9/30/18 to 10/2/18: In recent days
the American people have been introduced to two inseparable nominees to fill a
seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Soon it will be up to the Senate to decide
whether or not to confirm the pair—Judge
Brett Kavanaugh and his weenie. And, by “weenie,” of course, we are using a
polite term for “penis.” If you were to ask the Judge, however, he would tell
you the only “weenies” he ever considered in his youth were slathered in pickle
relish. He ate them at church picnics where he cast shy glances at women from
afar.
Very afar!
The case for seating Kavanaugh is proving a
tough one for Trump and the Republicans to make to that portion of the public known
as “women.” It’s not selling all that well with men, many of whom have mothers,
wives and daughters, and have always known there are guys who seize sexual
advantage at any opportunity.
But Republicans are stuck with the nominees
and GOP stalwarts must offer the best defense possible.
 |
Judge Kavanaugh had a bad week.
|
Trump cranked up the rhetoric some days back,
telling reporters that “some very evil” Democrats were going after Kavanaugh
and his innocent little pal. Trump said accusations against the Judge and his
weenie were false, because when twelve, or nineteen, or twenty- two women (it’s
hard to get a count) accused him and his weenie of sexual
assault he knew they were all lying.
In fact, Trump says it was Sen. Diane
Feinstein’s fault when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford contacted her to say Kavanaugh
nearly raped her at a party when she was fifteen and he was seventeen.
Acting badly: Kavanaugh and his weenie at Yale.
If we followed the president’s logic it was also
the fault of the Democrats when a woman who crossed paths with Kavanaugh and
his weenie at Yale in 1983, claimed the former exposed the latter at a drinking
party in a common room in their dorm. She says she looked up from her seat and saw
his weenie right in her face. She admits she was inebriated—which Republicans
are at great pains to point out. Alas, for that line of defense, his accuser
insists Kavanaugh was drunk too.
(Something tells me, at that time,
Kavanaugh’s weenie could not have passed a Breathalyzer test.)
If you listened to Republicans, Democrats’
were up to their usual dirty tricks when James Roche, Kavanaugh’s freshman
roommate at Yale, said he had never seen Brett stick his innocent weenie in
Deborah Ramirez’s face. But Ramirez had come forward. She said he did. In fact,
Roche didn’t see it happen—because he wasn’t there to see it happen—but did say
Kavanaugh and his weenie were really bad drunks. “Although Brett was
normally reserved, he was a notably heavy drinker, even by the standards of the
time. He became aggressive and belligerent
when he was very drunk.”
In the meantime, White House aides were
trying to keep the president from saying anything gross or demeaning about
women. For a few days the strategy almost worked. Still, Trump showed his true concern for the alleged victims
when he told reporters, if it had been up to him, he would have pushed the
confirmation process forward faster. The Republicans in the Senate, he
explained the day before Dr. Ford testified, “could not have been nicer.”
“They could have pushed it through two and a
half weeks ago and you wouldn’t be talking about it right now, which is frankly
what I would have preferred.”
Witnesses are such a bother.
“I think it’s horrible what the Democrats
have done,” he told reporters the next day, even though no one was accusing Democrats
of sexual assault. “It’s a con game they’re playing; they’re really con
artists. They’re playing a con game, and they play it very well. They play it
actually much better than the Republicans.”
Just in case anyone missed the point, the
president called it all a “con game” several more times. He even spelled it out,
“C-O-N.”
The “C-O-N” continued when a third woman,
Julie Swetnick, came forward to say that she had attended a number of wild
parties when she was in college and Kavanaugh was a senior in high school.
Republicans were quick to make a big deal of the fact that Swetnick was in
college—and why was she attending parties with high school kids—as if high
school kids and college kids never mixed. But it didn’t bother them when
Swetnick claimed Brett and his weenie and their other good friend, a classmate
named Mark Judge, spiked the punch at parties. Their goal, she claimed, was to
get young women wasted so they could take advantage.
