It is ironic that Kavanaugh would have a friend named Judge.
And it is appropriate that, arguably, the weakest and least reliable Republican in Congress has the last name of Flake. I think that literally every time I see his name. I wonder why he registered as a Republican in the first place. Democrat would have been so much easier.
The damage arises from the combination of helplessness and rage. You have a terrifying situation you cannot escape no matter how hard you try.
For these reasons I would assert it is not ENTIRELY unreasonable to describe what was done to Brett Kavanaugh as a rape of sorts. It is certainly mildly hyperbolic, but what are certainly present are severe emotional distress, and some degree of helplessness.
He is fighting, and that is good. If you do everything you CAN do, true PTSD is much less likely. If he had quit early on he would have had bitterness in him most of his life. It would have a risk in any event.
We all need to think about what we are doing. I myself am not infrequently an asshole. I know it. I admit it, and I’m pretty sure I know why.
But I would be incapable of consciously choosing to do to Kavsnaugh what is being done to him. It would gnaw at my gut.
At the considerable risk of being misunderstood, might I assert that great evil requires great principle?
White men were insufficiently Liberal while inventing Liberalism.
White men were insufficiently interested in women while laying the groundwork for what became feminism.
White men were excessively imperialistic prior to developing anti-imperialistic notions.
White men did not ban slavery fast enough while being the first large group in human history to do so.
There is an inherently sadomasochistic streak running particularly through self loathing white Leftists.
What if we called Voter ID laws homophobic? Would that make sense? What if we called misogynistic? Would that make sense? What if we said they discriminated against Asians? Would not everyone ask “why Asians”?
Tomorrow Grassley needs to say something like this:
This has been quite an ordeal. The confirmation of a Supreme Court justice was not supposed to be like this. It was supposed to rest on their records, their characters, and while we do have the FBI undertake background checks, it is assumed that major problems would show up in twenty years (or whatever it is) of public service.
Judge Kavanaugh has had a great many people vouch for his character. Everyone who has worked with him has applauded him, his family believes in him, and some 75 women have come forward to specifically vouch for him. He has a lot of support. He has a lot of women in his life who have known him for a long time, and who respect him and who do not believe that, at his worst, he was ever as bad a person as he is said to have been, by one person who was here yesterday, and two who emerged at the last second to level outrageous accusations from long, long ago.
Here is my view: we CANNOT and SHALL NOT make this the new standard. We cannot make every nominee to the Supreme Court go through this, if they happen to favor judicial opinions which are unpopular with an element of our society which is highly ideological, well organized, and willing to go to nearly any length to disrupt our process.
Mrs. Ford may be telling the truth. I don’t know. It is also possible she is NOT telling the truth. I don’t know that either. But if we make unsubstantiated allegation the new standard, there is no new low which is not possible. We make a mockery of the process. We turn the next Supreme Court confirmation hearing into a circus, IN ADVANCE, if the nominee is presented by a Republican, and, in the current hyperpartisan atmosphere, specifically President Trump.
We KNOW, from their own public speeches, that the Democrats vowed to oppose ANYONE President Trump put forward. Anyone. Ponder that. Judge Kavanaugh, obviously, is someone, and they have certainly been as good as their word.
But the Senate is supposed to be a place of sober contemplation. It is supposed to be where our most experienced leaders, our wisest minds, go to temper reckless populism–which is represented by the House, in all its sometime exuberance–with quiet consideration, and mature discussion.
It is ironic that we are in fact considering a man for the highest court in our land. Our laws are fashioned from the principle that many can be convicted in so-called Court of Public Opinion, who are in fact innocent. Lynch mobs do deliver immediate action, but their history of delivering justice is, to put it in the best possible light, mixed, and their history of great injustice is long and well documented.
We do things the way we do for a reason. We do them because, on balance, they are most likely to render justice, to render decency, to render fairness.
And in my view the standard moving forward should be clear: if we could not so much as bring a criminal case with regard to any given serious allegation, then we should not consider it at all. Yes, fine, we need to do background checks, of course. If there are any patterns of behavior discussed in hushed tones and anonymously, then that needs to be known and brought into the deliberation room, brought into the light.
But short of that, there is no limit to how many sensational charges can be brought. Perhaps next time it will be from 50 years ago. Perhaps next time there will be a murder in some foreign country, or even here. Perhaps even now, strategists are contemplating the stories that will be told in 3 years the next time this situation occurs.
As I say, I don’t know if Professor Ford is telling the truth. And this is core, salient fact of this case: we don’t know. We can’t know. She can’t tell us where this alleged assault happened. She can’t tell us when. She has no contemporaneous witnesses whose credibility is equal to the seriousness of the allegations. No prosecutor in the country would bring charges based on the evidence.
In this country, people do not go to jail based on hearsay, and asking us to delay one moment longer in confirming Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is to ask us to convict him of a crime no one here can provide sufficient evidence he committed.
Therefore, I move for an immediate vote.
Avennati (so?) represents a prostitute/stripper for hire, who wants more money.
And with regard to the new allegations: can we just stick with the vote Friday? It’s gone from the bad to the “do you really want to do this to yourselves Democrats”?
I know Sun Tzu said to never stop your enemy when they are making a mistake, but I think by now everyone who CAN figure out how insane and anti-American the Democrats have become has done so.
When you look at a Soviet flag you see repented an ideology that caused the unnatural deaths of some 100 million people.
When you see an American flag, you see represented the First Nation in human history which enshrined in its foundation the concept of universal human rights, and which was instrumental is n defeating the Nazis, and which remains, in the main, dedicated to the final defeat of the Communists, although it is hard to know when or how that may happen. We beat the Soviets, but the Chinese remain committed to their ideology of tyranny, oligarchy, and the repudiation of the right to do anything but conform.
And of course our nation is suffused with Communists calling for a reversal of everything promised and protected by the Constitution. But the fact that they feel the need to insult and burn our flag indicates it still stands for human decency and a belief in the power of ordinary people to grow and prosper, when given the freedom to do so.
I can’t help but think that in the future people will ask, when a woman comes forward with an accusation, “is this a Christina Ford, or is she maybe actually telling the truth?” Ford is creating, virtually singled-handedly, the category of the politically motivated liar.
I don’t believe her, and I don’t think anyone should believe her. Serious people with nothing to hide don’t play all these games. It’s a new demand, a new constraint, every single day. If this really happened, she would be EAGER to get in front of Congress and tell her story any way she can.
It may be that some boy did what she alleges–I am inclined to think the story, itself, is true–but it was not Brett Kavanaugh.
They need to hold a vote on Thursday or Friday, and put an end to this ridiculous charade.
Fifteen years from now, if that person decides to try and buck the system, if they have EVER done anything wrong, evidence can be produced immediately. It is most likely this process is in place now, and has been for some time. Our system may very well operate on blackmail nearly entirely. The net is simply getting wider and wider, to include substantially every waking moment spent within an arms length of your cell phone, which is to say substantially every waking (and sleeping) moment.
This thing would be quiet. No one who is a victim of it would dare protest, for the very reason that they are plainly guilty. Simple deals can be cut, in which relative compliance is bought for the price of silence; in which, in other words, our “leaders” prostitute themselves to unaccountable, invisible ghosts in the night, whose goals are unknown, whose activities are unknown, and who cannot be made answerable to anyone.
This is why the 4th Amendment exists. There is nothing new under the sun, and no fundamental aspect of human nature has changed in the past 200 years.
I don’t know what the solution is, but as always, I hope to make a start by stating the problem clearly.