Sunday, September 30, 2018

Who drove Ford home?

Ford's selective memory is also highly suspect. She says that the fact that it was Brett Kavanaugh who sexually assaulted her is indelibly imprinted on her hippocampus. And yet, her memories of other details of the event, for example, where and when it occurred and how she got home afterwards (did someone drive her? did she walk?) have vanished.

Ask yourself: Where were you and what were you doing when John Kennedy was shot or 9/11 occurred? Surely, your memories of these traumatic events contain an abundant store of details. Mine do. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing for much of 9/11/2001 (I was at a W3C Conference in San Jose). Is it possible that Ford could remember some, but not all, of the details of an event that she insists was so traumatic that it has had a psychological impact on her for 35 years?

When John Kennedy was shot, I was in 5th grade (about 10 years old) at St Leo's Grammar School in San Jose. I had asked my teacher, Mrs. Pereira, if I could go to the restroom. When I returned from the restroom, I found the class standing, praying for John Kennedy. When I asked one of my classmates what was going on, I was told that Kennedy had been shot. I remember thinking to myself "Hmmm. It must have been a hunting accident. I didn't know that Kennedy was a hunter." I realized later on that the reason I assumed it was a hunting accident was because my father was a deer hunter and I associated shooting with deer hunting.

How is it possible for me to have such vivid memories from over 50 years ago (I am 64 now), but for Ford not to remember how she got home on that traumatic evening in her life? It would be one thing if she said that someone had driven her, but she could not remember who (as I cannot remember which of my classmates told me that Kennedy had been shot). It is quite another for her to say that she cannot remember at all how she got home, in particular, when she remembers the subsequent fact that she did not tell her parents about the event because she was afraid they would be angered that she was at a party where drinking was going on.

How did she get home? Did someone drive her? Did she say anything to the driver or others in the car about the alleged event? How convenient for Ford to have indelible memories about who her attacker was, but not to recall who she drove home with, people who presumably could provide additional testimony about that night.

Who leaked Ford's letter

There were only a limited number of people who knew about Ford's letter: Ford herself, Anna Eshoo, Dianne Feinstein, their staffs, and any legal counsel Ford had retained.

If Eshoo, Feinstein, or anyone on their staffs leaked the contents of the letter, then, they behaved in a manner utterly inappropriate for elected officials, sharing the contents of the letter with the media, but not with their Republican colleagues on the Judiciary Committee.

On the other hand, Feinstein maintains that Ford's charges were not leaked by her or her staff, but by Ford herself:

    It’s my understanding that her story was leaked before the letter became public. She testified that she had spoken to her friends about it and it’s most likely that that’s how the story leaked and that she had been asked by press. But it did not leak from us, I assure you of that.

But, if Ford herself was openly discussing the letter with friends, then, Feinsteins's entire justification for withholding the letter from her Republican colleagues, namely, her sacred obligation to honor Ford's request to keep the letter absolutely confidential, evaporates. What need was there for Feinstein to maintain strict confidentiality about the letter if Ford herself was openly discussing the matter with her friends?

If Feinstein's explanation of the sequence of events is accurate, then what likely happened is: when the existence of the letter was not having the desired effect of derailing Judge Kavanaugh's confirmation (presumably because of the total lack of corroborating evidence), Ford's circle leaked the contents of the letter to the press in order to bring the smear out into the open so that it could be pushed by sympathetic media outlets.

In other words, if Feinstein's explanation is correct, then Ford lied about her absolute requirement for confidentiality, just as she lied about her fear of flying.

A father's final letter to his two sons

Because you support the Democratic Party, I hold you responsible for the travesty of justice that is unfolding right now in the United States Senate. Various women have accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting them. He has denied their allegations. I will not go into the details either of their charges or of his defense of himself. In my judgment, the determinative fact is this: there is no independent contemporaneous physical evidence or testimony from witnesses that corroborates the charges; in the absence of such corroborating evidence (and no matter how sympathetic the accuser may be or credible her charges may seem), the presumption of innocence, one of the bedrock principles of the American system of justice, should prevail; and that should be the end of the matter. But rather than accept this basic functioning of due process of law, the Democrats and their enablers in the media have waged a vile campaign of character assassination to demonize Judge Kavanaugh and derail his confirmation, and this they have done not out of any genuine concern for female victims of sexual assault (ask the women who accused Bill Clinton of raping them whether the Democrats “believed” them when they came forward), but rather in order to make sure that Judge Kavanaugh does not vote to overturn the deeply flawed Supreme Court decisions like Roe v Wade and Obergefell, whose substantive due process deficiencies you are too uneducated to appreciate.