The “very evil” Democrats hammer home their attacks.
As the week progressed, the “very evil”
Democrats hammered home their attacks. First, Mark Judge disappeared. The “Fake News” folks at
the Washington Post had to track him
down at a friend’s beach house in Delaware, a three-hour drive from his home. “A car in the driveway contained
piles of clothing,” a reporter noted, “a collection of Superman comics and a
package addressed to Judge at the Potomac home where he lived three years ago.”
Mr. Judge asked how they found him. Then he refused to answer any “Fake News”
questions at all.
Mr. Judge also declined to talk about his
writing—normally any author’s favorite topic. He did not wish, for example, to
discuss his 1997 memoir, Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk. In that
memoir he wrote about wild drinking during his high school days. He said he “lusted
after girls” at nearby Catholic schools and
referenced a “Bart O’Kavanaugh,” who drank so much at one party he threw up
in a car and passed out.
It soon became clear to all good Trump
fans—who now apparently believed in time travel—that the “very evil” Democrats
would stop at nothing to perpetrate their schemes. In 2012 they first set out
to derail the Kavanaugh nomination which would be made six years later! They had
Dr. Ford describe the attack to her therapist and husband during a “couples
therapy session.” The rotten, low-down Democrats convinced her husband to say that
she told the same story six years ago she was telling now. “She said that she
had been trapped in a room and physically restrained by one boy who was
molesting her while the other boy watched.”
When the Judge finally had his turn to
testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he insisted that he and his
appendage hardly ever drank more than an occasional beer. He did admit he
really liked beer. His problems had nothing to do with beer, he insisted. His
problems boiled down to the fact that the Clintons, Bill and Hillary and
probably Chelsey, were out to get him. If it wasn’t for them he would never
have flopped his member in some college girl’s face.
Or spiked any punch!
Dr. Ford spoke first on Thursday and almost
everyone agreed her testimony was powerful. But when Democratic senators
insisted on grilling Kavanaugh, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham finally had all
he could stand. Exploding with righteous indignation, he intimated that his
Democratic colleagues were terrible human beings. He could not believe they
would keep this fine judicial mind—Kavanaugh’s—and his long-virgin weenie—off
the Supreme Court.
(In case you missed it, Kavanaugh had
defended himself during an earlier interview on Fox News. He said he couldn’t have attempted to molest Dr. Ford
or any other girl, when he was a stripling, because he had been a virgin all
throughout high school and for “many years” after.)
Republicans love the Constitution more than Pudding Pops.
Watching the fury of Sen. Graham, I am sure
every fair-minded American was struck by the comparison with the gracious
fashion in which Republicans treated Judge Merrick Garland, when President
Obama nominated him for a previously vacant seat on the Supreme Court. Did they
ever attack Judge Garland or his private parts during the nine months they refused to grant him any hearing at all?
No, they did not! That’s because Republicans love the Constitution more than
Pudding Pops.
The “very evil” Democrats kept letting
accusers come forward and the Republicans had no choice but to do their duty
and try to speed the confirmation process to completion. They had to get
Kavanaugh on the bench and had to do it quick, before Kavanaugh ended up
looking like Judge Roy Moore.
Or Trump.
Before GOP leadership could push through a
confirmation vote, Sen. Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican, received an
anonymous letter. The writer claimed her daughter had seen Kavanaugh, “very
aggressively and sexually” shove a woman up against a wall after leaving a
Washington, D.C. bar in 1998. Her daughter was “shocked,” as were other
witnesses, although the woman he shoved was dating Kavanaugh at the time. “Her
friend, traumatized, called my daughter yesterday, September 21, 2018,
wondering what to do about it,” the woman wrote.
Of course, it was the Democrats’ fault when
this woman and her daughter chose to remain anonymous—just because the
President of the United States might trash them if they spoke out.
It had been the Democrats’ fault, too, when
Trump tweeted earlier, in such a way as to sound like a heartless, soulless bag
of orange crap. What did he think about Ms. Ford’s original accusation?
