Very perceptive question from a friend and fellow memo reader: "Dick - Just wonder is Ford's treatment include hypnosis? - G-----"
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Now that the RHINO contingent have gotten their wish and done everything they could to get their political compatriots to do and, should, if only for appearance sake, to accommodate Ms. Ford and her Democrat friends, I believe the criticism of their efforts will continue. New demands will be made because liberals are never satisfied. Their needs are bottomless. They are never sated. They always have to remain disappointed because that is what drives them. Since their new shtick is to bring sexual claims against those whose character they wish to destroy the thought occurred that many liberals often tend to be nympho-mic, because they never get enough of a good thing.
Five years from now when we look back at the Kavanaugh Hearings, as we do when we look at The Bork and Thomas Hearings, I suspect most reasonable people will cringe at the accusations and the ways we treated the accused unless, of course, we will, by then, have rid ourselves of all sensible jurisprudence.
Pendulums generally over-swing and then over-correct.(See 1, 1a, 1b and 1c below.)
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Dick
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1) Life in a Gynocracy
The performance of women this week – from Senator Dianne Feinstein to Christine Blasey Ford to the howling mobs on Capitol Hill – made me seriously consider surgically altering my sex. They are demanding special treatment because of their sex and in the process placing all of us – male and female alike – at peril of witch hunts against men and then, in time, against all who will not bow to their rule.
My Facebook friend Alex Bensky reminded me of the advantage to me of transgendering:
Ah, then we'd be unable to criticize your politics, your social viewpoints, your choice of teams to root for, and anything else you say because we'd be transphobic.
As a footnote, I've seen an estimate that the transgender population is about 0.05% of the population. This is hardly a warrant for beating up people but it is not clear to me why unless we substantially alter social arrangements that have existed in almost every known human society and celebrate...not just accept but celebrate...transgenderism, we are mean, hateful people.
Victor Davis Hanson offered up the most succinct summary of Blasey Ford's testimony:
The "process" of memorializing Ford's testimony involved a strange inversion of constitutional norms: The idea of a statute of limitations is ossified; hearsay is legitimate testimony; inexact and contradictory recall is proof of trauma, and therefore of validity; the burden of proof is on the accused, not the accuser; detail and evidence are subordinated to assumed sincerity; proof that one later relates an allegation to another is considered proof that the assault actually occurred in the manner alleged; motive is largely irrelevant; the accuser establishes the guidelines of the state's investigation of the allegations; and the individual allegation gains credence by cosmic resonance with all other such similar allegations.
Unless, however, you do not want to transgender, I want to note how we came to such a place, a place both ridiculous and dangerous.
I want you to pay attention to the distortions of language and statistics used to advance the gynocrats' agenda.
Since when do those accusing others of crimes become "survivors" rather than "accusers"? How you frame your self-description affects views, doesn't it? If you claimed that someone had raped you, why must we always believe you just because you tag yourself "a survivor"? Do we do this with those who claim to have been robbed or beaten? "I'm a robbery survivor, so you have to believe me when I say X robbed me." The shift in language is to message that accusers must always be believed. It is, at heart, based on a gross distortion of statistics.
It is difficult for many reasons to determine the percentage of false rape claims, to be sure, but like the claims about 97% of "climate scientists" and global warming, the assertion that only 2% of women's rape claims are false is itself demonstrably false. We don't know the answer, and since we don't, we should not upset laws and precepts guaranteeing due process for all those accused of the crime – men and women alike.
Indirect data, in fact, highly suggest that far more than two percent of rape accusations are false. The 2% genesis was a handout from Susan Brownmiller's file. (Brownmiller, the author of Against Our Will, Men, Women and Rape, argued that existing definitions of rape were a tool of male dominance.) It was her "interpretation of some data, now a quarter-century old, of unknown provenance from a single police department unit."
This fact is significant because based on this dubious statistic, efforts are made to transform rape accusations into a strict liability offense. Those who believe this nonsense contend that if only half of the accusations result in convictions, the definition of "consent" must be altered, making intent irrelevant to the crime and creating "a new breed of strict liability."
