Five prosecutors point out that prosecutors deal with conflicting claims all the time.

While some argue that the truth about this incident will come down to a “he said, she said” situation, that’s not how it looks to us. Prosecutors and investigators are confronted with these scenarios frequently and don’t just throw up their hands and say, “We can’t decide.” Instead, prosecutors look for corroborating evidence — and there are strong indications already that Ford is telling the truth about her attack. Here are some of those indicators:

First, there is corroboration. Ford’s therapist’s notes in 2012, provided to The Washington Post, generally record her account of the attack. To believe that this is a made-up tale to prevent Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Ford would have had to plant the seeds of this story in 2012. That makes no sense.

Second, while not determinative, the fact that Ford passed a polygraph administered by a former FBI agent lends credence to her claims. Polygraph exams are inadmissible in court because they are not always reliable, but the FBI and other law enforcement agencies frequently use polygraph tests to assess the credibility of witnesses and defendants.

In addition, consider the motives of Ford, who by all accounts is not a particularly politically active person, to go public with allegations of sexual assault. It appears that she did not want to speak publicly at all, but that reporters discovered her identity and pursued her. Ford knew that she would be personally attacked in front of her children, colleagues, students and friends. There is no reasonable explanation for why she would subject herself to such humiliation other than the reason she has given: that she felt she had a duty as a citizen to speak up.

A duty as a citizen with a particular kind of knowledge that should be very relevant when it comes to a Supreme Court candidate, especially one who will end abortion rights.

Ford’s delay in coming forward isn’t evidence that she’s lying, because there are other reasons for delaying, ones these prosecutors are familiar with.

If you are still inclined to believe that Ford is lying, ask yourself: Why would she create a defense witness by identifying Mark Judge, who was and still is indisputably a friend of Kavanaugh’s, as being present and participating in this attack? Why would she place at the scene an individual who could, because of loyalties to his friend, contradict her account if she were making this up? She wouldn’t.

…

Some have said that because these alleged acts occurred so long ago, when Kavanaugh was a teenager, they should not be disqualifying — even if true. We strongly disagree. In our criminal justice system, people 17 years old (and younger) are held accountable for acts they commit, sometimes in very harsh ways. It is simply not acceptable for one of the people tasked with overseeing that criminal justice system to not be held to the same standard.

Additionally, attempted rape is not simply an act of youthful recklessness, as some have cautioned. Few of us have such serious crimes in our pasts — and those who have committed them should not expect to easily be confirmed to posts like Supreme Court justice.

The five prosecutors are Mimi Rocah, Barbara McQuade, Jill Wine-Banks, Joyce White Vance and Maya Wiley.

Oh really.

Brett Kavanaugh talking about his high school in 2015: “What happens at Georgetown Prep, stays at Georgetown Prep.”

I can't imagine any parent accepting this view. Is this really what America wants in its next Supreme Court Justice? pic.twitter.com/WhL8YeZQ78

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) September 18, 2018

Jennifer Rubin on Trump’s latest move to obstruct justice:

The move is unprecedented. Never have we seen a president declassify documents in contravention of clear warnings from the intelligence community that doing so would harm national security. That this occurs in yet another effort to derail an investigation into his own wrongdoing, and to smear law enforcement officials, only underscores the degree to which Trump now puts his own political survival above the security of the American people.

I would omit that “now” – he’s done that all along.

“At best, a disgraceful distraction from the [Supreme Court nominee Brett M.] Kavanaugh matter; at worst, an abuse of power tantamount to obstruction of, and tampering with, the Russian investigation,” observes former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi. “People die when sources and methods are disclosed, this is not a game.”

That whole protect and defend the constitution thing? Pah, mere words.

Trump’s actions constitute such a grave violation of his oath to “take care” that laws are faithfully executed, his decision raises constitutional concerns. “Certainly, this is yet another action that triggers the threshold event of a House Judiciary Committee inquiry into abuse of power. Indeed, this is one of the more odious ones on the long and ever-growing list,” former White House ethics counsel Norman Eisen tells me. “To play political games with sensitive national security and law enforcement information is reprehensible. To use declassification as a pawn in his battles with his perceived adversaries is worse. It also weakens our national security and law enforcement, and so raises the danger to all of us.” Even if this issue alone does not constitute a singular impeachable offense, he says, if the declassification decision was “undertaken with corrupt intent, [it] certainly could form part of the mosaic of an obstruction case.”

