Kavanaugh Has As Much Chance Now Being Confirmed As I Have Being Pope

The would be rapist Brett Kavanaugh - would definitely be found to be that - if the FBI were allowed to expand its background check on him in that area now.

Back in my July 10 post, I wrote that Trump the "pussy grabber's' pick for the Supreme Court (Brett Kavanaugh)  "is not the worst pick but he still merits scrutiny."   This was also, to be sure, after breathing a sigh of relief that Amy Coney Barrett was not chosen, see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2018/07/amy-cloney-barrett-nightmare-sc-pick.html

Now, in the intervening two months we've learned much more about Kavanaugh including maybe why the nation's pussy grabber-in- chief would pick him. That is, not only to protect him in case of a potential Mueller indictment or even subpoena, but well, because maybe it takes a pussy grabber to recognize a fellow would-be species member.

For me, Kavanaugh's chances as a confirmed SC nominee crashed when Christine Blasey Ford stepped forward to make her serious allegations about Kavanaugh's attempted rape some 36 years ago.  This  concerning the same guy who was part of Ken Starr's infamous team and even questioned Clinton on how much ejaculate he produced in his liaisons with Monica Lewinsky.  

Now Prof. Ford says she is willing to testify about her experience, and this will happen on Monday as the eyes of the nation watch.  I am convinced, even before that drama unfolds, she will be found to  be the one with greater credibility- and at least two R-Senators' votes will be peeled off - sending Kavanaugh down to defeat. Hence, his nomination is toast, see e.g.

Supreme Court

Kavanaugh Is Toast

 Premature? I don't believe so. As Sen. Kamala Harris put it on CBS Early Show this morning, she has absolutely nothing to gain, nada, other than severe excoriation and ridicule as the Reepo dominated Senate Judiciary Committee goes after her like rabid rats  - trying to portray her as a kook or liar - like they did with Anita Hill some 27 years ago.   The difference here is that Prof. Ford needs a lot fewer Reepo Senators on her side, believing her account, than Prof. Hill needed way back when. (And let's recall that the Dems weren't much use back then either!)

Again, let's get it clear in our heads this isn't about finding Kavanaugh guilty of a criminal act given the statute of limitations has long since passed. This is about allowing a less than sterling moral character to have influence on the nation's highest court.  As blogger P.M. Carpenter put it, in the cited link above:

"Yes, he is going down, I'd wager, because Republican senators' "female constituents will not tolerate … rug-sweeping," as the Washington Post's Ruth Marcus put it. "Yes, it was high school," continued Marcus, "but if you do something bad enough in high school, it can lose you your seat on the Supreme Court."

Ford is being criticized for having a vague memory about the attempted rape incident. Yet her memory — and supporting notes from her therapist — are specific enough, concrete enough, indeed bad enough to be unforgivingly damning.."

So I agree. 

Of course, Kavanaugh has offered a full denial, saying: “I have never done anything like what the accuser describes – to her or to anyone.”  But what the hell would you expect him to say: "Yes, I admit doing that, when I was a brash, entitled young kid, but I was running on testosterone ya know? Please gimme a break now!" 

And to the point once more, I don't accept that on Monday Prof. Ford needs to provide absolute proof that Kavanaugh did what she alleges. All we need is to have enough credibility displayed that it is probable beyond a reasonable doubt he assaulted her, covering her mouth when she tried to scream and trying to remove her clothing.

Again, no one who has committed an act of violence against  a young woman  (even in high school) should be in a position to make future binding decisions about women’s lives – even if they were a reckless teenager when they did it.  Oh and even if they’re very sorry now and all of Kavanaugh's remaining record discloses he's a basically  decent guy  in other ways.

We accept that with age and maturity he availed himself of plausible rehabilitation - but still - that assault in his early years cannot be forgotten or  dismissed now. Not when so much is on the line, including the future of Roe v Wade.

True, testimony from both Ford and Kavanaugh on Monday  will not bring about perfect clarity.  It can't given that, as Sen. Harris said this morning, the FBI was not given the authority to do its background investigation on this event.  So as it stands there simply isn’t much in the way of evidence beyond Ford’s word. But I am predicting that word will be cogent and powerful when she delivers it.  And no, we already acknowledge whatever she says, Kavanaugh will not be led away in chains or handcuffs.

What’s at stake isn’t the deprivation of Kavanaugh’s life or liberty, but the privilege to hold one of the most important positions in the nation, for which good character and fair treatment of others is necessary.   We may be able to excuse the fact this guy was nominated by the nation's number one serial sexual assaulter, but we cannot have his confirmation if there's even a whiff of  extreme sexual impropriety, as there appears to be.

