RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/10/2001_video_shows_obama_admitting_being_a_thug_fighting_drinking_drugging_in_high_school.html

The standards being applied to Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s fitness for high office would have killed the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, among other recent Democrats (Clinton and Kennedy, for starters). Bill Clinton has adopted a low public profile, and deployed Hillary’s ”Bimbo Eruptions” squad to silence and discredit the women “survivors” of his sexual aggression. But Barack Obama went on the record in 2001, and nobody cared about behavior in high school they now feign outrage over in the case of judge Kavanaugh.

Kudos to Ryan Saavedra of The Daily Wire for uncovering a video from 17 years ago in which Barack Obama discusses his own behavior in high school. Evaluating it in light of the claims used to pretend that Brett Kavanaugh was too degenerate in high school and college to merit membership on the Supreme Court reveals the utter hypocrisy of Kavanaugh’s opponents.

While it is true that the unsupported claims of rape attributed to Kavanaugh have no counterpart in Obama’s admissions, the “evidence” against Kavanaugh’s character including drinking and “ralphing” is pale compared to what Obama admits to.

-“I was a thug,” a “mischievous child”
-“I got into fights.”
-“I drank and did–and consumed substances that weren’t always legal.”
-“I might have drank a six-pack in an hour before going back to class”

In point of fact, most people not crazed by desire to maintain the Supreme Court as a means of imposing progressive social policy that is too unpopular to pass Congress understand that childhood foibles should not be held against anyone.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271502/investigate-senate-democrat-wrecking-machine-michelle-malkin

How did we get here? The Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination circus didn’t happen by accident. The emergence of incredible — and by “incredible,” I mean the literal Merriam-Webster definition of “too extraordinary and improbable to be believed” — accusers in the 11th hour was no mistake.

It is my contention that this grand unearth-and-destroy spectacle was planned, coordinated and facilitated by Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats and their staffers.

After the FBI finishes its Freshmen Booze Investigations, Federal Barfight Interrogations and Fraternity Barfing Incidents probe of every last Yale and Holton Arms acquaintance and publicity hound ever photographed with Judge Brett Kavanaugh, every cog in the Resistance Wrecking Machine must be investigated:

Protest Orchestration. The hearings were doomed from the very start, when 70 screaming demonstrators (including Women’s March holy warrior Linda Sarsour and actress Piper Perabo) systematically infiltrated the Hart Senate Office Building and disrupted the proceedings in Hour One of Day One. Day Two saw another 72 social justice mobsters arrested, with more than 200 total taken into custody by Capitol Police by the end of Day Three.

Taxpayers have a right to know who sponsored the deliberate sabotage and abuse of the gallery pass privilege, which has been in place since 1890. As the U.S. Senate website notes, “A code of conduct for visitors to the galleries is set by the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration and is enforced by the doorkeepers … each gallery pass requires the ‘signature’ of a senator or officer of the Senate.” We’ve seen this partisan-organized circus mayhem before.

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/its-all-gone-the-democrats-dead-ideals/

As the spurious case against Brett Kavanaugh disintegrates, splinters, and re-forms into a cacophony of whiny, irrelevant expostulations, it is instructive to step back and survey the field upon which this battle took place.

The ground is littered with dead and wounded ideals: civility, dead; basic decency, dead; the presumption of innocence, gravely wounded, ditto for the idea of due process. And this disgusting carnage is all on you, O ancient one, Dianne Feinstein, and your self-important, preposterous colleagues. You were desperate to keep Brett Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court so you abandoned any semblance of decency and respect. You travestied the processes of the United States Senate for the sake of a cynical grab at power. I’d say that you should be ashamed of yourselves, but, like the thugs that you are, you have no shame. You believe the acquisition of power is a magical antidote to shame. You are wrong about that, and one can only hope that you will one day reap some portion of the obloquy you have sowed.

It is not yet clear what the snarling, incontinent attacks on Brett Kavanaugh will mean for him and his family. Early indications are not encouraging.

For many years, Judge Kavanaugh has taught a course at Harvard Law School. A couple of days ago, that Cambridge-based plutocratic bastion of privilege, smugness, and political correctness announced that Judge Kavanaugh was no longer welcome to teach there. Later, a coven of lonely and unappealing Harvard feminists filed a battery of groundless Title IX claims against him.

Hundreds of alumni, students, and faculty of Yale Law School have signed an open letter denouncing the school’s implicit support of Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Among other things, the signatories of this malodorous missive say that Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination represents “an emergency — for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country. … Without a doubt, Judge Kavanaugh is a threat to the most vulnerable. He is a threat to many of us, despite the privilege bestowed by our education, simply because of who we are.”

