New SCOTUS Judge

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Tsukasa Buddha said:
Senior Senate Dem aide tells me there's a concern the GOP is "now releasing anonymous allegations in an effort to make all allegations look frivolous.
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Assuming this is true, is there no now to which they won't stoop?

Slings and Arrows said:
Christine Ford and Julie Swetnick share a common link:

Damn, it really is a small world.
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You sounds desperate.
 
Travis said:
You really don't get it. In the 80's and into the 90's this was normalized. No one reported it because the victim was just a "slut" that got what she "wanted". There was no one to turn to. The best they could hope for is someone giving them some moralizing speech on why they shouldn't have drunk so much.



Bottom line: the culture of the time made the girls not victims but the responsible party. Adults wouldn't help them. The other girls would just laugh and call her a slut.
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Indeed, to the point that no-one raised an eyebrow about the fact that even teen rose -tinted-coming-of-age-John-Huges-rom-com "Sixteen Candles" ends with the 'hero' passing off his long term girlfriend to a (horney) virtual stranger after telling him she's "in the bedroom right now, passed out cold. I could violate her ten different ways if I wanted to." and encourages him to drive her home because "she's so blitzed she won't know the difference.", it's later suggested that they had sex although she (and it should be noted he) don't remember it.

And that's a ******* John Hughes film (although several his films have aspects that wouldn't be considered innocent today).
 
Darat said:
I know it is jaw dropping but given the many reports of how he assaulted women, even his own wife it really does seem that for once he may have been telling the truth. However given his pathology it actually isn't surprising if he thinks that what he claimed makes him look good.
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Actually, it's always been entirely clear that the "grab 'em by the ____" line was a deliberately humorous self-reference right back to what he'd said immediately before. He said "you can do anything" and then he realized "anything" was a pretty big claim, so he instantly gave a deliberately over-the-top example of something calculated to sound silly and humorous. He and Bush were very keyed into one another, he was enjoying making Bush both impressed and amused and he was caught up in his own sense of humor and having fun with what they were saying.

They were enjoying the thrill of knowingly being crude and "naughty" - I think there was a degree of self-awareness in it. It was self-indulgence in saying things they both knew were very un-PC.

I've joked around with guy friends enough to know how this stuff goes and I could read it in them.

I firmly believe "grab 'em by..." was willfully silly and over the top, demonstrating the absurdity of claiming literally "anything" would be permitted.

The large nugget of truth in what he was saying, however, was that yes - he had decades of experience seeing women throwing themselves at him because of his fame and fortune and probably a pretty solid track record of taking an interest in a woman and ending up getting to have sex with said women after putting in fairly minor levels of effort, which he correctly attributed a large part of to his fame and fortune.

I don't actually think he's really the assault type. The awkward Stormy Daniels encounter (which I think may be true) is probably more characteristic of how these things played out. I will concede that when he was substantially younger, back in the 80s or something, he might've been more physically forward and bold about these things... but I doubt he's ever done anything criminal which would qualify as sexual assault.

And again, people always conveniently try to exclude the "they let you do it" thing - he wasn't literally saying "I go around and grab random women's crotches with no prior indication of consent, and every time it turns out that they were okay with it because I'm famous." - No, he was saying "when I'm interested in women, my fame and fortune tend to mean that I don't get a lot of pushback and I tend to get my way most times. Now that I've said that obvious truth, let me get a laugh out of you with an amusingly absurd way to demonstrate that concept."
 
Stacyhs said:
If you know that she doesn't remember how she got to the party, then why did you write that they boy who had driven her there had to notice she wasn't there anymore?

She could well have walked and like you said, we don't know where the house was in relation to her own home.
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As I said, there were six people in the house. She had to have gotten there with one of them. (I said "he" before, but that was meant as the generic version, i.e. someone of unknown gender.)

No, I cannot imagine that, in a group of six people, one of them vanishes and the others find the event so insignificant that it is lost to their memory. She herself finds the need to walk home because she has been assaulted so insignificant that she forgets it.
 
If you think that someone leaving a house due to some unspecified drama is a remarkable enough event that it's something you'd remember decades later, then all I can wonder is if you genuinely remember what being a teenager is like. There was always a drama of one kind or another.

And according to Ford's account there wouldn't even have been any drama according to the other people in the house. She just left quietly.

"Person left a house without telling anybody" isn't really the shocking event that would be seared into everybody's memory that you're trying to make it out to be.
 
crescent said:
One key difference might have been class - the difference between going to a normal middle class public school, vs a fairly elite prep school, U of I vs Yale.
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It's possible, although it smacks of tribalism a bit. Of course, we would never do that, but the evil tribe across the river does it all the time.


