Barney & Clyde - episode 15

It's here.

Welcome back to the Libation Station! Pour yourself something bracing, pull up a bar-stool, and get in on the fortnightly exchange of libertarian and conservative perspectives on the weighty matters of the day. Specifically: 1. Making children into the spokespeople for climate alarmism 2. Our Fight or Not? - What is the proper US response to attacks on Saudi Oil production? 3. Old News: What's going on with Julian Assange? 4. Journalism's Death Rattle: the NYT attempt to revive the Kavanaugh smear. Send your feedback to barneyandclydeshow@gmail.com Comment here or at: https://www.facebook.com/barneyandcly... Please consider supporting us! https://www.patreon.com/barneyandclyde

The latest attempt to smear Brett Kavanaugh is falling apart fast

Well, well. The NYT now admits that the point on which the whole fabrication hinged was nothing but crap:

The New York Times was forced to correct a smear article on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh after it was revealed that they excluded exculpatory evidence from their report.

"An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book's account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party," The Times wrote in a correction. "The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article."

And Christine Blasey Ford might want to rethink that characterization of Leland Keyser as a close bud:

Buried at the end of their new book “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation,” reporters Robin Pogebrin and Kate Kelly quietly admit that Christine Blasey Ford’s lifelong friend Leland Keyser did not believe her friend’s tale of a sexual assault at a party they both supposedly attended. Keyser was named by Ford as a witness, one of four who denied any knowledge of the event in question.

The jackboots who can't stand the thought of an originalist majority on the Supreme Court employed their characteristic viciousness to try to bully Keyser as well as Kavanaugh:

The authors also acknowledge what had previously been reported in “Justice on Trial,” about the efforts of mutual friends to get her to change her testimony to be more supportive of Blasey Ford. The reporters say that some of Blasey Ford’s friends “had grown frustrated with Keyser. Her comments about the alleged Kavanaugh incident had been too limited, some of them felt, and did not help their friend’s case. Surely, given what a close friend Keyser had been, she could say more to substantiate Ford’s testimony and general veracity, even if she could not corroborate Ford’s more specific memories.”

A group text was formed in which friends such as Cheryl Amitay and Lulu Gonella discussed how to get her to say something more helpful to the cause. An unnamed man on the text suggested that they defame her as an addict. Keyser has been in recovery for some time, as her friends know and as has previously been reported.

Amitay answered, “Leland is a major stumbling block.” While asserting she didn’t want her to make anything up out of whole cloth, she offered ideas for things that could sound supportive of Ford’s story, such as that she’d been in similar situations with Blasey Ford that summer.

“I was told behind the scenes that certain things could be spread about me if I didn’t comply,” Keyser told the reporters, a stunning admission of the pressure to which she was subjected to by Blasey Ford’s allies. 

Will the Freedom-Hater candidates for president now rescind their calls for Kavanaugh's impeachment?

The Left's flimsy, transparent and really rotten ongoing attempt to trash Brett Kavanaugh

Roger Kimball at Spectator USA puts this latest non-starter under a magnifying glass in the glare of direct sunlight and sears it until you can smell the smoke:

 The excerpt is written in the Times’s high emetic style: every phrase infused with the new status anxiety of universal accusation and class-sex-and-race-based innuendo. The star of the article is Deborah ‘significant gaps in my memory’ Ramirez. Have the dramamine at hand?

‘Ms Ramirez grew up in a split-level ranch house [Oh, too bad] in working-class Shelton, Conn., perhaps best known for producing the Wiffle ball, and didn’t drink before college. [Got it: working class, straitlaced] Her father, who is Puerto Rican [Check]…

‘Before coming to Yale [Baaad Yale], Ms Ramirez took pride in her parents’ work ethic and enjoyed simple pleasures like swimming in their aboveground pool [above ground: noted. Definitely not part of the Cabana set]…she and her parents took out loans to pay for Yale [So?], and she got work-study jobs on campus, serving food in the dining halls and cleaning dorm rooms before class reunions. [Unlike snobs like Brett Kavanaugh, you see.]

‘She tried to adapt to Yale socially, joining the cheerleading squad her freshman year, sometimes positioned at the pinnacle of the pyramid. But Ms Ramirez learned quickly that although cheerleading was cool in high school, it didn’t carry the same cachet at Yale. People called her Debbie Cheerleader or Debbie Dining Hall or would start to say

‘Debbie does … ‘ playing on the 1978 porn movie Debbie Does Dallas. But Ms Ramirez didn’t understand the reference. [But your humble reporters do, nod, nod.]’

And on and on in seemingly interminable pointlessness. Or, rather, it does have a point: to establish Ramirez as a suitable victim for the depredations of Yale in general and Brett Kavanaugh in particular.

Any piece that was supposed to be objective journalism that I'd submit to an editor that was that rife with attempts to steer the reader into assumptions would be instantly rejected.

