he’s an uppity black being lynched. Clearly, he’s not. Au contraire. He’s a “privileged white guy” who went to the finest schools and according to all previous reports has played by all the rules. But for that reason, it is possible that (although he’s been a federal judge) this is the first real crucible that he’s been through.

If that is in fact the case, it would certainly not be his fault. Fortunately for most of us, most of us have never experienced anything remotely like the terrible public pressure he’s under. But at this point it would help if he had, if not Thomas’ history, at least the gravitas and fire that Thomas brought to his hearings because of his previous experiences that had helped to forge (that’s an appropriate word, too, in terms of the crucible metaphor) his steely character.

I don’t know that much about Kavanaugh’s life. Perhaps he has endured tests of his own that will stand him in good stead throughout this terrible ordeal. I hope that something will sustain him. Perhaps his faith, which apparently is strong, and his family.

Being associated with President Trump isn’t for the faint of heart. Ask Paul Manafort, for example; whatever he has done or hasn’t done, guilty or not, does anyone think he’d stand convicted now had he not had his little fling with the Trump campaign? Of course not. And ask Michael Flynn or Carter Page or Michael Cohen or any number of other people whose lives would probably be going quite smoothly right now were it not for the fact that they worked for Donald Trump and the left decided to try to destroy them.

If Kavanaugh is confirmed and the Democrats win the House in November, the new House may try to impeach him. If he’s not confirmed and the Democrats win the House in November, the new House may try to impeach him from the judgeship he now holds. If they have the votes, they can do it, too. I don’t know how far they will go with this. But they have conjured up forces of rage and destruction that they may have to placate by sacrificing Brett Kavanaugh further, and putting him through a few more crucibles.

What motives drive false accusers?

The New Neo Posted on by

The answer might seem obvious, but I think it’s more complicated than most people might think.

Let’s leave out accusers who are telling the truth. I’m interested in the ones who are not. They can have multiple motives, too. This list is not all-inclusive, but here are the major ones:

(1) Revenge. The person actually has hurt you in some way—estranged spouses are notorious for this motivation—but you’re making up a story with an accusation that can hurt them even more than the truth would, and you justify it by telling yourself they deserve it.

(2) You’re a sociopath who enjoys lying and gets off on seeing people squirm. Makes you feel superior to all those stupid normals.

(3) Someone has paid you money to lie.

(4) You want your 15 minutes of fame.

(5) An actual psychological contagion effect, a kind of mass hysteria in which people start thinking they remember something that is really just a reflection of what they’re hearing from others. Obviously, for this motive to be operating there must be other accusers and a lot of attention given to them, which is often true for a public figure. I believe that this was at least part of the motive for the girls doing the accusing in the Salem witch trials, for example. Do not underestimate the power of the strangeness of the human mind.

(6) (This one is related to #5, but somewhat different.) Some time ago, something happened to you that was bad, but your memory is foggy on some details. When you really think about it [added for clarification: or are coaxed to do so, perhaps by a therapist], you become convinced that it happened a certain way at a certain person’s hands. And yet this is actually a manufactured memory detail superimposed on a much hazier basic memory that is real. People who are undergoing numbers 5 or 6 can make very convincing witnesses indeed, because they have convinced themselves of the absolute truth of their memories and can therefore speak with the power of tremendous conviction.

(7) You believe this is a noble lie you are telling because the cause is noble. This is the mentality of some spies, or people working for the real Resistance during a war, in which that person can easily justify lying, making false documents, perhaps even assassination, for the sake of the greater good. Right now, for example, if a person believes, truly truly believes, that the right is waging a War on Women, let’s say, and that women’s very liberty is at stake if the evil Kavanaugh gets on the Court, that person could easily justify lying in order to take him down. I think that mentality is quite rampant these days.