What are these people talking about? But it is not insanity that moves them. It is malice and the desire for power.

Judge Kavanaugh mentioned in his testimony that one of his delights was coaching girls basketball. Will he be allowed to do that in the future? It is unclear. A putrid column in USA Today by Erik Brady — silently redacted after a cataract of outrage — said that “he should stay off basketball courts for now when kids are around.”

Who knows what toll the mob hysteria against him has taken on his wife and two young daughters. One of the most moving moments of his testimony last week came when he mentioned that one of his daughters suggested during evening prayers that they ought to pray for Christine Ford, the hysteric who first accused Judge Kavanaugh of committing an impropriety 36 years ago at a high school party. A wretched cartoonist for a large national newspaper — I won’t say which one, and I will forbear to link to that piece of filth — depicted the judge’s daughter on her knees praying that God forgive “my angry, lying, alcoholic father for assaulting Dr. Ford.”

There are not words sufficiently contemptuous to describe this repulsive display. Several commentators have drawn parallels between the unfounded attacks on Judge Kavanaugh and the tirades of Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. A better parallel, perhaps, is the case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was ritually humiliated, drummed out of the French army, and given a sentence of life imprisonment on trumped up charges of espionage. He was eventually cleared, years later, but his career had been shattered and his life ruined. “Where do I go to get my reputation back?”CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/christine-blasey-ford-lawyers-withhold-information-pending-fbi-interview/

Lawyers for Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accuses Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to sexually assault her, are refusing to turn over to Congress certain pieces of evidence she has cited to the Senate until she has been interviewed by the FBI, which is investigating the allegations.

Notes from Ford’s therapy sessions that mention the assault as well as the results of a polygraph test she took will be turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee only after the FBI interviews her, her attorneys said in a letter to Committee chairman Chuck Grassley.

“Dr. Ford is prepared to provide those documents to the FBI when she is interviewed,” the letter said. “We have not yet heard from the FBI about scheduling an interview with her.”

The California psychology professor says Kavanaugh drunkenly assaulted her at a party when they were both in high school, pinning her to a bed, covering her mouth, and trying to undress her before she managed to escape. She testified to Congress on Thursday about the alleged assault, and Kavanaugh afterwards presented the Committee with an emotional defense, categorically denying all accusations against him.

Grassley requested the documents Tuesday evening in a letter to Ford’s attorneys.

A sworn statement from an ex boyfriend of Ford’s suggested that she may have perjured herself and raised “specific concerns about the reliability of her polygraph examination results,” the Iowa Republican warned. “The Senate therefore needs this information,” he wrote.rassley said Wednesday that a cloture vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination could come as soon as Friday.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/democrats-complain-brett-kavanaugh-fbi-investigation/

It’s unnecessary to begin with, and is not a criminal probe.

The Delay, Delay, Delay strategy to stop Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court is taking the predictable course. Once they got Republicans to agree to the one-week delay, Democrats immediately started complaining that the time limit was arbitrary — that the FBI should have whatever time is necessary “to get the job done.”

Therein lies the issue, which Democrats have obfuscated from the start. “The job” is not the FBI’s job, it is the Senate’s; and the job is not to conduct a criminal investigation, it is to develop enough information that the Senate can responsibly exercise its constitutional advice-and-consent duty.

Thus understood, “the job” is already done. The Senate has more information about this nominee than it has had about any judicial nominee in history. It has vetted him before, approving his nomination to the prestigious D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. In the ensuing dozen years, Kavanaugh has issued hundreds of opinions, many of which are influential in the Supreme Court and the lower courts. He has, moreover, interacted with colleagues and litigants who give him high grades for collegiality and temperament. He has hired and mentored an impressive and diverse stable of law clerks, who think the world of him and are coveted for distinguished positions in the legal profession, including Supreme Court clerkships.

Furthermore, this nomination is the occasion for the seventh FBI background check of Kavanaugh’s career. The number is high because he has held positions of high responsibility, including national-security duties. Consequently, he has been carefully examined and found fit for access to the nation’s most closely held defense secrets.

https://pjmedia.com/video/hillary-clinton-says-kavanaugh-self-defense-is-a-denial-of-the-legitimacy-of-womens-stories/

On Tuesday at The Atlantic fest, Hillary Clinton laughed at President Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh. She attacked him as “unconvincing” and lacking “judicial temperament,” but praised Christine Blasey Ford — the woman who accused him of sexual assault — as “credible,” despite her story’s many holes and inconsistencies. She also praised the two women who angrily accosted Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) last Friday.

