My therapist has helped me recover some lost memories from the early 1980s when Brett Kavanaugh kidnapped me and sexually harassed me on board a UFO. Does anybody want to interview me?
The news which broke from the New Yorker last night under the byline of Ronan Farrow is all the buzz on social media and cable news this morning. And it’s breaking just as Christine Blasey Ford sets forth in her covered wagon for the long trek to Washington where she may or may not testify, depending on the results of ongoing “negotiations” with her attorneys. Reading into the dismal details, this new story being alleged by Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez, is even weaker than Ford’s tale, yet the New Yorker decided to run with it anyway.
You can click through for the sordid details yourself, but the recounting of a drunken frat party isn’t where the real action is in this tale. The epicenter of this political earthquake should be in the complete lack of any confirmation of the claims and the circumstances of the alleged victim coming forward. First of all, she admits that she was nearly blackout drunk when these events supposedly transpired. Then, much like Ford’s story, a group of people who supposedly witnessed the assault were all contacted and not one of them could confirm that anything like this ever took place. (Is any of this sounding familiar yet?)
And then we have the true cherry on top of the dish. Ramirez admits that even she didn’t know what was true or not until spending a week with her lawyer “assessing her memories.” (Emphasis added)
In her initial conversations with The New Yorker, she was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty. After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away.
So after 35 years she still wasn’t confident of her memories, but six days talking to her lawyer and some conversations with Ronan Farrow were enough to firm up her recollections, eh? And the events she’s describing took place at a moment when she said she was, “on the floor, foggy and slurring her words.” Even CNN’s morning team seemed taken aback by the flimsy nature of this story, with one of their analysts during the six o’clock block declaring, “Ronan Farrow is better than this.”
So what does the Judiciary Committee do with this now? (As well as a new story about an anonymous accuser being represented by Michael Avenatti, which I’ll leave for someone else here to cover because it frankly makes me feel like I need another shower.) That’s the same question Lindsey Graham was asking when somebody tracked him down last night. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
It’s time for the Republicans on the committee to make some hard decisions and the clock is ticking. Ford’s story is looking worse by the day – something I’ll have more on here a little later this morning – and this one comes off like a steaming pile. The Democrats have already declared that this is the hill they are willing to die on. Keeping Kavanaugh from taking a seat on the Supreme Court is their purpose in life right now and the rules are clearly out the window. Not one of these last-minute claims could stand up under even casual inspection in terms of building an actionable case and the claimants’ motives are suspect, to say the least.
It’s probably time to pull the trigger and let the chips fall where they may. We’re talking about rumors and accusations from 35 years ago which Kavanaugh’s enemies know can’t be definitively disproven because it’s nearly impossible to prove a negative. If the stories from Ford, Ramirez and Avenatti’s new, anonymous accuser fall through, they can dredge up more volunteers to keep taking a run at it until next year. There is, no doubt, a nearly endless supply of liberals in their early fifties who could be convinced that stopping Kavanaugh would be worth the slings and arrows of pitching stories like these.
If the GOP fails to seat Kavanaugh they may as well kiss the midterms goodbye because Trump’s SCOTUS picks are one of the major factors keeping the base together. Why go vote in November if having the majority means nothing in terms of the court? The committee should tell Ms. Ford to turn her covered wagon around, go home, and move to a vote. Preferably today. If someone thinks they have an actionable case against Brett Kavanaugh, have law enforcement investigate these laughably unsupported claims. You can always move to impeach him later if one of them somehow winds up being true.
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