For all these reasons the WSJ editorial today (The '#MeToo' Ambush) is mere last minute desperation before the hangman's noose appears, as when it asks: "Why go to such lengths (i.e. taking a polygraph test) if Ms, Ford really wanted her name to stay a secret? Even this weekend she could have chosen to remain anonymous".

Yes, she could have. but she is also smart enough to  know if she did remain nameless her claims would never be taken seriously.  Nor would she have been granted a public forum to air them.  It is precisely because coming forward dramatically shows she's prepared to defend herself in an open hearing  (vs. Kavanaugh's denials) that the media's  paying any attention.   Hell, she's even prepared to face the Reepo rat brigade on Monday, despite the fact there is zero upside for her other than establishing her credibility as a victim of an attempted rape - even after 36 years. Many women in the #MeToo movement will also relate to her, of that you may be sure.

One more observation in passing: If by some fluke or perversion of process Kavanaugh does succeed in still getting confirmed look for an even larger groundswell of women adding to the blue wave tsunami coming in November.  "Bloodbath" in the words of one GOP strategist, yep and times ten.

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Update: It now appears Christine Blasey Ford  will no longer be appearing in any hearing on Monday. This follows her being terrorized by a gaggle of demented degenerates  -  Trumpies no doubt- who forced her and her family into hiding after sending her vile emails and death threats, as well as hacking her computer and impersonating her online.   I still stick with my prediction that Kavanaugh's confirmation will be sunk  - one way or another.  The proper action to have taken, if the Senate Judiciary Committee was serious at all, would have been to demand that Trump authorize an updated FBI background investigation of Kavanaugh. But, of course, that would have meant neutralizing the one guy who could set him free in a SC decision, say following a Mueller indictment or subpoena.

See also:

Republicans are fearful of a full airing of an attempted rape allegation

If Not For A Skank Named Linda Tripp, Bill Clinton Never Would Have Been Impeached

The "most hated woman in America" - Linda Tripp - after the skank ilegally taped Monica Lewinsky and released the tapes to Ken Starr.

As confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh are set to open this week it is well to bear in mind he worked for Kenneth Starr, the infamous lawyer who led the "Whitewater"  investigation of President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Kavanaugh, as we've also since learned - was one of Clinton's most outrageous inquisitors even interrogating him on the amount of ejaculate he produced with each liaison with Monica Lewinsky. Now seriously, is it any wonder Ms. Lewinsky had the sense she was born with when she walked out of an interview yesterday when the prissy media idiot asked if "you expect a personal apology"?   Lewinsky said she "can't do this" as she walked off the stage- realizing her dalliance with Clinton was as a grown, mature woman who made her own choices - not a puppet tool or victim who merits a "personal apology".

Kenneth Starr  himself was honest and forthright - at least for one sentence- when he wrote  in his WSJ Review piece ('The Impeached President',  Aug. 30-31, p. C1):

"I deeply regret that I took on the Lewinsky phase of the investigation."

But adding:

"As I still see it 20 years later, there was no practical alternative to not doing so."

But in truth, there was.  However, that would have meant refusing to make use of an illegally procured tape made by a virago named Linda Tripp, who violated Maryland state law by obtaining not just one - but multiple  tape recordings  (over the phone)  without the knowledge or consent of her friend Monica Lewinsky.

 Later (p. C2) Starr writes that the "sun could have set on the whole Whitewater investigation" but for the choices subsequently made, i.e.  when a phone call  came into the prosecutor's office on Jan. 12, 1998.  As he informs us:

"Prosecutor Jackie Bentley was working at our office about 9 p.m. when he got a phone call from a woman who at first declined to give her name. 'So let me get this straight', Jackie said into the phone, 'You've tape recorded calls from a woman who had an affair with the president? '

"Jackie asked her a few questions. Then the woman dropped a bomb: "You know me, I'm Linda Tripp. I was a witness in the Vince Foster case ...Foster was the lawyer in the White House Counsel's office who had committed suicide in July 1993. Tripp had been Foster's executive assistant.

"Tripp explained that Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern , had struck up a relationship with the president during the government shutdown in November, 1996, when interns manned the phones and delivered documents. Lewinsky, then 22, and Clinton began having sexual trysts in a hallway off the Oval Office.  Working at the Pentagon the following summer, Lewinsky began confiding in Tripp."

But this confiding occurred because Monica trusted Tripp and was woefully  unaware of the nature of the two -bit skank with whom she shared her most intimate secrets.  With "friends" like that you don't need enemies.  Ironically, while Monica was mature enough to make her own sexual choices she appeared to need a crash course into the psyches of human detritus and vermin like Tripp.

As most of us who were alive at the time know, Starr couldn't get gnatshit out of  sawdust in the Whitewater investigation so had to pursue the irrelevant angle of Clinton's sex life- thanks to Tripp's  interjection of criminally- obtained tapes. . Evidently, neither Starr nor his lackey Jackie , was smart or perceptive enough to ask if Tripp violated Maryland law in making the tape. Some prosecutors!