He said:
I have no doubt that, if
the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been
immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her
loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn
date, time, and place!
Her parents weren’t loving enough.
You could see that the “very evil” Democrats
were hard at work making poor President Trump sound like an ignorant asshole.
When the president implied that a fifteen-year-old girl, just assaulted at a
party, should have immediately contacted the police, it was Democrats who were
terrible. When Trump implied that her parents weren’t loving enough because
they didn’t act on knowledge their daughter probably never shared, that she was
at a party where there was underage drinking and a 17-year-old guy and his
friend pinned her to a bed in a locked room and tried to strip off her
clothes—yeah, Democrats were the
problem.
As Thursday’s hearings drew to a close, and
Friday dawned, and the weekend commenced, Democrats kept dumping dirt on the
pristine record of Kavanaugh and his little buddy, his inseparable pal. Sen. Jeff
Flake was boarding an elevator on Capitol Hill Friday morning, when two women,
Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher, themselves victims of sexual assault,
accosted him.
“I have two children,” one yelled. An aide
tried to say that Sen. Flake needed to go. Refusing to let the elevator door
close, she continued, “I cannot imagine that for the next 50 years they will
have to have someone in the Supreme Court who has been accused of violating a
young girl. What are you doing, sir?”
Flake looked downcast. The second woman
joined in: “You are telling all women that they don’t matter, that they should
just stay quiet because if they tell you what happened to them, you are going
to ignore them. That’s what happened to me,” she shouted. “Look at me when I’m
talking to you.”
 |
In a letter Kavanaugh sent to friends about "Beach Week" in 1983,
he seems to indicate he and his friends partied hard. |
With the dawn of another week, the Democrats’
allies in the “Fake News” business refused to let the two candidates have any
peace. Kavanaugh had testified that he
drank the occasional beer with friends during the years in question and
maybe he did do some stupid crap. “But I did not drink beer to the point of
blacking out.”
Now The
New York Times started quoting actual human beings who had
known Brett back in the day. Reporters talked to Lynne Brookes, a classmate
at Yale University, who was also Deborah Ramirez’s roommate. She said Kavanaugh
“grossly misrepresented and mischaracterized his drinking.”
“He frequently
drank to excess,” she said. “I know because I frequently drank to excess
with him.”
Another classmate, Elizabeth Swisher, now a
doctor in Seattle, told the Times
that in their undergrad days, she “drank a lot. Brett drank more.”
A clumsy attempt to show affection.
The Times
kept quoting people who cast doubt on Kavanaugh’s credibility. “I definitely
saw him on multiple occasions stumbling
drunk where he could not have rational control over his actions or clear
recollection of them,” said Daniel Lavan, who lived in Kavanaugh’s dorm
freshman year. “His depiction of himself is inaccurate.”
Finally, the Times dredged up an even more damning witness. In a speech to Yale
Law students in 2014, Judge Kavanaugh talked about his drinking during his
years in college. He related a story of wild partying in Boston which ended
with his group of friends and himself returning to campus, “falling out of the
bus onto the front steps of Yale Law School at about 4:45 a.m.”
The “Fake News” folks kept digging into the
years the nominees spent at Georgetown Prep, a private boys’ Catholic high
school in Maryland. Kavanaugh had insisted during testimony that he was too
busy in those days, what with sports and studies, to go around molesting any
girls. There was, for example, the picture in his yearbook in which he and a
group of football players referred to themselves as the “Renate Alumnus.” This,
he told the Senate panel, was a reference to Renate Schroeder, a girl at a
nearby Catholic girls school. “That yearbook reference was clumsily intended to
show affection,” he claimed, “and that she was one of us. But in this circus,
the media’s interpreted the term is related to sex. It was not related to sex.”
