Time To Smear Kavanaugh's Good Name...

[One Bad Pig]

Beat you to it. I never belonged. Always have been a libertarian (that's with a small "l", not a member of that party either). I've voted for Democrats for state representative, Governor and both Houses of Congress -- they just haven't ever nominated anyone that I could vote for as president though (and several times neither did the Republicans).

The only reason I'm a member is so I can vote in primary elections.

[Zymologist]

Has there been any more info on Ford's not knowing about the senate offer to fly to her? That would sure seem to reflect very badly on somebody, though I'm not sure who (her lawyers are my first guess, but I don't know enough about it).

[rogue06]

The only reason I'm a member is so I can vote in primary elections.

We have open primaries.

[One Bad Pig]

We have open primaries.

I'm not much of a fan of open primaries - too much opportunity for one party to spike another's best candidate.

[oxmixmudd]

You are basically admitting she has no case and had no case to begin with because she has no evidence, so that is why she is letting it go. That means it should never have been brought forward in the first place. As it stands it is nothing but a smear campaign meant to try to stop or delay Kavanaugh's confirmation.

I am admitting that in the end she had no case. I am not admitting 'she had no case to begin with'. Until all possible witnesses at the party had been interviewed, no-one knew if there was any existing evidence beyond her memory of the event. I consider it logical she might have expected somebody to remember something. The truth is, IF she is telling the truth, it is very likely Judge remembers. But he will never flip on his buddy without some sort of Damascus road like experience.

Keep in mind I'm looking at what would make sense if she was telling the truth. So far, nothing on this end of the debate (why she didn't want to take on a law suit or criminal prosecution) is inconsistent with her experiencing an assault and believing the assailant to be Kavanaugh.

As for should she have brought it forward in the first place. The answer is yes. But even more so a long time ago. waiting till now was a mistake. But your attitude is part of the problem Sparko. If a women is assaulted, the difficulty often is that there is not proof or there is minimal proof. But to say to a women: "If you can't prove this happened then just keep your mouth shut" is not an acceptable policy.

My guess is she was coerced into proceeding by the democrats opposed to Kavanaugh. That she knew it was a long shot but didn't want Kavanaugh confirmed without someone knowing what happened to her. The rest as they say is history.

But I honestly don't understand how you can be so cavalier about that aspect of it, whether or not to report it. It is not right to expect that a person, male or female, be quiet about an assault unless they believe they can prove it happened. They are very likely not in a position to even determine if they can prove it. Think about it. How many women die from spousal abuse? How many women are assaulted in private places with at best a few bruise to show for it? You are advocating for potential assailants and against potential victims by demanding they be silent unless they can prove the event happened.

In the courts, a person that is falsely accused is protected by "Innocent until PROVEN guilty". So we don't need to tell women to shut up unless they can prove it. That is the wrong message given that most of the time the accusations are in fact truthful.



Jim

[Cow Poke]

Has there been any more info on Ford's not knowing about the senate offer to fly to her? That would sure seem to reflect very badly on somebody, though I'm not sure who (her lawyers are my first guess, but I don't know enough about it).

Here is a good look at that issue - https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/k...her-california

[Zymologist]

Here is a good look at that issue - https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/k...her-california

Is the possibility that the offer was withheld from her being investigated, do you know? Because if that's what happened, that seems pretty damning to me.

[oxmixmudd]

And this is more where I'm ending up, after seeing and reading so much from both sides...

One Ford Narrative Too Many

In the end, the Christine Blasey Ford accusations collapsed. With them went the last effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the United States Supreme Court.

After thousands of hours of internal Senate and FBI investigations of Kavanaugh, as well as public discussions, open questioning, and media sensationalism, Ford remained unable to identify a single witness who might substantiate any of her narratives of an alleged sexual assault of nearly four decades past.

To substantiate her claim, the country was asked to jettison the idea of innocent until proven guilty, the need for corroborating testimony, witnesses, and physical evidence, the inadmissibility of hearsay, the need for reasonable statutes of limitations, considerations of motive, and the right of the accused to conduct vigorous cross-examination. That leap proved too much, especially when located in a larger progressive landscape of street theater antics, including Senate disruptions, walkouts, and sandbagging senators in hallways and elevators.