(8) You once had something similar happen to you at the hands of someone else, and that person shares a lot of traits with the person being accused. Let’s say, for example, that the person who hurt you went to a Catholic prep school and wore his hair like Kavanaugh did in his high school yearbook, maybe even talked a bit like him, and became a lawyer or a judge. That person did something very upsetting to you, and never apologized or looked back, and then went on to great glory and fame and achievement in life. You want justice and never got it. For some people in that circumstance it is easy to tell themselves that all Catholic prep grads who look something like that or talk something like that are the same sort of scumbag. So what’s wrong with telling a little white lie to expose what a scumbag that person must be? You may be lying, but you’re telling A Greater Truth.

Kavanaugh, the virgin rapist

The New Neo Posted on by

Too much information, Brett!

But perhaps helpful and necessary information. The left picked quite a target for their sexual misconduct charges:

Or course, the left will mock him for this. They will also say that’s why he had to rape people when in his cups—he was so terribly repressed and out of the mainstream.

And no doubt this gives them the opportunity to drag forth a stream of Yale coeds (is that still the term?) who were there at the right time to swear that they slept with Brett Kavanaugh, that Casanova. Soon there will be a line of them as long as the members of my tiresome generation who claim to have been at Woodstock.

For the record, I wasn’t at Woodstock, and Brett Kavanaugh never raped me or even had sex with me.

ADDENDUM: Comment found at Althouse’s:

they’ve tried witch hunts, and that didnt work out.

Now they’re going to sacrifice a virgin

And speaking of Google and the algorithms it uses…

The New Neo Posted on by

Just now I read that Brett Kavanaugh had issued a statement about the new accusations and the fact that he plans to fight them. I wanted to look at his exact words, so I Googled “Brett Kavanaugh statement” and then the filter that said to limit the selection to only the last hour.

The first page that came up was divided between Christine Blasey Ford’s statement that she will not let fear intimidate her into not testifying, and a petition signed by 900 Yale graduates saying they believe Christine. Not a thing about Kavanaugh’s statement.

So I went to page 2, and in the ten links there I found a single one to Kavanaugh’s letter. The link was to a Fox News story. But it contained only a few quotes.

I finally got to the full text of the letter by Googling one of the exact quotes from the Fox story. That made it much much easier, and there were several sources from which to choose. Here’s one, and this is a portion of it:

There is now a frenzy to come up with something—anything—that will block this process and a vote on my confirmation from occurring.

These are smears, pure and simple. And they debase our public discourse. But they are also a threat to any man or woman who wishes to serve our country. Such grotesque and obvious character assassination—if allowed to succeed—will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions from service.

As I told the Committee during my hearing, a federal judge must be independent, not swayed by public or political pressure. That is the kind of judge I will always be. I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process. The coordinated effort to destroy my good name will not drive me out. The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out. The last-minute character assassination will not succeed.

I have devoted my career to serving the public and the cause of justice, and particularly to promoting the equality and dignity of women. Women from every phase of my life have come forward to attest to my character. I am grateful to them. I owe it to them, and to my family, to defend my integrity and my name.

He owes it to all of us.

ADDENDUM: And I think it’s very important to look back at this piece of history from twenty-seven years ago. It is very powerful:

The New Yorker’s Ramirez story and the art of defamation

The New Neo Posted on by

Needless to say, the New Yorker was extremely eager to pin another accusation on Kavanaugh. So their motives to publish the Ramirez story are obvious. Farrow and Mayer have also carved out a sort of niche of accusative journalism involving sexual abuse or harrassment allegations against public figures, and have achieved no small fame for it.

So why would they want to compromise that reputation by publishing such an iffy story? As I said, the motive to get Kavanaugh is strong, but that’s not the only reason they felt empowered to do this. Their probable defense is that they never say that Kavanaugh is guilty, they merely report what Ramirez said, and they even report that there are gaps in her memory and that the other named supposed-witnesses deny ever being privy to such a scene.

So Farrow and Mayer can say that they were reporting unverified rumors but they actually presented them as such, upfront, and therefore are protected because they didn’t publish them with “reckless disregard for the truth.”

I think it’s hogwash, for the simple reason that they know that in the current climate these unverified rumors have enormous force, and publishing them at all without strong evidence that they are true is to publish them with malice aforethought. But I’m not a judge and I’m not a jury.