And about this Stier person upon whom the Times hangs its whole premise that we have here some kind of hot fresh revelation:

 So what’s the point of this latest ‘bombshell’ in The New York Times (not to mention the book from which it is taken)? Haven’t we been here, done that?

Well, yes. But wait. As the Drudge Report screams in a headline today, there is a ‘Fresh Allegation’. It is this: another Yale classmate of Kavanaugh, to wit, one Max Stier, claims that he ‘saw Mr Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.’ This claim, as the Times notes darkly ‘echoes’ what Deborah Ramirez had said. You don’t need an urban dictionary of rhetorically helpful, if intellectually dishonest, enthymemes to see that what the Timeswants you to ring out of ‘echoes’ is ‘confirms’.
But now watch this:

‘Mr Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the FBI about this account, but the FBI did not investigate and Mr Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr Stier.)’

1. Stier runs a ‘non-profit’: a brownie point for him. 2. Stier ‘notified senators and the FBI’ but they declined to investigate. The implication is that they were too biased for Kavanaugh to do so, but the truth is that the allegation was too flimsy to merit investigation. 3. Stier won’t confirm the story publicly but 4. eager beavers Pogrebin and Kelly ‘corroborated the story with two officials’ [Oh, ‘officials’, eh? Impressive] who have ‘communicated’ with Stier.

What are we to make of this dog’s breakfast of a non-story promulgated solely to do ideological (along with some collateral personal) damage?

Not much, I’d say, or rather, we should take it as a warning of just how bankrupt the so-called progressive media has become. And here are a couple of little bijoux to be getting on with. First, Mollie Hemingway, who deserves some sort of medal for reading an advance copy of the Pogrebin-Kelly tome, notes on Twitter that the book includes a detail omitted in the Times’s ‘bombshell’. ‘The book notes, quietly, that the woman Max Stier named as having been supposedly victimized by Kavanaugh and friends denies any memory of the alleged event. Seems, I don’t know, significant.’ You think?
Then there is Max ‘Fresh Allegation’ Stier. Could he, asks The Federalist’s Sean Davis, be ‘the same Max Stier who was one of Clinton’s defense attorneys? Yes, yes it is.’
Really, wonders will never cease?

The Left wants to obliterate basic decency. These people have dog vomit where normal people have souls.

And of course all the freedom haters running for president are seizing the opportunity to grandstand on this nothingburger.

Christine "I can't remember the location of the party" Blasey Ford's dad supports Brett Kavanaugh

Well, well:

Ralph Blasey, Ford’s father, offered his support to Ed Kavanaugh shortly after the hearings. According to Hemingway and Severino:

Within days of Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, a fascinating encounter took place. Brett Kavanaugh’s father was approached by Ford’s father at the golf club where they are both members.

Ralph Blasey, Ford’s father, went out of his way to offer to Ed Kavanaugh his support of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, according to multiple people familiar with the conversation that took place at Burning Tree Club in Bethesda, Maryland. “I’m glad Brett was confirmed,” Ralph Blasey told Ed Kavanaugh, shaking his hand. Blasey added that the ordeal had been tough for both families.

The encounter immediately caused a stir at the close-knit private golf club as staff and members shared the news. The conversation between the two men echoed a letter that Blasey had previously sent to the elder Kavanaugh. Neither man returned requests for comment about the exchanges.

Man, that has to be tough for a guy whose principles include a Constutionalist Supreme Court to know in his heart his daughter cooked up this elaborate - yet ultimately devoid of details -  scheme to try to keep a Constitutionalist off that body. Prayers for the hurt he has to be experiencing.

Christine Blasey Ford's credibility just took an even bigger hit

Hey, man, she could have hired any lawyer she wanted to. She went with this:

The Daily Caller obtained a video of Christine Blasey-Ford’s attorney, Debra Katz, speaking to a group of the University of Baltimore’s Feminist Legal Theory Conference in April. Katz admits that part of Blasey-Ford’s motivation for accusing now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault in July 2018 was political.

Katz said, “In the aftermath of these hearings, I believe that Christine’s testimony brought about more good than the harm misogynist Republicans caused by allowing Kavanaugh on the court. He will always have an asterisk next to his name. When he takes a scalpel to Roe v. Wade, we will know who he is, we know his character, and we know what motivates him, and that is important; it is important that we know, and that is part of what motivated Christine.”

According to the Daily Caller, the video was first reported by Ryan Lovelace, a writer for the National Law Journal, for his new book, “Search and Destroy: Inside the Campaign Against Brett Kavanaugh.” 

Bingo. As I said in the immediately previous post, Democrats regard human life as dispensable.

I sometimes refer to post-Americans who are perfectly willing to give up their freedom as the cattle-masses. This gives the term an even deeper meaning. To Democrats, it's perfectly okay to off particular kinds of human beings if they don't serve the collectivist vision.

