RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/brett-kavanaugh-christine-blasey-ford-16176.html

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of sexually assaulting a woman. According to the accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, during a party Kavanaugh and a friend, both heavily intoxicated, pulled her into a bedroom, closed the door, and pushed her onto a bed. Kavanaugh got on top of her, and, placing a hand over her mouth to muffle her screams, groped her and tried to remove her clothing. Terrified, she was able to escape and hide in a bathroom before fleeing the house.

This happened 36 years ago, Ford says. Kavanaugh was 17 years old at the time and Ford, 15. Kavanaugh firmly denies the story.

These last facts should make all those determined to use the charge as the poison pill to kill the judge’s nomination nervous. They’re on the verge of setting a dangerous precedent that will inevitably come back to bite them.

For one thing, they are setting the stage for condemning to reputation-death not just a Roe v. Wade-threatening Supreme Court nominee but any person, man or woman, Bible-thumper or Democratic socialist, by accusation alone. Ford’s story is almost impossible to investigate, much less to corroborate. It happened either in 1982 or 1983; it was either in June or August; it was a house, but she doesn’t know whose; she can’t recall how she got home.

Despite the hazy details, many find Ford’s story is credible, and for good reason: there’s nothing extraordinary about the events she describes, unfortunately, and over the years she told two therapists about them, though it’s not clear that she ever named Kavanaugh. Still, those who caution that human memory is unreliable, especially after more than three decades, are indisputably right. Is she certain that it was Brett Kavanaugh who was on top of her during those dreadful minutes? She had reason to fear that he was going to rape her, but do we know that that’s what he was intending, and does that make a difference? Kavanaugh himself might not know the answer. Multiply 35 years by large quantities of alcohol—Ford described Kavanaugh and his buddy as “stumbling drunk”—and you’ve got a terrible formula for truth-seeking.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/09/20/after-kavanaugh

Is there a silver lining in the malignant circus now playing at the Capitol and beamed to computer and television screens across the fruited plain? Depending on when you happen to read this, you might ask: “Which circus? Who’s playing this week?”

Politics is by nature a performance art. The rhetor declaiming in the Agora or the orator fulminating in the Forum may not have been Cory Booker or Kamala Harris—and certainly wasn’t Dianne Feinstein—but we can see the same habits of exaggeration, grandstanding, calumny, and economy with the truth at work, to say nothing of Machiavellian calculation and preening self-regard.

Politics, in short, may be a high calling—the proper ordering of the state, after all, is a big deal—but it is assuredly a grubby business full of loathsome characters, backstabbing, and power-hungry melodrama. So what else is new?

Everyone’s personal metanoia proceeds at its own pace and is sparked by different contingencies. For me, this week’s performance, starring Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, was a minor Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment. I have long known, and often written, that the process by which we confirm candidates for the Supreme Court has become deeply corrupt. (I was going to say “politicized,” but that is not quite right: it’s by nature a political process, but one that has been perverted.)

As many commentators have noted, the definitive twist came with Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork in 1987. That televised circus, unprecedented in its tawdriness, captivated the nation’s prurient attention and marked a brutal new low, unsurpassed even by the battalions of lies that surrounded Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings. This wasn’t “advice and consent” but naked power politics, shocking partly for its breathtaking mendacity and bad faith but mostly alarming because of what it betokened about the place of “the least dangerous branch” in the metabolism of out political life.

Yes, judges were men, and men were interested parties, but here—one had thought—was a part of our political process that was set slightly to one side of the usual rough and tumble “I-want-this-so-you-cannot-have-that” partisan squabbling. The still-novel idea, back then, was that we were a country of laws, not men, and we therefore required people of intelligence and good will who were sufficiently impartial to don the black robe signifying not that they had no personal interests but that they could be sufficiently dispassionate to bracket those interests in order to adjudicate a dispute on the basis of the settled law of the land in light of precedent and the Constitution. Once upon a time, that was the idea.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-new-normal-1537484921

The economy is doing so well these days that even Barack Obama recently emerged 20 months after he left office to claim credit. Perhaps he’ll give another speech after Thursday brought more news that the days of economic malaise are over.

On Thursday morning the Labor Department announced that the number of Americans who filed new unemployment claims last week hit a new low for the current expansion. The seasonally adjusted figure, 201,000, was down 3,000—the lowest since November 1969. Part of the dip could be due to fewer claims in areas affected by Hurricane Florence. But the drop was even steeper in a few states like Illinois, and anyway the four-week average is at a record low too.

Then on Thursday afternoon the stock market, shrugging off President Trump’s latest tariffs, surged to a new high. At market close the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 1%, enough to beat its January record. Other indexes followed suit. Mr. Trump, responding to the news on Twitter, seemed to break his caps-lock key: “S&P 500 HITS ALL-TIME HIGH Congratulations USA!” If workers are checking their retirement accounts for the first time in a couple months, they’re probably happy too.

All the usual caveats apply: The data on weekly jobless claims can be noisy, the economy is bigger than the stock market, and nobody on Planet Earth knows what the Dow will do tomorrow. Mr. Trump’s trade fight with China continues to escalate, with no clear resolution in sight.

No doubt most of our readers recall when the sluggish economy of the Obama years was said to be a “new normal.” Economic sentiment began to shift on Election Day in 2016, and economic policy shifted dramatically toward growth over the last 20 months. Coincidence?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dianne-feinstein-on-the-hot-seat-1537463501

“DiFi on the Hot Seat” announces a Los Angeles Times newsletter emailed to readers this morning. It is beginning to dawn on even liberal politicians that the Kavanaugh controversy could potentially hurt Democrats more than Republicans.

The L.A. Times reports on the challenges that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D., Calif.) has created for herself and her party with her handling of an initially anonymous claim that a teenage Brett Kavanaugh assaulted another teen in the 1980s:

Republicans accuse her of withholding the allegation until the most politically advantageous moment. Even some Democrats initially complained that she didn’t share the explosive information with them earlier.

Next week, Feinstein may have to lead Democrats into a hearing — if it takes place — with Kavanaugh and possibly his accuser, Northern California psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford, that will likely determine whether Kavanaugh goes to the high court or watches his confirmation fall apart amid the #MeToo movement over sexual misconduct.

The Times reports that Democrats have generally rallied to Sen. Feinstein’s defense but notes that “at least one Democrat is ready to publicly criticize.” It’s her November election opponent, California State Senate President pro Tempore Kevin de León. Because the Golden State maintains a “jungle primary” system in which the top two vote-getters in the primary election advance, regardless of party affiliation, Sen. Feinstein faces her fellow Democrat in the general election. The Times notes the political fire she’s now taking from both the left and the right:

“The American people deserve to know why the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee waited nearly three months to hand this disqualifying document over to the federal authorities, and why Sen. Feinstein politely pantomimed her way through [the confirmation] hearing without a single question about the content of Kavanaugh’s character,” De León said.

Feinstein landed in hot water Tuesday when she told a reporter that she “can’t say everything’s truthful” in Ford’s account, a comment that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said makes “clear” why she didn’t bring the allegation forward sooner.

Feinstein later tweeted that she’s found “every single piece of information from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford eminently credible, sincere and believable.”

The Times report follows an editorial this week in Ms. Feinstein’s hometown San Francisco Chronicle:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s treatment of a more than 3-decade-old sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was unfair all around. It was unfair to Kavanaugh, unfair to his accuser and unfair to Feinstein’s colleagues — Democrats and Republicans alike — on the Senate Judiciary Committee. CONTINUE AT SITE