This is the part people need to read before responding.
It’s also the part people will ignore when responding.
However – and I think Timex agrees with me on this? – it calls into question his fitness to serve on the Supreme Court, and not just because it was a dick thing to do regardless of whether it was rape. It says a lot about his character and his reaction says a lot about whether he’s an honest man.
-Tom
I did read the post! Admittedly, I had a glass of wine first.
First, I’m not sure why it matters that what Kavanaugh did was “very different from rape.” It’s still sexual assault, which is still a grave crime.
Second, I disagree that “due to alcohol, your actions are not representative of who you are as a person”. Most people who get drunk do not suddenly sexually assault women. Somehow, Kavanaugh is different.
Maybe, but i don’t know. Because he could honestly not recall. And i could see that being a hard thing to accept that you did, if you did it while blackout drunk.
And normally, simply being blackout drunk would be disqualifying … but if it was something that only happened once when you were a minor? Then I don’t know, because when i was a kid, i drank way too much at least once. I didn’t do anything like that that i recall, but the act of being way too drunk was a factor of my inexperience with drinking, not really some deep moral failing.
I would say if there was one thing Kavanaugh didn’t have back then it was inexperience with drinking. Maybe a better word would be immature. It sounds like it was a routine habit for them to get shitfaced.
Ah, that’s where I would disagree. I’ve been blackout drunk and told what I did afterwards. It was stupid but not out of character. I understand what you were saying about being blackout drunk means your cognitive function is fucked nine ways to Sunday, but you’re still who you are, and if Kavanaugh is the kind of guy who would throw himself at a woman clearly against her will, he doesn’t belong on the Supreme Court.
Although, to be fair, he doesn’t belong on the Supreme Court regardless of what he does when he’s blackout drunk, but that’s a whole other issue.
-Tom
There’s a cultural thing in Japan where they basically believe that they don’t know the real you until you a drunk. So friends, colleagues, even bosses will try and get you drunk. In fact, they might even get you drunk before they tell you something important.
Alcohol doesn’t bring out what wasn’t there before. He may not be an actual rapist, but trying to be a rapist and failing is not something you get brownie points for.
Timex’s argument right now is just, so off base. Sure, it wasn’t rape… but was it attempted rape? Yes, of course yes! Definitely sexual assault. If we believe her version of events, he pinned her down, covered her mouth when she tried to scream, and was only saved when the other guy in the room (who as an aside has turned into a bit of a predator himself) jumped on them both.
The fact that he was drunk excuses none of it, and the weird sympathy take about it all is so strange that I’m shocked to see it in this day and age. I was a hard drinker at the age, and never ever did that to a girl… nor did anyone in my group of hard drinking friends. Most people don’t sexually assault girls when they are drunk (even if it still happens more than it should)
And why should we believe him at all? he is already a proven liar under oath.
But if that is really who he is, then I’d expect he would have done it more than once. And I’d expect to see other folks coming out of the woodwork soon.
Because i don’t think that if someone actually thought it was ok to assault women, that they would only do it once when they were 17.
We know Kavanaugh was very drunk, but I don’t think we know that he was “blackout drunk”. In any case his denials have not even attempted to use that as an excuse, so we should probably assume he remembers just fine.
I know others have said this but I feel like it bears repeating:
What Ford describes is sexual assault and it’s a crime.
It’s also morally reprehensible and no amount of alcohol excuses it. As Tom said, when you’re drunk, even black out drunk, your inhibitions are lowered but you’re still the same person. If someone is the sort of person who would commit sexual assault when they are drunk, then they are a super shitty kind of person.
Weighing the veracity of accusations of this sort is always tricky in large part because we as a society have a horrible history of disbelieving victims of sexual assault and blaming the victims. Because of this, I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to the victim If it seems wildly out of character for the accused I might give the benefit of the doubt to the victim while reserving judgement on the accused but context, character and credibility matter and in this case everything I have seen and heard lends veracity to Fords account. Could it be a giant conspiracy constructed out of whole cloth to take down a conservative judge? Sure but, given how common this sort of behavior seems to be amongst shitty people and given the way Kavanaugh and his supporters are behaving and given the corroborating accounts going back some time we have from credible people who Ford told her story to, I think it’s really, really unlikely.