Kavanaugh was insisting that he and his
weenie were innocent and pure. The Times
tracked down classmates from Georgetown Prep. Sean Hagan said Judge Kavanaugh’s
explanation was disingenuous at best. It was widely known that references to “Renate” in the yearbook were
veiled boasts of sexual conquest. After Kavanaugh finished testifying,
Hagan had posted on Facebook: “So angry. So disgusted. So sad. Integrity?
Character? Honesty?”
Renate Schroeder Dolphin—now married, once
the object of Kavanaugh’s and friends’ “affection”—caught wind of the story. She
had been one of 65 women who said they knew Kavanaugh well in high school and signed
a letter testifying to his qualities as a gentleman. Now she was seeing his old
yearbook for the first time and reading disparaging comments about her
throughout.
“I don’t know what ‘Renate Alumnus’ actually
means,” she told reporters. “I can’t begin to comprehend what goes through the
minds of 17-year-old boys who write such things, but the insinuation is
horrible, hurtful and simply untrue. I pray
their daughters are never treated this way.”
And still, the “very evil” Democrats weren’t
done dredging up these sorts of stories—the kind, that, if true—would make
Kavanaugh sound like the kind of teenage boy you wouldn’t want alone in a room
with alcohol and your teenage daughter. Kavanaugh’s senior yearbook page, for
example, included two cryptic entries: “Judge—Have You Boofed Yet?” and
“Devil’s Triangle.” Testifying during Senate hearings, Kavanaugh insisted that
“boofed” was a humorous reference to flatulence. See! Harmless fart jokes! And
the “Devil’s Triangle?” That was just a simple drinking game—which I suppose we
can assume involving nothing more potent than crème soda.
“Boofed” defined as anal sex.
Once again, the “Fake News” people started
quoting people from Georgetown Prep and others who remembered the 80s.
“Boofed,” several agreed, was a term meant to indicate you had experienced anal
sex. The “Devil’s Triangle” referred to coitus involving two men and a woman.
In other words, Kavanaugh seemed to be lying to cover up, at best, an
embarrassing past.
And that was a now a second, critical issue.
Was this man, who desperately wanted to be
confirmed to the Supreme Court, testifying
truthfully or not?
CNN soon joined the fray and reviewed Mark Judge’s writings, since
both Dr. Ford and Ms. Swetnick had named him as possible witness to Kavanaugh’s
alleged misdeeds. CNN noted that Mr. Judge had described attending a party
where one drunken high school boy fell through a ceiling. A teacher attended a
second party, featuring a keg of beer and a stripper. “[Georgetown] Prep was a school positively swimming in
alcohol,” Mr. Judge recalled, “and my class partied with gusto.”
Mark Judge can’t testify in public, too high an anxiety level?
Asked if he might like to testify in front of
the Judiciary Committee—but Republicans would totally understand if he did not
feel up to the task—Mr. Judge politely declined. He did say, through his lawyer
in a letter (which was introduced as sworn testimony), that he could not
testify publically because he still “struggled with depression and anxiety.” If
it was any help, however, he had no memory of any incidents of debauchery such
as Kavanaugh’s accusers described.
Then USA Today followed up on
his story. They noted that his publisher, Encounter Books, listed Mr. Judge as
“available for media and speaking
engagements.” Apparently, he could speak publically when he wanted.
The New Yorker had already published a story about Kavanaugh in his
youth and the role played in his life by Mr. Judge. Testimony was conflicting.
Several of Kavanaugh’s friends defended him, including Chris Dudley (more about
him later). No way, they said was Brett a bad drunk.
Still, one claim Mr. Judge offered in defense
of his friend upset a former girlfriend. Mark had said he could not recall any
rough treatment of women during his and Kavanaugh’s time at Georgetown Prep.
Elizabeth Razor, who had had a three-year relationship with Mr. Judge during
college, felt compelled to respond.
The New Yorker explained:
Rasor stressed
that “under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t reveal information that was told
in confidence,” but, she said, “I can’t
stand by and watch him lie.”
