Theatrical politics: the hearing

The New Neo Posted on by

[UPDATES below]

NOON:

So far I have not been able to bring myself to watch, although I probably will watch some of it later.

That may surprise you, but it’s for several reasons. The first is that I always am reluctant to take information in by listening and get impatient with it; I’ve mentioned that before. The second is that I generally get angry at the puffing and posing and posturing and politicking that are rampant in such hearings before Congress—all such hearings, in my experience so far. They are generally worthless or much worse than worthless, with perhaps a nugget or two that is important amid a pile of garbage. That means I tend to alternate between angry and bored for them.

But the third reason is the most important of all, and it applies to this particular hearing in particular. I am unusually angry right now that this is even being allowed to happen, because it seems deeply and inherently unfair to me. There is zero chance of discovering any sort of truth in this format. It is pure political theater. Even more offensively to me, it is a stage for theater in the guise of truth-seeking, with histrionics and feelings as the method and the goal.

It is a mock-trial that is nothing like a real trial. There are no protections for the accused here, and protections for the accused are the very foundation of the liberty we hold (or at least should hold) dear.

How on earth can a person counter the testimony of a traumatized, emotional woman in a forum like this? I have little doubt that Ford will either act that part (probably quite convincingly) or that she actually is a traumatized, emotional woman. I don’t know what traumatized her. It may have indeed been some incident thirty-six years ago in which a boy or two boys tried to get sexually intimate with her and ultimately failed.

Why that particular incident would traumatize this one woman so terribly when it would fail to do so with many others is one of the mysteries of human life, but that’s really not the issue here. The issue is: was Brett Kavanaugh one of the boys? How can he prove that? After hearing her emotional testimony, all he can do is deny it.

What force can that possibly have? I don’t know. But I do know that in an actual court of law his denial (in the form of a “not guilty” plea) would only be the starting point for a huge amount of discovery, evidence, cross-examination, expert witnesses—the entire panoply of the justice system in which one side would attempt to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that what the accuser says happened actually happened and constituted a crime or crimes, and in which the defendant’s name would be cleared if that proof could not be accomplished. However, in a real court instead of this kangaroo court, Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations wouldn’t even get that far, because they are so weak and so poorly evidenced and so old that the case would never come to trial.

The system is designed to protect us all, not just the Brett Kavanaugh’s of the world. Political theater is designed to protect no one except the fame and fortune of the politicians involved. It is not a forum for truth-finding, although in the process we may occasionally stumble upon it.

I can only hope that the truth will emerge here, but I strongly doubt it, and the process itself is a dangerous one that enshrines some of the worst impulses of our political “leaders.” I am with Ben Stein on this:

To stop Donald Trump, the Democrats have tossed out the whole basis of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence — innocent until proven guilty. They’ve taken the greatest deliberative body in the world, the Senate —and made it the chapter room of a sorority at a tenth rate college. Is there no end to it? Stalin would approve. So would Goebbels. If this Democrat trick works, there simply is no meaningful legal protection in this country any longer.

It is clear to me that there is none. And that is true no matter how the hearing goes and how the Senate vote on Kavanaugh goes.

UPDATE 12:20 PM: I watched a couple of minutes and turned it off, for the aforementioned reasons. Reading about it around the blogosphere so far, it seems that her testimony is perceived as “credible” (which only means it might be true, and that plenty of people will believe it who are disposed to believe it) and the format is terrible, with the questioner only allowed 5-minute segments, and the Democrats posturing and praising Ford’s bravery. It seems so far that it’s playing quite nicely into the Democrats’ hands, which is what I expected. Do you agree?

I am also reading that there is no opportunity for the Republicans to cross-examine the witness. Is this really so? Did they really acquiesce to such a bizarre and lopsided forum for the Democrats and Ford to speak unchallenged? If so, are they stark raving mad?

UPDATE 12:33 PM I just took a look at a site that explained the hearing’s format, and it appears that the GOP will not question her. The single female questioner will do all the interrogating. I realize this was done to avoid the appearance of the GOP browbeating her, but it puts all the pressure on this one person and ties the hands of the GOP entirely, while the Democrats are free to spout off. A terrible terrible format that never should have been allowed to occur.

UPDATE 12:40 PM I am continually puzzled by the word “credible.” I’m reading that she sounds “credible” and her emotion seems real. Do people not realize that “credible” simply means that she’s not saying something like “little green men came from Mars and Brett Kavanaugh directed them to rape me”? (Although I have no doubt that some Democrats would find that credible, too.) Plenty of people are very effective at faking emotion. In her case it would be even easier, since the experience of testifying in this way is itself traumatic and emotional and could lend itself to shakiness and near-tears or even real tears. But Ford doesn’t need to feign emotion. If something really did happen to her—or even if she believes it happened—her emotion would be extremely real and she would have no need for faking.

