Big Jolly Times
October 10, 2018
Tom wrote:
Has anybody ever thought that neither Ford nor Kavanaugh are lying, that is deliberately making false statements they know are false. It was a long time ago but from listening to Kavanaugh testify and hearing what some of his high school and college friends had to say, I’d bet he was a binge drinker. That was common when I was in college (during the LBJ and Nixon administrations) and it’s still common today. Students study their asses off from Sunday afternoon until the last class on Friday, then they get drunker than hell Friday and Saturday.
When Justice Kavanaugh was in high school and his freshman year at Yale, he was by definition young and stupid. I did lots of things when I was young and stupid that give me the chills now. Lord knows what he did when he was young, stupid and drunk. And, you can bet that when he came home drunk while in high school, his parents said something like, “Thank God its only beer. He could be smoking marijuana.” It might have happened and he doesn’t remember.
That shouldn’t disqualify him from anything 35 years later. He’s no longer young and he’s demonstrably not stupid.
As for Dr. Ford, like her, my daughter is a PhD psychologist who is a research scientist in a major research university. And, as any psychologist (or people like me who are lawyers) will tell you, memory is a fragile thing. Our brains aren’t video machines that play back what we saw and heard. That’s especially true when you’ve young and experiencing a major scary, traumatic incident. People might remember something that is not factually correct. There have been dozens of cases in which a person spent decades in prison based on eyewitness testimony only to be found innocent when the DNA is tested. There are dozens of studies showing how unreliable eyewitness identification is.
No one seems to have trouble believing former altar boys (yes, I was one of those too) who 30 or 40 years later say they were abused by a priest. I’m pretty sure something happened to Dr. Ford at that party but it may not have been what she remembers today. Or, it might have been exactly as she remembers it.
What is important is that we don’t pick who to believe based on our partisan view of the world. That is the road to trouble. There’s another psychological theory called confirmation bias. We tend to hear things that match our preconceived notions. Two people, one a conservative Republican and the other a liberal Democrat, might listen to the same political speech and hear something different.
If we examine the facts dispassionately and can’t decide who is telling the truth, we can’t decide who’s telling the truth. That happens.
What is important is that we examine facts and supporting data dispassionately and try to avoid confirmation bias and looking at it through the lens of our politics.
Peter D responded:
Tom, if Dr. Ford had provided the requested supporting documentation to the committee, it might have bolstered the case that she was telling the truth as she remembered it. It would have also supported her version of events if a single one of her named witnesses had remembered such a party, her best friend would have reason to remember if Dr. Ford left her alone as the sole female at a drinking party full of guys.
And it’s tough to get around her terrifying fear of flying that prevented her from attending the hearings earlier when it came out that she flies all the time. All of that also ignores the other inconsistencies such as the home remodel serving as the reason to get couples therapy in 2012 yet the remodel was in 2008. As you say, the memory is a fragile thing.
Contrasting that with the testimony of Justice Kavanaugh who was very up front about his drinking and admitted to drinking to excess at times. He also admitted he had a weak stomach so he puked when drinking too much, the difference between someone puking and being a blackout, memory loss binge drinker is very substantial, especially without a single specific, confirmed case of his doing so.
While I don’t discount the possibility Dr Ford was attacked at some point in her life, and accept that the two parties were acquainted, only one person on Earth seems to think “that party” as you put it, ever took place. Even if you use her unproven outcry claim from 2012, 30 years after the events were supposed to have taken lace, isn’t it more likely that she transposed Kavanaugh and the others from her youth into a completely generic party that never took place, than her fluid recall of a party no one else remembers?
So I completely agree with your final sentence, the facts just do not support the claim. As far as the politics of the matter, the totality of circumstances shows the heavy influence of the left in how the parties were treated, the withheld letter, the scrubbing of social media by Dr. Ford, and the rest of it.
As a lawyer, wouldn’t you love to have cases where the witnesses against your client refuted everything stated by the DA, where the state refused to provide supporting documents (Brady aside), and even the sole accuser admitted they weren’t sure of the facts?
Tom replied:
Peter: What I'm saying is that the liberals say Dr. Ford is telling God's honest truth and everything she says is gospel while conservatives say Judge Kavanaugh is telling the truth. There's not enough data to be sure. Everyone is looking at it through their own political prism.
In criminal law, that should be an acquittal but usually it's a guilty verdict in the real world. But a senate confirmation hearing isn't a criminal trial.
As a larger issue, the charge of unwanted sexual advance or sexual assault now seems to be enough. Many colleges and universities have internal procedures that give the accused student less due process than he would get in North Korea. People's lives are being ruined by expulsions and suspensions from colleges on nothing more than a she said, we don't need to hear from him and he doesn't need to know what she said procedure.
As to Judge Kavanaugh, I still say that a drunken stupid thing while in college isn't enough to make me vote against him if I had been a senator. What would make me vote against him is if he lied about it.
I'm not saying he lied. I'm saying I can't be sure one way or the other on the information I have.
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