A fresh assassination of Brett Kavanaugh’s character
I guess that The New York Times didn’t get the memo. Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court last fall. He is sitting there (officially, I mean) right now, as I write. Despite the most disgusting, ad hominem, evidence-free effort at character assassination of a Supreme Court nominee in history, the combined forces of The New York Times and other cesspool media organs like The New Yorker , bottom-feeding Senate Democrats, feminazis of various stripes, and other woke constituencies on the left, Kavanaugh made it. One of the most ostentatiously qualified candidates for the Supreme Court in recent memory managed — just barely — to slip through the gauntlet of baseless accusation, wild fantasy, and prurient hysteria and ascend to the country’s highest court. Hurrah.
The excerpt is written in the Times ’s high emetic style: every phrase infused with the new status anxiety of universal accusation and class-sex-and-race-based innuendo. The star of the article is Deborah ‘significant gaps in my memory’ Ramirez. Have the dramamine at hand?
‘Ms Ramirez grew up in a split-level ranch house [ Oh, too bad ] in working-class Shelton, Conn., perhaps best known for producing the Wiffle ball, and didn’t drink before college. [ Got it: working class, straitlaced ] Her father, who is Puerto Rican [ Check ]…
‘Before coming to Yale [ Baaad Yale] , Ms Ramirez took pride in her parents’ work ethic and enjoyed simple pleasures like swimming in their aboveground pool [ above ground: noted. Definitely not part of the Cabana set ]… she and her parents took out loans to pay for Yale [ So? ] , and she got work-study jobs on campus, serving food in the dining halls and cleaning dorm rooms before class reunions. [ Unlike snobs like Brett Kavanaugh, you see. ]
‘She tried to adapt to Yale socially, joining the cheerleading squad her freshman year, sometimes positioned at the pinnacle of the pyramid. But Ms Ramirez learned quickly that although cheerleading was cool in high school, it didn’t carry the same cachet at Yale. People called her Debbie Cheerleader or Debbie Dining Hall or would start to say ‘Debbie does … ‘ playing on the 1978 porn movie Debbie Does Dallas . But Ms Ramirez didn’t understand the reference. [ But your humble reporters do, nod, nod. ]’
And on and on in seemingly interminable pointlessness. Or, rather, it does have a point: to establish Ramirez as a suitable victim for the depredations of Yale in general and Brett Kavanaugh in particular.
The allegation in question was first published by that slick saffron journal, The New Yorker , in September 2018 just as the Kavanaugh hearing was reaching the apogee of hysterical denunciation. The piece was by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, deans of muckraking character assassination. It was, as National Review ’s Charles Cooke noted at the time, the least responsible piece of journalistic reporting in a major (well, formerly major) media outlet he could remember. Even The New York Times looked askance at it (that was then). Breathlessly recounted was a party at Yale some 35 years ago when Brett Kavanaugh, then 18, was a freshman. This is old news, of course, part of the mephitic backwash of rotting gossip that trailed along the garbage trawl that was Christine Blasey Ford’s exploded melodrama. Pogrebin and Kelly offer this summary:
‘During the winter of her freshman year, a drunken dormitory party unsettled [Ramirez] deeply. She and some classmates had been drinking heavily when, she says, a freshman named Brett Kavanaugh pulled down his pants and thrust his penis at her, prompting her to swat it away and inadvertently touch it. Some of the onlookers, who had been passing around a fake penis earlier in the evening, laughed.’
Of course, nothing so outrageous has ever happened in the annals of American college life, and thank goodness no sitting member of Congress or other Important Person ever participated in anything so disreputable while he was in college. But the point here is that Brett Kavanaugh categorically denied the allegations — and at this point they were coming fast and furious, with Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti lining up a stable of girls he said had been abused by Brett Kavanaugh. The trouble was, poor Debbie was a bit fuzzy on the details. It was so long ago. She had been unhappy at Yale. And she had been drinking ‘heavily.’
Nor were there any eyewitnesses, only hearsay — ‘sources’. It was at this juncture, in fact, as Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino note in their masterly, indeed, definitive, account of the Kavanaugh hearing Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court , that Kavanaugh’s legal team ‘suspected the anti-Kavanaugh forces had finally overplayed their hand. The tide was turning.’
