RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/brett-kavanaugh-should-be-angry/

Kavanaugh’s powerful testimony may well end up changing the course of the Supreme Court, and of our politics.

Brett Kavanaugh may have saved his Supreme Court confirmation with one of the most memorable statements in modern congressional history.

After his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, delivered a compelling, sympathetic performance earlier in the day, Kavanaugh entered the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with his chances hanging by a thread. Commentators speculated about how he’d inevitably be dumped by the GOP. Instead, he transformed his situation with a sustained exercise in righteous indignation as forceful and compelling, in its way, as Clarence Thomas’s attack on a “high-tech lynching” that saved his nomination in 1991.

Kavanaugh had been stilted and overly programmed prior to Thursday, including in his initial round of Senate hearings and in an interview with Fox News earlier in the week. But, after days of enduring a process of unprecedented nastiness, Kavanaugh didn’t hold anything back.

In his opening statement, he was personal about the devastating effects of the charges levied against him, both on his reputation and on his family. He was excoriating about how Ford’s allegation was handled by Senate Democrats, who sat on it until the last moment. He scorned the ridiculous charges that have been layered on since, including that he was party to gang rapes. He invoked all he had invested in public service and in his friendships over the years. He expressed regret, as he should, over juvenile references in his high-school yearbook. He acknowledged enjoying beer, as a teenager and still as an adult. And he was angry, very angry, at the Democrats who have attacked his integrity and welcomed any bottom-feeding allegation, including a grotesque smear dredged up publicity-hungry lawyer Michael Avenatti.

His face was distorted in fury, he had trouble composing himself, and at times he wept. This was an incredibly raw performance by the standards of Washington and especially by the standards of Senate confirmation hearings.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lindsey-graham-says-stop-1538089494

The U.S. Senate is sometimes called “the Club.” No Member in our time more personifies the Club than South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham. On Thursday at the Kavanaugh hearing, he dropped out.

When his turn arrived to question Brett Kavanaugh, Senator Graham instead stared across the long table at the Judiciary Committee’s Democrats and, well, unloaded. He called their tactics against Judge Kavanaugh “the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics.” A moment’s pause and then this: “Boy, do you want power, and I hope you never get it.”

What caused Lindsey Graham to pop?

A phrase rolling through the Kavanaugh confirmation story the past few weeks is character assassination. It is an ugly thing, and most of the time American politics stops short of defeating an opponent solely by tearing him apart personally and then using the damage to his reputation as a pretext to defeat him.

By the midday recess of Thursday’s hearing, that manifestly was the Democrats’ strategy. The hearing made clear that Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation was not going to be corroborated. But the Democrats’ real interest wasn’t Ms. Ford. It was Judge Kavanaugh. The informal standards of the Senate Club were shattered Thursday by Senators Dianne Feinstein, Richard Blumenthal, Mazie Hirono, Cory Booker and Kamala Harris.

One Democratic Senator after another took the allotted time to say Ms. Ford had been the victim of a sexual predator, specifically Judge Kavanaugh. None bothered to say the acts were “alleged.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/confirm-brett-kavanaugh-1538089143

Thursday’s Senate hearing on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination was an embarrassment that should have never happened. Judge Kavanaugh was right to call the confirmation process a “disgrace” in his passionate self-defense, and whatever one thinks of Christine Blasey Ford’s assault accusation, she offered no corroboration or new supporting evidence.

Ms. Ford certainly was a sympathetic witness—by her own admission “terrified” at the start and appearing to be emotionally fragile. Her description of the assault and its impact on her was wrenching. She clearly believes what she says happened to her. Her allegation should have been vetted privately, in confidence, as she said she would have preferred. Instead ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein held it for six weeks and it was leaked—perhaps to cause precisely such a hearing circus.

Yet there is still no confirming evidence beyond her own testimony, and some of what she says has been contradicted. The female friend Ms. Ford says was at the home the night of the assault says she wasn’t there. The number of people she says were there has varied from four to five and perhaps more, but every potential witness she has cited by name says he or she doesn’t recall the party.

She still can’t recall the home where the assault took place, how she got there or how she got home that evening. She has no witnesses who say she told them about the alleged assault at the time—until she first spoke of it at a couples therapy session 30 years later in 2012. Mr. Kavanaugh’s name doesn’t appear in the notes of her therapist.

https://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/rabbi-aryeh-spero/rabbi-spero-women-teenage-sons-and-daughters-will-support-kavanaugh

Chuck Schumer, the Democrats, and their spokespeople in the Senate seem to be spooking-out certain Republicans with a threat that if Republicans vote for Judge Brett Kavanaugh they will lose the support of women in their constituency.

