3379

This seems like an important development. It at least has to be very embarrassing.

3380

Welll, just like George W Bush’s right to be President was being infringed by the pesky process of accurately counting votes. (In the end, almost anyway you could have counted the votes, Gore would have won Florida. What a different world we would live in now if only the equal protection clause didn’t demand that we stop infringing on Bush’s rights.)

3381

Ah, yes, that’s a good separate point that I kind of subsumed in my argument about a slippery slope - if you actually acknowledge that you have to do some work to ascertain credibility of an accuser, then to have a credible accusation you expose the accuser to a potentially life-destroying level of abuse. You can’t buy that with a free lie detector test and some pro-bono lawyers. That said, Stormy Daniels is the go-to argument here: they see her as benefiting from the exposure, not suffering, therefore anyone can make an accusation “for free” (ignore the fact that Daniels accusation is also almost certainly true because it hasn’t been proven in court).

3382

Could he be dropping out of the teaching job because he’s planning on having a new job? Something like sitting on the Supreme Court? Do any justices also teach?

Is this really a concern? Let’s look at Kavanaugh for example. Sure, you might say it’s “he said, she said”, but Kavanaugh demonstrably lied during his testimony multiple times. Belligerence and obvious partisanship aside (which are their own issues), the guy straight up lied. Everyone knows it.

If you have to weigh the credibility of the victim vs the accused in this case, it’s no contest. Not even close. And, yet, there’s better than even odds this guy is still going to get his lifetime appointment.

For a Democratic appointee? I guess we’ll see. I fully expect the Republicans to play “whats good for the goose” in a few years, and I expect the accusations will be much less credible.

I’d fully approve of a Supreme court full of non-partisans, but that ship has sailed (and run aground).

3383

In Supreme Courtship , which is early in development and does not yet have a release date, the Justices have all been aged down into fit and hip 20-somethings. Ruth Bader Ginsburg sports a ponytail and a sweatshirt that reads “Dissent.” Sonia Sotomayor has a leather jacket. Clarence Thomas, who wears a green vest with no shirt underneath, shares his secret: “I listen.”

3384

Yeah, that’s not a bad outcome… except for the following paragraph where I said:

That’s what may make it a problem… because you’d potentially have the lunatic fringes torpedo anyone who isn’t their brand of crazy.

On some level, one thing that is a source of the problem we’re having now, is that we have no concrete proof of the stuff Ford says, because it happened decades ago. It’s totally possible that she’s remembering it wrong, even if not malicious.

But what SHOULD have happened, is that society shouldn’t shame the victims of those kinds of attacks. If that stuff happened, then BK should have been punished at the time, and then we’d have real evidence now of what happened.

Instead, society set things up in a manner where she was afraid to report the crime, and he went on to become a powerful judge. And that’s what really needs to change. Women need to know that it’s ok for them to come out against men who attack them, and not be forced to leave things until 30 years later. If we report those crimes when they happen, there actually WILL be evidence to prove their guilt, and they won’t be able to just deny it.

Regardless, for all this, it’s somewhat moot, because BK demonstrated a lack of fitness to sit on the court, through his behavior in the hearing.

3385

I believe this was planned a while ago, nothing to do with anything recently.

3386

You know that the extremists on the left are way out there on the fringe of society: the antifa dudes who are soundly denounced by every mainstream leftists, and… well… I don’t know who else. Michael Moore? The guy who was booed for saying extreme things like “We — We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons. Whether it’s the fictition of duct tape or the fictitious of orange alerts, we are against this war, Mr. Bush. Shame on you, Mr. Bush, shame on you.”?

The extremists on the right are major media personalities and United States Senators and Speakers of the House and Presidents.

Both Sides™ don’t do it.

3387

That’s what you got out of that, eh?

3388

You’re making inferences based on something that has never happened. The left has never tried to torpedo a candidate based on false accusations. And even if the “extremist left” wanted to, they couldn’t because they have no power. The right (including the current President), on the other hand has led for years with Obama’s birth certificate with the Clinton Chronicles, with swift-boating Kerry, with Al Gore and the internet. The right is the one side that deploys this tactic. To discuss it without mentioning that is malpractice.