As I’ve said before, that has no bearing on whether something of the sort she describes did happen to her, and it absolutely has no bearing on whether Brett Kavanaugh did it. That latter question—did this person do it?—is the only thing that’s relevant. And yet, how many people see it that way? I don’t think very many do. In a courtroom, the judge keeps reminding them of what they should be considering, and what the standard of proof should be. But as I’ve said before, this is no courtroom. This is a theater meant to draw on people’s emotional reactions.

UPDATE 1:05 PM One of the big problems the GOP faced from the start was that, once they decided to allow Ford to speak (a decision that IMHO was motivated by holdouts in the GOP who insisted on it) then they had problems with the optics of the GOP men questioning (“browbeating”) this poor suffering traumatized woman. In retrospect, I think it would have been far better had they gone ahead with that format anyway. The format they did choose involves a ceding of their own power, which makes them look weak and passive and allows the Democrats and Ford the floor, and depends entirely on the skill of the female interrogator. So the GOP screwed itself, essentially, by allowing the format to occur, but it was in some sense already screwed by the entire situation.

I sincerely hope I am wrong.

UPDATE 2:10 PM

Brett Kavanaugh has been a federal judge for about 15 years. But he’s also a lawyer and a graduate of Yale Law School, one of the finest in the nation in terms of reputation. To have gotten where he is professinally, he has to have tremendous legal skills. It occurs to me that he will need all those legal skills this afternoon. He is fighting for his life, not just the right to be on the Supreme Court. He is defending the entire record of his life both public and private. And there is no one to defend him except himself. He has no defense counsel and no rules of evidence here. He will have to depend on his wits.

This is profoundly unfair. The Clarence Thomas hearing was a bad situation as well, but it was fairness itself compared to today.

UPDATE 2:50 PM Having looked back recently to watch Clarence Thomas’ “high-tech lynching” moment, two things struck me in particular. The first was the clarity and eloquence of what he said. The second was his passion, his deep although controlled sense of outrage that came across loud and clear. It seemed like the outrage of an innocent man, and if he wasn’t innocent he certainly was a fine actor. although it did not come across as prepared. I think it was extemporaneous, although I’m not sure.

And it occurs to me that Kavanaugh will have to muster some of that eloquence and controlled fire. It shouldn’t be this way—these things should not be the way to determine things—but I think it is this way. I think that Kavanaugh needs to impress on his listeners that this isn’t just a threat to him, this sort of accusation winning the day is a threat to everyone, and that this is true even if Ford is convinced she’s telling the truth. Because memory is faulty and people are constantly mistaken about things, we deal with these things in the court of law and with the presumption of innocence. Once we throw that out the window we are set up for mob rule.

I don’t know whether that would save him. But I do think he needs to say that, because it is true.

UPDATE 3:21 PM

“Due process is the foundation of the American rule of law.” Kavanaugh. True, all too true.

He breaks down for a moment when saying his 10-year-old daughter said they should pray for “the woman”—i.e. Ford.

Kavanaugh does have Thomas’ outraged passion, but doesn’t have his deep voice.

UPDATE 3:35 PM

Kavanaugh keeps tearing up when he talks about his father. He is also going into detail about his calendar and what it says. I find it very effective. But I am disposed to finding it effective.

UPDATE 5:20 PM
I have not watched the questioning of Kavanaugh. Too stressful and exhausting; I can only imagine how stressful and exhausting it is for him. He’s made of sterner stuff than I.

But commenter “AesopFan” has posted some quotes from this portion of the proceedings. These quotes from Lindsay Graham are pretty intense:

Graham to Senator Durbin: you could have come to us at any time for an FBI investigation.

Yells at Durbin: I would never do to Kagan and Sotomayor what you are doing to him.

You want power, God I hope you never get it, Ford is your victim as much as Kavanaugh.

I am especially impressed with that last one: Ford is your victim, said to the Democrats. To me, that is an incredibly strong argument. She had wanted (supposedly, anyway) to remain anonymous, but it was the Democrats wouldn’t let her. They exposed her to this. And it was the Republicans who respected her fragility by being willing to question her in California, and ultimately by not having men question her, not having her be cross-examined, etc..

I was originally perplexed as to why the Republicans had tied their hands and kept themselves from questioning her at all during the hearing and only letting Mitchell question her, leaving her errors stated but essentially unchallenged in any strong way. I hadn’t realized that the Republicans would get to speak—and to challenge the Democrats, who deserve it—during the Kavanaugh phase of the hearings.