At the end of all things, Ford remained scarcely knowledgeable about the location and time of the assault than she was months earlier in her original anonymous complaint. Nor could she yet describe how she arrived at or left the party that may or may not have taken place in 1982. That Ford retained a crystal-clear account of having consumed just one beer and that Kavanaugh played the Hollywood role of a cruel, smirking, drunken, and privileged preppy groper were sensational accusations but not supportable.

After two weeks of the televised melodrama, the country rejected the therapeutic mindset and preferred what was logic and rational—without dismissing the chance that Ford somewhere at some time had experienced some sort of severe trauma.

In Ford’s case, that meant that being empathetic or even sincere did not translate into being credible. Logos (word) and ergon (deed) have never been synonymous. The country was finally asked to believe that because Ford told others of the assault 30 years later, that admission was de facto proof that the event really happened—and happened just as Ford described. But since when was sharing a story proof that the story therein was believable?

Serial Fibs and Fables

The Democrats’ strategy to derail Kavanagh encouraged the appearance of serial accusers—on the theory that the quantity of accusations could do what the quality of any individual testimony could not. Activists had little idea that the opposite usually occurs when such serial testimonials lack substantiation: like falling dominos one knocks down the next all the way back to the beginning. And so the wreckage of serial fibs and fables from all sorts also helped to undermine Ford’s credibility.

When the Deborah Ramirez yarn and the Julie Swetnick fantasy collapsed, along with those of accusers four, five, six, etc. (that inter alia had included charges of rape while out to sea off Rhode Island, a tag-team sexual assault with Mark Judge in the backseat of a car, and throwing ice), Ford’s narrative appeared even less credible. Instead it became just one of many fictions; the first accuser became different from the rest only in the sense of being the first rather than the only one credible.

But Ford’s problem was not just that her memory was inexact and often nonexistent about the details necessary to substantiate her quite serious charges aimed at destroying not just a nomination but the totality of an individual and his family, 36 years after an alleged teenaged encounter. Instead, the rub was that Christine Blasey Ford inadvertently became the best witness—against Christine Blasey Ford.

She had claimed that she was afraid of flying, but by her own admissions she was a frequent flyer.

She claimed the event took place in the early 1980s but also the mid-’80s—but also summer of 1982. Thus, her reported age at the time of the incident was equally fluid as a middle teen or late teen.

She swore that she had no idea that Senate investigators were willing to fly to California to interview her to accommodate her aerophobia—an offer splashed over the media for days.

Her halting answers to questions about her legal assistance funding, her past experiences with lie detector tests, the existence of any tapes or videos of her lie detector interview, and the content, accessibility, and nature of her therapist notes were either self-contradictory, illogical, or incomplete.

An ex-boyfriend turned up to question her narratives in a sworn affidavit alleging that she was demonstrably neither aerophobic nor claustrophobic—and perhaps far from being a novice in matters of taking lie-detector tests. Instead, he suggested that she had used her psychotherapy skills to coach her doppelganger friend how to massage such a test—a Zelig-like best friend who unfortunately also turned up at the hearings, and may well have hosted Ford before the Senate circus, and also allegedly may have tried to pressure one of Ford’s friends to massage her earlier condemnatory denials.

Reporters had noted Ford’s two-front-door remedy for anxiety was not necessarily a result of post-Kavanaugh stress syndrome as much a far earlier mercantile gambit to cash in on the Silicon Valley rent boom, where an extra room with a separate roadside entry meant a lucrative attached rental.

That the same ex-boyfriend claimed that an unfaithful Ford had also ripped him off for $600 in credit card bills (presumably a demonstrable accusation given banking records) did not help her case that she was a babe in the financial woods without a clue about her growing and lucrative GoFundMe account, or who in fact had paid her legal and prep bills and how—facts at odds with Ford’s adolescent demeanor of supposedly lost innocence.