Why did she so vigorously defend the accusers and dismiss the accused? It seemed to boil down to one statement — made about then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas — that a man defending himself against sexual assault accusations “very much felt like — and in fact it probably was — the denial of the legitimacy of women’s stories” (emphasis added).

If any innocent man’s defense against allegations of sexual assault constitutes “the denial of the legitimacy of women’s stories,” then no man ever can defend himself against a false accusation.

Clinton framed her views on the issue in terms of women triumphing over a long tradition of patriarchy. She claimed the modern movement against sexual assault is “finally righting the balance, because there’s been a tremendous imbalance on women’s lives, women’s narratives. They’ve been historically dismissed, condescended to.”

The former presidential candidate argued that women in politics “find themselves picked apart, second-guessed, held to a double standard. We want to have as much right to our agency, to our autonomy, as we should be able to have, where women’s lives are valued as much as men’s lives, their stories are as important as men’s stories, they are written into history, not out of history. So that’s what I see happening.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The unquestioned conventional wisdom in Washington these days is that suburban female voters will overwhelmingly reject Republicans in November elections and that the controversy over Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh will be a contributing factor. But perhaps many of these voters would first like to know what happened to two particular suburban females in the 1980s.

It won’t be easy to find out, because most professional journalists seem to have lost interest in trying to ascertain whether Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee was accurate. Judging by recent coverage, much of the press corps is now endlessly fascinated by demands for a broader investigation of her allegation of attempted rape by a teenage Brett Kavanaugh but largely uninterested in the emerging evidence.

For example, most reporters don’t seem to have noticed that the woman who was the other teenage girl allegedly attending the party described by Professor Ford still isn’t backing her story. CBS News mentioned in the fifth paragraph of a story last night:

An attorney who represents Leland Keyser, who Ford said was at the house that night, told CBS News Keyser met with the FBI on Saturday. Through the attorney, Howard Walsh, Keyser has said she does not refute Ford’s account but that she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where Kavanaugh was present, with or without Ford.

Today Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Times reports:

Leland Keyser, the high school friend Christine Blasey Ford counted on to corroborate her sexual assault charges, has told the FBI she has no knowledge of the supposed 1982 party or the accused, Brett Kavanaugh.

Howard J. Walsh III, her attorney, told The Washington Times that she met with the FBI on Saturday.

Asked if she had repeated the same two statements she provided the Senate Judiciary Committee, the lawyer answered, “yes.”

Sex-crimes prosecutor Rachel Mitchell reported to Republican senators on the inconsistencies in the evolving story from Professor Ford and specifically noted two statements that her lifelong friend provided to the Judiciary Committee:

Ms. Keyser stated through counsel that, “[s]imply put, Ms. Keyser does not know Mr. Kavanaugh and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford.” In a subsequent statement to the Committee through counsel, Ms. Keyser said that “the simple and unchangeable truth is that she is unable to corroborate [Dr. Ford’s allegations] because she has no recollection of the incident in question.”

Ms. Mitchell also noted another relevant part of the professor’s testimony:

Dr. Ford testified that her friend Leland, apparently the only other girl at the party, did not follow up with Dr. Ford after the party to ask why she had suddenly disappeared.

Professor Ford has reasonably made the argument that being assaulted would have made the evening much more memorable to her than to anyone else. But she’s also describing a chain of events that ought to have made an impression upon her friend. Perhaps the FBI is now exploring why a 15-year-old Leland Keyser, surprised to learn that she was the only girl at a party with older boys, would not have asked her friend at some point why she left without a word. It’s important to emphasize here that this is not a question of whether Ms. Keyser would remember such communication more than three decades later. Professor Ford testified that such communication never occurred.

One could argue that given that Ms. Keyser’s story hasn’t changed since her statements delivered by her lawyer to the committee, this is not news. But the whole premise of the new government investigation is that such statements are insufficient and that witnesses must be interviewed by FBI agents.

There is also of course an argument in this era that those alleging sexual assault should be believed, but Professor Ford will have difficulty arguing at this point that her account should not be questioned. That’s because her legal team has repeatedly demanded that she be questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Perhaps raising again the issue of whose interests her attorneys are really serving, the Ford team has been public in its call for further examination of the events she’s described. “NEW: FBI has not responded to requests from Christine Blasey Ford to do an interview. “We have not heard from the FBI, despite repeated efforts to speak with them,” her lawyer, Debra S. Katz, told me, when asked,” tweeted New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg on Sunday.

Whatever the government does, there seems to be a job here for reporters as well in trying to discover more facts about what did or did not happen in a house in suburban Maryland in the 1980s. But good luck getting the press corps to focus on the alleged sexual assault when reporters are on the hunt for evidence of drunken ice-tossing.