Wednesday roundup

A bombshell about Russia and Madame Bleachbit at Newsweek:

Moscow routed millions of dollars to the U.S. expecting the funds would benefit ex-President Bill Clinton’s charitable initiative while his wife, Hillary Clinton, worked to reset relations with Russia, an FBI informant in an Obama administration-era uranium deal stated.

In a written statement to three congressional committees, informant Douglas Campbell said Russian nuclear executives told him that Moscow hired American lobbying firm APCO Worldwide to influence Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, among others in the Obama administration, The Hill reported on Wednesday.

Campbell said Russian nuclear officials expected APCO to apply its $3 million annual lobbying fee from Moscow toward the Clintons’ Global Initiative. The contract detailed four $750,000 payments over a year’s time.

“APCO was expected to give assistance free of charge to the Clinton Global Initiative as part of their effort to create a favorable environment to ensure the Obama administration made affirmative decisions on everything from Uranium One to the U.S.-Russia Civilian Nuclear Cooperation agreement,” Campbell stated.

A Kavanaugh accuser has admitted she flat-out fabricated her rape charge:

She admitted to the false allegation, and said she has actually never met Justice Kavanaugh.

“I was angry, and I sent it out,” she told investigators.

“In short, during the committee’s time-sensitive investigation of allegations against Judge Kavanaugh, Ms. Munro-Leighton submitted a fabricated allegation, which diverted committee resources,” Mr. Grassley wrote. “When questioned by Committee investigators she admitted it was false, a ‘ploy,’ and a ‘tactic.’ She was opposed to Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation.”

William Barr's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee went well. 

Parliament gives Theresa May's Brexit deal a big thumbs-down. Seems extricating one's country from a labyrinthine continent-wide union is as tricky as just abiding by its conditions of membership.

The collapse of Western civilization personified:

Meet Greg and Jody, a married couple in Britain.

Husband Greg is a woman, as is wife Jody.

27-year-old Greg identifies as male. She also identifies as step-dad — to 21-year-old Jody’s son, Jayden.

The couple says their 5-year-old enjoys dresses and hates “everything about being a boy.

Therefore, they’ve put Jayden on track to “transition” into a girl in just a few years.

And currently, they’re miffed. Greg told the Daily Record all about it:

“We’ve had people saying we’re using Jayden for attention and that she just wants to be a girl because I changed sex. It’s ridiculous. Jayden knows nothing about my past. She just knows me as dad.”

Greg said Jayden is “adamant she is a girl.” Furthermore:

“They say it’s cruel we let her wear a dress but is it not more cruel to do nothing when you’ve got a kid who’s so adamant she’s a girl she’s ripping her hair off and banging her head off the walls?”

Hmmm….

Philip Klein at The Washington Examiner is right that Nancy Pelosi actually stumbled upon a good idea: the president ought to just send a written State of the Union report up to Capitol Hill.

The kind of thing we're up against

NBC sat on essential information about Julie Swetnick and her attorney Michael Avenatti:

To NBC News' credit, their reporting is the entire reason we know about the discrepancies in Swetnick's accounts. It was their October 1st report—during the height of the Kavanaugh sexual misconduct debate—that first revealed that Swetnick would not or could not confirm several of the details she made in a sworn statement to Congress.

But per the newest story, these are the details NBC News knew for a fact during the Kavanaugh debate, and chose not to report:

• On September 30, Avenatti forwarded an anonymous woman (I'll call her Woman B) to NBC claiming she could corroborate Swetnick's story. On the contrary, she said of the punch spiking "I didn't ever think it was Brett" and when asked if she ever witnessed Kavanaugh act inappropriately towards women replied, "No."

• On October 2nd, Avenatti publicized a sworn statement from an unnamed woman claiming she had "witnessed firsthand Brett Kavanaugh, together with others, ‘spike’ the ‘punch’ at house parties I attended with Quaaludes and/or grain alcohol" and he engaged in "inappropriate physical contact with girls of a sexual nature."

• The same day, Avenatti confirms to NBC News that the woman is Woman B.

• On October 3rd, Woman B tells NBC she only "skimmed" the statement she made to Congress.

• The same day, when asked about the discrepancies, Avenatti suddenly backtracks and claims the woman is not Woman B.

• On October 4th, Woman B texts NBC: "It is incorrect that I saw Brett spike the punch. I didn't see anyone spike the punch … I was very clear with Michael Avenatti from day one."

• The same day, when asked about her denials, Avenatti responds, "I have a signed declaration that states otherwise together with multiple audio recordings where she stated exactly what is in the declaration. There were also multiple witnesses to our discussions."

• Five minutes later, Woman B texts NBC: "Please understand that everything in the declaration is true and you should not contact me anymore regarding this issue."

• Minutes later, NBC calls again, and Woman B again reiterates she never saw Kavanaugh spiking punch or being sexually inappropriate.

• On October 5th, she texts NBC: "I will definitely talk to you again and no longer Avenatti. I do not like that he twisted my words."

Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed October 6th. At the time of his confirmation, there was a sworn statement before Congress indicating that the Supreme Court nominee was a sexual assailant and drugged women. As far as the Senate and public knew, there was nothing indicating that statement was false.

Still, the pro-fetal-death camp stands by Swetnick. Here's Planned Parenthood's latest tweet about the matter:

 

We still believe Julie Swetnick. #BelieveSurvivors

NARAL добави,

Потвърден профил

13:22 ч. - 25.10.2018 г.

Real evil is afoot in post-America.

 

Monday roundup

From the I'm-so-clueless-about-what's-going-on-in-my-nation-that-I-reflexively-submit-to-the-identity-politics-jackboots file:

Scott Kelly, a retired U.S. Navy Captain, NASA engineer, and veteran of four spaceflights, was brought low on Sunday by those possessed of neither his accomplishments nor talents for the crime of advocating Churchillian generosity of spirit. “Did not mean to offend by quoting Churchill. My apologies,” the astronaut wrote after what must have been a withering assault on social media. “I will go and educate myself further on his atrocities, racist views which I do not support.”

This is only the most recent example of a menacing phenomenon. In the name of historical literacy, an absurd form of pseudo-academic reductionism has become the preferred means by which we “interrogate” Western (and only Western) history. We are told that we must abandon discretion, compartmentalization, and basic good sense if we are to be taken seriously by the self-appointed arbiters of such things. Nuance is for the naïve. Sensibility is found only in simplicity.

The bottom line on the notion that Kavanaugh will be "damaged goods" as a SCOTUS justice, based on how Clarence Thomas's stint on the bench has played out:

. . . let’s pause for a moment and consider what that “asterisk” next to Thomas’ name actually means. I can sum it up for you in one word: nothing. Zip, zero, nada. Are Thomas’ votes in Supreme Court decisions measured as counting for less than one each? (Dare I say… two thirds?) No, they are not. Are decisions where he’s taken part in a 5-4 split somehow less final in the nation’s system of laws? Nope. He’s been on the bench and voting for just shy of 27 years, and each and every one of those votes was recorded just the same as those cast by every other member of the court.

Barring a complete breakdown of our political ecosystem or some shocking new revelation involving provable illegal conduct, Brett Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court to stay. And at the age of 53, barring any tragic health issues and with the grace of God, he’ll likely be there for the next quarter of a century or more. Those camping out on the steps of the Supreme Court and rending their garments in grief should probably come to terms with the idea.

American Thinker piece by Thomas Lifson entitled "Liberal Pope Francis Has Lost the Most Liberal Weekly in Europe":

You might think that the enthusiastic support Pope Francis has offered for environmentalism, open borders, and the normalization of homosexual behavior would buy him support from liberal media. But Der Spiegel, the most important weekly magazine in Europe, has turned against the Roman Catholic Prelate with a cover story that proclaims (auf Deutsch) the Ninth Commandment: “Thou shalt not lie,” with a subhead: “The Pope and the Catholic Church in their greatest crisis.”

Facebook is censoring ads for the new movie about Kermit Gosnell.

Great piece by Daniel Gelernter at NRO on a San Francisco Symphony performance at Carnegie Hall that included pieces by Gershwin and how it offers an opportunity to revisit the question of whether a pop tunesmith can also be a serious composer:

Gershwin is rarely performed by today’s leading orchestras. Howard Hirsch hit the nail on the head in his program notes for the evening: He observed that the musical establishment was profoundly irritated that “a more or less self-taught Broadway tunesmith presumed to write ambitious concert works” and that these works were “boisterously successful.”

Gershwin’s music is at once beautiful, exhilarating, and totally original. He captured the essence of a young, enthusiastic, but thoughtful America better than any other artist. He deserves to be considered one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. One could make a compelling case that he is the greatest composer of the 20th century, but music buffs and scholars tend to laugh: Gershwin, they say, is not “serious” music.

When did popularity become a strike against seriousness? Schubert performed his lieder at parties, and Bach played the harpsichord at Zimmermann’s Coffee House. How did we reach a point where music, to win scholarly approval, must be unpleasant and, to an untrained ear, unlistenable? It is funny to think that the same music buffs who praise contemporary composers for their iconoclastic rule-breaking also mock Gershwin for his supposed ignorance of classical symphonic structure. Even Leonard Bernstein once wrote, in an embarrassing screed, that Gershwin’s “nice” tunes were not “real composition” — but that they were so enjoyable he loved them anyway. Very generous.

The problem with Gershwin is that nobody else could do it: No one could write like Gershwin without being a grade-A, 100 percent, non-certified natural musical genius. So the academic music world hated Gershwin, and instead chose Schoenberg and Webern and, later, Cage and Glass as their role models: When music is based on a theoretical concept, rather than how it sounds, suddenly anyone can do it. This was the appeal of rule-based composition “systems” like Schoenberg’s terrible twelve-tones. This is why the only thing you’ll learn about Gershwin in a university music program is that he was Schoenberg’s occasional tennis partner.