So Many Stories

Senate prosecutor Rachel Mitchell might have proven in court more a depositioner than an inquisitor in her seemingly circular questioning, but in retrospect she proved a brilliant interrogator nonetheless in getting Ford to testify to a host of things that simply could not all be true—and would come back to haunt Ford in Mitchell’s damning summary of Ford’s likely untruths.

And why exactly were there so many contradictions as outlined in Mitchell’s written summation?

....

There is a lot in what you list there that is partisan opinion, echoed from people whose biases take speculation and speak about it as if it is fact. We've already discussed the fear of flying thing. This quoted article treats it like fact she made it up. That is wasn't real - when that simply isn't anywhere close to a known fact. She flies but is afraid to fly and takes medication for it is not 'making it up'. And really, I get incensed at people doing that sort of thing. Likewise the misnomer that she lied about the time frame of the doors when the proof of that claim is a discussion of the sequence of the counseling conversation. This sort of thing is just not a fair way to deal with the facts, it is in fact a distortion of the facts and I just don't understand why so many are willing to go along with it.

Ask yourself - is it morally right to go along with an idea that one knows is an exaggeration or distortion of the facts because it is convenient or because that is the party line of our particular ideological group? I remember coming face to face with this when I was asked to teach some kids at my church about creation when I knew there were issues with the YEC claims and justifications. The temptation was to just parrot the party line anyway, and to a certain extent I did that. And I always regretted it. That is why I am so particular about it on this end. The details matter. Blanket summarization of conflicting data points biased towards what we want to be true is ALWAYS a mistake.


Jim

[oxmixmudd]

Here is a good look at that issue - https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/k...her-california

That is a good article on the issue CP. And look at how she characterizes her fear of flying. It's clearly not something she can't do, but something she just finds very very uncomfortable.


Jim

[Leonhard]

And this is more where I'm ending up, after seeing and reading so much from both sides...

One Ford Narrative Too Many

In the end, the Christine Blasey Ford accusations collapsed. With them went the last effort to destroy Brett KavanaughÂ’s nomination to the United States Supreme Court.

After thousands of hours of internal Senate and FBI investigations of Kavanaugh, as well as public discussions, open questioning, and media sensationalism, Ford remained unable to identify a single witness who might substantiate any of her narratives of an alleged sexual assault of nearly four decades past.

To substantiate her claim, the country was asked to jettison the idea of innocent until proven guilty, the need for corroborating testimony, witnesses, and physical evidence, the inadmissibility of hearsay, the need for reasonable statutes of limitations, considerations of motive, and the right of the accused to conduct vigorous cross-examination. That leap proved too much, especially when located in a larger progressive landscape of street theater antics, including Senate disruptions, walkouts, and sandbagging senators in hallways and elevators.

At the end of all things, Ford remained scarcely knowledgeable about the location and time of the assault than she was months earlier in her original anonymous complaint. Nor could she yet describe how she arrived at or left the party that may or may not have taken place in 1982. That Ford retained a crystal-clear account of having consumed just one beer and that Kavanaugh played the Hollywood role of a cruel, smirking, drunken, and privileged preppy groper were sensational accusations but not supportable.

After two weeks of the televised melodrama, the country rejected the therapeutic mindset and preferred what was logic and rational—without dismissing the chance that Ford somewhere at some time had experienced some sort of severe trauma.

In Ford’s case, that meant that being empathetic or even sincere did not translate into being credible. Logos (word) and ergon (deed) have never been synonymous. The country was finally asked to believe that because Ford told others of the assault 30 years later, that admission was de facto proof that the event really happened—and happened just as Ford described. But since when was sharing a story proof that the story therein was believable?

Serial Fibs and Fables

The Democrats’ strategy to derail Kavanagh encouraged the appearance of serial accusers—on the theory that the quantity of accusations could do what the quality of any individual testimony could not. Activists had little idea that the opposite usually occurs when such serial testimonials lack substantiation: like falling dominos one knocks down the next all the way back to the beginning. And so the wreckage of serial fibs and fables from all sorts also helped to undermine Ford’s credibility.