“Mark told me a
very different story.” Rasor recalled that Judge had told her ashamedly of an
incident that involved him and other boys taking turns having sex with a drunk
woman. Rasor said that Judge seemed to regard it as fully consensual. She said
that Judge did not name others involved in the incident, and she has no
knowledge that Kavanaugh participated. But Rasor was disturbed by the story and
noted that it undercut Judge’s protestations about the sexual innocence of
Georgetown Prep.
The article continued:
Another woman
who attended high school in the nineteen-eighties in Montgomery County,
Maryland, where Georgetown Prep is located, also refuted Judge’s account of the
social scene at the time, sending a letter to [Dr.] Ford’s lawyers saying that
she had witnessed boys at parties that included Georgetown Prep students
engaging in sexual misconduct. In an interview, the woman, who asked to have
her name withheld for fear of political retribution, recalled that male
students “would get a female student blind drunk” on what they called “jungle
juice”—grain alcohol mixed with Hawaiian Punch—then try to take advantage of
her. “It was disgusting,” she said. “They treated women like meat.”
The allegations were serious enough to raise
doubt. First, Sen. Flake wavered. He said he would not vote for Kavanaugh’s
nomination to move to the Senate floor unless the F.B.I. conducted an
investigation. Fellow Republican senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski
backed him up. President Trump decided a week’s delay was a good idea and he
was glad he thought of it himself.
The F.B.I. could have a week to work and their efforts would be limited only
to current allegations. There would be interviews with four whole witnesses!
Neither Rasor nor Swetnick would be called.
To be fair, Kavanaugh and his innocent weenie
continued to have defenders. The New York
Times quoted a few. Dan Murphy, for example, lived in the same dorm suite when both he and
Brett attended Yale.
According to the Times, Murphy,
said
in a written statement that descriptions of a boorish drunk were “simply wrong”
and incompatible with his experience. “I never saw Brett black out or not be
able to remember the prior evening’s events,” he insisted. “Nor did I ever see
Brett act aggressive, hostile or in a sexually aggressive manner to women.”
Dudley’s credibility undercut by police report.
Dudley was an equally staunch defender. In a written statement he
admitted, yes, he drank with Kavanaugh in college but “never ever saw Brett
blackout.” “The person sometimes being described in the press is not the Brett
Kavanaugh that I have known as a good friend for 35 years. The person they are
trying to describe would not be able to function day to day.”
Unfortunately, Dudley’s credibility was undercut
when the Times turned up evidence that he and Kavanaugh had been
involved in a brawl in a New Haven bar in September 1985. Reporters first got
wind of the tale when another classmate raised questions about the veracity of
Kavanaugh’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee. Chad Ludington, a
teammate of Dudley’s on the Yale basketball squad, described what happened. “On
one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him
respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by
throwing his beer in the man’s face,” he recalled. Ludington, now a professor
at North Carolina State, told the Times
he “came forward because he believed Judge Kavanaugh had mischaracterized the
extent of his drinking at Yale.”
Harsh words had
passed between Kavanaugh and a stranger seated at a nearby table, Luddington
explained. The stranger used an expletive. Kavanaugh responded in kind. Then he
“threw his beer at the guy.”
“The guy swung at Brett,” Mr. Ludington continued. At that
point, Mr. Dudley “took his beer and smashed it into the head of the guy, who
by now had Brett in an embrace. I then tried to pull Chris back, and a bunch of
other guys tried to pull the other guy back. I don’t know what Brett was doing
in the melee, but there was blood, there was glass, there was beer and there
was some shouting, and the police showed up.”
The “Fake News” Times dispatched a reporter to New Haven to see if they could turn
up a police report. And they did.
The officer who wrote it describes the scene
he and other officers found: “Upon our arrival we met Mr. Cozzdino, he stated
that a very tall individual hit him in the ear with a glass. Mr. Cozzdino was
bleeding from the right ear. He also stated that he was in a verbal altercation
with an unknown male.” The argument became physical after “Mr. Kavanaugh [by
then identified] threw ice at him for some unknown reason and he then got hit
in the ear with a glass.”