Almost everyone who attends an academic composition program really wants, more than anything on earth, to be a composer. When these students discover that they’re simply not composers — that they haven’t got what 100 years ago would have been the obvious requisites of talent and imagination and a capacity for melody and harmony — there are two possible courses: They can admit defeat gracefully and move on to a different career. Or they can spend the rest of their lives pretending to be what they wish they were. Ever since the invention of conceptual music, the vast majority of failed composers have chosen the second and less honorable course, hiding their lack of talent behind a rulebook that proclaims talent no longer matters.

Brazil shifts abruptly to a populist-right political footing:

Far-right Congressman and former Army captain Jair Bolsonaro won nearly half the votes in Brazil's first-round presidential election on Sunday, as voters' anger at corruption drove a major shift to the right in Latin America's largest nation.

In what is likely to be a deeply polarizing runoff, Bolsonaro, an outspoken apologist for Brazil's 1964-1985 military dictatorship, will now face leftist Fernando Haddad, the former mayor of Sao Paulo, in a second round of voting on Oct. 28.

Dubbed a "Tropical Trump" by some pundits because of his nationalist agenda and anti-establishment tirades, Bolsonaro was swept from the political margins this year by a wave of antipathy toward scandal-plagued traditional parties.

His promise of a brutal crackdown on graft and crime have resonated with voters in the world's fifth most populous country, which registered a record 63,880 violent deaths in 2017. Bolsonaro has pledged to roll back gun controls and make it easier for police to kill.

With just three weeks until the runoff, Bolsonaro holds a commanding lead. He won 46.3 percent of valid ballots, far ahead of Haddad's 29 percent but short of the outright majority needed to avoid a second round, electoral authorities said.

In a seismic shift in Brazilian politics, Bolsonaro's once-tiny Social Liberal Party (PSL) was poised to become the second-largest force in Congress after legislative elections also held on Sunday, giving a boost to his agenda of slashing taxes and state involvement in the economy.

With no backing from major parties and little funding, Bolsonaro relied on his skilful use of social media during the campaign. He gained momentum after a near-fatal stabbing at a rally one month ago that kept him from campaigning.

"This was a great victory, considering we had no television time, a party that is still very small with no campaign money and I was in hospital for 30 days," he said in video streamed live over social media. "We have to believe in our Brazil. We have to remain mobilized."

I think repealing the 17th Amendment is a good idea, but I think Steve Berman's argument at The Resurgent merits consideration:

I think it would merely take the circus and $10 million (average) cost of Senate campaigns and move them to the individual state legislatures. It could, in theory, make your local state legislative races as nasty as some Congressional races have become. It could pour money (like the $50 million that went into the Handel/Ossoff special election in my home district) into local races in a way we have never seen.

In short, I think it's too late to even consider taking the new political landscape and trying to roll it back into a more pastoral time where state legislatures operated in relative calm (press-wise). A new crop of Wendy "Abortion Barbie" Davises and other demagogues and issue hogs would then dominate the race to get the coveted Senate seat. I think it would be a disaster, but YMMV.

Maybe in 1946, under Harry Truman, this idea could have worked. Not in 2018 under Donald Trump. And likely, never afterward. Some things have have their window of opportunity close, and the idea of states once again appointing Senators is one of them.

I'm not completely convinced, though. You know us conservatives. We're not too big on arguments of the it's-too-late-to-go-back variety.

This chick must really be invested in post-Americans continuing to be able to vacuum the brains out of people's skulls

Here at LITD, we're big on fealty to principle. The principle that Heidi Heidtkamp has chosen as a hill to die on may not be a principle we're cool with, but she doesn't seem to be afraid of the die-on-it part:

A new poll shows Republican challenger Rep. Kevin Cramer leading Sen. Heidi Heitkamp by a 10- point margin, with North Dakotans overwhelmingly in favor of confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Losing a race in North Dakota would make it significantly more difficult for Democrats to retake the Senate. 

The poll, from Strategic Research Associates and North Dakota's NBC affiliate, shows Cramer opening up a 51 percent to 41 percent lead over the Democratic incumbent.

The poll also finds North Dakotans support the confirmation of Kavanaugh by a 60 percent to 27 percent margin. Furthermore, the survey found that at 21 percent, more people rated Kavanaugh as their top concern than any other single issue.

Suit yourself, toots. As long as the Pubs afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome take their meds for keeping the symptoms at bay, the vote is going to work out in a way that pleases God.

The guy who asked for the FBI investigation says it offers no corroboration

From the Senator's own mouth:

Sen. Jeff Flake (Ariz.), a key swing Republican vote, said Thursday that a new FBI report on Brett Kavanaugh has failed to corroborate Christine Blasey Ford's allegation of sexual assault against the Supreme Court nominee.

Flake said there was nothing in the FBI’s supplementary background check to corroborate the claims from Ford, which threw Kavanaugh’s nomination into turmoil starting last month.