Others see the abuse of presidential power regarding classification as a parallel, but distinct, issue. Constitutional scholar Laurence H. Tribe argues, “Has this president repeatedly and dangerously abused his powers to classify and declassify information — risking our national security to punish his critics (as with [former CIA director] John Brennan), undermine the work of those investigating him and his family, and reward family members with access to sensitive information they would otherwise be unable to access? The answer appears to be “yes” and, at least, the question warrants systematic investigation by the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.”

“What will be disclosed is that there was no basis for these FISA Warrants, that the important information was kept from the court, there’s going to be a disproportionate influence of the (Fake) Dossier. Basically you have a counter terrorism tool used to spy on a presidential…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 18, 2018

….campaign, which is unprecedented in our history.” Congressman Peter King Really bad things were happening, but they are now being exposed. Big stuff!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 18, 2018

Ah the riches of the Intellectual Dark Web. Bari Weiss goes on tv to repeat the “who among us has not assaulted someone at 17, and should that really disqualify someone for a seat on the Supreme Court?” mantra.

WEISS: What about the deeper, moral, cultural, like, the ethical question here? Let’s say he did this exactly as she said. Should the fact that a 17 year old, presumably very drunk kid, did this, should this be disqualifying? That’s the question at the end of the day, isn’t it?

RUHLE: Wait, hold on. We’re not talking about should he be disqualified to be a dog catcher. We’re talking about to be a Supreme Court justice.

WEISS: I’m aware.

Cool, she’s aware, but why shouldn’t the standard for the Supreme Court be that high? It’s not even all that high, saying no assaulters thanks. The age cutoff is hardly an absolute. What if it’s a kid of 5? One who likes to kick dogs and cats, for instance? Do we just say “well, 5…” or do we recall that that can be a warning sign for psychopathy? The issue isn’t Kavanaugh breaking a window or smoking weed, it’s Kavanaugh assaulting a girl two years his junior. He looks to be a fairly beefy guy, and he had two years on her, and she was a girl. Yes this is something we should be taking seriously.

You know, if he’d done it to a boy two years his junior – jumped him, pinned him down, tried to drag his clothes off to humiliate him – I bet everyone would be taking that seriously. Everyone would grasp that that would show he was a bully as a teenager. But because it was a girl and the goal was sex, that somehow becomes not real violence any more. He didn’t want to hurt her, he just wanted to fuck her – and that’s totally understandable and forgivable and not something that should stand between him and ending abortion rights in the US for a generation.

What Dr. Ford describes is criminal conduct by Kavanaugh, such as battery. Voluntary intoxication is not a defense. Being 17 is also not a defense, but it may affect whether a defendant is tried as an adult.

The law has already settled this "ethical" question by Bari Weiss. https://t.co/JpHDWxp4j5

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) September 18, 2018

Alexandra Petri wrote this scorching parody yesterday, and I regret not reading it until just now. (A whole day lost!)

“If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.”
— A lawyer close to the White House, speaking to Politico

Look, who among us?

If, apparently, a single alleged assault at a single party decades ago is to be frowned upon, then no man is safe, right?

What’s next? You can’t harass a colleague and serve on the Supreme Court? You can’t pick up high schoolers outside custody hearings and serve in the Senate? You can’t have a meat locker full of female femurs and expect to breeze through your confirmation as interior secretary?

Right? Won’t somebody at last think of the men and boys before it’s too late?

I wonder if she too saw Tom Nichols’s tweets and was inspired by them.

This is a good point, but all I care about in this is whether we're establishing a new precedent that 35 year old accusations of things you did as a minor are now fair game as political weapons in DC. If so, okay, but no complaining when it happens again after this – as it will. https://t.co/T0LKE3HgiJ

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

“Things you did as a minor.” It’s funny (i.e. infuriating) how consistently he veiled it, how adamantly he refused to say “35 year old accusations of assaulting a teenage girl” in all that fretting about precedents.

Back to Petri:

This isn’t just my worry. This isn’t just something horrible I am now revealing about myself. This is an every-man problem.

If suddenly, as a country, we decide that violently attempting to assault someone is, like, bad, then that knocks out 98, maybe 99 percent of men, just going off the locker-room talk I’ve heard.

Look, which of us is 100 percent certain all his sexual encounters are consensual? That isn’t most people’s baseline, surely? You’re telling me I am supposed to encounter dozens, hundreds, thousands of women in my life, some drunk and some sober and some with really good legs and just … not assault any of them?

