First and foremost we've learned that some Americans consider it “equal” to listen to a terrified and nervous woman tearfully and painfully try to patiently and apologetically answer hours of deeply personal and traumatizing questions contrasted with an angry, petulant, rude, boorish, belligerent screaming man repeatedly declaring the he could never be rude or disrespectful to women, while he’s literally in the process of being rude and disrespectful to women.
For some people, these two approaches are apparently the same thing.
Even worse, we now seemed to believe accused of a bad thing is far worse and more worthy of sympathy of being on the receiving end of that same bad thing. Being questioned and accused of an attempted rape is actually worse and more worth of indignation and outrage than someone actually attempting to rape you.
This isn’t news because we’ve long seen the GOP attitude that being suspected or accused of supporting racism is much more horrific than being the victim of racist policies and actions, that saying that police have a tendency to killed unarmed young black men at a rate that is seven times higher than anyone else is far more “rude and insulting” to police, than being killed while unarmed is to the dozens upon dozens people that are now dead. Police are going to get “Ferguson Syndrome” and just stop doing their jobs because their afraid of being accused of bias.
Now we get the attitude that “good men won’t serve in public office” because they might be randomly accused of being sexist harassers and assaulters, without any evidence other than the accusers claims. That even when we aren’t in a criminal case, or for that matter a civil case, that the accused has to be believed first — and the accuser has to provide enough evidence not just to provide probably cause, but proof beyond all reasonable doubt before any serious investigation can even be performed in order to be taken seriously.
Clearly the accused and the surviving victims both have rights, but the balance between those rights, the balance between the right to bring forth your greivance and to confront and challenge your accusers is certainly way out of whack.
It is clear that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford delivered riveting heartfelt testimony. She touched the hearts of millions, and inspired them to also share their own person and painful stories of abuse and assault. She reached many in the country and did us all a great service by having the courage to come forward and state the truth as she best saw it.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh on the other hand was far from inspiring. He was petty and small minding, repeatedly proclaiming her personal greatness and accomplishment as if those had any relevance in relation to the issue at hand. As Sen. Leahy made clear, Kavanaugh repeated lied under oath when he, for example, claimed that the other persons who had been identified by Ford as being present during the incident had “cleared” him of being involved, but in fact they stated that they didn’t recall the get together or the incident itself.
“Time and time again, when confronted under oath with questions about his involvement in Bush-era scandals or controversial matters, he misled the Senate,” Leahy said. “Now, the fact that he misled the Senate over and over again does not make him guilty of sexual assault as a 17-year-old, nor does the fact he minimized the heavy drinking in his youth and misrepresented the misogyny in his yearbook.”
But, Leahy added, “It goes to the heart of Judge Kavanaugh’s truthfulness anytime he’s faced with potentially incriminating questions.”
Ford stated that her goal wasn't to derail Kavanaugh's confirmation, that she didn't want to block him from joining the court she just wanted to share her truth.
Kavanaugh lashed out with a vicious partisan attack on Democrats claiming that they had “plotted and planned” against him to stall and block his rising to the court. That they wanted to “Bork” him, that they wanted to do to him what Republicans did to the nomination of Merrick Garland just two years ago. That they had wanted “Payback for the Clintons” arguing that they were so petty as to want to subject him personally to type of salacious questioning that her personally inflicted on former President Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky investigation.
His partisanship was so potent, it raises questions about how he might rule on the court when the issue is highly political, in fact his history already shows his ruling are highly conservative and right-wing.
Among the many issues about Kavanaugh raised during this episode of Bill Maher’s Real Time, one is the fact that as part of President Bush’s White House Kavanaugh was responsible for many of his signing statements including his claim that he had the right to torture terrorists even though that had just been expressly forbidden by Congress in the Defense Authorization Act in 2006.
During the hearing Senator Kamala Harris asked him the fairly logical question, after pointing out how similar his judicial record was to Neil Gorsuch, if Democrats would concoct this dastardly plot to block his confirmation with false accusations of sexual assault, why didn't they do the same with Gorsuch?
When asked whether Kavanaugh would remain with this seething vendetta against Democrats, Kellyanne Conway argued that he would leave that obvious bias behind when he reached the SCOTUS.
Really man? Because it seems that Clarence Thomas, after his struggles getting through the Anita Hill hearings, still have a virulent vendetta against Democrat, Liberals and the “elites.”
A touchstone of Clarence Thomas’s career on the Supreme Court has been his hostility to what he calls élites. When the Court, in 2003, upheld the use of racial preferences in admissions at the University of Michigan Law School, Thomas dissented, writing, “All the Law School cares about is its own image among know-it-all elites.” This past June, Thomas joined a majority of his colleagues in rejecting attempts by Seattle and Louisville to maintain diversity in their public schools, and wrote a separate concurring opinion to reflect his scorn for such plans. “Nothing but an interest in classroom aesthetics and a hypersensitivity to elite sensibilities justifies the school districts’ racial balancing programs,” he said. “If our history has taught us anything, it has taught us to beware of elites bearing racial theories.”