The Arizona Republican said he agrees with fellow GOP Sen. Susan Collins(Maine) in viewing the FBI report as "thorough." He also said it failed to back up Ford’s claims that Kavanaugh assaulted her at a house gathering in 1982, when both were in high school.

“I think Susan Collins was quoted saying it was very thorough but no new corroborative information came out of it. That’s accurate,” Flake told reporters after reviewing the FBI report in the secure compartmented information facility in the Capitol Visitor Center.

“I wanted this pause; we’ve had this pause. We’ve had the professionals, the FBI, determine — given the scope that we gave them, current credible allegations — to go and do their review, which they’ve done,” Flake said.

“Thus far we’ve seen no new credible corroboration, no new corroboration at all,” he said.

Collins separately told reporters that the FBI investigation "appears to be a very thorough investigation" and said she planned to go read the full report later. 

Flake, Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) are the three Republican senators who are undecided on Kavanaugh. 

So how about it, Senator? You'll be retiring soon. This would be your big chance for the historical record to show that you went out with a demonstration of principle and backbone.

Oh, and Flake's bud Chris Coons says he doesn't think the FBI interviewed enough people.

Do yourself another favor regarding how history is going to view you, Senator Flake, and knock off the bromance with the Freedom-Hater.

Brett Kavanaugh's character, in the words of women who actually know him well

Let the record show this:

Meghan McCaleb was a year behind Kavanaugh in school and met him her freshman year of high school. She says she knew him because he had dated a few of her friends, as well as her older sister for a few months. “I just remember that he was always so kind to her. My parents really liked him, and he was so polite to all of us,” McCaleb says.

Even though Kavanaugh and her sister broke up after three months, all three of them stayed friends. “It always struck me what a great guy he was,” she adds. “There were other boyfriends we had who we never saw again. But it was different with Brett.”

“I can count on one hand the number of people from high school that I’d stand up for in such a vocal way, and Brett is one of them,” McCaleb says. “I have complete faith in his character. I absolutely stand by him.”

Julie DeVol is also one of the women Kavanaugh referenced in his testimony, and she tells National Review they became best friends after they met in 1980 through a group of high-school friends. “We used to get each other dates to dances and different events, but he and I never went to dances together because we were like brother and sister,” she says.

DeVol said several times throughout our conversation that Kavanaugh was always the patient, responsible one in their friend group. “He was always there taking care of us,” she says. “I was a year younger, and he was like my big brother. He wouldn’t let any guys mess around with you. If anybody was drinking, he would be the one taking care of you. Not everyone in his friend group was like that, but he always was.”

And that was true all the time, not just when their friends were spending time together on weekends or at parties. “He used to always help me with my homework over the phone,” DeVol adds. “My mom would say we couldn’t talk on the phone until I had done my homework, so he’d walk me through my math problems and other work so that we could talk.” 

Suzanne Matan — another of the women Kavanaugh mentioned in his testimony and who sat behind him during the hearing — met him in 1980 when she entered private Catholic school her sophomore year. She agrees with DeVol that he was always known among their friends for being responsible and careful. “You always have one in every class who sort of looks out for everyone,” she explains. “He stood out among us as being the responsible guy, the smart guy.”
She has a specific memory of when she realized in high school what kind of person Kavanaugh is. “One time he had asked me out to dinner, and it started to snow fairly heavily,” Matan says. “His mother called my mother and said Brett wanted to use the car to take me out to dinner, but his mother and mine were both worried the roads might get bad.”

But Kavanaugh was insistent that he had promised to take her to dinner, and he intended to do so, snow or not. He convinced their parents that he’d drive carefully and bring Suzanne home early. “He took me out, brought me home, and walked me right to the door and said good night,” Matan recalls. “That’s how I remember Brett. The guy that came and picked you up, you had a nice conversation, he brought you home and took you to the door. The guy who kept his promises.”

According to women who have known him later in life, too, Kavanaugh’s character and integrity have remained consistent regardless of age or circumstance. Monica Mastal has known Kavanaugh for several decades because her siblings were in school with him, they’ve remained lifelong friends, and she also worked with him in the White House. Their children attend the same parish school, Kavanaugh coached her daughter in basketball at the school, and she testified for him before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“I worked with him briefly at the office of independent counsel when I was in my young twenties, when I was an intern during law school,” Mastal says. “I was just an intern and he was an attorney, but he was always very friendly and supportive. He was kind to everyone on staff, whether you were an intern or FBI agent. It didn’t matter.”

Anita McBride also worked with Kavanaugh in the White House, under the George W. Bush administration. She’s known him since 2001, when she was working as acting director of White House personnel for the transition period, which meant working closely with Kavanaugh, who was an associate counsel in the White House at the time.

