I find it plausible that he might have done it - 34 years ago.
Personally, I am not fine with deciding to discard a candidate with 30 years of service over something he might have done 36 years ago. I feel like we should make decisions as a society and as a country on *reliable *evidence, not clearly politically motivated rumors. Reading the transcript, an awful lot of the evidence doesn’t add up. No one can ever prove Kavanaugh didn’t do it, but no reliable evidence that he did was presented.
We should make all our decisions on reliable evidence, not vague suspicions.
Nope, not going to bite, not when to answer that, you only have to review the Ford/Kavanaugh threads from a year ago. The assumptions are right there in plain sight.
Re: 65 women testifying from his high school: the population of Chicago in 1966 was about 3,500,000. You could have had a million women testify that Richard Speck never tried to kill them, but it wouldn’t have made him less guilty of the 8 student nurses he murdered in July of that year.
They weren’t mere suspicions, and they were never vague.
He may be a political hack, but his academic and legal credentials are a classic modern résumé for a Supreme Court appointment:
BA Yale
JD Yale
Clerkships with the 3rd Circuit and then the 9th Circuit, and then with Starr on the DC Circuit.
Associate counsel to a federal Special Counsel (Starr)
Justice on the DC Circuit.
Dislike him as much as you want, but that’s the résumé of most people considère for the Supreme Court nowadays.
Getting a prestigious clerkship or government position isn’t as impressive when you’re a federalist society member. The market for fedsoc types is roughly equal in demand to the market for non-fedsoc but maybe a tenth of the supply at most. It is one of the bizarre consequences of the elite law schools having a small minority of conservative students but having conservatives control over half of the judiciary.
Which is not to say Kavanaugh isn’t smart. It just means his credentials don’t mean what they would for someone not committed to his ideological agenda.
Number 1 in his preppie high school class…in between all his drinking, “devils triangle”, “renata alumnus”, and I guess attempted sexual assault. Honestly that’s pretty impressive.
Didn’t you advance the position that Democrats should do everything available to oppose Republicans? Does lying or exaggerating a story fall under that umbrella?
I don’t disagree with this, I was trying to show how she helped justify
“as if no one could possibly be honestly concerned about fighting sexual assault and rape in our society. That anything beyond political concerns are just not believable to them.”
I’ve advocated that the Democrats use any political and parliamentary tactics that they can get away with to gain an advantage, but that doesn’t include, and I would categorically and explicitly reject and oppose, inventing/exaggerating stories regarding possible sexual assault/rape/etc. The broader societal issue of sexual assault and rape is even more important than politics. I’ve also explicitly advocated booting Democrats who are abusers, even if it would have a short or medium term harm to Democrats’ political prospects.
And IIRC, one of the questions that the GOP-controlled Senate didn’t bother to investigate last year was allegations that he’d perjured himself in his testimony in his confirmation hearings for lower courts.
Depends on the decision, doesn’t it? If I’m thinking of putting my retirement fund in the hands of an investment outfit, vague suspicions would be sufficient to disqualify them. The downside risk is too great, and there are plenty of trustworthy places to put my money.
Ok. Quote which statement he made that you are certain is perjury. We can email Diane Feinstein in 2020 after the Democrats take the government.
As for the “vague rumors”, ok, so in this analogy you have researched investment outfits. And you are about to pick Fidelity. And suddenly, in the last week of the decision making process, the other outfit brings forward a witness who says Fidelity stole money from her account. 36 years ago. And she can’t establish the account number, or if she ever even had a Fidelity account, or how much money was stolen.
Oh, and money wasn’t actually stolen, but someone at Fidelity attempted to steal the money and was stopped. She swears. And some other people come forward with similar stories but no one can actually come up with account details. And there’s hundreds of millions of account holders and no one can find even a rumor of theft that isn’t more than 30 years old.
Is this a reason to go with the “other guys”? I think Kavanaugh is a bad thing for my political beliefs. But I can’t deny he appears to be a solid, reputable judge for the political side of the fence he is on. And whatever he did while drunk as a teenager, to me, sounds like the kind of aggressive behavior that was encouraged in 1982 by culture among other factors. The film Revenge of the Nerds, made 2 years later, is a series of rapes by deception, and there wasn’t an outcry when the film was released.
Ok. Given the nature of the latest claim you chose to highlight (third party allegation, raised by people selling a book, and the alleged actual victim with no recollection of the event, and no other people recalling the event), do you think it is possible that this is an exaggerated or fabricated story? People have done much worse for money, or for politics.
If you advocate for any political tactic, why wouldn’t exaggerated or false stories be part of that? Or do you draw the line at things that are sexual in nature? I’m trying to figure out what you think is okay as a tactic and what isn’t. For you, would lying or exaggerating be okay if it were about non-sexual topics?
It’s certainly possible, which is why I advocate for a full and extremely thorough investigation. At the same time, I advocate for a full and thorough investigation into whether Kavanaugh may have lied under oath. The latter is more about politics (and law, I suppose – dissauding future folks from lying under oath); the former is about the principle of fighting sexual assault and rape (by thoroughly investigating every serious allegation, of which this one certainly qualifies).
In general, no. Maybe there are certain circumstances in which I’d be okay with it, but I’d take it case-by-case, and none come to mind immediately. My recurring “all out political knife fight” theme is mostly about the kinds of things McConnell does – by all means, the Democrats (if they get the Senate) should get rid of the filibuster; refuse to consider (or stall) many or most Republican judges; investigate any and all possibility of wrongdoing by any Republican in (or seeking) high office; pack various courts that they can get away with; immediately take action to admit PR and DC as states by whatever legislative means might have a chance to get through; otherwise use and twist and change the rules to get whatever possible political and legislative benefit they can; and generally abandon any and all pretense of collegiality and pretense that this is anything but that all out political knife-fight.