The bet here is that suburban women, just like people in every other demographic group, want evidence to evaluate the Ford claim.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/02/61-questions-the-fbi-should-ask-about-christine-blasey-fords-story/

I am a former prosecutor, a father of three daughters, a brother to five sisters. I’ve drawn up a list of questions relevant to the FBI investigation of Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Several, including the first ones, are for the FBI to answer. The rest are for the FBI to ask of Ford and others, including her parents and her siblings. The FBI may not read this, of course, but it may help you assess the FBI’s work and Ford’s credibility. It can be difficult for any of us to remember an incident. And our memories can play tricks. As an examiner, all we can do is try to help the alleged witness remember what happened, with all five senses and the accompanying emotions.

I number these for reference. I have sought to avoid including any questions that appeared to have been answered already.

I won’t address why I’ve included each question, but let me describe the two groupings of questions.

First, there are a few questions on Ford’s knowledge of national current affairs and of Washington, D.C., affairs, and on her knowledge of Kavanaugh’s career. It may be that because she lives on the West Coast and works in a field unrelated to history, current events, journalism, law, and government, Ford may have been totally oblivious to Kavanaugh’s career. Until we know the answers to those questions, we don’t know. But a good prosecutor could line up one detail after another, and raise suspicions about why, after all of the national notoriety Kavanaugh received, especially after his nomination to the D.C. Circuit (that lasted three years), she raised no allegation against him before his nomination to the Supreme Court.

Second, there are questions about who knew Ford was leaving the gathering on the first floor to go upstairs. It is not likely that two boys lay in wait on the second floor for her. So they must have gone up the stairs behind her, so close behind her that she didn’t have enough time to get to the bathroom. Not just one boy, but two. And neither of them lived in that house. And she didn’t notice, or hear, that? And no one else noticed this oddity either?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dianne-feinstein-friday-too-soon-to-vote-brett-kavanaugh/

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said on Tuesday that lawmakers should not be made to vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court this week.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Monday that the Senate would vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation on Friday, at the conclusion of the one-week FBI investigation into the allegations of sexual assault that have been levied against the nominee by three women.

“The time for endless delay and destruction has come to a close,” McConnell said. “Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination is out of committee, we’re considering it here on the floor, and Mr. President, we’ll be voting this week.”

Feinstein, who led her Democratic colleagues in calling for the confirmation vote to be delayed pending an FBI probe, said on Tuesday that the report detailing the findings of the investigation should not be made public.“It would seem to me that if people are going to be identified, this ought to be held very close,” she said.

McConnell confirmed on Tuesday afternoon that the report will only be seen by senators and will not be made publicly available.

The White House ordered the FBI to investigate the sexual-assault allegations against Kavanaugh on Friday at the behest of Republican leadership. The FBI was initially instructed to interview just four witnesses, but the White House expanded the probe on Monday, instructing the FBI to interview any witnesses with pertinent information.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/fallout-from-the-kavanaugh-hearings-a-permanent-cloud/

After the trial by fire, he could prove to be one of the most fearless, principled justices on the Court.

Conventional wisdom suggests that, if confirmed, Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh forever will be “smeared” and stained by past frenzied unfounded allegations of sexual assault.

Yet the opposite just as well may be true. As a Supreme Court justice, Kavanaugh would have withstood every imaginable smear and slander and yet stayed defiant in defending his character and past, proof of both his determination and principles. His near-solitary rebuttal to his Senate accusers may suggest that Kavanaugh could prove to be among the most fearless justices on the Court.

Indeed, the only lasting effect, if any, of the serial smears lodged against him might be that in the future, as in the case of Justice Thomas, Kavanaugh would be essentially immune from progressive media attacks. What he went through likely has inoculated him from the Georgetown-party-circuit syndrome of conservative Supreme Court judges’ eventually becoming more liberal by the insidious socialization within the larger D.C. progressive media, political, and cultural landscape.

Incidentally, contrary to popular opinion, Clarence Thomas hardly remains under a permanent cloud after his ordeal. What stopped further Robert Borking for a while was the resistance and pushback of Clarence Thomas. Far from being ruined by unproven charges, he resisted the mob, got confirmed, and thereby established a precedent that innuendo, ipso facto, would not derail a nominee. For three decades, Thomas has not been regarded as suspect by most Americans but is seen as inspirational for his courage in facing down character assassination.

We have a strange standard of calibrating relative Supreme Court comportment. Thomas certainly has never said from the bench anything remotely like Justice Ginsburg’s “Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”