 That phone call at 9 pm. on Jan. 12, 1998 then should have been a total dead end. Either Starr  himself or a separate court ought to have disallowed the use of secretly made phone tapes of  confidential conversations with Monica Lewinsky by Tripp.   Tripp lived in Columbia, MD at the time-  where wifey and I also resided - and it was widely known Tripp violated Maryland statutes against taping phone conversations without informing the taped party.  Technically then, the Lewinsky tapes (Tripp incited Monica for more and more details at each taping)  ought to have been inadmissible. But Ken Starr disregarded the law when it suited him and used said tapes to trap Clinton in a lie ("I did not have sex with that woman!") which then became the basis for his impeachment.

It was the Starr Report, co-authored by our little wannabe SC weasel Kavanaugh, which laid out the  spurious case for Clinton’s impeachment and removal from office, based on Lewinsky's illegally- obtained taped spiels with Tripp, i.e. about a blow job and soiled dress.  After the case broke, and Ken Starr emerged as "special prosecutor" no one believed it would go anywhere, since Starr would not be able to use illegally obtained evidence. As it turned out, after Kavanaugh signed on as a Starr stooge and Clinton inquisitor, it didn't really matter. It turned out some laws could be ignored.  Despite that, Starr in his WSJ piece clearly had misgivings about his investigatory reach as when he writes:

"I turned to those who had authorized me, asking them to weigh in. I complained that the Justice Department should either rally to our defense, or if I had in their view gone off the rails, Attorney General Reno should fire me. But Reno didn't fire me nor did she defend me. This was moral cowardice."

TO which I concur.  At the end of the day, Reno ought to have given Starr and his odious  team the boot, given they had invoked illegal evidence (Tripp's taped recordings)  to justify going after Bill Clinton. Case closed.  Unlike the current Mueller investigation, pursuing actual conspiracy with a foreign adversary to gain power,  the Clinton 'blue dress' evidence really did constitute a "witch hunt".  This is given Tripp's nefarious role and now we've since learned the roles of other Reich wing apparatchiks. 

Barely more than a year after that phone call to Bentley, a lengthy, documented account emerged (see e.g.  'The Right Wing Web', February 22, 1999, Newsweek, p.34)  about a NY Reep media mole (associated with Alfred Regnery and the Regnery press) named Lucianne Goldberg.   To jog readers' memories, Regnery has been famous for publishing such classics as:

According to a TIME expose piece ('Read and Right', Sept. 17, 2012,  p. 16), the number one publisher of anti-Obama books was Regnery Publishing Inc

Anyway, according to the Newsweek article, it was Goldberg who knew Tripp was friends with Lewinsky, and egged her on to surreptitiously record phone calls with Monica concerning her sexual contacts with Bill. This sordid sleaze tactic kind of reminds us of many other Right wing dirty tricksters, from Lee Atwater, to Nixon "ratfuckers" Roger Stone and G. Gordon Liddy, and more recently (2015) the CMP bunch that infiltrated Planned Parenthood to make surreptitious (and specious)  "fetal tissue"  videos.

In other words, the information that drove Kenneth Starr to go after Bill Clinton (despite his second thoughts)  was tainted from the get go - not only by the sources instigating the release of the info - to use Tripp to call Starr's office on that January night in 1998. But the whole Right wing web that was determined to try to bring his presidency crashing down and repeal the votes of millions.  There is no analogy, not one, with the current Mueller team investigation, and anyone who seeks to make an equivalence ought to be recognized as an untrustworthy actor in the public communication sphere. 

Sessions Needs To Resign - And Reepos Finally Need To Get Serious About Investigating Trump

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman!" - Bill Clinton before he was impeached.

"I did not have communications with the Russians," - Jeff Sessions when asked during his confirmation hearings if he had any contacts with the Russians.

With the news last night out of the Washington Post that AG Jeff Sessions lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee about having contacts with any Russians, it is time the Party of Pachyderms finally pulled its head out of its ass and commenced a full, independent investigation. And no, you dumbass Reeptards, this is not about "whining over the 2016 election" or "trying to delegitimize Trump's speech". (He did that all on his own - see my post from yesterday)  It is about getting to the bottom of a very serious issue: the infiltration of our general election by an outside power.

And may I remind any Repuke denizens reading this, compared with Clinton's relations with Monica Lewinsky this Sessions episode reaches 8 on the political Richter scale, compared with a '1' for Clinton's  sexual transgression.

