The rogues gallery of the shameless and repulsive:
Many more senators with a “D” after their name – that means you, Sen. Dick Durbin – could be inducted into this hall of shame. Space requires some restraint by limiting the inductees to those constantly running to the microphones and cameras to defile reputations. These suspects come readily to mind.
And, of course, we have the bewildered:
Judiciary Committee chairman, Sen. Charles Grassley, in probable consultation with his colleagues, agreed to a week delay of the committee vote on the nomination upon the request of a Dem committee member. Quite rightly, a person could be excused for suspecting something was up. It was. An orchestrated hell broke loose – a shameful and disgusting orchestrated hell.
The Senate Republicans always appear flat-footed when it comes to women making charges against other Republicans and conservatives. The Dems are much more agile. Look at their dexterity in defending Bill Clinton. They smeared Ken Star, created new partisan media flagships in the form of MoveOn.org, rhetorically manipulated Clinton’s perjury and perversities into Republican prurience, and vilified the women accusers of Clinton’s adult sallies into rape and less abusive forms of abuse. And got away with it! Heck, his chief enabler, his wife, Hillary, was only 43 electoral votes shy of appointing liberals to the bench and wreaking other havoc on our republic.
Of course, lefty types dominate the newsrooms which makes a headwind for Republicans but fills the sails of the Dems’ political racing yachts. The Dems have a perpetual downwind advantage. So, credible charges of rape quickly go down the memory hole as hazy teenage charges of teenage antics of ancient vintage get the full rectal examination. Go figure.
Lets’ face it. The Kavanaugh imbroglio is about one thing: keeping a conservative from joining the 8 other potentates in black robes … at all costs! It stands to reason. Progressives wouldn’t be progressives if they weren’t on a mission to remake mankind in their own image. The state, not churches, is the engine for the recreation since their image doesn’t comport with the biblical one. So they fight tooth and nail to control the levers of power. It’s who they are. It means so very much to their political identity.
On the far end of the lefty side of the political spectrum, we have Lenin, a political operator whose credo entails the ends always justifying the means. The notion has seeped into the owner’s manual of politics for Dems in their drive for perpetual reform. The connection is not surprising since lately they have been ideologically sliding ever closer to the old and still-deceased goat in his Kremlin mausoleum. He endorsed state-sponsored terror. The Dems are only slightly more humane, stopping short of the blood on the wall and floor, even though we’re getting close to that. Simple decorum and decency be damned.
Their enthusiasm to get us back on the track to the pc-plagued nirvana means ginning up the hive, using anything at hand. And they have a political mre-equivalent in the estrogen-rich swarm of women’s marches and Mee Too.
Everything gets tossed into that maelstrom including Supreme Court nominations, and especially Supreme Court nominations. If the Dems can’t find anything compromising in the nominee’s adult and professional background, just extend the time frame to childhood or at least those in-between years of 15-18. In fact, the teenager phase with its hormonal hyperactivity is probably dense with potentialities for later chicanery. The Dems have hit upon a rich source of tar for their brushes.
One thing about our modern overheated politics is the huge number of willing recruits into the legions of political cannon fodder. What budding NeverTrumper and SJW, with some long-ago life intersection with Kavanaugh, or not, wouldn’t relish the opportunity to step forward to take one for the team? Brush off Andy Warhol’s 15-minutes-of-fame moniker, but replace “fame” with “shame”.
The Folly of “No Woman Lies”
People with vaginas for headgear are chomping at the bit to enter Warhol’s hall of mediocrities. They have in mind a war with the white male patriarchy in the form of Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, the guys running CBS and NBC, and any of the other suits in charge of things. But bear in mind that along with the certified brutes we have Columbia University’s mattress girl, Emma Sulkowicz. Fully reminiscent of the sexual revolution’s hookup culture in the college dorm rooms of today, she had consensual sex with fellow student Paul Nungesser. Somehow she turned it into a cause replete with agitprop. (1)
The University of Montana tells its incoming freshman “Almost no one lies [meaning female accusers]” in its flabby attempt to assuage the female-genitalia-headgear squads. (2) Really, no woman lies? Emma did.
She filed complaints against Nungesser with the school and New York police and both concluded that action was unwarranted. Corroboration – you know, that thing that presupposes that we are not a god with the power to make pronouncements from a heavenly throne and therefore we must backup what we say – was lacking. There was much to contradict her. And she pursued him as a sexual interest for months after the purported “assault”. She concocted a sham and turned it into a cause.