I ask you to consider the following. You and I both went to an all-boys Jesuit high school. I will not presume to speak for you, but, as for me, I can say that I did many things that I truly regret: I drank too much; I smoked too much pot; what I regret most is wasting my time there and not taking advantage of the rich resources that were placed at my disposal so that I could learn more and be a better student, the kind of student Brett Kavanaugh so obviously was. On the other hand, I never sexually assaulted any girl and neither I nor any other Bellarmine student I knew (let alone the top student in his class, for heaven’s sake!) ever spiked the drinks of girls from Presentation so that we could gang rape them (at one party after another, no less, to which the girls came back willingly again and again, apparently). The ludicrous grotesquerie of this caricature should offend your experience deeply and reveal to you the utter shamelessness and complete moral bankruptcy of the Democrats who have painted it. It probably does not.

Even worse, now that Judge Kavanaugh has angrily defended himself against the outrageous charge that he was “a drunk and serial gang rapist,” the Democrats are claiming that his righteous anger is additional evidence that he “does not have the proper temperament” to be a Supreme Court Justice. In other words, after doing everything in her power to antagonize the man, our noble California Senator, Dianne Feinstein, now has the temerity to complain that he has become antagonistic. It is as if she had beaten a dog with a stick repeatedly and then, when it snarled at her in its anguish, she said “You see? You see how vicious and rabid it is? That's why we must put it down.” But, instead of being appalled by such behavior, you undoubtedly applaud it and will dutifully vote for Senator Feinstein in November, or, if not for her, then for her opponent because his agenda is even more extreme.

The Obama administration and then the Clinton campaign did everything in their power to weaponize the agencies of government against conservative groups and then Trump. Conservatives were branded as knuckle-dragging “deplorables” simply because we disagreed. When the inept and feckless Clinton lost anyway (and, btw, I did not vote for Trump; I wrote in Paul Ryan instead), the Democrats simply could not accept her defeat as a normal (if somewhat unusual) outcome of the American electoral system (the Electoral College must be done away with, they cried) and instead launched a campaign to overthrow the Trump administration, now using slanderous innuendoes from psychiatrists about Trump’s mental instability to justify recourse to the 25th Amendment, now using a Special Prosecutor to press the ridiculous charge that Trump colluded with the Russians to influence the election (when, in fact, the only thing we know so far is that it was the slick Democrats who paid for dirt to be dredged up from Russian sources and handed over to the FISA court to facilitate their spying on the Trump campaign). They declared it a “moral imperative” to “resist” Trump (when Democrats are about to break the law, they always appeal to higher moral imperatives, which, of course, they feel they, in their superior wisdom, are entitled to define). And now they have taken the next step to overthrow the government, poisoning yet another judicial confirmation process, just as they did before with Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. But this is by no means the end of it. If the Democrats take back the House and Senate in the upcoming midterm elections, they will surely institute impeachment proceedings against Trump (and now even against Kavanaugh, apparently, if he is confirmed) on trumped up charges or seek, like that first great demagogue FDR, to pack the Supreme Court with compliant lackeys who will debauch the rule of law even further. And these Democrats have been and will be abetted by a completely biased and compliant media, purveyors, yes, of false news, whose most powerful organs (for example, the Washington Post) are being snapped up by the very tech moguls who fire their employees, like James Damore, when they dare to express a different point of view and who filter out conservative views, like those of my friend Victor Hanson, from their social media platforms. What we are witnessing is essentially a slow motion coup d'état. And yet, you both probably applaud its progress, blithely unaware that soon the revolution will come for you, white males that you are and thus irredeemably infected, in the opinion of the very people you stupidly applaud, with systemic, institutional, and unconscious racism, sexism, and bias.

I cannot stand by and acquiesce in your complicity in these developments any longer. I disown you, you Antifa fascists who are destroying our culture and dismantling the checks and balances of lawful, constitutional government that so many generations of our forebears worked so hard to set in place. I don’t want to have anything to do with you any more. Do not bother sending replies; I will not read them since there is no reason to continue this discussion. I will not persuade you, nor you me. I tried my best to raise sons with a proper moral compass. Obviously, I failed. I am tired of making excuses for you, of defending you; your morals and your politics are indefensible. What good does it do anymore to be a decent (if admittedly human) father and husband when the shameless smearing of the reputation of a decent father and husband like Brett Kavanaugh can be so easily countenanced?

Your heretofore father