This journalistic technique is not new. One previous instance that comes to mind was the attempt by the NY Times to smear John McCain during the 2008 election, in which the Times carefully calibrated its smears against McCain by reporting them this way:

The uproar was over an assertion in the second paragraph that during McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, some of his top advisers became “convinced” he was having a “romantic” relationship with a female lobbyist and intervened to protect the candidate from himself. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, denied they had an affair, and at a press conference after the article was published, McCain denied that anyone ever confronted him about their relationship. He described her as a friend.

The article had repercussions for both McCain and The Times. He may benefit, at least in the short run, from a conservative backlash against the “liberal” New York Times. The newspaper found itself in the uncomfortable position of being the story as much as publishing the story, in large part because, although it raised one of the most toxic subjects in politics — sex — it offered readers no proof that McCain and Iseman had a romance.

In a follow-up article on Friday, the newspaper even seemed to play down its role in the sex angle. It described the previous day’s article as talking about McCain’s “ties” to Iseman and his “association” with her. The only mention of romance came in quoting a question to McCain at his press conference.

That was ten years ago, and the MSM was more careful back then. But it’s the same modus operandi as that used by Farrow and Mayer now. Now the charges are much bolder, although the sourcing is probably even weaker, if such a thing be possible. But events in the last ten years—the Cosby trial, the Herman Cain accusations, the Moore debacle, the Steele dossier, and of course #MeToo—have created a climate in which this sort of thing will become more and more common and more and more outrageous and unfair.

Let’s take a look at Bill Cosby again, shall we?

The New Neo Posted on by

Distasteful though that process may be.

I wrote a lot about the Cosby charges and the Cosby trial. It’s easy to take a look, here.

The gist of the situation regarding Cosby was and is as follows:

I happen to think Cosby is guilty. I also think he has a scummy sexual history: cheating on his wife, and kinky stuff involving drugged women. But when I say that I think he’s guilty, I don’t mean that he’s guilty of having a scummy sexual history of cheating and drugging, although those things are apparently true. I mean I think he’s guilty of at times having sex with women (or at least one woman) without their consent, having given them drugs. Those were the acts for which he was tried, and it came down to the issue of consent.

If you look at just about all of those posts I wrote about the Cosby accusations and trial, I’m actually defending him because I thought he did not get a fair trial. And that is despite the fact that I think he most likely is guilty. But I think the rules of evidence were misapplied in his case, as I wrote here.

Now, perhaps you may not care if Cosby was unfairly treated by the court because you think he’s a scumbag. I do care, though, because I care more about the fairness of the legal system—and the protection of the rights of the innocent, which is everyone till proven guilty—than I care about putting Bill Cosby in jail.

If that makes me a bleeding heart, so be it. I don’t think it does, though. I think it makes me very skeptical of the honesty and decency of people in power, particularly when they think that right is on their side in addition to might. All tyrannies, or at least a great many of them, begin with people who think they have good intentions.

A lot of people think that Cosby was a scumbag, that he used drugs to sleep with women who were practically unconscious, and so it’s obvious that the women didn’t consent and that they’re telling the truth in their accusations. Such people sometimes don’t care what the prosecutors did to Cosby because they want him in the slammer and they don’t care if prosecutors have to cut a few corners to do it.

I disagree, which may put me in the minority at this point. But it also puts me in league with the Founding Fathers, who were very concerned about such issues. Their deep concern and the protections they built into the Constitution have protected us for a long time, but I fear that concern has virtually evaporated in the face of MeToo. And actually, it’s been evaporating for quite some time.

To turn to that other court, the court of public opinion—a lot of people have pointed out that cases like that of Roy Moore and Harvey Weinstein have accustomed us to think that the accusations of one person are stronger if there are other, similar accusations. Now, we reap the dubious “benefits” of that with Kavanaugh, where even the most suspect accusations are strengthened (in the eyes of some people, anyway) when there’s more than one accuser. But weak, suspect accusations are weak and suspect no matter how many there are. What makes accusations especially weak or suspect? Sketchy memory, a long previous silence, a political and/or financial motive for making the claim, and reading about other claims from other women giving the new accuser ideas for a similar set of charges. It’s not hard to do for anyone who may have had any prior encounter with the accused, and who has the motivation.

