Kavanaugh and Ford

Brett Kavanaugh says he did not grope Mrs. Ford at a party when both were teenagers.  She says he did. The  one person she says was also there sides with Kavanaugh.  She says she cannot remember where or in which year the groping happened or how she arrived at the party or left it.  Her present version contradicts the story she told a therapist in regard to the number of people present at the groping and perhaps other things. She is a leftist opponent of Trump and the Republicans.  She found her two question lie detector test to be almost too emotionally stressful to handle. She was reported to have recently travelled to Hawaii but was reluctant to come to Washington because of a claimed fear of flying.  He produced a detailed calendar of his activities showing no such party, while she produced no evidence at all.  Another man has stated that he may have been the one who groped her when they are teenagers. While one can never know for sure, the preponderance of evidence supports the conclusion that Kavanaugh is probably telling the truth, and Ford is probably  lying and/or mixed up to the point of being delusional.

  Beyond that it is surely fair to ask why this accusation matters at all.  At most a horny teenager tried to cop a feel at a probably drunken high school party from a girl in a swimsuit and got rebuffed. There was no rape. No one was beaten or slapped.  No one’s clothes were removed.  One does not have to condone it to believe it would be irrelevant to a person’s  character or qualifications thirty or forty years later or to see the hypocrisy of Democrats who claim  to be scandalized by it but excuse their own likely actual abusers of women from Bill Clinton to Keith Ellison.  (The same thing was true about the dispute between Clarence Thomas and  Anita Hill. The sensible reaction to a charge that an adult man made a suggestive wisecrack or two to an adult woman is “who cares?”. )

One can write the awful behavior of the Democrats in the senate off as only typical political nonsense, but I am afraid that would be a mistake.  Things are getting rough, not 1850s or even 1930s rough, but rough enough to be very worrisome. That sort of thing can get out of hand.