I wouldn’t assume there weren’t any unsubstantiated allegations against other Supreme Court nominees. The Dems just weren’t as desperate.
Regards,
Shodan
From the start, the White House and Republicans were determined to get this nomination through the confirmation process as quickly as they could. They wanted to at least have some minimum procedural workings of a nomination so that they could comply with their constitutional requirements, but there’s been an unprecedented lack of transparency, with the White House withholding documents and Republican Senators knowing of these allegations but not acknowledging them publicly until days later. In fact their response has been not to slow things down, but to sped things up since discovery.
It reveals the operational philosophy of the modern republican leadership: the general public does NOT have a right to know about their public servants.
Huh. Given the underlined part (which I’m presuming you knew at the time), I would have chalked it up to karma and not risked so much as a hangnail on her behalf, but to each his own.
Anyhoo, getting back to the thread subject, my guess at this point is that the Republican leadership has figured out that they’re big-red-capital-Superman-“S” screwed either way, pissing off either the deplorables or the normal people, so they might as well try to push this one through.
That’s the particularly damning part. Someone who indulges in vicious behavior but has enough shame to keep it under wraps might have enough self-control to prevent his baser impulses from influencing his professional conduct. Someone who sees nothing wrong with such attitudes to the point of casually boasting about and memorializing them is not going to do so – why would he bother?
Was his perjury on the subject before or after his last birthday (seeing as how is age is so critical to passing judgment on his character and all)?
I’m not psychobunny, but I’m pretty sure that was ‘assume for the sake of argument.’
In this man’s mind, there isn’t. At least not on this issue.
In 2018, I’d never dream of pulling a girl into a room, locking the door and holding my hand over her mouth to stifle her screams while I tried to rape her. And I wouldn’t call that “just trying to get laid”. And - shocking, I know - I, as well as those I used to party with, thought the same back in 1982.
He’s not going to jail for what he did at 17; he’s having to answer for something that he did at 17 and hasn’t had to answer for until now, even though Blasey Ford has had to spend the decades since processing the events of that night.
Your position could be more respectable if you’d just come out and accuse her of making it up. You’d still rightly receive scorn and condemnation, but the position would be more sensible.
But what you’re arguing is that, assuming Ford was actually assaulted or harassed, then we should feel more sorry for the perpetrator of that offense now that he’s being forced to acknowledge it, than for the victim who’s been trying to process it for the past 4 decades.
Please explain why you have more sympathy for someone finally answering for his offenses than someone finally having the strength to disclose that she felt victimized by behavior that any reasonable person would find, at minimum, uncomfortable.
There have been people put to death for what they did at 17.
By 17, most of your moral character is pretty well determined. If you’re the type to attempt rape at 17, then you really aren’t the sort of person who should be given one of the highest offices in the nation.
While I agree that many of us have done shameful and embarrassing things in our youth, that’s not the only thing that is working against Kavanaugh. He is also strongly denying it ever happened. He is saying they are all lies and he would never act like that. He’s painting his teen self as a church-going virgin who would never even dream of acting inappropriately. But if you look at his past, it does seem like stuff he would have done. His own yearbook page is pretty incriminating. And all of us who have been teenagers know the routine debauchery that goes on. Most often it’s not at the level of sexual assault, but there is typically plenty of drinking, smoking, staying out late, getting into trouble, etc.
Even if we give him a pass for what he did as a teen, he is clearly misrepresenting himself right now. If instead he was honest about his past, it would be viewed differently. But he’s being deceptive as a 53-year-old, so it is relevant.
I think the biggest shift between the mores of 1982 and those of 2018 have to do with intoxication. My recollection is that back then, if a woman was drunk but conscious and responding positively to one’s attentions, that was considered OK; few people were making arguments back then about a woman being too drunk to give consent.
And while it varied a great deal between different social groupings at the time, certainly there were still a lot of people in 1982 who thought it was OK to get a woman drunk for the purpose of getting past her inhibitions, as they might’ve said back then.
But trying to force oneself on a woman who clearly didn’t want to be intimate with you - that was generally disapproved of back then as well as now.
I still want to know who thought “I was a virgin throughout high school” is a good defense. Not that there’s anything at all wrong being a virgin, but that it’s somehow a defense against attempted rape. “I was a virgin throughout high school.” “Yeah, that’s because you never made it past attempted rape.”
I think this is significant.
I doubt he can be found criminally or civilly liable at this point; we’re just asking him to come clean about his behavior as a youth, and he refuses to do that. He refuses to address that. And he’s been encouraged to do this all along, because the entire process has lacked transparent. Kavanaugh, if confirmed, would be a wholly illegitimate justice, and he should be impeached at the first available opportunity if one ever presents itself. In the meantime, let’s just hope that he gets voted down.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that all the women are lying liars out to destroy a good man’s reputation. Would Kavanaugh like to give a truthful explanation, backed up by bank records and other financial statements, of how he managed to retire $200,000 worth of debt in an extremely short timeline? That kind of unexplained financial behavior alone would probably deny any one of us “normal citizens” a clearance or other things.
Lots of lazy thinkers also think men rape when sex deprived. Incels promulgate that belief as well.
If he struck out trying to get consensual sex, then trying to get the non-consensual kind isn’t too far out there. But I don’t believe his virginity claim.
Also not believing that he didn’t get blacked out drunk. He also denied this on Fox too.
On Thursday, I expect a few Democratic Senators will read excerpts from Mark Judge’s writings about the drunken debauchery of “Bart O’Kavanaugh” and ask if Kavanaugh remembers anything like that.
We’re back to doubting whether Thursday’s scheduled hearing will happen again: Kavanaugh hearing once again in question as Christine Ford raises new concerns | Fox News
IIRC, “Bart” makes only one appearance in that book with a reference to throwing up in someone’s car and possibly passing out. If there is a reading, it will be exceedingly short. So I doubt it.
This has already been addressed. No we aren’t.
Who is “we”? I didn’t see a quote there suggesting that Ford wouldn’t testify. It merely stated the facts that Republicans were already smearing Ford, and that Republican Senators were too afraid to question Ford themselves.