When the Deborah Ramirez yarn and the Julie Swetnick fantasy collapsed, along with those of accusers four, five, six, etc. (that inter alia had included charges of rape while out to sea off Rhode Island, a tag-team sexual assault with Mark Judge in the backseat of a car, and throwing ice), FordÂ’s narrative appeared even less credible. Instead it became just one of many fictions; the first accuser became different from the rest only in the sense of being the first rather than the only one credible.

But Ford’s problem was not just that her memory was inexact and often nonexistent about the details necessary to substantiate her quite serious charges aimed at destroying not just a nomination but the totality of an individual and his family, 36 years after an alleged teenaged encounter. Instead, the rub was that Christine Blasey Ford inadvertently became the best witness—against Christine Blasey Ford.

She had claimed that she was afraid of flying, but by her own admissions she was a frequent flyer.

She claimed the event took place in the early 1980s but also the mid-’80s—but also summer of 1982. Thus, her reported age at the time of the incident was equally fluid as a middle teen or late teen.

She swore that she had no idea that Senate investigators were willing to fly to California to interview her to accommodate her aerophobia—an offer splashed over the media for days.

Her halting answers to questions about her legal assistance funding, her past experiences with lie detector tests, the existence of any tapes or videos of her lie detector interview, and the content, accessibility, and nature of her therapist notes were either self-contradictory, illogical, or incomplete.

An ex-boyfriend turned up to question her narratives in a sworn affidavit alleging that she was demonstrably neither aerophobic nor claustrophobic—and perhaps far from being a novice in matters of taking lie-detector tests. Instead, he suggested that she had used her psychotherapy skills to coach her doppelganger friend how to massage such a test—a Zelig-like best friend who unfortunately also turned up at the hearings, and may well have hosted Ford before the Senate circus, and also allegedly may have tried to pressure one of Ford’s friends to massage her earlier condemnatory denials.

Reporters had noted FordÂ’s two-front-door remedy for anxiety was not necessarily a result of post-Kavanaugh stress syndrome as much a far earlier mercantile gambit to cash in on the Silicon Valley rent boom, where an extra room with a separate roadside entry meant a lucrative attached rental.

That the same ex-boyfriend claimed that an unfaithful Ford had also ripped him off for $600 in credit card bills (presumably a demonstrable accusation given banking records) did not help her case that she was a babe in the financial woods without a clue about her growing and lucrative GoFundMe account, or who in fact had paid her legal and prep bills and how—facts at odds with Ford’s adolescent demeanor of supposedly lost innocence.

So Many Stories

Senate prosecutor Rachel Mitchell might have proven in court more a depositioner than an inquisitor in her seemingly circular questioning, but in retrospect she proved a brilliant interrogator nonetheless in getting Ford to testify to a host of things that simply could not all be true—and would come back to haunt Ford in Mitchell’s damning summary of Ford’s likely untruths.

And why exactly were there so many contradictions as outlined in MitchellÂ’s written summation?

....

I've been thinking about this for a while.

I'd say its likely what she says is true, more likely than not. There is nothing about missing details that make her testimony implausible, this is what memory looks like, even for traumatic memory. The problem is that the research I read about traumatic memories is that they tend to grow worse over the years. The exact extent of what happened that night, how bad it really was, is almost impossible to judge from her memory. Some details grow seemingly clearer, though what's actually happening is that the memory is growing worse, like a story that gets refined over time. Some details are seared in, others aren't. Photographic memory does not result from trauma. For instance she claims she's certain its Kavanaugh, and its a legitimate trauma I find that hard to dismiss.

Her psychotherapist's testimony would have been useful to distinguish how Ford related to these memories. Were they haunting her, were they recurring, etc... but we don't have that. So its even harder to judge anything about what she remembers, and how it reflects what happened.

Unlike the article Cow Poke posted, I don't believe Ford is telling 'fibs and fables', I don't believe she's lying. The story itself isn't implausible. Cow Poke's linked article calls it Hollywood glitz, which seems to deny the problem of frat boys raping girls, which has become a significant problem.

