Posted on 09/28/2018 5:59:32 PM PDT by Kaslin
Thursday's hearing with Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, was an almost perfect Rorschach test: Democrats and much of the mainstream media saw Ford's testimony as credible, authentic and emblematic of the mistreatment of women by privileged men. Republicans saw a decent man with an unblemished record being accused of the most heinous criminal acts in a last-minute attempt to derail his confirmation.
I watched the hearings transfixed. I am a conservative who generally supports Kavanaugh's judicial philosophy, but I also believe the GOP bungled this process. I would like to have heard, in person, from Mike Judge, who Ford claims was in the room when the alleged attack took place. I believe it was in everyone's interest -- including Kavanaugh's -- to ask the FBI to reinterview witnesses after the allegations were made.
But we're left to make a judgment without a perfect process. And after listening to both witnesses, I found Kavanaugh's testimony more compelling. That is not what I expected to feel.
Memory is often imperfect, and decades-old memories, even of traumatic events, change over time. My younger sister died when I was 12 years old. I have a vivid memory of the doctor calling to say that my parents should come to the hospital because she was in heart failure. I remember that I was sitting on a swing on the front porch of my apartment building, that I ran down the stairs to our basement apartment to answer the phone. I remember my parents returning later that evening with my sister's clothing in a small paper bag. I can see myself standing on the landing at the top of the stairs as my mother walked in, clutching the bag.
The picture in my mind now is as clear as the day it happened. Except that some of the details are wrong. My memories have conflated some facts. As perfect as the images in my mind may seem, they are inaccurate. The crystal-clear image of my mother clutching the bag as she comes up the stairs is in an apartment we no longer lived in when my sister died. The dress I remember my mother wearing could not have been what she wore. It's a dress I've seen dozens of times in a picture taken years later. I am remembering images I've looked back on hundreds of times, and I've altered some of those memories in the act of recalling them so often. That is the way memory works, and it is why memory is often unreliable.
Ford's testimony was based entirely on memory. No corroborating witnesses. No evidence to support a timeline or important information, such as how she got to the party in question or how she got home -- over 5 miles away -- at a time when she had no driver's license. All we have to go on is the searing details she provided from memory.
Kavanaugh, on the other hand, can point to sworn statements from those Christine Ford said attended the event. Their statements say they do not recall any such gathering taking place, and in one case, that the supposed witness has never even met Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh also produced contemporaneous calendars that detailed his activities from the time in question, which show him otherwise occupied on the dates the event might have occurred. And we have his unblemished record of more than a quarter century in high-profile jobs, which required six full-field investigations by the FBI and a previous Senate confirmation.
Perhaps I am reacting as a partisan -- though I have been critical of the Trump administration and Trump himself. But I believe Brett Kavanaugh. And if uncorroborated accusations are the new standard to determine who is fit to serve, then our toxic politics have sunk to a new and dangerous low.
Doesn’t matter if you believe him or not the GOP has gone spineless...
I hate all democrats.
and rinos.
Its bizarre - the Left has given up even trying to argue facts. They have admitted as much - facts don’t matter, only your political outlook and your sex.
This is something new
Where we seem to be, is that the liberals have a veto power over the nomination process.
And we’re not just talking about the liberals in the senate. We are also talking about liberal useful idiots such as Christine Ford, who can make any allegation, and the mere utterance of anything , will be a veto over Senate procedures until some investigation of allegations takes place.
No its moved to blood for blood..
I beileve most of the commie scum (D) know damn good and well that Ford is nuts.
But the proglib commie scum (D) are enthusiastically lying, joyfully using a nutjob for their own gain, and gleefully destroying an honest Christian man and his entire family.
Something tells me that in the fullness of time their collective butts will get "karma-kicked" up around their ears.
.
There was no effort to cross examine her - ask if she was using medications, had suffered false memories, was she ever victimized by any family members, etc.
I Am Kavacus!!
Could the committee republicans been in on Flakes’ FBI request? Do they have something on her that is damming that by playing along with the FBI game, they satisfy this issue of raming the vote and also win big with the FBI results and thoroughly embarrass the Dems?
> No evidence to support a timeline or important information, such as how she got to the party in question or how she got home — over 5 miles away — at a time when she had no driver’s license.
I don’t think enough people have talked about the significance of this. Ford said she left the party distraught immediately after the event. But her home was too far away to walk. Before cell phones, who drove her home, and how did they know to pick her up? Since she said she left the party alone, the driver wasn’t at the party, so were they sitting idle waiting for her to be done, or was there a time — that then had to be changed — she was to be met and picked up? And did no one at the party notice her standing outside by the street waiting for someone to come get her?
This part of it stinks more than the rest of her story
And if she was supposedly sexually assaulted why would she leave her friend alone at the party with the boys?I mean, who does that?
Doesn’t evidence matter any longer?
Because she had lawyers ready to jump and cut off those questions. Any that they would let her answer were rehearsed. It was all for show on both side. Republicans to look gentle and reasonable. Dems to paint their witness as 100% certain and victim-like. Nothing more and nothing less than that. That show worked, as expected, on party lines. The next show is an investigation that could also delve into her medications, mental state, etc but it won't.
I lived with my wife & kids in England for 4-5 months in 1992. I have many clear memories of incidents that happened or scenery we passed by on the motorways or on the streets near where we lived & shopped & worked, and of the routes I took every day, hundreds of times total.
And in every one of those memories, I am driving on the right side of the road, or in the slow/right lane on divided highways pulling out into the left lane to pass someone, or sitting in the left-hand driver's seat of our carpool car looking at my wife to my right, or looking to the right at my father-in-law in the front passenger seat of the rented caravan (ie motorhome) we drove for 3 weeks just before moving home.
Yet all those left-right memories contain completely false images in my mind's-eye, because in the UK, you drive on the left, not the right. And the driver's seats were on the right, not the left.
What's also interesting is that when I run these incidents or routes through my head, and I suddenly realize I'm in a false mirror image of what I actually saw, I am able to consciously correct the mind's-eye images to see it as it really had to have happened.
And that ability to consciously correct the images that are part of a long-term deeply buried memory, makes me realize it should be easy for Ford to decide she "needs" to correct a 35+ year old memory to match what she thinks she SHOULD be remembering.
Because they ran out of time. She only got 5min then a dem got 5min, then back and forth. This was so stupid. The prosecutor should have had most of the time to interview her- then the last half hour to the dems. It gave Ford a break-dems did nothing but tell her how brave she was, her courage, blah blah, then back to prosecutor.
I was just blown away that Kav did not have his lawyer with him. That was not wise. The lawyer could have stopped the badgering. Told him to say asked and answered.
And why did the Judge pick a former Hillary lawyer who defended Cheryl mills and 3 other state dept people in the email server situation?
When I said “I know exactly what she’s talking about,” I’m referring to Linda Chavez’s “crystal clear” memories of the day her sister died, which she realized later contained significant anachronisms, ie false pieces of the memory, though not the entire memory.
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