9/21/18:
We know President Trump never believes women who say they were sexually
abused. Now, with accusers coming out to say that U.S. Supreme Court nominee
Judge Brett Kavanaugh was guilty of abusive behavior in his youth, Trump can’t
resist commenting.
Trump
says Kavanaugh accuser, 15, should have called F.B.I.
On Fox News he weighs in on the story
told by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Ford says, when she was 15, and Kavanaugh
was 17, he attacked her at a party. He and a friend, Mark Judge, had been
drinking heavily and dragged her into a bedroom, locked the door, turned on
loud music to muffle her protests, and then Kavanaugh held her down and tried
to take off her clothes.
Trump now says the girl should have called the F.B.I. back in
1982. “You say, why didn’t somebody call the FBI 36 years ago? I mean, you
could also say, when did this all happen? What’s going on?”
The president is apparently too dumb to know this would be a local matter to be handled by
local police.
Today, he tweets out a backhanded slap at her parents. Either
the attack she describes wasn’t so bad or her mother and father failed to
defend their daughter. “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as
bad as she says,” he 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!”
(One is reminded of Trump’s July 2016 attack on the Khan family, particularly the Gold Star
mother.)
Local police would have handled any complaint, not the FBI.
9/24/18: George Packer, writing in The New Yorker, captures the essence of
the Trump administration in five words: “Only snakes and sycophants survive.”
____________________
“Only
snakes and sycophants survive.”
George Packer
____________________
*
JUDGE BRETT KAVANAUGH appears on Fox News to interview. It’s conservatives’
safe place and the Judge wants to make clear he deserves to be confirmed to a
seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Why? Because he was a virgin in high school and
for many years after. I think that’s the point he’s trying to make.
Unfortunately for Judge Kavanaugh, he has been accused of
sexually abusing a young woman back in the day.
Host Martha MacCallum gives him a good old Fox “going over.”
She thanks the nominee, accompanied by his wife, for coming. “What made you
decide to speak out before the hearing on Thursday? Judge Kavanaugh?”
“I am looking for a fair process, a process where I can
defend my integrity and clear my name. And all I’m asking for is fairness and
that I’d be heard in this process,” the Judge intones.
Sen. Majority Leader McConnell has already decided Kavanaugh is innocent.
On Fox News, they won't bring that up.
This is Fox, so MacCallum serves up a creampuff for his wife.
“Ashley, what has this been like for you the past couple of weeks? I know
you’ve had death threats and all kinds of things coming your way. What – how does
that feel?”
Mrs. Kavanaugh admits the confirmation process has been
“incredibly difficult. It’s harder than we imagined.”
One reason it’s harder, is that one woman has come forward to
claim her husband sexually assaulted her when she was fifteen and he was a high
school senior. A second accuser says
Kavanaugh exposed himself during a
drunken dorm room party at Yale, during their freshman year.
McCallum asks the Judge about that.
“I never did any such thing – never did any such thing,” he
exclaims. “The other people alleged to be there don’t recall any such thing. If
such as thing had a happened, it would’ve been the talk of campus. The women I
knew in college and the men I knew in college said that it’s unconceivable that
I could’ve done such a thing.”
Did he attack the fifteen-year-old, when he was seventeen,
McCallum inquires?
“No. I had never sexually assaulted anyone, not in high
school, not ever. I’ve always treated women with dignity and respect.” He cites
a letter signed by 65 women who knew him in high school who all say he
was a great guy.
(I am wondering: What guy in high school knows 65 women well
enough for them to vouch for his purity – particularly a guy who went to an all-men’s private prep school. But let’s set that aside.)
“Let me ask Ashley, when this came out what did you say to
your husband?” McCallum inquires. “Did you question him and have moments where
you wondered if he was telling you the truth?”
“No. I know Brett. I’ve known him for 17 years. And this is
not at all [in] character; it’s really hard to believe. He’s decent, he’s kind,
he’s good. I know his heart. This is not consistent with – with Brett.”
(I am doing the math in my head. MacCallum is not. Or she is,
but this is Fox News and she’s hoping no one watching realizes the math doesn’t
work. That would mean the alleged
incidents occurred decades before Kavanaugh met his wife.)
Is the Judge sure he never did anything bad at Yale?
Not a chance, the Judge insists.
Judge
Kavanaugh turns to the embarrassing “Virgin Defense.”
What about the allegations of excessive drinking, MacCallum
wonders? Could Kavanaugh have been so drunk in high school, for example, he
couldn’t remember what he’d done?
Kavanaugh admits there were parties – which is pretty much
like admitting you went to high school at all:
And the drinking age was 18, and
yes, the seniors were legal and had beer there. And yes, people might have had
too many beers on occasion and people generally in high school – I think all of
us have probably done things we look back on in high school and regret or
cringe a bit, but that’s not what we’re talking about.