As indeed they had, and it was. We still had the spectacle of the malignant buffoon Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse attempting to parse some slang in Kavanaugh’s high school year book to savor, but the baselessness not only of Ramirez’s claim but the surreal extrapolations sprouting up like rhetorical toadstools around it, helped tip the balance in Kavanaugh’s favor.
So what’s the point of this latest ‘bombshell’ in The New York Times (not to mention the book from which it is taken)? Haven’t we been here, done that?
Well, yes. But wait. As the Drudge Report screams in a headline today, there is a ‘Fresh Allegation’. It is this: another Yale classmate of Kavanaugh, to wit, one Max Stier, claims that he ‘saw Mr Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.’ This claim, as the Times notes darkly ‘echoes’ what Deborah Ramirez had said. You don’t need an urban dictionary of rhetorically helpful, if intellectually dishonest, enthymemes to see that what the Times wants you to ring out of ‘echoes’ is ‘confirms’.
But now watch this:
‘Mr Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the FBI about this account, but the FBI did not investigate and Mr Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr Stier.)’
1. Stier runs a ‘non-profit’: a brownie point for him. 2. Stier ‘notified senators and the FBI’ but they declined to investigate. The implication is that they were too biased for Kavanaugh to do so, but the truth is that the allegation was too flimsy to merit investigation. 3. Stier won’t confirm the story publicly but 4. eager beavers Pogrebin and Kelly ‘corroborated the story with two officials’ [Oh, ‘officials’, eh? Impressive] who have ‘communicated’ with Stier.
What are we to make of this dog’s breakfast of a non-story promulgated solely to do ideological (along with some collateral personal) damage?
Not much, I’d say, or rather, we should take it as a warning of just how bankrupt the so-called progressive media has become. And here are a couple of little bijoux to be getting on with. First, Mollie Hemingway, who deserves some sort of medal for reading an advance copy of the Pogrebin-Kelly tome, notes on Twitter that the book includes a detail omitted in the Times’s ‘ bombshell’. ‘The book notes, quietly, that the woman Max Stier named as having been supposedly victimized by Kavanaugh and friends denies any memory of the alleged event. Seems, I don’t know, significant.’ You think?
Then there is Max ‘Fresh Allegation’ Stier. Could he, asks The Federalist ’s Sean Davis , be ‘the same Max Stier who was one of Clinton’s defense attorneys? Yes, yes it is.’
Really, wonders will never cease?
Since we’re walking down memory lane by looking back at the disgusting effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh, it is worth reminding ourselves about what was at stake in that perverted effort to weaponize the nomination process for partisan ends. Kavanaugh himself summarized it eloquently. Dismissing as groundless ‘smears’ the cornucopia of allegations that had been fabricated like little ju ju dolls to destroy him, he went on to note that such evidence-free allegations not only ‘debase our public discourse,’
‘they are also a threat to any man or woman who wishes to serve our country. Such grotesque and obvious character assassination — if allowed to succeed — will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions from service. As I told the committee during my hearing, a federal judge must be independent, not swayed by public or political pressure. That is the kind of judge I will always be. I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process. The coordinated effort to destroy my good name will not drive me out. The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out. The last-minute character assassination will not succeed.’
God bless Brett Kavanaugh. And shame, shame on The New York Times and its sweaty minions for abetting the revival of this grotesque calumny.
Roger Kimball
"Documented? In the book @rpogrebin & @katekelly discuss the second claim, but note that Kavanaugh’s alleged victim refused to discuss the incident & that “several of her friends said she does not recall it.” That seems quite relevant. Yet, it was left out of the @nytimes story"......Christina Sommers
What character?
As if the constantly evolving and witness contradicted Blasey Ford allegation wasn't desperate enough, the Times will now smear any Republican with the mere claim of a partisan who claims to to remember something form 30 years ago that even the supposed victim doesn't remember occurring.
But go ahead, watch and see what happens if a Republican claims to have seen Elziabeth Warren molest a guy at some point in the 80s, at some location. Wanna take bets it get treated differently?
"The New York Times suddenly made a major revision to a supposed bombshell piece late Sunday concerning a resurfaced allegation of sexual assault by Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh — hours after virtually all 2020 Democratic presidential candidates had cited the original article as a reason to impeach Kavanaugh.
The update included the significant detail that several friends of the alleged victim said she did not recall the purported sexual assault in question at all. The Times also stated for the first time that the alleged victim refused to be interviewed, and has made no comment about the episode."