Kavanaugh was a preppy frat back when he was young. Him having a wife and a career in no way makes it implausible that he went to stag fests (which he hasn't denied), or gotten drunk (which he does deny - though its rather implausible). There is nothing in any way unlikely about him getting grabby with a girl.

At the end of the day, her claim is plausible. Kavanaugh, was likely a frat. Who advanced on a girl, in a way he shouldn't, but not in a way he noticed. If Kavanaugh did anything, which I'm uncertain about (repeating it again for my conservative friends), I don't think he remembers. I don't think he's lying when he says he didn't do anything like that.

I do believe he's lying if he says he's never gotten drunk at those parties.

Reasonable doubt remains though. This should have been clear from the start. Throughout this discussion that what I've said. The situation is in no way comparable to OJ Simpson for instance. There are no forensic evidence. There are no witnesses who can or will corroborate. It wasn't the work of a clever lawyer that turned the opinions of people. It wasn't even a trial. There just wasn't any good hard evidence.

So even if her testimony is prima facia plausible, too much doubt remains. We can't legally judge a man based on memories of one person, so long after the event, without any more details to back up the claim.

The Democrats should be ashamed for dragging her into the public light, making her believe her testimony would carry the weight it couldn't. I don't think any of it is Ford's fault, she shouldn't be blamed, and the way she's been hunted down by conservatives is shameful. As is of course the way Kavanaugh has been targetted.

I wish there could be a stronger resolution, but I think likely only God knows what happened that night.

[seer]

Kavanaugh was a preppy frat back when he was young. Him having a wife and a career in no way makes it implausible that he went to stag fests (which he hasn't denied), or gotten drunk (which he does deny - though its rather implausible). There is nothing in any way unlikely about him getting grabby with a girl.

I don't think he ever denied being drunk, but he did deny blacking out. And all the times I was three sheets to the wind, there was only one time I blacked out. It was memorable!

[Leonhard]

I don't think he ever denied being drunk, but he did deny blacking out. And all the times I was three sheets to the wind, there was only one time I blacked out. It was memorable!

Kavanaugh is a bit over the place with that stuff. During all these allegations he apparently decided that the legal age of drinking in Maryland was 18 (which it wasn't), and that the prep houses were kept legal and so he didn't drink. Though in contrast in his year book he bragged about being "the treasurer of the Keg City Club"

That guy got tanked is all I'm saying. Whether he passed out or not, which might be true, he can't convince me that he only drinked cream sodas at those parties.

[carpedm9587]

No thanks, I'm just gonna dig in and believe that the Democrats were low-life scumbag pinko commie leftist hatemongers doing anything to derail any conservative who doesn't worship at the altar of the slain pre-born baby.

We call that the "Sparko school of political activism!"

Serious answer - some good points raised, but I left the Republican party years ago.

I actually never left a political party, because I never joined one. I personally think the two parties have too-significant a strangle hold on our political process, leaving too many people with the reality that if they vote for a third party, they are effectively giving that vote away. For example, since the green party is "liberal," a vote for a Green Party candidate harms the Democrats and helps the Republicans - it does nothing for the Green Party. A vote for a Libertarian Party candidate tends to have the opposite effect.

Some of these parties might actually have a chance of succeeding, but we would need to have nationalized run-off voting for that to happen. Until we do, Dems and Reps will lock up the system.

[Leonhard]

You are basically admitting she has no case and had no case to begin with because she has no evidence, so that is why she is letting it go. That means it should never have been brought forward in the first place. As it stands it is nothing but a smear campaign meant to try to stop or delay Kavanaugh's confirmation.

Pretty much. I hope Ford has a good life following this. Its the people trying to make use of her that should be ashamed.

[seer]

Kavanaugh is a bit over the place with that stuff. During all these allegations he apparently decided that the legal age of drinking in Maryland was 18 (which it wasn't), and that the prep houses were kept legal and so he didn't drink. Though in contrast in his year book he bragged about being "the treasurer of the Keg City Club"

That guy got tanked is all I'm saying. Whether he passed out or not, which might be true, he can't convince me that he only drinked cream sodas at those parties.

Again, I don't remember him saying he was never drunk.