It’s funny, in a bitter way, but it’s also real.

I mean, it’s not as though they’re people, are they? At the moment of conception, yes, but then they come out Daughters, not people! They grow into objects; some become Wives or Mothers, others Hags or Crones. Then they die! If they were people, we would not expect dominion over their bodies, surely; if they were people, we would not feel entitled to their smiles. If they were people, I could read a novel with a female protagonist and not be instantly confused and alarmed.

No. They are an unintelligible something else. They are to be put on pedestals, as John Kelly urges, or groped, as the president urges. They are impervious to cold, capable of wearing a bikini on the most frigid day to please us; they can run great distances in heels without discomfort; they were created for us from a rib and designed as our companion. If they have wants of their own, there is really no way of knowing.

And even if they do have wants of their own, those wants are rudimentary and shallow, and forgotten in an instant. They may seem to struggle and resist when we throw them onto beds and jump on top of them, cover their screaming mouths with our hands, and drag their clothes off, but actually it’s just a reflex, with no connection to anything going on in their tiny smooth brains.

If assault renders a man unfit to serve on the Supreme Court, then how are we to discern the Founders’ intent? I mean, Jefferson, hello? And what is going to become of the presidency? Who wants to live in that world?

Every man should be worried. If boys cannot be boys, then how can boys be men who rise to the highest offices in the land? If this stops being something you can get away with, then will anyone still be above the law?

Yeah, I don’t see this whole move getting anywhere.

Trump’s vile spawn was quick to sneer at the woman who dared to report that Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her years ago.

Donald Trump, Jr., son of President Donald Trump, posted an image to his Instagram account on Sunday appearing to mock the woman who accused Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.

The image shows a piece of scrap paper with childish handwriting reading: “Hi Cindy, will you be my girlfriend,” followed by two boxes marked “yes” and “no.” “Love, Bret [sic]” the note ended.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BnwjBsVnSN1/?utm_source=ig_embed

Hur hur; such a funny guy.

Megan Garber at the Atlantic on this whole “all teenage boys try to rape girls, let’s have a little charity here” thing:

Ford’s account of the event has been corroborated by her husband; by a therapist, with whom she discussed the alleged event in 2012; by the notes of a 2013 therapy session, which refer to a “rape attempt” Ford survived as a teenager; and by a polygraph test Ford took on the advice of a lawyer who knows the doubt with which the world, still, reflexively responds to the recollections of women. What the professor describes, in her letter to her Congressional representatives and again to the Post, is by no means the typical stuff of mere youthful indiscretion. What Ford is talking about—what she has been talking about, for years—is not the behavior of kids simply being kids, boys simply being boys. What she is alleging, instead, is cruelty; it is entitlement; it is violence; it is assault.

And it’s not the case that all boys do it or that it’s just a normal part of being a testosterone-addled kid.

The White House—which of course has multidimensional interests in downplaying negative claims about Kavanaugh, particularly those involving sexual misconduct—has thus far defended its nominee in the broadest of terms, claiming its support for Kavanaugh and otherwise offering “no additional comment.” (Donald Trump’s evergreen advice on countering allegations of misconduct: “You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women. If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead.”) A lawyer close to the White House, interviewed by Politico, reiterated the idea that, regardless of Ford’s claims, Kavanaugh’s nomination would not be withdrawn. On the contrary: “If anything, it’s the opposite,” the lawyer told the reporter Burgess Everett, suggesting that the White House has been, actually, galvanized by the allegations against its nominee. “If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something.”

Really. Saying all males are that violent and entitled? That’s their defense?

And here is the deeper venality of the boys-being-boys defense: It normalizes. It erases the specific details of Christine Blasey Ford’s stated recollections with the soggy mop of generalized male entitlement. What red-blooded guy, after all, its logic assumes, hasn’t done, in some way, the kinds of things Ford has described? Who, as a younger version of himself, hasn’t gotten stumble-drunk, pinned down a woman, groped her, tried to undress her, and then, when she resisted, held his hand over her mouth to muffle her screams? (“It was drunk teenagers playing seven minutes of heaven,” the Fox News columnist Stephen Miller tweeted, derisively.)