Brownmiller's desire to revise the definition (indeed, the meaning of sex crimes involving women) was not the only fake statistic used to turn the presumption of innocence on its head.
The same kind of jiggered statistics were used to justify Title IX tribunals in colleges where men were grossly mistreated following false accusations. The Duke lacrosse team and University of Virginia cases come to mind, but daily we read of men who fought back, were reinstated to college, and even won substantial damages because their schools followed the Obama Department of Education's gynocratic star chamber
policies. Those policies were based on an equally suspect claim that 20% of college women experienced a sexual assault. Countless others doubtless lacked the financial ability to do so and had their lives damaged if not ruined by campus star chambers.
Statistics surrounding sexual assault are notoriously unreliable and inconsistent, primarily because of vague and expansive definitions of what qualifies as sexual assault. Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute explains that the study often cited as the origin of the "one in five" factoid is an online survey conducted under a grant from the Justice Department. Surveyors employed such a broad definition that "'forced kissing" and even "attempted forced kissing" qualified as sexual assault.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics' "Violent Victimization of College Students" report tells a different and more plausible story about campus culture. During the years surveyed, 1995-2002, the DOJ found that there were six rapes or sexual assaults per thousand per year. Across the nation's four million female college students, that comes to about one victim in forty students. Other DOJ statistics show that the overall rape rate is in sharp decline: since 1995, the estimated rate of female rape or sexual assault victimizations has decreased by about 60 percent. ...
Bolstered by inflated statistics and alarmist depictions of campus culture, advocates have been successful in initiating policy changes designed to better protect victims of sexual violence. Duke, Swarthmore, Amherst, Emerson and the University of North Carolina are among the many institutions that have recently reviewed and revised their policies. It is not clear that these policies have made campuses safer places for women, but they have certainly made them treacherous places for falsely accused men.
It is in this fevered atmosphere, where women are led to believe that all men are rapists or would-be rapists, that a charge made months earlier with a request for anonymity and kept hidden by Senator Feinstein (but not from the Washington Post) was finally disclosed, with demands for a reopened hearing on the suitability of Judge Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. He has, without doubt, a pristine reputation. The accusation was vague – no date, no place were given. The others she claimed were present, like the nominee, all denied the claim under penalty of perjury. On examination by a mild prosecutor, Rachel Mitchell from Arizona, Ford made a number of inconsistent statements and other assertions that were hardly credible. Miss Mitchell notified the committee that had she received this information as a prosecutor, she would not have filed a charge against Kavanaugh and doubted she would even have been able to get a search warrant issued.
I have to agree with Powerline blog's John Hinderaker:
If we can do this to the Boy Scout Brett Kavanaugh, we can do it to anyone. Are you thinking of serving in a Republican administration? Or accepting an appointment to the federal judiciary from a Republican president? Think twice, and then think again.
Because our smear machine will reach back to middle school if necessary. If we can't find any dirt on you, we will manufacture some. There is no depth to which we will not stoop, and your honesty, integrity and spotless reputation are no match for our control over the media and our determination to dredge up ridiculous allegations against anyone who stands in our way.
Really, the more ridiculous the better. If we can accuse Brett Kavanaugh, one of the most respected lawyers and judges in America, of gang rape, we can accuse anyone of anything! And our insane accusations will dominate the news.
That is the Democratic Party's message. And we have learned from the Christine Ford fiasco that accusations don't require corroborating evidence. A single wacky, false allegation will negate decades of hard work on behalf of the American people. ...
Given that strategy, the fact that they are smearing a man of obviously sterling character on absurdly flimsy grounds is not a bug, it is a feature.The fact that the Democrats' smears are so patently false is ultimately their main point.The Democrats are telling us: Republicans, beware – if this can happen to Brett Kavanaugh, it can happen to anyone. You'd better go quietly and cede power to us.
Hinderaker is right about the strategy of the Democrats in Kavanaugh's case, but Brownmiller, the Obama Department of Education, and the various left-wing organizations and their media cohorts have created an atmosphere within which they could commit this outrage.
