Common Sense On the Kavanaugh Ambush

The nomination vote should proceed asap.

We cannot and must not normalize this latest example of bad behavior by the unscrupulous Dimotards.

The Wall Street Journal sums it up best...


The #MeToo Kavanaugh Ambush

A story this old and unprovable can’t be allowed to delay a Supreme Court confirmation vote.

2932 Comments
By The Editorial Board
Updated Sept. 17, 2018 7:47 p.m. ET

The woman accusing Brett Kavanaugh of a drunken assault when both were teenagers has now come forward publicly, and on Monday it caused Republicans to delay a confirmation vote and schedule another public hearing. Yet there is no way to confirm her story after 36 years, and to let it stop Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation would ratify what has all the earmarks of a calculated political ambush.

This is not to say Christine Blasey Ford isn’t sincere in what she remembers. In an interview published in the Washington Post on Sunday, Ms. Ford offered a few more details of the story she told anonymously starting in July. She says she was 15 when Mr. Kavanaugh, who would have been 17, and a male friend pushed her into a bedroom at a drinking party, held her down, and pawed her until the male friend jumped on them both and she escaped to a bathroom until the two boys left the room.

Mr. Kavanaugh denies all this “categorically and unequivocally,” and there is simply no way to prove it. The only witness to the event is Mr. Kavanaugh’s high school male friend, Mark Judge, who also says he recalls no such event. Ms. Ford concedes she told no one about it—not even a high school girl friend or family member—until 2012 when she told the story as part of couples therapy with her husband.

The vagaries of memory are well known, all the more so when they emerge in the cauldron of a therapy session to rescue a marriage. Experts know that human beings can come to believe firmly over the years that something happened when it never did or is based on partial truth. Mistaken identity is also possible.

The Post reports that the therapist’s notes from 2012 say there were four male assailants, but Ms. Ford says that was a mistake. Ms. Ford also can’t recall in whose home the alleged assault took place, how she got there, or how she got home that evening.

This is simply too distant and uncorroborated a story to warrant a new hearing or to delay a vote. We’ve heard from all three principals, and there are no other witnesses to call. Democrats will use Monday’s hearing as a political spectacle to coax Mr. Kavanaugh into looking defensive or angry, and to portray Republicans as anti-women. Odds are it will be a circus.

The timing and details of how Ms. Ford came forward, and how her name was coaxed into public view, should also raise red flags about the partisan motives at play. The Post says Ms. Ford contacted the paper via a tip line in July but wanted to remain anonymous. She then brought her story to a Democratic official while still hoping to stay anonymous.

Yet she also then retained a lawyer, Debra Katz, who has a history of Democratic activism and spoke in public defense of Bill Clinton against the accusations by Paula Jones. Ms. Katz urged Ms. Ford to take a polygraph test. The Post says she passed the polygraph, though a polygraph merely shows that she believes the story she is telling.

The more relevant question is why go to such lengths if Ms. Ford really wanted her name to stay a secret? Even this weekend she could have chosen to remain anonymous. These are the actions of someone who was prepared to go public from the beginning if she had to.

The role of Senator Dianne Feinstein is also highly irregular and transparently political. The ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee knew about Ms. Ford’s accusations in late July or early August yet kept quiet. If she took it seriously, she had multiple opportunities to ask Judge Kavanaugh or have committee staff interview the principals. But in that event the details would have been vetted and Senators would have had time to assess their credibility.

Instead Ms. Feinstein waited until the day before a committee markup on the nomination to release a statement that she had “information” about the accusation and had sent it to the FBI. Her statement was a political stunt.

She was seeking to insulate herself from liberal charges that she sat on the letter. Or—and this seems increasingly likely given the course of events—Senator Feinstein was holding the story to spring at the last minute in the hope that events would play out as they have. Surely she knew that once word of the accusation was public, the press would pursue the story and Ms. Ford would be identified by name one way or another.

Democrats waited until Ms. Ford went public to make public statements. But clearly some were feeding the names of Ms. Ford and her lawyer to the press, and now they are piling on what they hope will be an election-eve #MeToo conflagration.

“Senator [and Judiciary Chairman] Grassley must postpone the vote until, at a very minimum, these serious and credible allegations are thoroughly investigated,” declared Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday. “For too long, when women have made serious allegations of abuse, they have been ignored. That cannot happen in this case.”

His obvious political goal is to delay the confirmation vote past the election, fan the #MeToo political furies until then, and hope that at least two GOP Senators wilt under political pressure. If Republican Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker think a hearing will satisfy Mr. Schumer, they are right to retire from politics.