Once again, in much of the public discussion, the empathy settles on the man accused. There but for the grace, etc.: If youthful indiscretions like that are allowed to affect the fate of a basketball-coaching, soup-kitchen-volunteering, daughter-nurturing, carpool-driving Supreme Court nominee, whose fortunes wouldn’t be affected? “We’ve now gone from ‘he did this terrible thing at 17’ to ‘he’s a man who treated a woman like that,’” the professor and author Tom Nichols tweeted on Sunday. “Man, I hope all the people who are making this case had spotless lives at 17, because I sure as hell didn’t.”

Exactly. I spent much of yesterday afternoon, as you saw if you were around, disputing that tweet and a string of others defending the basic idea, from Tom Nichols. All his empathy was for the man, and the woman simply disappeared. Many people pointed this out to him, and still he kept on doing it. He can’t grasp that women actually exist even when people are saying it right to him.

The salient question about Ford’s allegations became, in some quarters, not whether they are true, but rather whether they count as allegations at all. The cruelties she describes—the alleged acts of dehumanization that left her traumatized, she says, as a 15-year-old and, still, as an adult—might be “terrible,” yes, but they are also … simply part of the natural order of things. Boys, figuring out how to be men. Locker-room talk, made manifest. “Drunk teenagers playing seven minutes of heaven.” Who wouldn’t be implicated in that? Who doesn’t see himself, in some way, in this age-old story? If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.Americans talk a lot, these days, about norms. What will be preserved, in the tumult and chaos of today’s politics; what is worth preserving; what will fall away. Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was already, in the profoundest of ways, a matter of norms: It will determine, almost inevitably, whether the women of America maintain autonomy over their bodies. Here, though, in Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that a young Brett Kavanaugh compromised her autonomy in another way, another norm is being litigated: the way we talk about sexual violence. Whether such violence will be considered an outrage, or simply a sad inevitability. Whether it will be treated as morally intolerable … or as something that, boys being boys and men being men, just happens.

Tom Nichols repeatedly described it that way – as just a thing that happened between two teenagers. Denial is a powerful force.

The New Yorker has a long piece on Sarah Sanders as Trump’s battering ram.

Trump needed a stronger link to evangelicals and women, and Sanders was happy to provide one. Despite the differences in their family backgrounds—Mike and Janet Huckabee grew up poor; Trump didn’t—the candidate felt familiar to her. Huckabee was an economic populist; Trump claimed to be one, too. Huckabee had campaigned on a promise to “restore America’s greatness”; Trump’s slogan was “Make America Great Again.” Huckabee wanted to ban abortion; Trump had vowed to appoint pro-life advocates to the bench. Like Huckabee, Trump enjoyed ad-libbing while giving speeches.

Sanders relished the idea of helping an outsider like Trump defeat the people she viewed as the ultimate Washington insiders: the Clintons. She appreciated Hillary Clinton for advancing the cause of female candidates, but loathed her politics. “She has shown her utter contempt for anyone that doesn’t support her and doesn’t think like her, and I think that’s a really scary thing to have in a President,” Sanders said, on a talk-radio show.

So she works for Trump, who is such a contrast to Clinton that way: he of course never shows his utter contempt for anyone who doesn’t support him and doesn’t think like him.

No but seriously. If Clinton were president now we can be absolutely sure she would not be issuing multiple tweets every day insulting people who don’t support her or agree with her. We can be sure she wouldn’t be issuing any tweets of that kind at all, because that’s not an intelligent responsible adult thing for a president to do. So Sanders loathes the “basket of deplorables” but is fine with “Pocahontas” and “Cryin’ Chuck” and “a very low-IQ individual” and “you can grab them by the pussy” and all the rest of it.

Maybe what she said is not what she really meant. Maybe the problem is just that Clinton is obviously both intelligent and informed.

Officially, the White House press secretary’s job is to represent the President and the executive branch before the press and the public, and to relay media inquiries to the White House. Acrimony among these various parties isn’t unusual: Ronald Reagan once muttered, “Sons of bitches,” after reporters questioned him. But the Trump Administration’s relationship with the press transcends ordinary discord. The President’s toxic relationship with the media demands that a press secretary behave, at least publicly, less as a source of information than as a battering ram—especially during a moment of crisis, like now.

“Like now” being in the wake of the publication of Woodward’s book and the anonymous op-ed.