Well, the New York Times, partisan propaganda site that it is, did it's job. It got a news cycle of hit pieces attacking Kavanaugh. Then after the damage is done, it quietly reports the most salient fact of the entire t (supposed victim doesn't recall it happening) and then it turns out this "new" accusation was in fact reported to the Senate during the hearings.
The National Enquirer has higher standards than the New York Times at this point.
And the funny thing is that by the time they walked this story back most of the democratic candidates had already gone on record calling for Kavanaugh's impeachment! Two of their reporters writing a book, which was unveiled in the opinion section write a BS story that nobody checks and here we go again!
The New York Times - all the fish wrap that's fit to print!
Kavanaugh was a punk when he was in high school and college. There is too much anecdotal evidence.
They wont be able to impeach him for this though. McConnell would demand DNA evidence.
It looks like you are once again backing a false story.
He can't. Anecdotal comments are "personal" comments of an event or a remembrance.
Nothing here - as usual - moving on.
For once, I agree.
You DO know what "anecdotal" means, right?
Here:
(Highlights by me).
Yeah, I know, Kavanaugh nominated by Trump, so of course all anecdotal evidence MUST be true, right?
LMFAO!
Those that hate Trump and hate Kavanaugh are desperately trying to make something out of nothing.
Here's what some Dem Candidates said:
The real 'sham' here is the willingness to publicly convict without due process. Anyone quick to do so is not going to uphold the Constitution and doesn't deserve to be in the White House.
Seems like some Democrats are still pissed off that a Democratic President didn't get to nominate and place another "liberal" Justice who would vote in lockstep with the other 'liberal" Justices.
Democrats seem to want all Justices to vote the same way on every issue.
Pretty stupid to think that will happen on every issue.
Which is why Court Packing is so attractive to them.
Garland was never considered a liberal judge. That is why Obama passed him several times for other judges. When he became a lame duck president, he thought that moderate judge could pass, but he was wrong.
It is a proven fact, based on SCOTUS decisions, that the "liberal" Justices vote in lockstep far more times than the "conservative" Justices. In fact, when "conservative" Justices vote in lockstep, it is more likely to be in a 9-0 decision.
I believe that is why so many Democrats are mad about Kavanaugh being placed on the Court. And why some Democrats have suggested adding Justices to stack the Court.
Why would you possibly believe that?
hat is why Obama passed him several times for other judges.
No, he wasn't gay or a woman, (or both). That's why Obama couldn't nominate a straight white male off the bat.
First, Democrats only nominate liberals. The last actual moderate nominated by a Democrat was probably whizzer white by Kennedy. Garland's vote would be indistinguishable from Kagan, or Sotomayor, or any other liberal Democrat. Garland simply ins't the most extreme possible liberal. That doesn't make him an actual moderate.
Republicans nominate independent justices who think for themselves. Democratic Presidents nominate liberal who vote in lock step. That's been proven time after time after time.
Kavanaugh didn't go to trial and we NEVER got the benefit of a real investigation. He was having a JOB INTERVIEW and the gop allowed him to get confirmed even though he had multiple credible accusations against him. So be clear, KAVANAUGH WAS NEVER CLEARED OF ANYTHING, a real investigation was NEVER done, and many many witnesses were never interviewed. This is what happens when you decide to go with someone who obviously has credibility and behavior problems. And things will continue to drip out because he the gop didn't want him fully investigated in the first place, placing limits on time and witnesses. Who hires a person who has these problems and expects no problems in the future? Suck it up, conservatives. Women won't let this rest, and it won't get better over time.
Excuse me ? WTF !
No, Kavanaugh never went to trial because no one has ever, ever pressed any criminal charges against him.
That would require evidence, something sorely lacking in the hullabaloo over this fiasco of left-wing hysteria.
Kavanaugh was never "cleared" because no one ever filed a single police report against him. We are STILL waiting for something to materialize, but thus far, all we hear is senseless noise.
I don't give a god shit if women or men ever, ever "let it rest".
Put up some facts with evidence and make a case instead of slander.
Well ..... there is that ....."Trail by PUBLIC OPINION" thingy that is most important to "Liberals", True or NOT !
To them ….. "Legal" is just a word …… "Never to be used" in their circle jerks drum circle!
Ms. Ford's accusations can still be taken to Montgomery County for prosecution .