For 3 years Sulkowicsz was the poster child of the campus “rape culture” movement. The hifalutin Feminist Majority Foundation and others heaped honors upon her for her “courage”. Harassment on campus – the real kind – haunted Nungesser till graduation. Then, in 2017, Nungesser sued Columbia. In the settlement, Columbia apologized and promised “that every student — accuser and accused, including those like Paul who are found not responsible — is treated respectfully and as a full member of the Columbia community.” (1) Mea culpa, but now the cause takes on a life of its own. The genie is out of the bottle.
The Silkowicsz-Nungesser case illustrates the enthusiasm of left-wing activists to turn the Fifth Amendment into the irrelevance of the Third. Lenin would be proud. It’s a rewrite of western civilization’s legacy of enlightened jurisprudence. The rights of the accused are supplanted by the ambiguous “preponderance” of believability and the need to protect at all costs the feelings of the accuser and her allegation from being questioned. The woman-as-accuser is our new god.
The event is only a small chapter in a long tale of moral monstrosities. They include the 2006 public lynching of the Duke lacrosse team, complete with the connivance of the local DA, and the subsequent vindication of the accused and Duke’s agreement to pay the 3 male students $20 million each. Rolling Stone in 2017 had to cough up $1.65 million to the Virginia Alpha Chapter of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity for its hit piece on the group for a false claim of gang rape. Additionally, the Rolling Stone writer of the article, Sabrina Erbin Erdely, was assessed $3 million for defaming Nicole Eramo, a Virginia University administrator, as the “chief villain”. (3)
The history of our current “rape culture” hysteria is a mixed one. There are real instances of real assaults along with mutual abuse and bald-faced lies. It’s really a story of the sexual revolution’s Sherman’s March through the culture and college life. Hookup, be sexually liberated, experience this integral part of the college experience, and consequences be damned. That’s the message and the kids live it. Don’t be surprised that we lose much of our cultural integrity along the way with a few out-of-court settlements and ruined futures to boot.
Private citizens accused of high-octane falsehoods, and few things are more high-octane than a charge of rape, have recourse to a court of law. Brett Kavannaugh, as a public figure, presents the perfect target. He can be smeared without consequence by any accuser and their huckstering Dem supporters. Support her, damn him, and expunge any semblance of fairness from our deliberations is their sickening message.
We can only hope that they won’t get away with it at the ballot box come November.
The Miasma of Polygraph Tests and Repressed Memories
Unbeknownst to Brett Kavanaugh as he jumps in the water of the nomination approval process is that he just became chum for a partisan shark frenzy. Thrown in as accusatory chum for Dem sharks is Christine Blasey-Ford. She purports an attempted rape by Kavanaugh of 36(?) years ago but witnesses dispute her story. She’s fuzzy on the details. But she is to be believed despite her own 4 witnesses contradicting her and no other evidence.
Oh, she has passed a polygraph test. What about that test? For her examination, Blasey-Ford was asked only 2 questions with the important one being, Is your written statement truthful? This was no deep dive into her accusations. The examiner said that this was to avoid traumatizing the accuser. The test only tells us that she has a foggy recollection, since her written accusation is so foggy, but she believes it. But is it the “truth”?
A polygraph test measures certain bodily reactions such as heart rate and blood pressure to an interviewer’s questions. If the subject remains calm, ipso facto, she must be telling the truth, or so it is assumed. No, it’s only proof that she remained calm, period. Remaining calm can be an intuitive or coached skill. The test also might indicate that the subject believes in something that isn’t true. And aren’t we really concerned about getting to the truth and not ending proceedings with a measurement of a person’s serenity?
Criminal defense attorneys, and most jurisdictions in the country, find polygraph tests highly suspect. Here’s from one law firm’s website: “… a polygraph machine does not have any reliable capacity for detecting the truth or falsity of a statement…. While these [blood pressure and heart rate] may be indicators that a person is lying, they may also simply indicate that a suspect is feeling pressurized by the interrogation even if they are telling the truth.” (4)
What are we to conclude? Blasey-Ford has a long-in-the-tooth murky allegation and she remained calm as an examiner asked her about her “written statement” and not the details of it. Is this the stuff of truth or even justice? Hardly.
But she has “repressed memories”, which can be scientifically suspect and an excellent source of fairy tales. Many adults have languished, and are languishing, in prison due to testimony of “repressed memories”. The use of “repressed memories” catapulted Florida state attorney Janet Reno to fame and a seat in Bill Clinton’s cabinet as Attorney General. Sadly for Reno and the claque of psycho-therapist fans of “repressed memories”, the convictions are being reversed. It’s a poor rack for Dem”solons” to hang their hat.
