Rape/Sexual Assault Culture

There's no debate. It only matters if you're a Democrat.

 

Upon further review, and upon listening to the authors in a 50 minute interview, I reject this post. The authors are thorough, and significantly more fair to Kavanagh than the right has been to Ramirez and Blasey-Ford.

 

And the authors point out that it's the Trump Way. Hit back. No remorse. No sympathy.

And Kavanagh, faced with the opportunity to do the right thing and acknowledge youthful indescretions (the authors found nothing like this after Kavanaugh's 19th year), and apologize for the pain he caused in his immaturity, and thereby probably lose his nomination bid, went full Trump. So ******** him.

 

Look up Bob Packwood, (R) Oregon. Republican Senate was preparing to expel him before he resigned. A democrat then narrowly won the special election to fill the seat. This was all contemporary of Bill Clinton, who was given a complete pass by the Dems. Do you think Al Franken would have been "pushed out" if there was a chance he could have been replaced by a Republican? Those racist/misogynist democrats are still running Virginia. Could that be because the next person in the line of succession is a Republican?

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Packwood

Despite pressure for open hearings from the public and from female Senators, especially Barbara Boxer from California, the Senate ultimately decided against them. The Ethics Committee's indictment, running to ten-volumes and 10,145 pages, much of it from Packwood's own writings, according to a report in The New York Times, detailed the sexual misconduct, obstruction of justice, and ethics charges being made against him.[37] The chairman of the Ethics Committee, Republican senator Mitch McConnell, referred to Packwood's "habitual pattern of aggressive, blatantly sexual advances, mostly directed at members of his own staff or others whose livelihoods were connected in some way to his power and authority as a Senator" and said Packwood's behaviour included "deliberately altering and destroying relevant portions of his diary" which Packwood himself had written in the diary were "very incriminating information".[37]
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Is that the same Mitch McConnell? It can't be.

Four years later, during debate on President Clinton's impeachment, McConnell said that the Republicans knew that it was very likely Packwood's seat would fall to the Democrats if Packwood were forced out. However, McConnell said, he and his fellow Republicans felt that it came down to a choice of "retain the Senate seat or retain our honor."[39]
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just imagine the world in which Mitch McConnell gave a rat's asshole about "honor."

 

You said "more vile" than Ted Cruz.

Let that sink in everyone.

(Not that you are wrong, of course)

 

Whether Kavanaugh's 18-year old actions were enough to deny him the Supreme Court membership, we can debate that. I might well take his side on that matter. What's not debatable is that it's wrong to prevent the debate by not only shutting down the allegation without investigation, but insulting the woman in the process, and attacking those who report her claims.

 

As I said, one of the reporters said that, as a result of their digging, it's very likely he's been better as an adult, and he has good relationship with nearly every woman he's ever worked it. This book is by no means the hack job it's being treated as by the Republicans.

 

Speaking of which, I'd like to return to the NYT article. My understand based on your previous post was: 1) The original version of the article conflicted in one place with the book, but 2) That conflict didn't affect the Deborah Ramirez portion of the article. Is that correct?

 

I don't think there's any doubt that he lied many MANY times under oath at his confirmation hearing. It's hilarious to see many GOPers who said Clinton should be impeached for lying under oath* on a non-material matter to his presidency, but Kavanaugh is A-OK for lying to get the job he now has.

*I have to put in my mandatory disclaimer that based on the rules his lawyers got, I don't think he perjured himself. Obstruction, yes. Perjury, no. A handful of congresscritters voted that way, no on perjury, yes on obstruction.

But for whatever reason, nowadays it's impossible to find a journo or pol who mentions the more provable claim.

 

That is correct. And I've seen three right wing sites stay otherwise. Only one has issued a correction. In the comments.

 

Every right-wing headline I have seen has been deeply misleading. Fox, The National Review, and so forth were never trustworthy, but they have declined precipitously under The Rule of Trump. Now they're barely more reliable than he is.

There's no benefit from "hearing from the other side" when the other side functions solely as a propaganda wing.

 

All legit criticisms, and I would have liked to have seen the Dems do more with that. But nobody was listening once the Blasey Ford news came out. From that point forward, the hearing was sex, sex, sex.

 

This rambling post is more proof that brevity is the soul of wit. But the fact that there are other considerations involved in voting for president than his sexual history was precisely my point.