GOP Senators should understand that the political cost of defeating Mr. Kavanaugh will likely include the loss of the Senate. Democrats are already motivated to vote against Donald Trump, and if Republicans panic now their own voters will rightly be furious. They would be letting Democrats get away with the same dirty trick they tried and failed to pull off against Clarence Thomas.

It would also be a serious injustice to a man who has by all accounts other than Ms. Ford’s led a life of respect for women and the law. Every #MeToo miscreant is a repeat offender. The accusation against Mr. Kavanaugh is behavior manifested nowhere else in his life.

No one, including Donald Trump, needs to attack Ms. Ford. She believes what she believes. This is not he said-she said. This is a case of an alleged teenage encounter, partially recalled 30 years later without corroboration, and brought forward to ruin Mr. Kavanaugh’s reputation for partisan purposes.

Letting an accusation that is this old, this unsubstantiated and this procedurally irregular defeat Mr. Kavanaugh would also mean weaponizing every sexual assault allegation no matter the evidence. It will tarnish the #MeToo cause with the smear of partisanship, and it will unleash even greater polarizing furies.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-met...ush-1537197395

She was asked to come to Washington testify under oath and now wants a delay.

The OP was published yesterday. Here is today's WSJ editorial:


Schumer’s FBI Ploy

The Democratic demand for a bureau probe is one more delaying tactic.

1436 Comments
By The Editorial Board
Sept. 18, 2018 7:32 p.m. ET

Democrats have succeeded in delaying a vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination until the Senate holds a public hearing with him and his accuser scheduled for Monday, but they’re still not happy. Now they don’t even want to hold that hearing until the FBI investigates the alleged sexual assault that happened when the two were in high school.

“The FBI conducted a background check on Judge Kavanaugh before these allegations were known,” Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Monday on the Senate floor. “It is now the FBI’s responsibility to investigate these claims, update the analysis to Judge Kavanaugh’s background, and report back to the Senate.”

Other Democrats have picked up the same chant since Senator Dianne Feinstein announced last week that she had forwarded to the FBI a letter that accuser Christine Ford had written to her. Both Senators know this isn’t the role that the FBI plays in nominations, and their demand shows that their real motive here is further delay.

The FBI doesn’t conduct criminal investigations into nominees, especially not into an alleged incident that would not have been a violation of a federal statute. State law would be at issue. That’s why the FBI responded to Ms. Feinstein’s statement last week by saying it had no plans to conduct a criminal probe and merely added Ms. Ford’s letter to Judge Kavanaugh’s background file.

The purpose of a background check is to interview people about the character and qualifications of a nominee. The FBI makes no judgments about the veracity of the people it interviews, and its role isn’t to issue a judgment about the nominee. The FBI simply compiles information that is then submitted to the White House.

If the nomination is for a judgeship confirmable by the Senate, then the White House will forward that information to the Senate Judiciary Committee. If there is an allegation of some kind, the Senate staff will typically follow up with the accuser and the nominee and present the information to Senators, who then make their own judgment as part of their advice and consent power.

The preposterous circumstance in this case is that Senator Feinstein withheld Ms. Ford’s accusations for six weeks from Republicans and the White House. Ms. Feinstein could have turned over Ms. Ford’s letter to the FBI immediately, yet now Democrats are demanding a further delay so the FBI can do what the Senators can do for themselves—which is to interview the nominee and his accuser.

Republicans have invited Mr. Kavanaugh and Ms. Ford to appear on Monday, Mr. Kavanaugh says he’ll show up anywhere or anytime to deny the accusation. Yet by our deadline Tuesday Ms. Ford’s lawyer was still declining to say if her client would appear. Democratic staffers were also refusing to cooperate with Republicans on a schedule to conduct phone calls with Ms. Ford, Judge Kavanaugh, and any relevant witnesses. Such follow-up phone calls are standard procedure after an FBI background check has been completed.

All of this underscores that the main Democratic goal is to delay a confirmation vote past the November election. That would spare Democrats running for re-election in Donald Trump states from having to take a difficult confirmation vote. If Democrats take the Senate majority, they’ll then insist on no vote until the new Senate convenes in January.

Republicans have already created more danger for themselves and Judge Kavanaugh by agreeing to a hearing that Democrats will turn into a #MeToo spectacle. They should tell Ms. Ford and Democrats that if she doesn’t want to show up on Monday, they will move to a confirmation vote post-haste.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/schumer...loy-1537313532

She was asked to come to Washington testify under oath and now wants a delay. Originally Posted by NBruno

IMO she shouldn't have been given a choice. YOU make this serious of an accusation, you could be supoena'ed to appear to testify.