But I agree with Timex that it’s unfair to call him a rapist. He is likely an attempted rapist or, at best, a sexual assaulter.
The best I’m willing to give him is that there are degrees of shittiness. In colleges all over the country there are shitty frat boys getting drunk and committing sexual assault but I’m guessing that many and of them don’t grow up to be serial rapists or habitual sexual assaulters. But that doesn’t excuse them. They are still garbage people who use alcohol and a juvenile boys wil be boys culture to do horrible things to their fellow human beings. But I’ll grant that they are less shitty than the thousands of other frat boys across the country who are actively raping women and will continue to do so as adults.
Character matters. The world is full of shitty people and it’s up to the rest of us to call them out on it and hold them to account. It’s up to us to raise our kids to be part of the solution, not the problem.
As far as we know, Brock Turner only sexually assaulted one woman. He was pretty drunk the night of his crime. Should we assume that he doesn’t really think it’s ok to assault women because he only did it once when he was 19? I don’t remember any stories about Brock trying to rape or assault any other women but it’s possible I just missed them. Seems like the main difference between the two is that Brock didn’t have a drunken friend to interfere.
This is fair, but in the case of Kavanaugh you have the benefit of another, what, 40 years of history afterwards?
If we are saying that this act when he was a minor was indicative of his character, i would expect to have seen that character surface again at some point.
I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to think that he could have crossed the line with a woman numerous times and covered it up, as men of power tend to do. I’ll grant that it’s also possible this was an isolated one time incident but we may never really find out. I honestly can’t believe they couldn’t find a SCOTUS candidate that didn’t have a possible sexual assault in his past yet would still be warm & fuzzy with Trump.
We are not saying that this act when he was a minor indicates that he is a serial rapist.
We are saying that this act when he was a minor indicates that he is a person with grossly bad judgment. Which may very well have surfaced again in other ways that are harder to detect, but are nevertheless relevant to appointment to the SCOTUS.
Until we invent a panopticon, it is reasonable to conclude that Kavanaugh is likely to have worse judgment than most people even based on a single incident.
I’d say it’s worse than bad judgment. Bad judgement is buying a car you can’t afford, not taking a job when you need to pay bills, or trying to change bulb while teetering on two chairs, not trying to cover a woman’s mouth to rape her while your buddy looks out for others who might interrupt. This is moral character kind of stuff. And if he knew it happened, and he lied about it, he’s a liar on top of that.
This is totally true, and I’m not saying, “this never happened because we never heard about it.”
I’m saying that if he really is the kind of person who thinks it’s ok to molest women, they he DID do it more than once, and we will hear about it.
That’s one of the things that we saw in the whole metoo thing… I can’t think of any cases where it was just one case of it happening.
Fair enough. “Bad morals” is a better description.
Kavanaugh has no credibility IMO. He’s lied under oath already to fulfill his ambitions. And the “but drunk” defense is really revealing.
At any rate, there’s this. Kozinski is straight up a steaming pile. While I’m no fan of guilt by association, BK’s claim that he had “no idea!” is laughable.
Actually, I don’t think there is a lot of evidence for that. His friend Mike Judge, wrote about a book about the troubles that Mike had with alcohol. Mike got drunk with his friends, one of his friends was Brett. I joined a frat as a sophomore in college cause I didn’t get back in the dorms and I couldn’t afford an apartment and the other living options were really depressing. Of 30 odd guys at least 20 had serious drug problems 4 never smoked dope and about 1/2 dozen of did so once a week or so. One of the guy who never smoked dope and seldom drank to excess was best friends with one of the guy who was the worse druggie and also a dealer. I heard the druggie later became a writer, any stories he wrote about his six years at Berkeley would have included Steve. But guilt by association would have been completely wrong in this case.