 

The NYT article somehow left out the fact that the alleged victim in fact refused to speak to the report, and also that her friends reported that she didn't remember the instance. Allegedly, these points were in the original draft of the article, but then the NYT editors removed them. These seem like big details to leave out.

 

Wankler says otherwise, if I read him correctly.

 

I checked. Doc was correct. Right wing deception. The story was about Ramirez, and there are no doubts about what she consistently has said, and there are no doubts that several former Yale students backed up portions of her story.

That the right would protest about the accuracy of side issue, while accepting Trump's daily whoppers, is hypocrisy of a grand scale. And, I may add, once again ignoring Ramirez. It seems to be very hard to get you people to listen to her; you always change the subject.

 

The actual reporters of the article admit that this happened in an interview with Chuck Ross.

https://twitter.com/ChuckRossDC?ref...9/09/17/brett-kavanaugh-new-york-times-story/

 

Here are the reporters from their interview on NPR' Fresh Air yesterday.

POGREBIN: I see it as lending credibility in this picture of, you know, now how we started - have come to understand this young man, which is that he grew up in this milieu that was largely male. He went to an all-male high school. It was kind of - he was very much associated with athletes. There was a currency that was kind of jocular and disparaging of women in a casual way, you know, perhaps only verbal way - sort of ironically that Brett Kavanaugh was not, like, a ladies man. He kind of didn't really have the moves. He didn't get the girls. And that's kind of why he seems to have relied on alcohol conceivably to kind of make himself feel a little more socially relaxed because, you know, he wasn't necessarily that adept. And so there's kind of this ham-handed quality of let's say, you know, pawing at Christine Blasey Ford's bathing suit or, you know, thrusting his penis into Deborah Ramirez's face that is sort of all of a piece with a certain kind of juvenile behavior.

That said, you know, we did find, after considerable digging, that in the 36 years since these allegations, he basically grew up. He, you know, in our view became a better man either because he sort of consciously sought to reform these ways or he just simply matured into a person who actually ended up promoting women - in terms of his own practice, hiring female clerks to a notable degree and promoting women in the profession and being a family man and having daughters of his own whose basketball team he coaches and actually being an individual who people speak highly of in terms of character and professional just behavior on both sides of the aisle​

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Yeah: total hatchet job. Right.

Name one book about Hillary Clinton penned by a Republican operative that has a paragraph like that second one.

And addressing the point in your post...

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us my guests are New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly. They covered the Brett Kavanaugh hearings for The New York Times, where they're both reporters. And now they have a new book called "The Education Of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation." You raise a question in the book that I'm going to pose to you. What if Brett Kavanaugh did what he was accused of, but his conduct has been good since then? How should those past actions be taken into account? I know you don't have, like, a pat answer for that, but I'm sure it's something you've reflected on a lot.

KELLY: We've talked about it a lot. And we feel like it's something that our readers should make up their minds on, hopefully armed with some of the facts and evidence that we raise in our book. There are a few ways to look at it, obviously. I mean, there is one school of thought that says if this type of behavior, which is to say sexual assault or sexually themed mistreatment of women, even just verbal sort of misogynistic commentary - if this is part of your character ever, it's part of your character as an adult and that a Supreme Court justice perhaps should be held to the very highest standard of conduct of any public officer in our country. So it's all relevant. Doesn't matter when it happened.

There's another school of thought that is - deals with our mentality in this country around young people and our juvenile justice system. And in all 50 states, it varies a little bit state to state. But there are protections for juveniles who commit crimes. And court proceedings, court documents, settlements - any sort of these legal processes that might surround a juvenile crime are kept confidential. And the reason is we want to give young people a chance to reform themselves and learn from their ways and not be haunted by the mistakes of their past. Now, this is obviously a theoretical. There was no police report here, let alone any set of charges. This is only an allegation. But just as a way of thinking about our culture and how we evaluate things that happen when a person is 17, 18 - at the very oldest, Kavanaugh might have been 19 when the Ramirez allegations were said to have occurred. So those are sort of two ways of thinking about it. And we feel like they're both compelling, as are many arguments in between.​

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Trump has slimed pretty much everything.

https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=761191576

 

I agree. I just wish that was universal, regardless of party affiliation and status.