It’s not that people can’t have “repressed memories”. The problem lies in the tactics in the conjuring of them into the rudiments of testimony. Even as strong a defender of the phenomena as Jim Hopper (Teaching Associate in Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry of Harvard Medical School) acknowledges that, “There is strong evidence that people can sincerely believe they have recovered a memory or memories of abuse by a particular person, but actually be mistaken [my emphasis]”. Further he writes, “There is strong evidence that such memories have led to accusations about particular events that never happened and accusations of people who never committed such acts.” For Hopper, the potential for misuse of the theory lies with the therapist. (7) True, very true.
“Repressed memories” as false accusations turned into false convictions? Enter Harold Grant Snowden, Bobby Finje, Janet Reno, and the “Miami Method” into the unhinged child sex-abuse saga of the 1980’s and 1990’s. (6)
The “Method” involved a brew of “expert” testimony, multiple child witnesses, and questionable physical evidence. The physical evidence is doubtful because it might, or might not, be supportive of the charges. The tests for sexually transmitted diseases produce positive results for conditions not necessarily sexually transmitted. The tests as corroboration don’t corroborate. And, by the way, conveniently for Janet Reno, the test samples were mysteriously destroyed. Witting or unwitting destruction of evidence by the state?
What of the multiple young accusers who allegedly confirm each other’s stories? The problem with their testimony is the same as with the testimony of the child-therapist “experts”. The children were saying things on the stand that came out of the interview sessions of therapists Joseph and Laurie Braga.
Later courts found their techniques suggestive and coercive to the point of planting false “memories” in the kids’ heads. Young adolescents playfully interact with an interviewer when the questioner starts presenting elements of a scenario no matter how outlandish. An Easter-bunny-believing kid can come to accept the reality of the Bragas’ new artificial reality. The kids on the stand were confirming a Braga story of the suspect’s abuse of children in oral/anal sex, spaceships, dismembering babies, and Satanic rituals. The Bragas added new meaning to the word “travesty”.
Both Snowden and Finje were exonerated. Bobby Finje, 14 at the time of the accusation, was acquitted by a jury. It took Snowden 11 years to be cleared on appeal. Many of the other convictions were overturned or sentences commuted by parole boards due to “substantial doubt” about guilt. (8)
Janet Reno still became Attorney General. She refutes the Peter Principle because she kept rising despite showing incompetence at lower levels.
Caution is wise when tinkering with the “repressed memory” stuff.
Today, caution is out the window as the old child sex-abuse hysteria feeds into another hysteria, the delirium to neuter Trump and conservatives. Blasey-Ford’s hypothetical “repressed memories” of attempted rape first appeared in marital counseling in 2012. That’s a 30+-year repressed memory. Important details are missing, the named 4 witnesses/participants deny it, and her verbal and written statements contradict her therapist’s notes.
The only non-corroboration corroboration is that of people who confirm that she mentioned the matter to them not in 1980-1-2-? but in … 2012. Kavanaugh’s name wasn’t attached to the story till 2016 or 2017.
So what do we have? We have a repressed memory of an event allegedly with many people present but none can validate. What can we conclude? We can conclude that she was serene while wired to a polygraph. Anything more than that belongs in the fever swamp of The Resistance.
Auditioning for the Role of Additional Accuser
The week-long interregnum in the Kavanaugh hearing was a busy time for the left-wing/Dem hive. Its minions went fishing for candidates to fill roles in the expanded cast of their not-based-on-facts docudrama, “The Sick and Evil Brett Kavanaugh”. It didn’t take long for auditioners to show up.
The New Yorker made a splash with a second accuser, Deborah Ramirez. She claimed Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a Yale party in the early 1980s. She was drunk; there are gaps in her memory; she pieced together the story over 6 days of flogging her memory and consultations with her attorney; and the red flag in these allegations: no reliable corroboration.
The New York Times couldn’t find anyone. The paper reported,
“The Times had interviewed several dozen people over the past week in an attempt to corroborate her story, and could find no one with firsthand knowledge. Ms. Ramirez herself contacted former Yale classmates asking if they recalled the incident and told some of them that she could not be certain Mr. Kavanaugh was the one who exposed himself.” (9)
Only one person could admit to hearing something like this from someone. That attempt at validation lies somewhere between not-for-certain hearsay and hallucination.
Next, we have the tall tales of Julie Swetnick.