Two witnesses told police they saw the “very
tall gentleman”—Dudley—throw “a tall glass (Collins glass) and hit Mr. Cozzdino
in the ear.”
“Mr. Dudley,” the police report noted,
“stated that he didn’t do it and Mr.
Kavanaugh didn’t wanted [sic] to say [emphasis added] if he threw the ice
or not.”
In other words, Mr. Cozzdino, who was treated
at the scene and then transported to the hospital, got hit in the face by
magical, flying ice and later hit in the head by a magical, flying Collins
glass.
Dudley was clearly lying and police carted him off to jail (records do not
indicate whether or not he was ever charged with a crime).
Kavanaugh wasn’t lying exactly, but he wasn’t
being entirely truthful, for sure. Or to put it plainly, he seemed to have the
same problem in 1985, he displayed in Senate testimony just last week.
The president decides to mock the alleged victim.
The sad saga of his confirmation continued.
At a rally in Mississippi, Tuesday night, Trump decided the best defense was to
be offensive. Previously, he had said Dr. Ford was a “very credible witness”
and “a very fine woman.”
Now the president shifted course.
Mocking Dr. Ford—who couldn’t remember all
the details from a day she says she was assaulted thirty-six years ago—he
served up a “debate” for his loyal fans. “How did you get home?” he said, as if
interviewing the teen girl. “‘I don’t remember,’” he had her reply. “How did
you get there? ‘I don’t remember.’ Where is the place? ‘I don’t remember.’ How
many years ago was it? ‘I don’t know.’”
“‘But I had one beer—that’s the only thing I
remember.’” At that point the crowd erupted in cheers and applause. “A man’s
life is shattered,” Trump added, referring to Kavanaugh’s accusers as “really
evil people.”
Several undecided senators admitted they were
appalled by the president’s comments; but by Thursday morning it looked like,
for Republicans, it was full steam ahead. Nicholas Kristof, writing in The New York Times, raised a great
point. “Judge Kavanaugh,” he offered in an editorial:
I’ve learned
from my criminal justice reporting that witnesses err surprisingly often. You
have earned a reputation as a first-rate conservative judge, and I thought it
possible that there was some mistake and that you had been terribly wronged.
But ultimately what perhaps damaged you most was not the unproven allegations
of assaults decades ago, but your own lies and partisanship last week.
As of this morning, more than 1,000 law
professors had signed a letter to their senators, saying
the same.
We are law
professors who teach, research and write about the judicial institutions of
this country. Many of us appear in state and federal court, and our work means
that we will continue to do so, including before the United States Supreme
Court. We regret that we feel compelled to write to you, our Senators, to
provide our views that at the Senate hearings on Sept. 27, Judge Brett
Kavanaugh displayed a lack of judicial
temperament that would be disqualifying for any court [emphasis added],and
certainly for elevation to the highest court of this land.
At the very least, they warned, Kavanaugh had
shown himself in testimony to be “partisan,” “intemperate” and “inflammatory.”
We have
differing views about the other qualifications of Judge Kavanaugh. But we are
united, as professors of law and scholars of judicial institutions, in
believing that he did not display the impartiality and judicial temperament
requisite to sit on the highest court of our land.
And that’s not even counting the very real
possibility that in his youth, Kavanaugh assaulted young women.
The final F.B.I. report is now in—and it
turns out agents talked to ten whole witnesses—and only ignored about 40 more.
Milksop Mitch McConnell, however, plans to
push the vote ahead Friday. There’s no more time to sort this mess out.
For the next quarter century or more a
tainted justice and his weenie will occupy a place on the greatest court in the
land.
POSTSCRIPT: As of Friday morning the number of law professors signing a letter opposing Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation had grown to:
2,400.
No comments:
Post a Comment