Add to that, what's this bull, about her being 'too scared to show up' to the bright lights of washington, so Washington needs to send folk to her??! Sorry, but cops rarely if ever, do that.

So why should congress?

Everyone has a choice. Think of it like a criminal trial. A witness is called and they are a no show. The judge asks the attorney, "where's your witness?" The attorney shrugs her shoulders and indicates the witness had a change of heart. The other attorney pontificate that his client has not been able to respond to slander and asks for a dismissal. The judge grants the dismissal and says to take up the slander in a civil court. That should be the new strategy, she their asses off. Too bad politicians are too afraid of any bad publicity, truthful or not.

Everyone has a choice. Think of it like a criminal trial. A witness is called and they are a no show. The judge asks the attorney, "where's your witness?" The attorney shrugs her shoulders and indicates the witness had a change of heart. The other attorney pontificate that his client has not been able to respond to slander and asks for a dismissal. The judge grants the dismissal and says to take up the slander in a civil court. That should be the new strategy, she their asses off. Too bad politicians are too afraid of any bad publicity, truthful or not. Originally Posted by the_real_Barleycorn

+1

If the Republicans had the votes assured, McConnell would call for the votes today. Supposedly there are a couple of Republicans on the fence. One from Maine is being outright bribed.

In a way, I'm blaming President Trump. Hear me out. You can't drain the swamp outright from day one. He needed to make some arrangements and pick his battles carefully. Like Obama he didn't know how to use political capital. Not nearly as bad as Obama, but he was a swamp novice. That's how he got stuck with Jeff Sessions. There wasn't much of a selection. The RINOs weren't going to help him.

That's how come Obamacare hasn't been fully dismantled. My understanding is that the Tax Repatriation cash influx hasn't happened yet. The swamp is dragging it's feet trying to come up with the regulations. He should have stayed off Twitter past midnight and accepted a 20% swamp drain the first two years.

Now he's made some enemies in the Republican party who have a vendetta. And the few remaining "blue dog" Democrats aren't going to help him for fear not of their constituency but of their party.

If Mitch could count on 55 votes yesterday, he would have had the vote today.

If the Republicans had the votes assured, McConnell would call for the votes today. Supposedly there are a couple of Republicans on the fence. One from Maine is being outright bribed.

In a way, I'm blaming President Trump. Hear me out. You can't drain the swamp outright from day one. He needed to make some arrangements and pick his battles carefully. Like Obama he didn't know how to use political capital. Not nearly as bad as Obama, but he was a swamp novice. That's how he got stuck with Jeff Sessions. There wasn't much of a selection. The RINOs weren't going to help him.

That's how come Obamacare hasn't been fully dismantled. My understanding is that the Tax Repatriation cash influx hasn't happened yet. The swamp is dragging it's feet trying to come up with the regulations. He should have stayed off Twitter past midnight and accepted a 20% swamp drain the first two years.

Now he's made some enemies in the Republican party who have a vendetta. And the few remaining "blue dog" Democrats aren't going to help him for fear not of their constituency but of their party.

If Mitch could count on 55 votes yesterday, he would have had the vote today. Originally Posted by gnadfly

sounds about right. he needs to pick his battles. he got suckered on some issues like sessions.

The nomination vote should proceed asap.

We cannot and must not normalize this latest example of bad behavior by the unscrupulous Dimotards.

The Wall Street Journal sums it up best...


The #MeToo Kavanaugh Ambush

A story this old and unprovable can’t be allowed to delay a Supreme Court confirmation vote.

2932 Comments
By The Editorial Board
Updated Sept. 17, 2018 7:47 p.m. ET

The woman accusing Brett Kavanaugh of a drunken assault when both were teenagers has now come forward publicly, and on Monday it caused Republicans to delay a confirmation vote and schedule another public hearing. Yet there is no way to confirm her story after 36 years, and to let it stop Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation would ratify what has all the earmarks of a calculated political ambush.

This is not to say Christine Blasey Ford isn’t sincere in what she remembers. In an interview published in the Washington Post on Sunday, Ms. Ford offered a few more details of the story she told anonymously starting in July. She says she was 15 when Mr. Kavanaugh, who would have been 17, and a male friend pushed her into a bedroom at a drinking party, held her down, and pawed her until the male friend jumped on them both and she escaped to a bathroom until the two boys left the room.