Her story upped the ante from mere attempted rape and exposure to serial gang rapist. Now we’re getting close to the Satanic-rituals-in-spaceships style of accusation that was evident in the 1980’s child sex-abuse fever. She spins a tale of Kavanaugh at 10 drug-induced gang-rape parties from 1981 to 1983. Further, she was raped at one of them in ’82. What she was doing at high school parties when she was a sophomore in college is anyone’s guess. (10)
And, as in all the others, no one can corroborate. How is it that serial gang rape in a small community of high school students – with one college sophomore in attendance – can go unnoticed for 35+ years? How is it that corroboration is so difficult about something so heinous and so well attended for such an extended period? Her claims evaporates any possible meaning of credible.
There have been other stories coming down through the ether equally as bizarre. The fact is, there appears to be no shortage of auditioners. My Demdar (radar capable of detecting Dem bogies) is activated. Lawyers and other handlers within the loose network of Dem operatives have fingerprints all over much of this.
This May Not Be A Criminal Court But It Certainly Looks Like A Lynching.
One of the Dem talking points in response to their clear intent to discard the presumption of innocence is to assert that the Kavanaugh hearing isn’t a criminal trial. Yes, and neither was the above.
The Dems intentionally miss the point. The presumption of innocence and the rest of the rights of the accused go to the heart of elementary fairness, one of the great projects of western civilization. That legacy was an attempt to establish and codify the simple rules of fairness. The rules are more than a matter of guidelines for court proceedings. They touch upon how we relate to one another in the broader course of our lives. The Dems have conveniently forgotten them in their zeal to smash their opponents.
Here’s a sample of the forgotten civilized principles that the Dems would do well to remember. (1) Before the accused can defend themselves, he or she must know the accusation in order to refute it. (2) The burden of proof must rest with the accuser since it’ll be forever hard to prove a negative – the demand that a person must prove that he or she didn’t do it. (3) The charge must be stated in a falsifiable manner. That is, it must be stated in way for it to be capable of being proven or disproven. It’s simple logic (see the writings of the philosopher Karl Popper). (4) And a charge against a person can’t be allowed to stand on the say-so of one person alone. More is required.
That’s how it should be, but that’s not how it is for the Dems when the swing seat on the Supreme Court is in the balance. It’s amazing how quickly they jettisoned our inheritance for a leg-up on those who disagree with them. Disgraceful. Disgraceful.
RogerG
Footnotes and Bibliography:
- A full accounting of the Emma Sulkowicsz episode is found here: “It’s High Time Columbia’s Mattress Girl Was Discredited”, Mona Charen, National Review Online, 8/4/2017, https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/08/columbia-university-mattress-girl-emmas-sulkowicz-paul-nungesser-lawsuit-rape-accusation-exonerated/
- Once more, Mona Charen: “What the Left and Right Don’t Get About Campus Rape”, Mona Charen, The Federalist, 8/31/2015, http://thefederalist.com/2015/08/31/what-the-left-and-right-dont-get-about-campus-rape/
- “Rolling Stone to Pay $1.65 Million to Fraternity Over Discredited Rape Story”, Sydney Ember, 6/13/2017, NYT, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/13/business/media/rape-uva-rolling-stone-frat.html
- “Why Polygraph Tests Are Not Admissible in Court”, Broden & Mickelson: Criminal Defense Attorneys website, 10/13/2015, https://www.brodenmickelsen.com/blog/why-polygraph-tests-are-not-admissible-in-court/
- An excellent introduction into the mania about child sexual abuse at daycare centers can be found here: “The Child Terror”, PBS Frontine, originally aired on 10/27/1998. A synopsis and transcripts can be seen at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/terror/.
- “Harold Grant Snowden”, The National Registry of Exonerations: A Project of the University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Scoeity, University of Michigan Law School & Michigan State University School of Law, https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3871
- “Child Abuse: Recovered Memories of Sexual Abuse”, Jim Hopper, https://www.jimhopper.com/child-abuse/recovered-memories/
- A recounting of the 14 significant child sexual-abuse cases can be found here: “Day-care sex-abuse hysteria”, wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria
- “Christine Blasey Ford Reaches Deal to Testify at Kavanaugh Hearing”, Sheryl Stolberg and Nicholas Fandos, New York Times, 9/23/2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/23/us/politics/brett-kavanaugh-christine-blasey-ford-testify.html
- “Things Fall Apart: NYT Delivers Another Kill Shot To Kavanaugh Sexual Misconduct Fiasco”, Matt Vespa, Townhall.com, 9/27/2018, https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2018/09/27/things-fall-apart-nyt-delivers-another-kill-shot-to-kavanaugh-sexual-misconduct-n2522947
