With apologies for the lack of citations, here is a list of things that can simultaneously be true, notwithstanding claims in the media to the contrary:
Kavanaugh can be guilty of one or more of these acts AND the Democratic Senate leadership can be abusing the process.
Yes, the Democrats are, from all appearances, acting in bad faith. The opposed Kavanaugh from the start, and many of them have professed opposition to any individual Trump would nominate. In some cases, one might say that they declared their opposition while being simultaneously aware that their vote would be in the minority, but in other cases, there are statements on record that suggest an intention, from the start, to do whatever is possible to delay the seating of a nominee until after the midterm elections, and, if they should retake the Senate, until after the 2020 elections. Some Democrats are suggesting that if the Kavanaugh vote goes through, they will impeach him after gaining control, others are proposing a court-packing scheme in 2020 so as to gain the Supreme Court majority. And while some people are pushing back on concerns that Democrats are themselves partisan by citing the fact that no such fuss was raised about Gorsuch, I do think that a significant driver in the current opposition is that Democrats were at least more willing to accept a conservative replacing a conservative, but have now gotten themselves into a frenzy over Kavanaugh because Kennedy was, if not a consistent liberal, then at least a hoped-for swing vote.
But the degree to which they are exercising bad faith in the process, and the degree to which Ford’s lawyers are likewise trying to manipulate the process (claiming inability to fly, seemingly keeping from Ford the information that investigators were willing to come to Ford in California), does not have anything to do with whether Ford was attacked. And the desire to avoid giving the Democrats a victory is not sufficient reason to discard questions on the suitability of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court appointment.
Kavanaugh can be a heavy drinker, have grown up in a “rich private school kids” environment, have been friends with an admitted alcoholic AND be innocent of sexual assault, AND even have been a virgin as claimed.
Something that’s really starting to bug me is the claim of guilt by association. Private schools were dens of iniquity, to such an extent that the administration (at both Georgetown Prep and Holton-Arms) didn’t even bother censoring the yearbooks. Therefore, Brett Kavanaugh is guilty as charged.
Of course, Neil Gorsuch also attended Georgetown Prep. Was he one of the dorks who was never invited to parties?
The fact that alcohol flowed freely is not proof. The fact that Mark Judge wrote a book about being a teen alcoholic proves nothing about Brett Kavanaugh. Likewise for the fact that Mark Judge’s last name is “Judge” and Brett Kavanaugh is a judge.
Oh, and it can also be true that Kavanaugh was a heavy drinker AND that he did not black out. Again, with apologies for lack of links, I’ve read multiple articles saying that blacking out when drinking is a phenomenon that depends on the person, and the nature of their drinking. Someone that gets bombed very quickly on hard alcohol is more likely to black out than someone who drinks beer such as Kavanaugh, and there are genetic predispositions as well. It is not merely a matter of probabilities, and one cannot say that, for someone who drinks and gets drunk, he or she will inevitably black out.
I would also speculate that the reason why the conventional wisdom is that blacking out is an inevitable result of drinking, is in part that people use the explanation of “blacking out” as a way of avoiding consequences of behavior while drunk. “I can’t believe you did X last night!” “Really? I don’t remember any of it.”
Ford can be completely sincere and have no intention to deceive anyone AND can be stating factually untrue things.
There are experts peddling their expertise on the internet that when something traumatic happens, you never, ever forget the key details. This is Ford’s position (though it is hardly appropriate to cite her as an expert on something in which she is clearly not impartial). There are other experts saying that the reverse is true, that our memories do deceive us, even when we are convinced that said memory is crystal-clear and unambiguous (see this article, but there are more like it).
It seems to me entirely possible for something traumatic to have happened, and for Ford, in retrospect, to have latched onto Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge as perpetrators. After all, the initial Post story says that the therapist’s notes say “late teens” and “four boys,” and the reports are that it was her college years, not the remaining high school years, which were troubled. Reports have circulated that her 2012 therapist’s visits coincided with news reports that Kavanaugh was a likely Romney pick.
And none of this is to say that I have a solution to the present difficulty. Some further investigation may provide clues as to the probability of the incident having occurred, but there is so little to go on, that it seems unlikely that any evidence will turn up that will alternately persuade Kavanaugh supporters that Ford’s account is true, or persuade Kavanaugh opponents of his innocence, especially now that they are claiming (on twitter anyway) that his high school and college drinking likely means that he is to this day an alcoholic and thus unsuitable for the Supreme Court, and are even threatening, when Democrats get control, to impeach him not merely from the Supreme Court but even, should he not make it there in the end, from his current judgeship.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Judge_Brett_Michael_Kavanaugh.jpg; By U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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