9/30/18 to 10/2/18: In recent days, the American people have been introduced to two inseparable nominees to fill a single opening on the U.S. Supreme Court. Soon it will be up to the Senate to decide whether 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!
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Acting
badly: Kavanaugh and his weenie at Yale.
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The case for seating Kavanaugh is proving a tough one for the president and GOP senators to make, at least in the eyes of that portion of the public known as “women.” It’s not selling all that well with men either, many of whom have mothers, wives, and daughters, and have always known there are guys who seize sexual advantage at any opportunity.
Republicans are stuck with the nominees and GOP stalwarts must offer the best defense possible.
Trump cranked up the rhetoric some days back, telling reporters that “some very evil” Democrats were going after Kavanaugh and his innocent pants 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 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.
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A key witness against Judge Kavanaugh. |
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IF WE FOLLOWED the president’s logic it was also the fault of 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 on the floor and saw his weenie right in her face. She admits she was inebriated, which Republicans are at great pains to point out. The flaw in that line of defense? The 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. Roche didn’t see it happen, because he wasn’t there to see it happen, but he 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 [emphasis added, here and below] when he was very drunk.”
Meanwhile, White House aides were working overtime 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.”
“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 several 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 mix.
It didn’t bother them when Swetnick claimed Brett and his weenie and their 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 whatsoever.
Mr. Judge declined even to talk about his writing, normally any author’s favorite topic. He did not wish to discuss his 1997 memoir, Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk. In that memoir he wrote about wild drinking in 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 Trump fans – who apparently
believe 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 low-down Democrats convinced her husband to tell reporters that she told
the same story six years ago that 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 Judge Kavanaugh had a turn to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he insisted he and his appendage rarely drank more than an occasional beer. He did admit he really liked beer. His problems had nothing to do with beer. His problem, he claimed, boiled down to the fact that Bill and Hillary Clinton were out to get him. If it weren’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 had all he could stand. Exploding with righteous indignation, he intimated that his colleagues were terrible human beings. He could not believe they would keep this fine judicial mind, 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. He had been a virgin all throughout high school and for “many years” after. (See: 9/24/18.)
Republicans love the Constitution more than Pudding Pops.
Watching the fury of Sen. Graham as the hearing unfolded, I am guessing every fair-minded American was struck by the comparison with the gracious way in which Republicans treated Judge Merrick Garland, when President Obama nominated him for a vacant seat on the Supreme Court. Did they ever attack Judge Garland or his private parts during the nine months they refused to grant a hearing? No, they did not! That’s because Republicans love the Constitution more than Pudding Pops.
By comparison, 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 along. 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 on Twitter 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 dung. 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!
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 an end, 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 (R-AZ) 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.
(The video of their encounter went viral.)
“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.”
“He frequently drank to excess.”
With the dawn of another week, the Democrats’ allies in the “Fake News” business refused to leave the paired candidates in peace. Kavanaugh had testified that he drank the occasional beer with friends during the years in question. Perhaps he had done 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, 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.”
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.”
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Yale Commons. |
The “Fake News” folks kept digging into the years the nominee/s 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 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 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’ “clumsy affection” – caught wind of the story. She had been one of 65 women (see: 9/24/18) who said they knew Kavanaugh in high school and signed a letter testifying to his fine 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 such stories, the kind, that, if true would make Kavanaugh sound exactly like the kind of teenage boy you wouldn’t want alone in a room with alcohol and your teen 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 a simple drinking game, which I suppose we can assume involving certain skills in geometry.
“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.
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 once wrote, “and my class partied with gusto.”
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 publicly because he still “struggled with depression and anxiety.” If it was any help, he had no memory of any incidents of debauchery such as Kavanaugh’s accusers described.
Then USA Today followed up on the story. They noted that
his publisher, Encounter Books, listed Mr. Judge as “available for media and speaking engagements.” Apparently, he
could speak publicly if 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 Brett’s time at Georgetown Prep. Elizabeth Rasor, 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.
“They treated women like meat.”
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.”
(This,
we now know, was Julie Swetnick.)
The allegations were serious enough to raise real 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. investigated. 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.
Chris 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.”
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. 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 if he threw the ice or not [emphasis added, here and throughout, unless otherwise noted].”
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 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 tactics.
Mocking Dr. Ford, who couldn’t remember all the details from the 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.”
(His
weenie was a victim, too, right?)
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, 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 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.
POSTSCRIPT: As of Friday morning the number of law professors signing a
letter opposing Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation had grown to:
2,400.
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