Sanders has labelled “Fear” a work of “fiction,” and attempted to trivialize its celebrated author by noting that she hadn’t read his books. The day that the Op-Ed appeared, she convened her staff, then launched a counterattack questioning the mystery author’s honor, deploying such Trumpian keywords as “pathetic” and “coward.” On Twitter, she urged Americans to call the “failing NYT”— Trump’s favorite (and erroneous) characterization of the newspaper—and demand the unmasking of the “gutless loser” who’d written the piece. Her tweet included the paper’s main phone number.

Two former White House ethics chiefs declared that Sanders’s tweet had violated federal law. One of them, Richard Painter, who worked in the Bush Administration, told Newsweek that Sanders was “using her official position to interfere with the freedom of the press.” This wasn’t the first abuse-of-power complaint. In June, Sanders was accused of employing the @PressSec account to target the Red Hen—a restaurant in Virginia that, when she went to dine there, asked her to leave.

It’s what a battering ram does.

Perhaps Sanders’s greatest asset at the podium is her embodiment of the Trump voter. The supposedly populist President is tremendously wealthy, as are many top Administration figures: Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Steve Mnuchin, and Kellyanne Conway. Like Sanders, Vice-President Mike Pence is also a heartland Christian, but he’s rarely on TV, and he lacks the combative instinct that she shares with Trump. Sanders’s briefings offer repeated confirmation to Trump’s base that the U.S. government is being run by Christians standing up to condescending Beltway insiders. In a characteristic flourish, Sanders defended immigrant-family separations by noting that “it is very Biblical to enforce the law.”

It may be biblical, but is it specifically Christian? It’s not very “if they take your coat, give them your shirt too,” now is it.

In the Obama Administration, press briefings happened almost daily, and regularly exceeded an hour. Sanders’s have become sporadic and typically last about twenty minutes. (Olivier Knox, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, has complained to Sanders about the infrequency of briefings.) According to the Washington Post, Sanders “manufactures urgency”—exuding a righteous impatience that simultaneously limits her exposure to difficult questions and makes her appear determined to keep reporters in their place. In previous Administrations, most press briefings were low-key affairs in which journalists downloaded policy details; reporters were allowed many follow-ups, and sometimes asked dozens of them. Sanders grumbles if someone asks more than two questions. A Post analysis showed that, in her first year, she spent less time informing the public than Spicer had done in half that time. When C-span asked Sanders why her briefings were so short, she said, “I don’t think I take as long to get to the point.”

This gets back to that point about being intelligent and informed, and being threatened by that. A normal adult presidency, however annoying it may find critical reporters, understands that it owes it to the public to keep reporters informed. This one has contempt for the very idea.

Reporters complain that Sanders’s briefings almost never involve substantive disclosures. Instead, she deflects questions and returns to the same talking points: “stock market, at an all-time high”; “isis, on the run.” A White House reporter told me, “I’ve never learned a single thing in that briefing room that’s been helpful to me. It’s the part of my job that I dread most. You’re either being spun or gaslit.” Mike McCurry, a press secretary under Bill Clinton, has lamented that, in the Trump era, live briefings have devolved into an “entertainment product.” More and more, Sanders presents a televised reënactment of Trump’s Twitter feed.

And what is that useful for?

When McCurry chastised a reporter, he generally did so off camera. But Trump thrives on bullying antagonists in public, and has urged his staff to “fight” the press. In Sanders, he has found an eager pugilist. After Trump tweeted that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand used to beg him for contributions at Trump Tower—and “would do anything for them”—a reporter asked Sanders if this had a sexual implication. “Only if your mind was in the gutter would you have read it that way,” she retorted. Sanders prefers short, tough interviews to “soft,” one-on-one encounters in which she might drop her guard and say something that she will regret. In public, she tends to handle reporters with the sort of eye-rolling derision that Fox News’ Tucker Carlson levies against liberal guests. In one notorious exchange, Sanders told CNN’s Jim Acosta, who she thinks performs for the cameras, “I know it’s hard for you to understand even short sentences.”

So basically what Sanders does has nothing to do with informing reporters, but is instead just a branch of Trump’s Permanent Mass Rally.

Republicans are preparing the buckets of mud.

Judiciary Committee Republicans sent out a memo criticizing “Democrats’ tactics and motives” and calling on Feinstein to release “the letter she received back in July so that everyone can know what she’s known for weeks.” And four people close to the White House said they expected Republicans to question the accuser’s vague memories and why Feinstein, up for reelection in November with the Democratic base hungry for anti-Trump fodder, sat on the accusation for months.