However, the tens of millions of women who currently have or have previously raised teenage boys, and even teenage girls, will probably be alarmed if a precedent is set in a Senate confirmation vote that would penalize or snuff out the opportunities of a fully grown man who did something foolish while yet a minor or was accused of something that was never verified with any surety.

Parents of boys and girls lovingly sacrifice their life’s energies, time, and money so that their children will have a bright future – economic, social, and familial. And all parents, since they themselves were once young, know of the mistakes teenagers make or the non-mistakes that merely involve rowdiness. What a frightening and demoralizing thing it would be to parents if after thirty years of proper and refined living and accomplishment by their children, a new American convention is established by the Senate that all lifetime achievements can be wiped away by a single instance in their child’s life. A person’s life, their child’s life, can be destroyed by an accusation, especially if it craftily summons-up whatever happens to be the politically correct, avant-garde sin of that given era.

Today’s Democrats play dirty, despicably dirty. In their quest for personal power, riches, and control over all aspects of American civic life, Democrats will equally play dirty tricks against conservative women running for office, bringing up or fabricating events from when they were once teenage girls, charging them from that full basket of the new Seven Sins: racism, intolerance, nationalism, whiteness, Christian Evangelicalism, Islamophobia, and anti-LBTG. We have seen them reach into this basket on many occasions. The Democrats have been successful in concocting false narratives that most often, in the court of public opinion, end up beating facts and the truth. For them, winning is everything, the only thing that counts.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/09/27/kavanaugh-ford-hearing-in-awful-process-democrats-gain-advantage-as-republicans-walk-on-eggshells.html

The testimony of Christine Blasey Ford before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court was a plus for Democrats who want to derail the nomination, because Republicans were walking on eggshells.

The 11 Republican senators on the committee – all men – clearly did not want to appear to be bullying Ford or to look like they were being accusatory or insensitive toward a woman who claims she was a victim of sexual assault committed by Kavanaugh when the two were in high school.

Ford came across as earnest, likeable through her nervousness, and seemed to do her best to answer questions from both sides during her testimony.

But it’s a fact that there is no corroboration of her version of the sexual assault she says happened about 36 years ago (she said she is not sure of the exact year). And when you take a step back, aspects of her account do not make sense under any objective examination.

At the end of the testimony, Mitchell laughed with Ford, commiserating with her about how bad the hearing format was. All of this strengthened Ford’s standing and made her a more sympathetic figure.

For example, Ford (about 15 at the time) obviously needed a ride home right after the alleged assault. But she could not or would not say who took her home or what she said to that person in the immediate aftermath of what she said was a sexual assault.

Republicans faced a two-fold problem at the hearing.

First, Rachel Mitchell, the experienced prosecutor to whom Republicans ceded their five-minute questioning rounds, treated the proceeding as if she was taking a deposition from Ford. Attorneys routinely take depositions – statements under oath – to be presented as evidence during trials or hearings.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ford-most-indelible-memory-of-alleged-attack-is-uproarious-laughter-of-kavanaugh-friend/

WASHINGTON — Christine Blasey Ford told the Senate Judiciary Committee today that the most “indelible” memory she has of her alleged assault and attackers in high school is “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.”

Ford told the committee she did not mix up Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge with other teens at the time.

“The person that was blamed for the incident is actually the person who introduced me to them originally. So he was a member of Columbia Country Club,” she said of the middle-school teacher named in Ed Whelan’s Twitter doppelganger theory. “And I don’t want to talk about him because I think it’s unfair, but he is the person that introduced me to them.”

Ford said under questioning from Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) that she remembers Kavanaugh and Judge “were laughing with each other.”

“I was, you know, underneath one of them while the two laughed — two friends having a really good time with one another,” she said.

Ford testified that she had one beer and “Brett and Mark were visibly drunk” when they pushed her into a bedroom and turned up loud music.

“Brett got on top of me. He began running his hands over my body and grinding into me. I yelled, hoping that someone downstairs might hear me, and I tried to get away from him, but his weight was heavy,” the Palo Alto, Calif., professor said. “Brett groped me and tried to take off my clothes. He had a hard time, because he was very inebriated, and because I was wearing a one-piece bathing suit underneath my clothing. I believed he was going to rape me.”

“I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from yelling. This is what terrified me the most, and has had the most lasting impact on my life,” she said. “It was hard for me to breathe, and I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.”

Ford testified that “Brett’s assault on me drastically altered my life,” and “for a very long time, I was too afraid and ashamed to tell anyone these details.”

“I did not want to tell my parents that I, at age 15, was in a house without any parents present, drinking beer with boys,” she added. “I convinced myself that because Brett did not rape me, I should just move on and just pretend that it didn’t happen.”

She said the incident was revealed to her husband in a 2012 therapy session because he couldn’t understand why she was insisting on a second front door in their home remodel. CONTINUE AT SITE