She said the letter started after Feinstein’s news came out. As for the speed, there is this thing called Facebook, it is really popular among Gen Xs. David French, in National Review said he has 237 high school friends on Facebook.
To those hearing the thwap thwap thwap of black helicopters because my father is a journalist or because I worked in politics: In a group of 65 graduates of D.C. area schools, it would be odd not to find someone related to or working as a journalist or politician. It is entirely unremarkable. This is a company town. (That said, it might explain why people happened to see my tweets on the subject)
There is also the I knew them before there were famous effect. This didn’t happen to me much in high school, (but I didn’t go to an elite prep school), but it happened a lot with folks I went to college with. I’d see some dude that I knew from college, get named CEO or VP of some high flying tech company, and it would trigger my memory of them.
The nomination has been in the news constantly for months. Plenty of time for folks on Facebook and other social media to remember “oh you meet Brett, he dated Sue’s sister and came to our party at Bill’s house”
My thought was kind of along the famous effect lines of how many really knew (more than in passing) and how many it was kind of like of that kid, he seemed nice. Not discounting their recollections, but I really wonder how many were truly close to him. He might have been wonderful to them, but that still doesn’t mean this other woman is lying, and I’m not sure what exactly Feinstein was supposed to do. The woman won’t recant her story, and she understandably doesn’t want to go forward, because it is a she said/ the 2 implicated guys said and already a lot of people just want to assume she is the one not telling the truth. Was Feinstein just supposed to completely ignore an accusation of him purposefully sexually assaulting someone? I see some people say, well it was back in high school so it should be let go, but at what level of violence does the line get drawn? Manslaughter? Murder? If it came up in a TS/SCI clearance investigation it would sure as shit get looked into. It is nice having a letter vouch for him, but why not take a polygraph about it?
Yes, I read that. But the details of Feinstein’s letter didn’t come out until Friday morning (in Ronan Farrow’s reporting). They organized the letter (they say) on Thursday night. Looking at that timing, assume they assembled the letter before they knew the details of the allegations. Does that enhance the credibility of the exercise? No, I don’t think so.
Sure, but that’s not credibility-enhancing either. You might remember that you went to high school with (say) Bill Gates because he’s Bill Gates. Does that mean you’re in a position to vouch for his character? Probably not.
Sure, but those vouchers are largely incredible, if that’s how people are being reminded of their closeness to Kavanaugh. How many people do you remember from high school, 35 years ago, for whom you would vouch in the face of an undisclosed criminal allegation? For me, the answer is zero. Regardless of what I think I knew about them then, 35 years is a long time.
After Anita Hill, I honestly don’t blame anyone who doesn’t want to come forward.
I mean the President is a rapist who assaults women and no one gives a fuck. Why would they care about you?
All you’d be doing is inviting death threats and the like.
That letter was absolutely prepared ahead of time because they knew this was going to come up. You don’t find 65 women from someone’s past willing to sign a letter on Facebook in under 24 hours. Try organizing 65 of your friends on Facebook to do sign something in a day, tell me how that works out.
Turns out the letter names the other kid with Kavanaugh at the alleged incident as conservative writer Mark Judge (irony rules, I guess). Judge denies the allegations in the letter, of course, but he also long ago acknowledged that as a teenager he was a blackout drunk, and wrote a memoir about it. So — like the 65 women who don’t know what Kavanaugh did — it’s possible Judge doesn’t have any idea what happened in that room that night.
In that: She’s been telling it for 6 years in counseling and to her husband, she’s permitted her husband and counselor to corroborate it, she can name the people at the party, she doesn’t make the allegation bigger or more awful than it was, she came forward with it months ago, she’s passed a polygraph, she did not intend to go public and has done so only after the story was leaked against her wishes. She’s telling the truth. Kavanaugh did this.
I also believe that, within 48 hours, we’ll know every bad thing she’s ever done along with a bunch of rumors and lies. She’s a female, a professor, a Democrat and lives in California – other than being white, she’s everything the GOP base has been taught to hate.
In other news, Kavanaugh’s alleged accomplice Mark Judge over the years apparently made and posted dozens of videos featuring scantily-clad young women. In the last few days he began deleting them all, though not before other people had seen and captured them. He’s about to get a lot of scrutiny he wasn’t planning to get.
In any normal time, normal Senate Republicans would already feel queasy about approving Kavanaugh, and a normal Republican President would feel a strong pull to ask Kavanaugh to withdraw, and both parties would understand that there’s another potential nominee waiting to be named who is just like Kavanaugh on polítics and partisanship and the law but with far less of his baggage. That this seems unlikely to be actually happening and instead, they’re going to double down on him, tells us how far the right has fallen.
Same here. Republicans almost always fall in line. The only reason McCain didn’t vote for the crappy nonentity that was the Republican “repeal and ‘replace’” health care bill is that he had absolutely nothing to lose. Unless whatsherbutt wants to retire she won’t vote against Kavanaugh.
Republican senator running in 2020 in a state that’s blue and getting more so.
I mean, maybe not, but it’s at least reasonably likely it carries some consequence. One of the things that made Jack Danforth decide to bow out of the Senate in 1994 was his name being so visibly attached to Anita Hill. (And 1994 was a wave election for the Republicans, too.)