And the pussy-hatted women are telling us they can do this to you whether or not you are a Republican, as long as you are a man.
Really, guys, you have to fight this. You pick your weapon. You can march around in penis hats and accost senators in elevators demanding that since some men have been falsely accused of rape, all accusations of rape must be deemed falsely made. You can call a nationwide strike by men. Let the women dig the ditches, fix the electrical wires and telephone lines, fight all the fires and wars, and conduct all the police work and intricate surgeries. Do all the countless things men do every day to protect all of us – men and women alike.
Or maybe, like me, you can vow to never vote for a Democrat again and fight tooth and nail against such efforts to distort our constitutional rights to due process.
1a) Empathy, Accuracy, and Credibility
Christine Blasey Ford testifies at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. September 27, 2018.(Melina Mara/Reuters)
It is considered taboo even to suggest that an emphatic Professor Ford at times was inexact and inconsistent in her prior written and current Senate testimonies.
But the result of her sometimes-moving account still remains that she seems to have little recollection of how her still-private therapist’s notes or versions of notes ended up in the hands of the Washington Post and were to be used as corroborating evidence — even though they at times seem to have contradicted elements of versions of her allegations
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Ford, unfortunately, seems to have little memory of how her original letter requesting anonymity surfaced in the media. Nor does anyone else in the small number who had access to it. Ford, apparently, has little recollection of an offer — widely reported in the media — from Senate members to fly out to California to alleviate her anxieties about flying. Strangely, she did not explain how such a fear of flying contradicted her own record of relatively recent and extensive flying both for business and leisure.
One wished that Ford could at last have named one witness who could corroborate her allegations that the 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her 36 years ago in a place where witnesses were apparently present, or at least produced convincing evidence that the testimonies of those alleged to be at the party who had no memory of her narratives were sorely mistaken.
Ford might have been deemed more credible had she just been able to locate the scene of the alleged assault, or to explain how and why the alleged gender and number of those at the scene of the alleged assault were not reported by her consistently, or to remember how she arrived and left the scene.
The assertion that Ford sought “medical treatment” after the assault would usually not be taken to suggest that 30 years after an alleged sexual assault one brings up the allegation for the first time during a marriage-counseling session.
The “process” of memorializing Ford’s testimony involved a strange inversion of constitutional norms: The idea of a statute of limitations is ossified; hearsay is legitimate testimony; inexact and contradictory recall is proof of trauma, and therefore of validity; the burden of proof is on the accused, not the accuser; detail and evidence are subordinated to assumed sincerity; proof that one later relates an allegation to another is considered proof that the assault actually occurred in the manner alleged; motive is largely irrelevant; the accuser establishes the guidelines of the state’s investigation of the allegations; and the individual allegation gains credence by cosmic resonance with all other such similar allegations.
Those assumptions played out as extensive examination of minute details of Kavanaugh’s teenage life with little commensurate inquiry into Ford’s. The premise was that victimizer Kavanaugh thought he had an entitlement to be on the Court, rather than the fact that victimized Ford had initiated the entire line of inquiry, whose aim was to establish that a teenage Kavanaugh 36 years ago was a sexual assaulter and foiled rapist, and therefore now unqualified to take Antony Kennedy’s vacant Supreme Court seat. All that meant that the accuser was exempt from providing substantiation at a level required from Kavanaugh. I don’t think the American people have yet evolved to accept such a line of reasoning or quite yet believe that the U.S. Senate is entirely free from the spirit of the Constitution when conducting confirmation hearings and investigations.
Finally, in a most non-empathetic fashion, Ford sought to refute the contradictory testimony of her close friend Leland Ingham Keyser (whose attorney had unequivocally stated, “Simply put, Ms. Keyser does not know Mr. Kavanaugh and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford”) — in a manner that had anyone employed the same trope against Ford herself, he would have shamed as a condescending slanderer.