Mr. Kavanaugh denies all this “categorically and unequivocally,” and there is simply no way to prove it. The only witness to the event is Mr. Kavanaugh’s high school male friend, Mark Judge, who also says he recalls no such event. Ms. Ford concedes she told no one about it—not even a high school girl friend or family member—until 2012 when she told the story as part of couples therapy with her husband.

The vagaries of memory are well known, all the more so when they emerge in the cauldron of a therapy session to rescue a marriage. Experts know that human beings can come to believe firmly over the years that something happened when it never did or is based on partial truth. Mistaken identity is also possible.

The Post reports that the therapist’s notes from 2012 say there were four male assailants, but Ms. Ford says that was a mistake. Ms. Ford also can’t recall in whose home the alleged assault took place, how she got there, or how she got home that evening.

This is simply too distant and uncorroborated a story to warrant a new hearing or to delay a vote. We’ve heard from all three principals, and there are no other witnesses to call. Democrats will use Monday’s hearing as a political spectacle to coax Mr. Kavanaugh into looking defensive or angry, and to portray Republicans as anti-women. Odds are it will be a circus.

The timing and details of how Ms. Ford came forward, and how her name was coaxed into public view, should also raise red flags about the partisan motives at play. The Post says Ms. Ford contacted the paper via a tip line in July but wanted to remain anonymous. She then brought her story to a Democratic official while still hoping to stay anonymous.

Yet she also then retained a lawyer, Debra Katz, who has a history of Democratic activism and spoke in public defense of Bill Clinton against the accusations by Paula Jones. Ms. Katz urged Ms. Ford to take a polygraph test. The Post says she passed the polygraph, though a polygraph merely shows that she believes the story she is telling.

The more relevant question is why go to such lengths if Ms. Ford really wanted her name to stay a secret? Even this weekend she could have chosen to remain anonymous. These are the actions of someone who was prepared to go public from the beginning if she had to.

The role of Senator Dianne Feinstein is also highly irregular and transparently political. The ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee knew about Ms. Ford’s accusations in late July or early August yet kept quiet. If she took it seriously, she had multiple opportunities to ask Judge Kavanaugh or have committee staff interview the principals. But in that event the details would have been vetted and Senators would have had time to assess their credibility.

Instead Ms. Feinstein waited until the day before a committee markup on the nomination to release a statement that she had “information” about the accusation and had sent it to the FBI. Her statement was a political stunt.

She was seeking to insulate herself from liberal charges that she sat on the letter. Or—and this seems increasingly likely given the course of events—Senator Feinstein was holding the story to spring at the last minute in the hope that events would play out as they have. Surely she knew that once word of the accusation was public, the press would pursue the story and Ms. Ford would be identified by name one way or another.

Democrats waited until Ms. Ford went public to make public statements. But clearly some were feeding the names of Ms. Ford and her lawyer to the press, and now they are piling on what they hope will be an election-eve #MeToo conflagration.

“Senator [and Judiciary Chairman] Grassley must postpone the vote until, at a very minimum, these serious and credible allegations are thoroughly investigated,” declared Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Sunday. “For too long, when women have made serious allegations of abuse, they have been ignored. That cannot happen in this case.”

His obvious political goal is to delay the confirmation vote past the election, fan the #MeToo political furies until then, and hope that at least two GOP Senators wilt under political pressure. If Republican Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker think a hearing will satisfy Mr. Schumer, they are right to retire from politics.

GOP Senators should understand that the political cost of defeating Mr. Kavanaugh will likely include the loss of the Senate. Democrats are already motivated to vote against Donald Trump, and if Republicans panic now their own voters will rightly be furious. They would be letting Democrats get away with the same dirty trick they tried and failed to pull off against Clarence Thomas.

It would also be a serious injustice to a man who has by all accounts other than Ms. Ford’s led a life of respect for women and the law. Every #MeToo miscreant is a repeat offender. The accusation against Mr. Kavanaugh is behavior manifested nowhere else in his life.

No one, including Donald Trump, needs to attack Ms. Ford. She believes what she believes. This is not he said-she said. This is a case of an alleged teenage encounter, partially recalled 30 years later without corroboration, and brought forward to ruin Mr. Kavanaugh’s reputation for partisan purposes.

Letting an accusation that is this old, this unsubstantiated and this procedurally irregular defeat Mr. Kavanaugh would also mean weaponizing every sexual assault allegation no matter the evidence. It will tarnish the #MeToo cause with the smear of partisanship, and it will unleash even greater polarizing furies.


https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-met...ush-1537197395 Originally Posted by lustylad

Really excellent article.

So she contacted a paper via a tip line. That's interesting. What paper would that be?