They’re going to attack Feinstein for not acting on the letter and attack anyone who does act on the letter. All bases covered.

Three of those people also said they expect the president to go after Kavanaugh’s accuser rather than to turn on the judge. They noted that Trump has done so before, not just denouncing his own accusers but also attacking those of others, notably, failed Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore.

A lawyer close to the White House said the nomination will not be withdrawn.

“No way, not even a hint of it,” the lawyer said. “If anything, it’s the opposite. If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something.”

Pussygrabbers and rapists stick together.

God, he’s still doing it. The stubborn dishonesty of it and the absolute determination to remove the young woman who was assaulted from the picture is mind-boggling. Is this what Republicans are? Guys who struggle hard to draw a veil over attempted rape so that they can take women’s reproductive rights away at last?

As would mine. But I would not want to be the father who says: "Your life will now be defined by this one moment at a party, so just accept that it will be used at will at any point in your life."

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

It was more than a moment – they shoved her into the room, they locked the door, they turned the music up. It wasn’t “at a party”; it was upstairs from the party, where she had gone because she needed to pee.

But I'm still completely worried about stuff you did as a minor ending your career at 50. There's something in that I cannot get used to, and I have *always* felt this way. But @MalcolmNance made me think about this differently in a way a million other stupid insults didn't. /3x

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

It’s not “ending his career.” Potentially it will end his bid to be on the Supreme Court. That’s all.

Pretty sure I was around some felonies in the 1970s as a boy. Lots of drugs and bad stuff where I grew up. For a while, I was a kid who could just as easily have gone to jail as college. Maybe that's why I'm in a defensive crouch about this.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

But drugs are (mostly) a harm to the self. Assault is harm to the person assaulted. The issue isn’t a generalizes soup labeled “bad stuff”; the issue is sexual assault of a girl in a locked room.

I don't know, David. On the one hand, I'm rethinking this, because the argument that a national judge should be morally spotless, even to teen years, sways me. On the other, I'm not sure what happened between two teenagers and I'm creeped out by this emerging as the killer app.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

It didn’t HAPPEN. Assault is not a thing that happens; it’s a thing that an agent does.

That, for me, is the adult behavior that is even more disqualifying than anything that happened one night when he was 17.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

It’s not “anything that happened” – that is shifty, evasive, victim-erasing, agent-concealing language.

Some men can’t see that they’re erasing women even when you point it out to them directly. It’s astonishing.

Lordy lordy lordy – even Radio Free Tom, who is normally…sensible, at least.

Whoa. One was accused of as a continuing behavior while a senior supervisor at a Federal agency. The other's been accused of an incident of drunken assault at 17 years old. Both are terrible things, but they're not generically the same.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

It's giving me the willies to go back to "this happened between minors at a party in high school" as a permanent disqualification for anything. This is a powerful weapon that will be deployed again, and I think in ways that will have drastic and unintended consequences.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 16, 2018

ARGGGHHH! It did not “happen between two minors.” A minor male did it to a minor female. It wasn’t a mutual sex act, it was a teenage boy assaulting a teenage girl, while another teenage boy stood ready to provide backup.

It never ceases to amaze me the way some men – even apparently liberal men – just cannot see or imagine the point of view of women.

Now the woman who said Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were both teenagers has gone public – with great reluctance.

Earlier this summer, Christine Blasey Ford wrote a confidential letter to a senior Democratic lawmaker alleging that Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her more than three decades ago, when they were high school students in suburban Maryland. Since Wednesday, she has watched as that bare-bones version of her story became public without her name or her consent, drawing a blanket denial from Kavanaugh and roiling a nomination that just days ago seemed all but certain to succeed.

Now, Ford has decided that if her story is going to be told, she wants to be the one to tell it.

Speaking publicly for the first time, Ford said that one summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.

While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”

She was able to get away when the drunk friend jumped on top of both of them.

She didn’t talk about it in detail until she told a therapist about it in 2012; the therapist took notes.

The therapist’s notes, portions of which were provided by Ford and reviewed by The Washington Post, do not mention Kavanaugh’s name but say she reported that she was attacked by students “from an elitist boys’ school” who went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.”

And a girls’ soccer coach at another elitist school, this time a Catholic school in DC.

Reached by email Sunday, Judge declined to comment. In an interview Friday with The Weekly Standard, before Ford’s name was known, he denied that any such incident occurred. “It’s just absolutely nuts. I never saw Brett act that way,” Judge said. He told the New York Times that Kavanaugh was a “brilliant student” who loved sports and was not “into anything crazy or illegal.”