That’s pretty smart as a tactic, actually. Had they questioned Ford directly at all it would have seemed like they were taking advantage of an emotionally distraught and somewhat fragile woman.

Prediction for tomorrow’s hearing

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t think one single Senate vote depends on how Ford and Kavanaugh perform on Thursday, or even whether or not she shows up. The voting will go entirely according to politics and party, and the few possible swing votes will vote on calculations of self-interest.

Ford is a MacGuffin at this point, as are the others. She has served her purpose for the left even before she testifies.

You call that a polygraph?

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps the Ford forces thought it would never come to this. Because they couldn’t possibly have thought that anyone would accept these results as evidence of anything except their own conniving and misleading duplicity:

The letter looks like it was created by a dyslexic child, and the polygraph test looks like it was administered by some fifth-grader playing detective.

Did they never expect to have to produce this? Did they think their friends in the MSM would just cover for them and claim a polygraph was administered (not that polygraphs actually mean anything, but a lot of people actually set great store by them), and that would be enough to get Brett Kavanaugh rejected?

Well, maybe they were right, at least in the sense that maybe it will be enough, because facts and truth don’t seem to matter one whit to a great many people who will be voting on Kavanaugh in the Senate. If 2 + 2 must be said to equal 5, so be it, if the Party so demands.

And speaking of accusers, accuser number 3—the rape room girl—has this history.

From Politico (not known as a Trump-supporting, conservative site):

A Miami-Dade County court docket shows a petition for injunction against Swetnick was filed March 1, 2001, by her former boyfriend, Richard Vinneccy, who told POLITICO Wednesday the two had dated for four years before they broke up.

Thirteen days later, the case was dismissed, not long after an affidavit of non-ability to advance fees was filed.

According to Vinneccy, Swetnick threatened him after they broke up and even after he got married to his current wife and had a child.

“Right after I broke up with her, she was threatening my family, threatening my wife and threatening to do harm to my baby at that time,” Vinneccy said in a telephone interview with POLITICO. “I know a lot about her.”

“She’s not credible at all,” he said. “Not at all.”

…Vinneccy, 63, is a registered Democrat, according to Miami-Dade County voting records.

And she has another interesting tidbit in her background:

This woman appears to be a serial con artist. I believe that some unknown percentage of sexual harassment suits in the business world are shakedowns by con artists, awarded by companies for whom it’s sometimes easier to give the accuser a small amount of money rather than fight the claim. I have no idea if the percentage is large or small, but I have a strong suspicion it is not infinitesimal.

The Furies

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s no accident that the Furies were women:

According to Hesiod’s Theogony, when the Titan Cronus castrated his father, Uranus, and threw his genitalia into the sea, the Erinyes [Furies] (along with the Giants and the Meliae) emerged from the drops of blood which fell on the earth (Gaia), while Aphrodite was born from the crests of sea foam. According to variant accounts, they emerged from an even more primordial level—from Nyx (“Night”), or from a union between air and mother earth.

And then there were the Maenads:

In Greek mythology, maenads…were the female followers of Dionysus and the most significant members of the Thiasus, the god’s retinue. Their name literally translates as “raving ones”…

In Euripides’ play The Bacchae, maenads of Thebes murder King Pentheus after he bans the worship of Dionysus. Dionysus, Pentheus’ cousin, himself lures Pentheus to the woods, where the maenads tear him apart. His corpse is mutilated by his own mother, Agave, who tears off his head, believing it to be that of a lion. A group of maenads also kill Orpheus.

That mention of the death of Orpheus at the hands of the maenads reminds me of this:

Reading this piece by Sarah Hoyt brought all of this to mind. I recommend that you read it if you haven’t already. I’ve been alarmed for a long time about what we’re teaching boys and girls about themselves and their interactions. It seems a kind of madness. And that’s why I, along with Hoyt, feel this way:

Lately, I’ve been getting deeply, profoundly depressed…

So many things are winding up, it’s not even worth listing them all. The most proximal one, though, is the accusation against Kavanaugh, which, even if true, would not be in any way actionable nor, barring this behavior persisting into adulthood, mean anything about his character as a grown up…

And reading her piece left me with a feeling of even deeper depression. As does the accusation du jour.

As did finding this (at least it doesn’t seem like a popular item; there are no comments or ratings).

[NOTE: And no, of course not all women are like this, jumping on the bandwagon of accusations and male-hatred. But way too many are, and way too many men are jumping on, too. Politics can’t be the only explanation. The nature of humankind seems to make us susceptible.]

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