“There were things I’d send to him for review, and he was always a very responsive colleague,” McBride explains. “A lot of the time we’d work long hours, and he’d walk papers down to my office late, late at night, just to be sure that he got to them in the same day that I had sent them to him. I very much appreciated that, his responsiveness and collegiality as a fellow staff member.” 

McBride says Kavanaugh was widely respected in the White House, especially when he later served as staff secretary to President Bush and managed decision-making processes. She calls him “an exemplary honest broker” and says he was “fair to everybody on the staff,” making sure everyone, no matter their rank, had a chance to give equal input. “It was very clear the president really trusted the way that he handled his job.”

Cathie Martin first met Kavanaugh when they both were lawyers in Washington, D.C., running in the same professional and social circles; they later worked together in the White House. “We had children at the same time and spent those early parenting years together, at each other’s houses, dealing with children’s birthday parties, and holidays, and babies,” she says. “You get to know people pretty well during those times.”

Martin says Kavanaugh was always highly professional in the workplace: “He’s a really reserved and humble guy, so he had a way of connecting with staff throughout the White House in a very friendly and unassuming way.” At one point, Martin managed a staff made up of people under 30, who she says “were always highly impressed with how professional and respectful [Kavanaugh] was to them, not to mention to his peers and seniors.”

McBride agrees that Kavanaugh was always highly regarded for the way he treated everyone with whom he worked, including women. “Honestly, I’ve worked in this town for 35 years. . . . I’ve seen the best of colleagues and not the best of colleagues,” she says. “There are very, very few in all those years who I can say I’d truly go to the mat for. Brett is one of them, because of the way he treated people around him, whether superiors or subordinates. Even in the highly intense atmosphere of the White House, this is a guy who never lost his cool and had a sense of humor about him, even in the toughest of times, that was very helpful to be around. The way he treated everybody, men and women, was always the same.”

“Brett was the kind of person who, because he’s so mild-mannered, so accomplished, and has such a grounded center of what is right and good, he attracted really good people around him,” Martin adds. “He made you want to be better, and that’s why people who know him are standing up for him.”

All of these women are insistent that they are completely sure Kavanaugh would never commit the sexual misconduct of which he’s been accused — it would contradict everything they’ve experienced over decades of friendship with him.

“Knowing Brett, who honestly was always mature and respectful, nothing in his life has ever led us to believe he would do anything like this,” Mastal says

“I am 100 percent sure that this isn’t something he would do, because everything I know and have seen and experienced with Brett contradicts that,” Matan say. “If any of my friends had experienced anything differently, we would know about it. We could choose the guys we hung out with. No one was forcing us to hang out with that group of guys. We chose to hang out with those guys because we felt comfortable around them, they were fun to be with, and they respected us.”

McCaleb says she could never believe the allegations against Kavanaugh. “That just wasn’t Brett’s personality at all,” she says. “He was one of the more responsible ones of the bunch, there’s no question. He just was not aggressive in that way at all. When I heard the allegation, I was shocked. . . . I don’t doubt that something happened to [Ford] at some point. But not with Brett. Never ever.” 

“I’m confident that he’s incapable of doing this,” says Martin, “because I know Brett’s character and I know his heart, and I know what kind of person he is. He’s been nothing but ethical and moral and good and decent in all aspects, professionally and personally, in all the time I’ve known him.”

DeVol says she’s never been a political person and has never gotten in an argument over politics, but she feels an obligation to stand up for her friend’s character. She even wrote a letter this week to Senators Jeff Flake, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins saying just that. “It’s devastating to watch Brett and his family go through this,” she tells me over the phone, her voice shaking. “He is just such a good person. I can’t imagine how he’s surviving this. He is a good, good person and he would never do what she says he did. It’s crazy what they’re doing to him. None of it is true.” 

How evil does someone have to be to set out to ruin someone like this?

 

The prosecutor who queried Ford: as flimsy a case as I've ever seen

Some plain speaking from from Rachel Mitchell:

After last Thursday’s testimony by Christine Blasey Ford, commentators rushed to call her a credible witness. Did the professional prosecutor with 25 years of experience in sexual assault cases agree? Not really, no, as Rachel Mitchell explained in a detailed analysis she provided after the hearing to the Senate GOP caucus, The Arizona prosecutor laid out her case in a memo published earlier today by the Washington Post.

SEE ALSO: Axios: White House has no Plan B if Kavanaugh is borked

The “bottom line,” Mitchell writes, is that this case doesn’t meet either a probable-cause nor a preponderance-of-evidence standard. Furthermore, the experienced sex-crimes prosecutor states, there are significant reasons to doubt Ford’s recollections:

In the legal context, here is my bottom line: A “he said, she said” case is incredibly difficult to prove. But this case is even weaker than that. Dr. Ford identified other witnesses to the event, and those witnesses either refuted her allegations or failed to corroborate them. For the reasons discussed below, I do not think that a reasonable prosecutor would bring this case based on the evidence before the Committee. Nor do I believe that this evidence is sufficient to satisfy the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard.