Oh, he loved sports, well that changes everything – popular male athletes never assault women.

Christine Ford is a professor at Palo Alto University who teaches in a consortium with Stanford University, training graduate students in clinical psychology. Her work has been widely published in academic journals.

So…did a sports-loving teenage boy get drunk and assault a teenage girl at a drunken party? Or did a 51-year-old professor of clinical psychology tell a whopper about him, after carefully laying the groundwork for it in therapy six years ago?

For weeks, Ford declined to speak to The Post on the record as she grappled with concerns about what going public would mean for her and her family — and what she said was her duty as a citizen to tell the story.

She engaged Debra Katz, a Washington lawyer known for her work on sexual harassment cases. On the advice of Katz, who believed Ford would be attacked as a liar if she came forward, Ford took a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent in early August. The results, which Katz provided to The Post, concluded that Ford was being truthful when she said a statement summarizing her allegations was accurate.

By late August, Ford had decided not to come forward, calculating that doing so would upend her life and probably would not affect Kavanaugh’s confirmation. “Why suffer through the annihilation if it’s not going to matter?” she said.

But bits of the story leaked anyway, and reporters started contacting her.

On Friday, the New Yorker reported the letter’s contents but did not reveal Ford’s identity. Soon after, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) released a letter from 65 women who say they knew Kavanaugh when he attended high school from 1979 to 1983 at Georgetown Prep, an all-boys school in North Bethesda.

“Through the more than 35 years we have known him, Brett has stood out for his friendship, character, and integrity,” the women wrote. “In particular, he has always treated women with decency and respect. That was true when he was in high school, and it has remained true to this day.”

Skeptical people have been pointing out what a striking bit of luck it is that Grassley had that letter handy, almost as if he’d known all along that he might need it.

As the story snowballed, Ford said, she heard people repeating inaccuracies about her and, with the visits from reporters, felt her privacy being chipped away. Her calculation changed.

“These are all the ills that I was trying to avoid,” she said, explaining her decision to come forward. “Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation.”

Which is heartbreaking. She shouldn’t be in that position.

We’ve been here before you know; Anita Hill. I watched that whole thing, riveted and enraged. It was utterly disgusting.

She married her husband in 2002. Early in their relationship, she told him she had been a victim of physical abuse, he said. A decade later, he learned the details of that alleged abuse when the therapist asked her to tell the story, he said.

He said he expects that some people, upon hearing his wife’s account, will believe that Kavanaugh’s high school behavior has no bearing upon his fitness for the nation’s high court. He disagrees.

“I think you look to judges to be the arbiters of right and wrong,” Russell Ford said. “If they don’t have a moral code of their own to determine right from wrong, then that’s a problem. So I think it’s relevant. Supreme Court nominees should be held to a higher standard.”

There’s more to it than that. There’s the specific issue of putting men on the court who see women as public property rather than human beings like themselves.

Philosopher Asia Ferrin explains why feminists must defer to trans women no matter what:

There has been some online discussion recently about how, or if, people can have open conversations about policies that aim to create more inclusive spaces for trans people, trans women in particular. I will not recount the conversation here, but readers might want to see these posts, first from Kathleen Stock, then a reply from Talia Mae Bettcher, and a reply to the reply from Stock. Similar themes also come up in a recent post here on hostility in such discussions.

That’s one way to put it, but it’s quite a loaded way. “Inclusive” has become a highly deceptive or tendentious word in some contexts, and this is one of them. Nobody wants “inclusive spaces” in all situations and contexts, and the reasons for that are not all “exclusionary” or racist or racist-like. To put it another way,  we are allowed to want privacy in some situations, and it can be a matter of life and death. Remember those girls in India who were raped and murdered because they had to go outside to crap?

Mostly women and men work together in shared spaces, but we know that that doesn’t always work out well for the women. That doesn’t mean the sexes should be segregated at work, but it does mean there’s an issue. One compromise people arrived at historically was that women could at least segregate themselves when they had to lift their skirts or take their trousers down to deal with physical imperatives. That means women do not necessarily want to “create more inclusive spaces for trans people” if that includes the places where they have to lift their skirts or take their trousers down, or take them off altogether to change into athletic gear. Women don’t necessarily want to be more inclusive about undressing, and they shouldn’t have to. They should not have to. Reasons for not wanting to include bruises, stab wounds, rape, and death. It’s not some stupid little whim and it’s not right-wing and it’s not cruel – it’s a core part of women’s ability to leave the house at all.