As I pointed out in an earlier post, if something like this election interference had occurred 40 years ago - when U.S. citizens were still largely well informed and sane (e.g. no radical Right members were in the seats of power) it would have resulted in an inquiry that would have made Watergate look like a child's party.  No stone would have been left unturned in the cooperative effort to ferret out the culprits, or any who might have colluded with the foreign power.   Today, however, too many citizens are prepared to insanely lay blame on "bitter" political opponents as opposed to getting at the truth. Which is now fairly screaming at us in constant sirens and red flag alarms, especially with David Remnick's recent New Yorker article ("Trump, Putin and the New Cold War"),  on the Trump-Russian ties.

But of course to two fifths of the populace this is dismissed as "fake news".  The other hoot is that this is all about trying to "delegitimize" Trump. An interesting claim given that for eight years that's all the Reeptards tried to do over Obama - including using the phony birth certificate claim, as well as other idiotic beefs. (He was a "socialist" etc. or engaged in an "apology tour"). What drives this level of hypocrisy and detachment from reality?

Sam Greene of King’s College London puts it this way:

Our politics are vulnerable to nefarious influences — whether of the Kremlin variety or the Breitbart variety — not because our information landscape is open and fluid, but because voters’ perceptions have become untethered from reality. For reasons that are both complex and debatable, very many voters have stopped seeing government as a tool for the production of the common good, and have instead turned to politicians (and others) who at least make them feel good. Thus, the news we consume has become as much about emotion and identity as about facts.

In other words, the emotions of Trump backers, voters tend to overpower and overcome their good sense, reality perception and reason. This is why - like broken records- even when sobering material is presented that demands investigation they fob it off by yelping "Election bitterness!"  Their own emotions won't permit them to see anything else.

What do we know? According to two Justice Dept. sources, Trump’s attorney general Jeff Sessions twice spoke with the Russian ambassador to the United States during the presidential campaign.

The Washington Post, citing those  justice department officials (not specified but may be FBI  - which agents are under DOJ) , first reported that Sessions met with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak once in September 2016, when US intelligence officials were investigating Russian interference in the presidential election, and once in the summer of that year. A spokes person for the little liar from Alabama confirmed the meetings took place, while Sessions himself - slimy Johnny Reb that he is - doubled down with denial.  He burped: "I never met with any Russian officials in the campaign. I have no idea what this allegation is about. It is false".

And yet when one member of the judiciary committee (Sen. Al Franken)asked him point blank during his confirmation hearings if anyone  in the Trump campaign had ANY contacts whatsoever with any Russians, Sessions said  flatly:

  "I have been called a surrogate a time or two in the campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians."

Here the idiot volunteered information (albeit lies) that he was never asked for. Nonetheless, asked or not, he is hoist on his own dumb petard. He did have communications - TWICE - during the RNC in July, according to the two Justice Dept. sources.

As one might also have expected, the lying, reality- challenged Trumpies spun this differently. Resident Dodo Sarah Isgur Flores, obviously a lackey wrote:

"He was asked during the hearing about communications between Russia and the Trump campaign not about meetings he took as a Senator and member of the Armed Services Committee"

Fair enough, but why then volunteer denial information he was not asked for?  Also as Sen. Claire McCaskill wrote:

"I've been on the Armed Services Com. for 10 years. No call or meeting w/Russian ambassador. EVER. Ambassadors call members of Foreign Rel. Com."

So even in spinning the Trump toadies and lackeys lie.

 Meanwhile, the White House insanely claimed that this was merely an attempt to undermine Trump's speech which was  "reviewed favorably" by some parts of the U.S. media. Uh yeah, maybe, the "parts"  that had signed their gonads over to the Trumpies and lost any claim to being exponents of reality. See e.g.

http://www.salon.com/2017/03/01/donald-trump-pseudo-president-media-embraces-his-latest-pivot-like-the-proverbial-drunks-under-a-streetlight/

Excerpt:

"Old habits and impaired thinking lead to a suboptimal outcome.

In the age of President Donald Trump, too many members of the American news media have acted like the drunk searching for his or her keys under the streetlight. They are looking for answers in all the wrong places.  Here are several examples drawn from the tour de force of lying and deception that Trump performed on Tuesday."

But this won't wash. As 35 year Intelligence veteran Malcolm Nance noted last night, all the evidence is coming together including the conversations collected by foreign sources to bring the Trumpists down. It is only a matter of time before the whole demise arrives. If the Republicans are smart - namely in the Senate and House- they will get real about an investigation and not sit on their asses waiting for the scandal and corruption epic to manifest. They ought to recall history when too many were caught up in the Watergate mess with Nixon and the GOP lost 49 seats in the mid-term election following that debacle.

DO they want the same now? If so, let them keep doing the same  stonewalling and cast their ignominious  fate with the Trump liars and frauds. They will all come down one time, and I will enjoy and relish every minute of the spectacle.

See also:

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/michael-winship/71474/if-sessions-had-nothing-to-hide-why-did-he-try-to-hide-it