The 'credibility' problems are with the accusers... not the accused. Ms. Ford already laid everything out in public...why hasn't she filed charges?
The "I HATE conservative KAVANAUGH Attorneys" haven't "TOLD" her to do that yet.
And there it all is in a nutshell.
No one will file criminal charges because no accusers have filed them.
Because even they know how delusional they are.
Ms. Ford's senate committee testimony lacked credibility and corroboration. Had that testimony been given in a court of law, a judge or jury would have found Kavanaugh Not Guilty. Even a liberal - all female jury would have found him Not Guilty.
And that is one major problem with waiting 30 years to say something. It makes it hard to believe and impossible to prove.
Ford was a lousy "witness".
It is also interesting to note that no civil cases have been filed against Kavanaugh in relation to the Ford "case".
Burden of proof is much, much lower in civil cases. Why hasn't the oh-so-credible Ford cashed in yet?
Or any of the other "witnesses"?
I served on a jury in a Civil case. While the burden of proof is much lower...one must still prove their case. In the trial I heard, it was obvious that the plaintiff didn't really have a case...by the time it came to the defense, well, we were sent back to the jury room. When we came out we were thanked for our time.
Someday you might learn that investigations begin with evidence of wrongdoing not rumors coming from people who want to sink a nomination.
After right wingers, tea party jerkoffs, and plain old racists tried to de-legitimize the first non-white president of the United States with years of "birther" nonsense, I really dont give a flying fuck what they think about investigations into Brett Kavanaugh.
And you could benefit from lessons on sexual abuse and the shame and embarrassment that goes with it, changing lives forever, especially when they come forward, and I can give you multiple examples that are current. Republicans PUSHED a man with very shady past behavior witnessed by multiple sources over multiple years. They consistently defend the abusers and blame and shame the victims, even proudly voting for a self professed pussygrabber. They've thrown out baseless accusations against others that actually did get investigated over years and turned up nothing, multiple times. They currently accept behavior they would have decried and investigated for years from a man who submits to Putin. And they have a history and are currently doing everything in their power to LIMIT WOMEN'S POWER, INCLUDING FORCING KAVANAUGH ON THE COUNTRY. So spare us the handwringing.
I understand why you might want to discuss anything but the New York Times story. The birther nonsense (as you defined it) is OFF TOPIC!
I'm going to have to bring you back to the topic - The New York Times. Any thoughts? Can't defend them?
I thought so.
Look at all these justifications for the New York Times deceitful reporting.
I get there are fanatics out there who will believe any wild allegation that fits their political agenda, but some of us require, at a minimum, a coherent allegation before we start accusing others of crimes.
Kavanaugh was a self admitted drunk during his high school and college years. It's likely some or all of the accusations against him are true.
That's not the point here John.
Why would a major American newspaper allow for unsubstantiated allegations against a sitting Justice on the Supreme Court?
And even after committing that outrage
Why would they allow the writers of that story to omit such an important fact?
He had multiple accusations that were proven to be false.
Oh but it will, when Trump puts even more constitutional judges on the Supreme Court after 2020, Lets face it RBG is a fossil that is barely hanging on.
Considering who sits in the Oval Office, this guy is a rank amateur in regards to sexual misdeeds.
There are zero, zip, nada events of sexual misconduct on the part of Justice Kavanaugh at any point in his life.
Brilliant description. And so apt.
We studied yellow journalism in school, but we are clearly living in a second age of the practice.
Kavanaugh is 'corporate judge' beholding to the wealth class. This is why conservatives need him.
As far as Kavanaugh's position on the court---did he lie under oath or not?
YES
"Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist, who also noted the correction at The New York Times, offered a scathing review of Pogebrin and Kelly’s book The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation :
It is not until the end of the book that the authors admit:
Keyser told Pogrebin and Kelly about the smear campaign against her if she did not help Ford take down Kavanaugh. It’s important to remember this is the first time Keyser has spoken on the record about the incident:
Instead of professing doubt on Ford, Hemingway wrote the authors downplayed Keyser’s account. Like with Deborah Ramirez, Pogebrin and Kelly used their “gut” instincts to back Ford instead of actual evidence."
Great link.
There's more evidence that a witness was threatened to lie on Ford's behalf than there ever was that Ford was assaulted, yet the New York Times couldn't be bothered to investigate that part of the story.