We’re talking about an
allegation of sexual assault. I’ve never sexually assaulted anyone. I did not
have sexual intercourse or anything close to sexual intercourse in high school
or for many years thereafter. And the girls from the schools I went to and I
were friends…
If MacCallum is surprised by such a response, she’s not
showing it. She merely asks for clarification: “So you’re saying that
through all these years that are in question, you were a virgin [emphasis
added, here and throughout]?”
“That’s correct,” he says.
“Never had sexual intercourse with anyone in high school?”
she wonders.
“Correct.”
“And through what years in college since we’re probing into
your personal life here?” she probes.
“Many years after. I’ll leave it at that.”
What about having the F.B.I. investigate the new allegations,
MacCallum asks? “Ashley? And then I’ll ask you that, Brett.”
“I mean, I’ve said all along and Ashley, too, I want to be
heard,” the Judge responds, cutting off Mrs. Kavanaugh. “I was first
interviewed last Monday, the day after the allegation appeared by the committee
staff under penalty of felony, and I denied this categorically and
unequivocally and I said twice during that, I said, ‘I want a hearing
tomorrow,’ last Tuesday, a week ago.”
MacCallum wonders if it bothers the Judge to hear that
Democratic senators have already said
they believe the accusations. “When you hear United States senators who
are making judgments, final judgments, what does that make you think about the
presumption of innocence in this country?”
This is good Fox News “journalism,” signaling viewers that
Democrats are unfair and don’t believe in the “presumption of innocence,” a
hallmark of justice.
You know MacCallum isn’t going to ask about the comments of
President Trump, who has already said the second accuser, the woman at Yale,
“has nothing” and that the Democrats are running a con-job.
“In America, we have fairness,” the Judge replies:
We hear from both sides. I’ve
spent my life in the judiciary, the – our judicial system, and part of the
judicial systems as I’ve said during my first – my hearing was process
protection. That’s what judges believe that’s what our system was built on, the
rule of law, about fair process.
MacCallum isn’t taking any chances. She wants to send obvious
signals to viewers about what they should think.
“Let me ask you this,” she says. “Separately from these
allegations, is it fair to judge someone on something they did before they
were 18 years old? When they were 17 years old? Should anything they did
then follow them later in life, or should it enter into any decisions made
about them later in life?”
Kavanaugh replies: “What I’m here to do is tell you the
truth, and this allegation from 36 years ago is not – ”
“But separately from what you’re being accused of just as a
judge, if you were looking at this case as a part of what you’re going through
and someone said, ‘This person did that at 17 years old,’ is it fair to judge
them on something that when they’re in their 50s, 60s?” MacCallum presses.
If she’s doing her job, the knuckleheads watching at home
will start nudging each other and saying, “Naw, that ain’t right. Why this good
Christian fellow, if he tried to rape a woman back then, well, would you rather
have some commie liberal on the Supreme Court?”
Kavanaugh assures her he’s a good person.
“So in terms of the process now and what happens now, when
you look at how all of this – where all this generated from, do you have
thoughts?” MacCallum inquires. “Is this about Roe v. Wade? Is this about people who initially right off the bat
said they wanted to see you never take the spot on the Supreme Court? Where’s
all this coming from?”
Again, she and her handlers at Fox want that idea to sink in.
This is another witch hunt, they hope viewers will decide.
Kavanaugh says he just wants a “fair process.”
MacCallum tries again to get him on record, saying he’s being
persecuted. He says he wants a “fair process.”
MacCallum tries it a third time: “You don’t want to talk
about where you think this is coming from?”
“What
would you say if this happened to them?”
Watching at home myself, I want to shout at the television:
“It’s coming from a woman who has nothing to gain, who says this choir boy
virgin tried to strip off her clothes when she was fifteen! Come on, MacCallum,
ask the Judge or his wife, ‘You have daughters, what would you say if this
happened to them?’”
The Judge replies again, “I just want an opportunity, a
fair process where I can defend my integrity.”
Speaking of closed minds, three days before this interview
aired, Milksop Mitch McConnell had
assured Christian conservatives that Kavanaugh was going to be
confirmed.
9/26/18: A third accuser, Julie Swetnick, until today anonymous,
identifies herself. She claims that in the early 1980s Brett Kavanaugh, a
nominee for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, attended high school parties where girls were drugged and raped.
This is not proof that Judge
Kavanaugh participated when he was a teen. It does call into question
the idea that he was some boy scout-choir boy-high school virgin in his youth.
(See: 9/24/18.)
Kavanaugh - Swetnick.
BLOGGER’S NOTE: To
view some of the good work done by reporters, regarding Judge Kavanaugh, see
the post for 9/29/18-10/2/18.
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!
____________________
Acting
badly: Kavanaugh and his weenie at Yale.
____________________
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.
A key witness against Judge Kavanaugh.
*
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, Democratswere 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.
“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 toLynne
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 controlover 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.”
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 truthfullyor 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 Timesquoted 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:
