Time To Smear Kavanaugh's Good Name...

[Sparko]

Funny how she still hasn't bothered to file criminal charges being that Maryland has no statue of limitations on these things.

http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/sh...l=1#post582023

[rogue06]

http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/sh...l=1#post582023

I could say something about great minds thinking alike and all that but we're talking about a rum addled, degraded pirate one and a ... well, one great mind at least

[Terraceth]

an evenly split government would just end up in endless deadlocks.

As the Founders intended.

But seriously, we're talking about the Supreme Court here. An evenly split Supreme Court might end up with a bunch of 4-4 decisions, but that just means the ruling of the lower court stands. There's not really deadlock involved here.

So basically her entire motive was just to stop Kavanaugh and now that that has failed, she is back to normal. Pretty much what the republicans have claimed all along. It was just a ploy.

This doesn't make sense. Of course her motivation was to stop Kavanaugh, because (according to her) the guy sexually assaulted her, it'd make sense if you thought that you'd try to stop them from getting onto the Supreme Court. What's the issue?

If it truly was as traumatic as she made it out to be, how could she just drop it? That doesn't make any sense at all. This was a life changing event according to her.

Because regardless of how traumatic it may have been if it happened, it's ultimately a "he said, she said" case from 30+ years ago which are therefore extremely difficult to win in court.

[oxmixmudd]

Funny how she still hasn't bothered to file criminal charges being that Maryland has no statue of limitations on these things.

Being critical of her for not filing charges or a civil suit after 200 pages crowing about little evidence there is to support her claims is absurd.

'Nuff said


Jim

[Sparko]

Being critical of her for not filing charges or a civil suit after 200 pages crowing about little evidence there is to support her claims is absurd.

'Nuff said


Jim

Just as absurd as her making the claims in the first place with no evidence, trying to ruin a man's career and reputation. Then "oh well! sigh.?"

[Terraceth]

But that is not the biggest mark against him as far as being confirmed is concerned, had he been found to be lying about his past in a job interview, he wouldn't be hired, and lying to congress, exhibiting a biased political perspective, and threatening revenge is more than ample reason to deny his confirmation to a lifetime seat as SC Justice.

As far as I can tell, the various claims that Kavanaugh lied to congress, while not fully unfounded, are nevertheless speculative. Recently people focus on his statements regarding his yearbook and drinking, but (again, to my knowledge), no "smoking gun" has been found that definitely shows his statements were false. For example, people point to statements from former classmates contradicting his assertions about what terms in the yearbook meant (though I'll notice at least some of these are secondhand, i.e. someone claiming classmates said this rather than an actual classmate saying so), but then you'll have other former classmates say the opposite.

His claims may have been questionable at points, but it seems a pretty big jump to assert he definitely lied.

[Cow Poke]

THIS is exactly what this has all been about....

destroy Kav life.jpg

[oxmixmudd]

Just as absurd as her making the claims in the first place with no evidence, trying to ruin a man's career and reputation. Then "oh well! sigh.?"

Not if she is telling the truth. There is nothing inconsistent about realizing she can't win these cases. Nothing that says she is lying.

Nothing about this choice is inconsistent with her having told the truth as she remembers it. And none of us knows what the truth is here. And without knowledge of what the truth is, your comments on this element of the situation are simply without justification.


Jim

[rogue06]

Not if she is telling the truth. There is nothing inconsistent about realizing she can't win these cases. Nothing that says she is lying.

Nothing about this choice is inconsistent with her having told the truth as she remembers it. And none of us knows what the truth is here. And without knowledge of what the truth is, your comments on this element of the situation are simply without justification.


Jim

She wouldn't have to much of anything if she filed charges. The state does all the work and covers the expenses. She wouldn't have to touch a dime of all the money she was paid for testifying.

[Cow Poke]

Not if she is telling the truth. There is nothing inconsistent about realizing she can't win these cases. Nothing that says she is lying.

Nothing about this choice is inconsistent with her having told the truth as she remembers it. And none of us knows what the truth is here. And without knowledge of what the truth is, your comments on this element of the situation are simply without justification.


Jim

I'm gonna have to concur - the fact that she (and any legal team) knows that the bar in a criminal case is such that it would be impossible to meet with the lack of evidence on hand doesn't prove she was lying, in that she may actually believe Kavanaugh did this.

On the other hand, I'm becoming less convinced that she was as innocent in the incredibly hostile jackass way this was handled as I was wanting to believe originally.

[carpedm9587]

I found this article to be pretty well articulated, and critical of both parties for their performance in the Kavanaugh issue. Others may also find it informative. The author pretty succinctly articulates the primary things I find wrong with each party.

[Sparko]

Not if she is telling the truth. There is nothing inconsistent about realizing she can't win these cases. Nothing that says she is lying.

Nothing about this choice is inconsistent with her having told the truth as she remembers it. And none of us knows what the truth is here. And without knowledge of what the truth is, your comments on this element of the situation are simply without justification.


Jim

You are basically admitting she has no case and had no case to begin with because she has no evidence, so that is why she is letting it go. That means it should never have been brought forward in the first place. As it stands it is nothing but a smear campaign meant to try to stop or delay Kavanaugh's confirmation.

[Cow Poke]

I found this article to be pretty well articulated, and critical of both parties for their performance in the Kavanaugh issue. Others may also find it informative. The author pretty succinctly articulates the primary things I find wrong with each party.

No thanks, I'm just gonna dig in and believe that the Democrats were low-life scumbag pinko commie leftist hatemongers doing anything to derail any conservative who doesn't worship at the altar of the slain pre-born baby.


Serious answer - some good points raised, but I left the Republican party years ago.

[Cow Poke]

And this is more where I'm ending up, after seeing and reading so much from both sides...

One Ford Narrative Too Many

In the end, the Christine Blasey Ford accusations collapsed. With them went the last effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the United States Supreme Court.

After thousands of hours of internal Senate and FBI investigations of Kavanaugh, as well as public discussions, open questioning, and media sensationalism, Ford remained unable to identify a single witness who might substantiate any of her narratives of an alleged sexual assault of nearly four decades past.

To substantiate her claim, the country was asked to jettison the idea of innocent until proven guilty, the need for corroborating testimony, witnesses, and physical evidence, the inadmissibility of hearsay, the need for reasonable statutes of limitations, considerations of motive, and the right of the accused to conduct vigorous cross-examination. That leap proved too much, especially when located in a larger progressive landscape of street theater antics, including Senate disruptions, walkouts, and sandbagging senators in hallways and elevators.

At the end of all things, Ford remained scarcely knowledgeable about the location and time of the assault than she was months earlier in her original anonymous complaint. Nor could she yet describe how she arrived at or left the party that may or may not have taken place in 1982. That Ford retained a crystal-clear account of having consumed just one beer and that Kavanaugh played the Hollywood role of a cruel, smirking, drunken, and privileged preppy groper were sensational accusations but not supportable.

After two weeks of the televised melodrama, the country rejected the therapeutic mindset and preferred what was logic and rational—without dismissing the chance that Ford somewhere at some time had experienced some sort of severe trauma.

In Ford’s case, that meant that being empathetic or even sincere did not translate into being credible. Logos (word) and ergon (deed) have never been synonymous. The country was finally asked to believe that because Ford told others of the assault 30 years later, that admission was de facto proof that the event really happened—and happened just as Ford described. But since when was sharing a story proof that the story therein was believable?

Serial Fibs and Fables

The Democrats’ strategy to derail Kavanagh encouraged the appearance of serial accusers—on the theory that the quantity of accusations could do what the quality of any individual testimony could not. Activists had little idea that the opposite usually occurs when such serial testimonials lack substantiation: like falling dominos one knocks down the next all the way back to the beginning. And so the wreckage of serial fibs and fables from all sorts also helped to undermine Ford’s credibility.

When the Deborah Ramirez yarn and the Julie Swetnick fantasy collapsed, along with those of accusers four, five, six, etc. (that inter alia had included charges of rape while out to sea off Rhode Island, a tag-team sexual assault with Mark Judge in the backseat of a car, and throwing ice), Ford’s narrative appeared even less credible. Instead it became just one of many fictions; the first accuser became different from the rest only in the sense of being the first rather than the only one credible.

But Ford’s problem was not just that her memory was inexact and often nonexistent about the details necessary to substantiate her quite serious charges aimed at destroying not just a nomination but the totality of an individual and his family, 36 years after an alleged teenaged encounter. Instead, the rub was that Christine Blasey Ford inadvertently became the best witness—against Christine Blasey Ford.

She had claimed that she was afraid of flying, but by her own admissions she was a frequent flyer.

She claimed the event took place in the early 1980s but also the mid-’80s—but also summer of 1982. Thus, her reported age at the time of the incident was equally fluid as a middle teen or late teen.

She swore that she had no idea that Senate investigators were willing to fly to California to interview her to accommodate her aerophobia—an offer splashed over the media for days.

Her halting answers to questions about her legal assistance funding, her past experiences with lie detector tests, the existence of any tapes or videos of her lie detector interview, and the content, accessibility, and nature of her therapist notes were either self-contradictory, illogical, or incomplete.

An ex-boyfriend turned up to question her narratives in a sworn affidavit alleging that she was demonstrably neither aerophobic nor claustrophobic—and perhaps far from being a novice in matters of taking lie-detector tests. Instead, he suggested that she had used her psychotherapy skills to coach her doppelganger friend how to massage such a test—a Zelig-like best friend who unfortunately also turned up at the hearings, and may well have hosted Ford before the Senate circus, and also allegedly may have tried to pressure one of Ford’s friends to massage her earlier condemnatory denials.

Reporters had noted Ford’s two-front-door remedy for anxiety was not necessarily a result of post-Kavanaugh stress syndrome as much a far earlier mercantile gambit to cash in on the Silicon Valley rent boom, where an extra room with a separate roadside entry meant a lucrative attached rental.

That the same ex-boyfriend claimed that an unfaithful Ford had also ripped him off for $600 in credit card bills (presumably a demonstrable accusation given banking records) did not help her case that she was a babe in the financial woods without a clue about her growing and lucrative GoFundMe account, or who in fact had paid her legal and prep bills and how—facts at odds with Ford’s adolescent demeanor of supposedly lost innocence.

So Many Stories

Senate prosecutor Rachel Mitchell might have proven in court more a depositioner than an inquisitor in her seemingly circular questioning, but in retrospect she proved a brilliant interrogator nonetheless in getting Ford to testify to a host of things that simply could not all be true—and would come back to haunt Ford in Mitchell’s damning summary of Ford’s likely untruths.

And why exactly were there so many contradictions as outlined in Mitchell’s written summation?

....

[rogue06]

No thanks, I'm just gonna dig in and believe that the Democrats were low-life scumbag pinko commie leftist hatemongers doing anything to derail any conservative who doesn't worship at the altar of the slain pre-born baby.


Serious answer - some good points raised, but I left the Republican party years ago.

Beat you to it. I never belonged. Always have been a libertarian (that's with a small "l", not a member of that party either). I've voted for Democrats for state representative, Governor and both Houses of Congress -- they just haven't ever nominated anyone that I could vote for as president though (and several times neither did the Republicans).