This theme is expanded upon in Thomas’s new memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son” (Harper; $26.95). In his book, Thomas is clear about whom he blames for the pain of his confirmation hearings, when he had to defend himself against Anita Hill’s accusations. “In one climactic swipe of calumny,” Thomas writes, “America’s elites were arrogantly wreaking havoc on everything my grandparents had worked for and all I’d accomplished in forty-three years of struggle.”
But this attitude didn’t start with the Hill hearings, he’d had this attitude long before.
When Thomas went on to Yale Law School, though, his rage grew. The young law student quickly came to resent the fact that he had benefitted from preferential admissions. “As much as it stung to be told that I’d done well in the seminary despite my race, it was far worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it,” he writes. “I was bitter toward the white bigots whom I held responsible for the unjust treatment of blacks, but even more bitter toward those ostensibly unprejudiced whites who pretended to side with black people while using them to further their own political and social ends.” Thomas never explains what Yale did to him that was so terrible. When he didn’t receive the job offers he wanted from law firms, he interpreted the slight as reflecting what “a law degree from Yale was worth when it bore the taint of racial preference.” He does not consider that, in the early nineteen-seventies, major law firms simply might not have wanted black lawyers—reflecting the very racism that affirmative action was designed to combat. Later, Thomas peeled a fifteen-cent sticker off a package of cigars and put it on the frame of his law degree. “I never did change my mind about its value,” he writes.
So the racism wasn't exemplified by a law firms who wouldn’t hire a black Yale law school graduate, it was — in his mind — worse than the assumption by potential employers that a black Yale Law school graduate couldn’t possibly have earned his degree on his own merits.
Similarly Kavanaugh’s hatred of Democrats and Liberals didn't start with the hearings this week, he’s long been a bitter partisan activist pretending to be a calms and reasonable jurist for the past 12 years.
He “may have a Jim Jordan problem.” Karoli Kuns noted that Kavanaugh clerked for Judge Alex Kozinski, who retired abruptly in December 2017after numerous allegations that he had sexually harassed his female law clerks came to light. Reports indicate that Kozinski’s behavior was widely known. It seems curious to think that Kavanaugh, who screened clerks for Kozinski, would not have known or heard about the sexual harassment. Or maybe he just considered it “locker room talk?”
He appeared to have a prurient interest in the Monica Lewinsky affair. If Kavanaugh missed Kozinski’s behavior, he certainly didn’t want to miss any details about Bill Clinton’s affair while he worked with then-independent counsel Kenneth Starr. Vox‘s Dylan Matthews explained: “In his history of the investigation, The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, Duquesne University’s Ken Gormley notes that Kavanaugh, ‘considered one of Starr’s intellectual heavy-lifters, pushed hardest to confront Clinton with some of the dirtiest facts linked to his sexual indiscretions with Lewinsky.'”
He may have lied during his appeals court confirmation hearings in 2006. According to a July 4, 2007 New York Times report, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-VT), who was then the chairperson of the Judiciary Committee, and committee member Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-IL), “questioned the forthrightness of the judge, Brett M. Kavanaugh, of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.” When asked by Durbin about his role in the Bush administration’s detention and interrogation policies, Kavanaugh replied: “Senator, I was not involved and am not involved in the questions about the rules governing detention of combatants and so I do not have any involvement in that.” That statement contradicted news reports by both NPR and The Washington Post, according to the Times, which indicated that Kavanaugh had been involved in those decisions.
Republicans repeatedly said that there was “no corroboration” for Ford’s claims — just as they’ve said there “no collusion” despite the fact that there is plenty of evidence of that — and yet it appears that the Washington Post discovered by listening to her testimony that accused accomplice Mark Judge’s book confirms when he worked at Safeway — as she described — and that Kavanaugh’s own calendar confirms the probable date of the get together as being July 1, 1982 as noted by Sen. Whitehouse.
“We know ‘Bart’ Kavanaugh was there because it’s his schedule, and here’s Judge, and here’s PJ, here are all those three named boys and others at a house together just as she said,” Whitehouse said. “She said Kavanaugh and Judge were drunk and that she had a beer. (The calendar shows) skis — (or) brewskis, beer. They were drinking, just as she said.”
“Now, I will concede that the two girls aren’t mentioned, but spot me this,” he added. “If you had just sexually assaulted one of the two girls, would you add the girls’ names to your calendar? I doubt it. This may, may be powerful corroborating evidence that the assault happened, that it happened that day, and that it happened in that place, but with no FBI investigation, we can’t tell.”
“Kavanaugh dodged and dissembled, ranted and raved, filibustered — I did not find him credible,” Whitehouse said. “I don’t believe ‘boof’ is flatulence, I don’t believe the devil’s triangle is a drinking game, and I don’t believe calling yourself a girl’s alumnus is being her friend, and I think drinking until you ‘ralph’ or fall out of the bus or don’t remember the game or need to piece together your memory the next day is more consistent with Dr. Ford’s and others’ testimony than his own.
“If Dr. Ford’s testimony is true, I hope we can all agree Kavanaugh has no business on the court, and I for one believed her,” he added.
Dr. Ford welcomed a further investigation by the FBI — this is not something that someone who is lying generally wants. Kavanaugh repeatedly refused to call for an FBI investigation and when Durbin asked for him to turn around to ask Don McGahn to have the White House call for an FBI Investigation he was angrily interrupted by Sen. Grassley.
Ultimately Sen. Flake reached a deal with Sen. Coons and other to force for a one week delay to allow the FBI to investigate these claims. Hopefully they will not just talk to Mark Judge, but also talk to his former girlfriend Elizabeth Rasor who has said that he admitted to participating in a gang-bang/rape of a drunk woman when in school.
Though Rasor did not corroborate Ford’s allegation, she told the New Yorker that Judge “ashamedly” confided in her about an incident in college when he and other men “took turns having sex with a drunk woman.”
“Rasor said that Judge seemed to regard it as fully consensual,” the New Yorker noted. “She said that Judge did not name others involved in the incident, and she has no knowledge that Kavanaugh participated in it.”
This sounds rather similar to the claims of Julie Swetnick that Judge and Kavanaugh were participants in previous group sex situations where they helped get women inebriated which Kavanaugh blew off as being “a farce.”
She actually witnessed Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could be gang raped by a train of numerous boys,” Sunny said, continuing to read from Swetnick’s statement. “She has a firm recollection of seeing boys lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their turn with the girl inside the room. And she says those boys included Brett Kavanaugh.”
Kavanaugh has claimed that he didn’t have a drinking problem but Sen. Corey Booker brought up, his former Yale roomate and other members of his dorm don’t agree and also noted that much of Dr. Ford’s testimony is credible and corroborated by her prior statements to her husband and therapist.
Speaking with the Washington Post, Liz Swisher, a self-described college “friend” of Kavanaugh, painted a picture of Kavanaugh as an excessive drinker whose claims of moderation were nothing like the man she used to party with:
Brett was a sloppy drunk, and I know because I drank with him. I watched him drink more than a lot of people. He’d end up slurring his words, stumbling. There’s no medical way I can say that he was blacked out. . . . But it’s not credible for him to say that he has had no memory lapses in the nights that he drank to excess.
Former classmate Lynne Brooks agreed, recounting to the Post a time when she saw Kavanaugh at a frat party, wearing a superhero cape, struggling to keep his balance, and singing “I’m a geek, I’m a geek, I’m a power tool. When I sing this song, I look like a fool.”
“It’s a funny, drunk college story that you remember — at least, I remember,” Brooks told the Post. “I thought it was so funny to think that’s the Brett who sang that song.”
This in additional to the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow and his report that Deborah Ramirez, a fellow Yale Student of Kavanaugh’s claim that he exposed himself to her during a dormitory party. She said that he “thrust his penis” into her face, and “caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away.” Rather than talk to her GOP members of the committee blew off a conference call with Ramirez’s lawyer [only the Dems showed up], then they refused to invite her to the Thursday hearing.
What we saw was one woman with sincere trauma, terror and sorrow trying to be as helpful as she could without any agenda and one man filled with entitlement and rage who repeatedly obstructed the proceeding, lied, dissembled and belittled those questioning him for one of the most powerful position in the land.
We saw one group of lawmakers struggling to uncover the facts and the truth, and another that merely lobbed insults and invective. Claiming simultaneously that the idea of making unfounded and unproven allegations was so horrific and unseemly, then immediately hurling unfounded and unproven allegations against the members of the opposing party without apparent conscience or irony.
Of that party, only one member had the basic decency to at least temporarily put a halt to the farce and require that some basic professional investigation of matters be attempted.
Hopefully the impending FBI investigation will be able to follow down all these threads and bring us some clearer picture of Kavanaugh and Ford’s credibility on this issue. Is Ford sincere but mistaken? Is Kavanaugh innocent, or likely simply unable to remember what he may have done or not done while exceedingly drunk?
Having some clarity on this may help us come together somewhat as a nation, although I still have my doubts this will be nearly enough to heal the partisan divide on this or many other issues.
All the issues need to be explored, but what we also saw on display this week was a man more than willing to twist facts and words to suit his own purposes and agenda, a man raging without reason, full of conspiratorial indignation. The man we saw this week may very well have been the “real” Brett Kavanaugh, the one he usually keeps bottled up, someone need to bottom of a six pack of his prized beer. The one he only lets come out into the light when only his trusted fratpack beer-addled allies are around.
That man is not fit to sit in judgement of others. He’s not fit to sit on the bench. Even if the FBI find there isn’t enough corroborating evidence for any of these claims, Brett Kavanaugh is clearly unfit to wear the judicial robes of impartiality.
Most of America now know this, the rest is living in partisan conspiratorial denial.