Ford, albeit gently, sought to refute Keyser’s contradiction of her assault narrative by essentially claiming that Keyser was now ill and had needed help even to make a statement, and therefore apparently was non compos mentis: “Leland has significant health challenges and I’m happy that she’s focusing on herself and getting the health treatment that she needs, and she let me know that she needed her lawyer to take care of this for her and she texted me right afterward with an apology and good wishes and et cetera.” In other words, Keyser was supposedly not able to weigh in herself, according to Ford, due to alleged health issues. So she relied on her lawyer to report her testimony — but, according to Ford, Ford alone was privately assured that the ensuing official statement was apparently now inaccurate and therefore had earned Ford an rightful apology.
The end result? We have no confirmation of whether such a characterization is true; but the nation is to know, thanks to Ford’s quite brazen insinuation, that Keyser is either apparently too ill to be credible or being manipulated by her lawyer or refuting her own statement. A cynic might infer that Ford referenced her close friend, Keyser, in expectation of confirmation, and when confirmation did not follow, impugned the credibility of her friend. Had Keyser confirmed publicly Ford’s allegations, one might also cynically suspect that Keyser’s “health challenges” would not have been raised by Ford.
The lesson of the hearings transcends the Kavanaugh confirmation. We were presented with two radically different and now competing versions of American jurisprudence and due process, one traditional and constitutional, one fluid and revolutionary. It will be up to Americans, ultimately, to decide by which version they wish to conduct their lives.
1b) In Defense of Brett Kavanaugh's Judicial Temperament
One of the more exasperating accusations against Brett Kavanaugh going around right now is that his impassioned defense before the Senate Judiciary Committee proves that he lacks a "judicial temperament." This ludicrous charge gets the thing completely backwards. In the irregular hearing that the Democrat committee members demanded last Thursday, it wasn't Kavanaugh's obligation to be even-handed and judicious, because he wasn't there as a judge – he was in the dock as acriminal defendant representing himself. It was the Democratic senators who were acting as judges (God help us), at a hearing they said was needed to assess the "credibility" of an accuser and the accused. In doing so, it was they who showed a complete lack of judicial temperament.
The hearing was not a criminal trial in the strict sense. But neither was it a regular committee hearing for the purpose of providing advice and consent as to the fitness of a judicial nominee. Those hearings had taken place already, and that process was over, or should have been. Thursday's hearing, (which, as Andrew McCarthy argues correctly, Chairman Grassley should never have permitted), was held ostensibly for the sole purpose of evaluating Christina Blasey Ford's sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. While there was no fact-finder and no verdict, there was an accuser and an accused, testimony was taken and evidence reviewed (not Ford's evidence, as she didn't provide any), and it was without a doubt the last opportunity that the accused was going to have to defend himself against heinous charges carrying serious penalties.
Most people would call that a trial. Not a fair trial by American standards, but a trial.
Kirsten Gillibrand dismissed Kavanaugh's entitlement to due process and a reasonable-doubt standard of proof, saying, "Those are the standards in criminal justice. We are not having a trial; this is not a court. He's not entitled to those because we are not actually seeking to convict him or put him in jail[.] ... This is not about whether or not he should be convicted; this is about whether or not he has the privilege to serve on the highest court in the land for a lifetime."
In other words, it's not a criminal trial; it's just that we intend to hold him accountable for committing at least one, and probably countless more, criminal acts. And once we find him guilty (officially), he faces no risk of punishment. The worst that will happen to him is that he'll be denied a seat on the Supreme Court – and lose his reputation, see his family destroyed, face disbarment and certainly an effort to impeach him from the Circuit Court, be fired from his coaching positions, fired from Harvard Law School, and called a rapist by the left half of the country for the rest of his life. As for the standard of proof? We don't need one! It's perfectly fitting if the senators meant to sit in judgment of Kavanaugh declare days in advance of the hearing that they've already chosen to believe the accuser based on what they've read in the paper. Let's call it the preponderance of the empathy standard.