Mitchell notes how the story has changed in the telling of it, even over the last couple of months, although she never states that Ford is being deliberately deceptive. One key point: in her original letter, Ford told Feinstein that she could hear Kavanaugh and Mark Judge talking with other party-goers while she hid in the bathroom, but testified in the hearing that she didn’t hear any talk at all. Ford had just “assumed” a conversation took place. Furthermore, the timing of the attack seems to have shifted since Ford’s initial text to the Post on July 6, when she described it as the “mid 1980s,” a time which matched the Post’s reporting of her therapist notes that said Ford had claimed it occurred in her “late teens.” Only after Ford got in contact with Feinstein did the timing of the attack get narrowed to the “summer of 1982.”

There are logical gaps in Ford’s story as well as suspicious details within it, Mitchell argues. For instance, Ford can recall that she was taking no medication the night of the alleged assault and that she had only one beer — but she can’t remember how she got to the party, and more importantly, how she left: 

Given that this all took place before cell phones, arranging a ride home would not have been easy. Indeed, she stated that she ran out of the house after coming downstairs and did not state that she made a phone call from the house before she did, or that she called anyone else thereafter.

Mitchell also raises questions about Ford’s memory in the near term. Ford couldn’t recall whether she’d been recorded during her polygraph, even though that was a significant event from less than two months earlier. Ford also couldn’t recall whether she shared her therapy notes with the Washington Post or summarized them. In fact, Ford seemed to insist that she had paraphrased them, even though the Post report clearly stated that Ford had provided at least a portion of them to the reporter.

Ford never shared her therapy notes with the committee, Mitchell points out, which makes it tougher to determine just how dispositive they might be. However, the Post’s account of those notes give different details than those Ford gave the committee. Ford claimed that the Post’s account of them was in error. Although Mitchell doesn’t make the argument explicit here, the prosecutor clearly implies that a refusal to share share supposedly dispositive evidence reduces Ford’s credibility. 

I guess we still have to wait for the FBI to weigh in, per what Senate Pubs, due to Jeff Flake's terminal case of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, agreed to. But this pretty much tells us what we need to know.

Can't improve upon this

I'm not sure I've ever disagreed - at least very sharply - with David French's pieces at NRO (don't have a prosecutor grill me on that under oath), and his immediate post-Ford-testimony take on the present moment strikes me as spot on:

Across both sides of the ideological spectrum you see the same words: “Compelling.” “Credible.” “Heartbreaking.” We’re human. Unless you have a heart of stone, we hate to see a person’s pain, and there is often an instinct towards sympathy and comfort. The book of Proverbs notes an ancient truth: “In a lawsuit, the first to speak seems right, until someone comes forward to cross-examine.”

In this case, because the format consistently interrupts the cross-examination before it can gain any momentum, Dr. Ford’s first statement retains its emotional power. There is no real test of her claims. To be clear, I’m not blaming Rachel Mitchell, the attorney the GOP hired to question Dr. Ford. Not even Clarence Darrow could effectively examine a witness if he was interrupted every five minutes by emotional tributes to the witness’s strength, courage, and virtue.

Moreover, we also often have this mystical faith in our own ability to discern the truth by examining tone, demeanor, and likeability. She was “real.” He’s been “wooden.” These things impact us far more than we’d like to admit. Yet if there is one thing we know from our modern re-examinations of the impact of witness testimony on case outcomes, our faith in ourselves is deeply misplaced. We’re not very good at determining who’s correct and who’s mistaken by watching people talk. That’s one reason why innocent people go to prison, including for rape.

So, given the human dynamics of watching a person in obvious pain, the lack of real cross-examination, and our misplaced faith in ourselves to discern truth, it’s entirely possible that Dr. Ford’s testimony changed everything. That she moved the needle decisively in her favor.

But it’s also very important to note that Dr. Ford’s testimony has changed nothing about the underlying evidence in the case. She has made her claim, there are no corroborating witnesses. No one else can place the two of them together at the party — not even the witnesses she’s identified. She is inconsistent or forgetful on a number of key points. She can’t even identify who brought her to the party or who took her home. He’s denied the claims and will deny them again.

That’s thin — very thin — evidence of sexual assault. The evidence is no stronger this afternoon than it was before Dr. Ford testified. When this controversy began, I said that her claims were serious enough that, if true, Kavanaugh should not be confirmed. Further, I said that that she should only have to carry the lowest burden of proof — to establish that her claims were more likely than not. If you step back, look at the totality of the evidence and consider that she has brought no new evidence to the committee, I still don’t believe she has met that minimal burden.

There's no way that feels were not going to take precedence in what has gone down today.

There's too much solidarity-with-the-sisterhood in the air for the plain fact that Kavanaugh's career trajectory, the number of people eager to speak in his defense via letters, his family life and the general way he's carried himself are utterly incongruous with any of these claims to get a proper consideration.

Praying that his time before the committee and Ms. Mitchell go well.