3389

What do you mean? The mainstream left thinks the President of the United States is actively engaged in a conspiracy with Russia to undermine the US itself. It has accused President Trump of all sorts of illicit activities from pee tapes to porn stars to taking bribes. It thought George W. Bush fought wars based on some conspiracy to invent false evidence, and accused him of being a drunk and a drug addict when he was younger. It thought George H.W. Bush and even Reagan himself were involved in some massive conspiracy with Iran and accused Reagan of having dementia. It thought Richard Nixon was constantly doing something shady, including a bunch of unproven accusations about election tampering and obstruction of justice. Both sides clearly do it.

3390

Evidence or otherwise, that man who testified has no business being in the highest court of the land. His temperament, the way he treated women just asking him questions… he does not belong there. Anyone not trying to “win” can see that. He is not the right choice. He lost his marbles in front of the world.

3391

What exactly in what I said made you think that there was some kind of equivocation taking place? Who gives a shit if only one side does this? There’s nothing in what I said that requires some kind of partisan score keeping. Hell, if only “the other guys” do it, then you should be even more worried.

3392

This whole notion of slippery-slope future concern over false accusations is a nonsense threat with no basis in truth or logic. People can suss out whether or not an accusation has merit long before a public hearing like we saw last week. And if it did get to a hearing, then we have a chance to see how the nominee responds.

Imagine Kavanaugh had behaved in a professional and respectful manner. Took all questions with an even temperament and expressed at least some humanity toward Dr. Ford’s experience while also vigorously denying that it was him. I’d even give him leeway for expressing a measured amount of anger and/or sadness about the ordeal. And, as long as we’re in fantasy-land, what if he had taken the opportunity to expound upon the complexity of justice and the importance of our highest court. Both confidence and humility in the face of something larger than all of us.

At that point, most would agree that it’s an impossible conundrum and a decades-old case and now it’s just he said/she said and not enough to derail the nomination. We would accept the vote and move on since we all know we lost that in November of 2016.

Instead, he went full Trump with bluster and fury and partisanship and tough-guy-playing-the-victim and in the process, revealed himself to be unfit for the Supreme Court. I find it incredibly disheartening because I need to believe that Trump is four years of temporary insanity. I can’t stomach the thought of a person who would emulate him being a Supreme Court justice with a lifetime appointment. It’s horrendous.

3393

Forgive me if I misunderstood your slippery slope argument. I thought you were saying that if Kavanaugh gets knocked out by unsubstantiated charges it will open the floodgates for both parties to engage in leveling false accusations in order to torpedo nominees that are too extreme. I was just responding that Democrats don’t do this and that Republicans always have. If Kavanaugh gets knocked out, it’s because he’s an unsuitable candidate. And the tactics of both parties won’t change as a result. Republicans will continue to lie and use political machinations to consolidate power. Democrats will continue to stick to principle, retain faith in institutions, try to govern, and lose.

3394

Yes, EVEN IF he never did what he’s being accused of, his outrageous and deeply disrespectful behavior during the exchange with Senator Klobuchar alone, combined with his partisan rant in his opening statement and his multiple “small” perjuries last Thursday are enough to disqualify him.

3395

The mainstream left thinks all of those things because they are more or less established facts. So, you know, there’s that.

3396

I think that was his point, Scott. :)

3397

I’ve been trying to imagine this, to see if there was a way that, given the other facts as we know them, Kavanaugh could have admitted to his drinking in high school and college, admitted to the juvenile sexual phrases in his yearbook, admitted the possibility that an event could have occurred that he later didn’t remember, and yet convinced everyone that a) he’s no longer that drunken, irresponsible kid, b) he was never the kind of person who commit a violent sexual assault, no matter how drunk, and c) he genuinely cares about what happened to Dr. Ford, but doesn’t believe it was him. Could he have done this and gotten confirmed? Intellectually, it seems possible, but I think he would end up losing support of evangelicals, losing support from Trump, and still facing headwinds from Collins and Murkowski and the red state Dems because it would end up feeling like an admission of guilt.

So that’s the dilemma the GOP has ginned up - what if the opponents crafted accusations so that you couldn’t reliably refute them and they encourage the media to show things from your past in a negative light? Even if you provided all the evidence you had and told the full truth, your skeletons would all dangle out there and you’d still seem suspicious. Personally, I think the threat of this is wildly overblown, since public positions demand public scrutiny anyway and the damage done to an accuser’s family is too great for false accusations to be as common as they say. I’m just not sure that all the people espousing this view are insincere.

3398

BTW, John Oliver’s take on Kavanaugh’s just turning the blackout drinking question around on Klobuchar as he did last Thursday was priceless (and accurate). Start watching at about 10m20s