When the ABA evaluates judicial temperament, it "considers the prospective nominee's compassion, decisiveness, open-mindedness, courtesy, patience, freedom from bias, and commitment to equal justice under the law." Is that what we saw in Kavanaugh's Democrat interrogators on Thursday? Open-mindedness, freedom from bias, and commitment to equal justice under the law?
When people fly off the handle, as Kavanaugh is said to have done last Thursday, they don't lay out extended, detailed, logical accounts of their positions organized into five numbered sections, as I watched Kavanaugh do on Thursday. (It's judges who write that way.) No one would criticize a zealous defense attorney for angrily pounding the table while denouncing the flimsy case against his client. Kavanaugh, without benefit of defense counsel, had to make his own closing argument, into the faces of ten Democrat senators who'd all made up their minds 12 weeks ago to vote against him – and who had spent the last three weeks proving they couldn't care less about what's right or wrong as long as it stops his confirmation. Looked at this way, his self-control was extraordinary.
With a sterling judicial record over twelve years, Judge Kavanaugh has already proved that his temperament is just fine.
T.R. Clancy looks at the world from Dearborn, Michigan. You can email him at trclancy@yahoo.com.
1c)
COMMENTARY: Democrats launch a war on men
By Wayne Allyn Root Review-Journal
Here are my observations regarding this Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court witch hunt.
First, this is the worst disgrace in the history of American politics. Joe McCarthy looks like a choir boy next to Democrat senators and the liberal mainstream media.
Second, here are the heroes. Brett Kavanaugh is a great man. He is Jimmy Stewart meets Andy Griffith of “Mayberry RFD.” What this fine gentleman has been put through is criminal.
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has more common sense and courage than any other GOP senator. He will forever more be my hero for standing up for what’s right and courageously pointing out pure evil.
The villains? Sen. Dianne Feinstein is repulsive. She perpetrated a fraud to destroy a
great All-American gentleman in the name of partisan politics.
On the GOP side, Sen. Jeff Flake is an utter fool and coward. All it took to change his
mind was two liberal feminist women screaming in his elevator. His new book should
be titled “Profiles in Cowardice.”
Democrats have showcased the true “gender gap” in American politics. Democrats have a “male problem” the size of Texas. Plain and simple, Democrats hate men. In particular, All-American boys who went to Catholic school, played sports and are now husbands, fathers and men of faith who go to church, have outstanding careers and resumes and vote Republican.
Recognize that list? It’s me. It’s all my friends. It’s every kid I ever grew up with in my middle-class neighborhood in New York. We were All-American boys. Sure, we all liked girls. Is that a crime? Do Democrats want to outlaw men? Do they want to outlaw testosterone?
But I’ll tell you what boys like us didn’t do. We didn’t attempt to rape anyone. We
didn’t drug anyone. There was no such thing in the neighborhoods I grew up in. This
is all a fantasy from the mind of liberal feminists with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Brett Kavanaugh graduated near the top of his class in his high school while starring in sports. I graduated No. 1 in my high school while starring in sports. Then he went on to Yale. I went on to Columbia. We both earned our success as adults. We’ve both lived
the American Dream. We both love our kids more than anything in life. I’m Brett Kavanaugh. I’ll bet many of you are, too.
When I was watching Brett’s opening statement in front of the DWHC (Democrat Witch Hunt Committee), this macho male cried five separate times. So did all my macho male buddies back in New York. Kava- naugh touched all of us.
Those in the Democrat Party want to burn Republican males at the stake. Kavanaugh’s
only mistake was not saying directly to Sen. Feinstein, “You, ma’am, are Joe
McCarthy. You have no decency. What you have done to me and my family in the
name of politics is evil personified.”
Let the FBI investigate. But be sure it goes both ways. Demand the FBI investigate the accuser, too. Study her phone and email records. Was she in contact with top Democrat operatives in the weeks leading up to her story? Study her bank accounts. Any
suspicious large deposits from Democrat donors? Where’s her high school yearbook?
And if she committed perjury, she should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
And after the FBI investigation proves nothing — and it will — let’s see how many Democrats vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh. Then we’ll see clearly who the frauds
are. It was all a charade from day one
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