My initial absolute denial that this could ever happen was in part based on a mental image that came from a literal reading of the accusation. After reading the piece that TB posted, I shifted my thinking to a different image, with larger parties, more people, and a less literal description. After doing that, I would say that it is not so absurd as to be dismissed out of hand.
 
applecorped said:
Do these guys have the right to be believed?

"Two men have come forward to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to claim that they are the ones who actually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford during a house party in 1982 — and not Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh."

https://nypost.com/2018/09/27/two-men-tell-senate-that-they-not-kavanaugh-assaulted-ford/
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You're right that this is indeed more evidence that the correct course of action is for there to be a proper FBI investigation into all the allegations surrounding Kavanaugh. Delaying the vote until everything can be properly investigated is the only reasonable course of action.

Probably also worthy of investigation is why the Republicans reportedly interviewed these men without informing the Democrats that the assertions had been made or the interviews were to be conducted, breaking Senate rules in doing so.
 
Belz... said:
That's rather uncalled for. Some could just be unattractive, shy, socially awkward or a host of other, non-creepy alternatives. It's very easy for those in a situation to denigrate those who aren't or can't.

I met my wife-to-be at 35. Was I creepy before that?
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I agree with you. I know some terminally shy adults that have very few to no intimate relationships.

I didn't meet my wife until I was 38, but I was not celibate or a stranger to long term relationships.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
Transcript of Ford's opening statement to the Senate Committee

Worth noting that, contrary to some claims in this thread, she says that she named Kavanaugh in a 2012 therapy session, which means that his name would be in the therapist's notes that have been made available to the relevant parties.
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The Post had access to the notes and reported they didn't have the name. Some have suggested that a therapist wouldn't write down the name if she said it, but I don't have a good source for that.
 
Squeegee Beckenheim said:
Transcript of Ford's opening statement to the Senate Committee

Worth noting that, contrary to some claims in this thread, she says that she named Kavanaugh in a 2012 therapy session, which means that his name would be in the therapist's notes that have been made available to the relevant parties.
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I'm not sure you can draw that conclusion. If you take her at her word, we know she said it - not that the therapist wrote it down.

I've never been in therapy, nor am a therapist, so I accept I'm not in a qualified position to comment, but I don't think you can assume that the therapist would have taken such detailed notes. Ford doesn't say that she's seen the notes, only that she said the name. Is it usual practice for therapists to note down such specific details?
 
Skeptic Tank said:
Actually, it's always been entirely clear that the "grab 'em by the ____" line was a deliberately humorous self-reference right back to what he'd said immediately before. He said "you can do anything" and then he realized "anything" was a pretty big claim, so he instantly gave a deliberately over-the-top example of something calculated to sound silly and humorous. He and Bush were very keyed into one another, he was enjoying making Bush both impressed and amused and he was caught up in his own sense of humor and having fun with what they were saying. ...snip...
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Pity you weren't around to explain all this to Trump when he was lying about it!
Skeptic Tank said:
...snip...

I don't actually think he's really the assault type. The awkward Stormy Daniels encounter (which I think may be true) is probably more characteristic of how these things played out. I will concede that when he was substantially younger, back in the 80s or something, he might've been more physically forward and bold about these things... but I doubt he's ever done anything criminal which would qualify as sexual assault.

...snip...
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In a book Trump and his "may have met him once in an elevator" lawyer couldn't stop and never took any action against:

".... After a painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot, Donald Trump confronted his then-wife, who had previously used the same plastic surgeon.

“Your ******* doctor has ruined me!” Trump cried.

What followed was a “violent assault,” according to Lost Tycoon. Donald held back Ivana’s arms and began to pull out fistfuls of hair from her scalp, as if to mirror the pain he felt from his own operation. He tore off her clothes and unzipped his pants.

“Then he jams his penis inside her for the first time in more than sixteen months. Ivana is terrified… It is a violent assault,” Hurt writes. “According to versions she repeats to some of her closest confidantes, ‘he raped me.’”

Following the incident, Ivana ran upstairs, hid behind a locked door, and remained there “crying for the rest of night.” When she returned to the master bedroom in the morning, he was there.

“As she looks in horror at the ripped-out hair scattered all over the bed, he glares at her and asks with menacing casualness: ‘Does it hurt?’” Hurt writes.

Donald Trump has previously denied the allegation. In the book, he denies having had the scalp reduction surgery......"​
 
Worm said:
I'm not sure you can draw that conclusion. If you take her at her word, we know she said it - not that the therapist wrote it down.

I've never been in therapy, nor am a therapist, so I accept I'm not in a qualified position to comment, but I don't think you can assume that the therapist would have taken such detailed notes. Ford doesn't say that she's seen the notes, only that she said the name. Is it usual practice for therapists to note down such specific details?
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ETA: Somewhat ninja'd by Tsukasa Buddha. Must type faster ;)

ETA pt2: Replied to my own post. Doofus.
 
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