His exemplary reputation should outweigh a charge that is unproven and, as far we know, unprovable.
If Franz Kafka had written about confirmation hearings, he couldn’t have come up with a better scenario than the one now unfolding in the U.S. Senate.
Brett Kavanaugh, who the day before yesterday was an unimpeachable pillar of the legal establishment, stands accused of a heinous offense that is almost impossible to definitively rebut.
Even if he is completely innocent of the charge that he sexually assaulted a teenage girl at a high school party 35 years ago, he will be forever considered guilty of it by some portion of the public. This is not due process, or any kind of decent process at all, but how the Senate conducts its business, especially if you are a conservative jurist on the cusp of confirmation to the Supreme Court.
A 51-year-old research psychologist named Christine Blasey Ford went public with the accusation in a Washington Post interview over the weekend, saying she feared for her life when the teenage Kavanaugh attacked her.
The charge was inevitably viewed through the prism of #MeToo. But it lacks the credibility of allegations that have felled powerful men over the past two years. There is no contemporaneous corroboration. There is no pattern of conduct on the part of Kavanaugh. There is no weaselly, “Well, I don’t remember it that way, but I’m sorry if she was offended” denial; Kavanaugh rejects the charge categorically.
Contrast the allegations against, to take a Republican from another moral universe, the Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. A key accuser from decades ago told friends about her relationship with Moore at the time. There was more than one allegation — indeed, Moore had a reputation for unsavory interest in teenage girls. When he first reacted to the stories, Moore gave a mealy-mouthed denial.
Ford’s memory is so fuzzy that there is very little in her story that can be corroborated or debunked. She doesn’t know what year it happened, although she thinks 1982. She doesn’t know who owned the house where the party took place, or how she got there or how she got home.
It is impossible to disentangle with certainty what may or may not have happened in the early 1980s. Maybe Ford fabricated the entire story, although she told a therapist in 2012 about such an incident. Maybe her memory is faulty, as happens more than we realize. Maybe there was a drunken encounter that she only later came to consider a trauma. Or maybe what she alleges really took place.
This is a new weapon developed by Democrats. Certainly compared to this, the accusations against Moore contained some credibility, but they also contained a lot of details that indicated Moore’s innocence. The issue was the timing; the accusations were made late enough to affect the voting and too late to allow for proving the matter one way or another.
Same thing here and there seems to be no effort made to make it even appear valid. Everything about it screams suspicion and, of course, per the Democrat play book, though the Democrats had this information since June (possibly since 2012), they drop it at the last minute so verification is impossible. We are still waiting to see if Ford will actually appear and face questions.
It’s all lies and smear. I’m not sure if the tactic is more disgusting than the fact that a major political party in America stoops to such trashy ploys.