So, I’m put off by Asia Ferrin in the first paragraph, and I don’t warm to her as I read on.

I write primarily for the person who reads Stock’s writings and thinks “hmmm, good question: why do conversations about trans issues have to be so hostile or difficult? Some of Stock’s worries seem legitimate and worthy of further consideration.” I aim to explain, and in part defend, resistance and hostility to the conversation, at least as Stock presents it. In doing so, I will also problematize some of her analysis.

Yeah, we can’t have people thinking Stock’s questions are reasonable, and we should have lots of hostility toward her arguments and her.

Specifically, for our purposes, why might trans people and trans allies (myself included) express hostility—or exasperation, frustration, hurt, anger, betrayal, resistance, etc.—when someone proposes an investigation into whether trans women should have access to spaces typically designated as women only? There is much that could be said here, and again, much that has been said here, so I will aim to be relatively brief. One reason for such resistances is that it seems that a negative answer, that is, the claim that “no, trans women should not have access to spaces typically designated for women only” relies on one of the following premises:

Assumption A) Trans women aren’t women.

…

Assumption A) Trans women aren’t women. Stock defends this view, and the Gender Critical position generally, here. There is good reason to think this assumption is false, however, and thus a nonstarter. See here, here, here, and here. But even if it’s true, the assumption that trans women aren’t women doesn’t sufficiently ground the moral claim that Stock is after. One can’t derive the moral claim that trans women should be excluded from resources and spaces like homeless shelters, rape crises centers, changing rooms, hostels, public transport sleeping carriages, etc. from the descriptive claim that “Trans women aren’t women.”

But again, that’s a tendentious way of putting it. Men are already “excluded” from resources and spaces like some homeless shelters, rape crises centers, changing rooms, hostels, public transport sleeping carriages, and the like, because women need and want privacy from men in those situations. In a perfect world they wouldn’t need that because men would never take advantage of vulnerable women, but this is not that world.

Then she moves on to say the discussion is “hurtful and harmful.”

I can imagine that if someone wanted to have a discussion, or explore a thesis, that involved invoking this assumption about me, I would experience a range of emotions—e.g. fear, hurt, disappointment, anger, resentment, hopelessness, and/or betrayal. I would feel some or all of these things at once if someone implied that I was dangerous. Furthermore, when this assumption gets airtime and uptake from less well-intentioned individuals or groups, trans women’s lives can be compromised in physical, social, ontological, and political ways. In other words, trans women and trans allies would be expected to be upset when certain positions about gendered spaces depend upon an assumption about them as threatening.

Furthermore, this upset is normatively justified. Imagine a scholar wanted to discuss the legal status of Black people, making claims that invoked and implied the following: “Black people are dangerous to white people.” It would be unsurprising for a conversation involving these assumptions to make many Black people feel a range of emotions and thus inclined to shut down conversations in which these assumptions are made. Moreover, beyond emotional affront, the world is worse for Black people, due to white supremacy, when these ideas get airtime as worthy of consideration.

And, you see, women are to trans women as white people are to black people.

What?

No. No we are not. That’s one of the ways this movement goes all the way off the rails, and down the embankment and into our living rooms. Women as a class are not in the dominant or privileged position in this world, and that does not change just because you add the word “cis.” It’s embarrassing to see women themselves buying into that bullshit idea, and even doing their best to enforce it on other women.

Stock posted a reply today.

Eleazar David Melendez on Facebook:

They did not die in the hurricane.

They died in pain, at home, of kidney failure unable to access the dialysis clinic for weeks.

They died, gasping for hours near the end, when the oxygen tank they needed to breathe gave out.

They died in the dark and the heat of unsanitary ICU units, of burns or gunshot wounds received before the hurricane that they almost certainly would have survived otherwise.

They died, burning up with fever, of leptospirosis from being in touch with flood waters during the effort to save their neighbors.

They died in fear and confusion after being forced to go off their regular medication.
They died of heat stroke.

They died of diseases of antiquity, in a crisis of neglect unworthy the greatest, wealthiest and most powerful nation in human history.

They died. But we lived. And we remember.

Cartoon via Circe Torruellas:

That’s a good cartoon. That’s the essence of Trump right there.

H/t Katrina