Is Rosenstein toast?

The New Neo Posted on by

The news is coming from all angles today. There’s a report that Rod Rosenstein is on the way out:

Axios has reported that “Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has verbally resigned to Chief of Staff John Kelly in anticipation of being fired by President Trump, according to a source with direct knowledge.”

Other reports indicate that Rosenstein is headed to the White House and “expecting to be fired” and he will not resign.

Last week, The New York Times wrote using anonymous resources that Rosenstein offered to wear a wire to tape Trump and try to rally Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment.

That’s about it so far. An anonymous source tells us Rosenstein and/or Trump is doing this, and the leavetaking is apparently is based on last week’s Times story (based on an anonymous source) that Rosenstein had offered to spy on Trump for the Resistance.

I will update when more is known.

I do wonder, though, why the Times published the story about the wire offer. I would have thought they wanted to protect Rosenstein. There’s an angle here I must not be seeing. Perhaps it’s that they wanted to provoke Trump into firing Rosenstein, and then have Trump attacked for it?

The anti-Kavanaugh plan of attack

The New Neo Posted on by

This evening I wrote a post about the second Kavanaugh accuser. I want to add a few more thoughts, but I decided to use a separate post.

Not only was it inevitable that the left would find someone else to accuse Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, however vague the accusation and however deeply they had to dig—but it is also fairly obvious that they’ve known about this second person for some time (it took a while to interview her and write the story). I think it’s highly likely that all those negotiations with the Senate over the first accuser’s testimony had one basic goal: to postpone the vote till this second story could be published.

Even a story as thin as this second one gives ammunition to the anti-Kavanaugh forces. No matter how suspect the accusations, sheer numbers tend to convince people. I don’t see the logic in it—twenty hazy, ancient, vague, uncorroborated recollections about a person that one political party wants to destroy are no better than one. But precedent made it clear to the left that it can work.

A little over a week ago I wrote a post that ended like this:

…beware!! It’s scorched earth, and we [the left] will use every method we can think of to destroy you.

And this is the truth.

Another point that occurs to me is that, not only was the campaign to delay the confirmation vote and let Ford testify before the Senate based on the knowledge that this New Yorker article was in the hopper, and the delay was precisely timed to make sure it was published shortly beforehand, but now Ford really doesn’t have to testify at all. Maybe she will, but maybe she won’t. But the negotiations and delay to get to this second accuser were the point. And if Ramirez wants to testify—or temporarily claims she does—the idea would be to effect another delay until, if possible, the rollout of another accuser.

In fact, the article about the third accuser is probably already being written. There is no question that other accusers are being sought, encouraged, and/or solicited [see *NOTE below].

And still another point of it all is to peel off people like Flake and Collins and Murkowski and have them vote “nay.” They will find it harder and harder to hang tough in the face of multiple accusers.

The GOP had better come up with a strategy against this, or it will destroy the party. It may even destroy the country. Maybe it already has.

Or maybe, just maybe, the mendacity, the transparent plotting by the left, the leading of the witnesses, the danger posed by false and uncorroborated defamation, will finally touch enough people that they’ll realize what’s going on here and reject it.

Maybe. That’s my hope, anyway.

[ *NOTE: Coaching the witness:

First, Ramirez says she was completely inebriated when the misconduct supposedly occurred.

Second, she told the New Yorker she wasn’t certain what happened until “after six days of talking with her attorney” a former elected Democrat. According to Farrow and Mayer, “in her initial conversations with The New Yorker, [Ramirez] was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty.” But one can do plenty of brain washing in six days.

We’ve all heard of the “MeToo” movement. Now we have the “MeToo, My Democrat Attorney Thinks” movement.

I have no doubt this happens quite often.

And then after the goal is reached and the accused candidate is defeated, we never hear from the accuser again.]

[ADDENDUM: It occurs to me that the entire country has become one big Title IX hearing, in which due process is waived, a woman is always presumed to be telling the truth, and all men are scum. The only difference here is that only Republican men are scum; for Democrats, the accusations bounce right off.]