Kavanaugh Hearings Today
A reader asked me my opinion on this matter. I assume anyone with even a smattering of legal training, or even anyone who got a passing grade in civics class, shares the same opinion: the matter is open and shut. The accusations are vague, stale, and have no corroboration, and even if they did, are irrelevant.
If there is even a single person, aware of all the facts, and yet not a partisan beholden to the Left, who comes to a different conclusion, I have heard no rumor of him.
The facts, in brief, are these: 36 to 40 years after the alleged event, a woman who is a pussy-hat wearing Democrat activist, an academic, writes an anonymous letter to a Democrat Senator accusing Kavanaugh of misdemeanor sexual assault during a house party when both were drunk. The accuser has no recollection as to the year or location, except that both were teens, and it was somewhere in a county in Maryland. The accusation mentions another boy present, who happens to be a famed GOP stalwart, and who has categorically denied the event ever happened. Other than he, the accusers recalls no names and no descriptions of anyone at the party.
The accusation is first mentioned in private to a therapist a few years ago, decades after the alleged event. Notes taken at that time by the therapist do not agree in significant details with the current version of the story, hence do not corroborate it.
The accuser deletes her social media records and hires a lawyer. The accusation is made public by the Dems at first anonymously, and then, after a dramatic pause for theatrical effect, publicly. This is done at the eleventh hour, after the hearing are over. Everything which can be done by the Dems and their media allies to prevent cooler heads from prevailing, or fact to be made clear, is done.
Later, another accuser comes forward, saying Kavanaugh exposed himself. And then a third says Kavanaugh ran a gang rape ring during his college years.
Now, I have heard an argument made that since only 2% to 10% of rape accusations in England turn out to be case prosecutors there are unwilling to pursue, and since we here have three accusations of misdemeanors or felonies alleged to have happened in America under other conditions two generations ago, statistically speaking he is more likely guilty than not.
This argument assumes that a statistical correlation of prior cases grants insight into the likelihood of the present case. This is an incorrect use of statistics. It does not even rise to the level of a logical fallacy: it is merely irrelevant. As if a medicine man who danced the rain dance boasted a ninety percent success rate were transported to Death Valley, and he continued to assert that his rain dance on Thursday, October 12 was ninety percent likely to produce nine inches of rain before that Friday the 13th.
The argument is also factually wrong. There is only one accusation, not three. The other two have been withdrawn, as one turned out to be a false recollection, and the other was a 4-chan prank.
Also, a man has come forward saying he, not Kavanaugh, was the one who was drunk at the party with the accuser and forced her down, etc.
The context of surrounding facts makes the claim itself highly suspect. The public recalls parallel cases of false accusations of sexual misconduct leveled against Robert Bork, Herman Cain, Roy Moore, Clarence Thomas.
Abuser tend to be repeat offenders. Which is more likely: that the Democrat Party, which has used the tactic for years of leveling highly emotional yet false claims of sexual harassment and assault against GOP nominees for public office without any show of shame or regret should be doing it again? Or that a man invested for previous positions six times by the FBI, whose character is attested to by hundreds of women, including seventy who knew him during the years in question, and whose reputation is utterly spotless, should have on this one occasion acted out of character?
The vagueness prevents the accused from mounting a defense. If a specific time a place is named, a man could produce evidence, if he had any, of his whereabouts showing he was not there. But if nothing is named, he cannot.
Unfortunately, whether the accusation is true or not, there is as yet not one scintilla of corroboration. Even were it true, without corroboration, the accusation is not actionable: the woman sat silent for too long, and the matter is now too old to be proved one way or the other.
We have nothing but the unsupported word of an activist with a strong motive to lie, who came forward not to the police at the time, nor to family nor friends for decade upon decade afterward, but to a leftwing politician, in a forum where the claims themselves can never be assessed, and who is disrupting a confirmation process which her party previously attempted to disrupt forty or fifty times. Are we to believe that this disruption is merely a happy coincidence, unrelated to all the prior disruptions?
If an accusation offered under such suspicious circumstances from such a source is counted as believable, what accusations are not?
Perhaps those where there are corroborating witnesses and contemporaneous records agreeing with current accusations? Perhaps those where the accuser is not an active member of an enemy political party whose record over the last five decades of political life show a marked penchant for false accusations, made at the eleventh hour, without corroborating witnesses nor contemporaneous supporting records?
To believe accusers based on the accusation uttered, regardless of lack of evidence, or based on the sex, not the credibility of the accuser, is witchhunting pure and simple.
And even supposing the accusation as stated is true what possible relevance does it have to the fitness of the candidate to serve on the Supreme Court? The statue of limitations on misdemeanor assault would have run on a case taking place back when the Soviet Union was still in business and Ronald Reagan was still in office. Even had Kavanaugh been guilty of a capital crme, his records as a minor would have been sealed.
Hence, the whole issue is irrelevant.
The Democrat party at one time may have served a useful social function by standing up for the poor and dispossessed. No longer. They have become a barbaric mob with the howling, blood-soaked stench of the French Terror hanging over them. The whole party is an embarrassment to democracy and to decent people everywhere, has banished decency from the public sphere, and a threatens to do likewise with democracy.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
