Chad Lundquist/Nevada Appeal
If Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser, California research psychologist Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, declines to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week, the committee should immediately send his Supreme Court nomination to the full Senate with a favorable recommendation. She has every right to tell her alleged sexual abuse story, but if she decides not to exercise that right, this bitterly partisan battle is over.
Ford accuses Kavanaugh of sexual assault when both of them were high school students in the Washington, D.C., area in 1982; he was 17 and she was 15. She claims he groped her over her clothing at a boozy high school party. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing,” she said. “I thought he might inadvertently kill me.”
“I categorically and unequivocally deny this accusation,” Kavanaugh replied. “This is a completely false accusation.” Personally, I think Democrats sunk to a new low by digging up a dubious 36-year-old sexual assault allegation against Kavanaugh in a desperate 11th hour attempt to derail his Supreme Court nomination. Nevertheless, Ford’s accusation should be taken seriously because she has every right to tell her story and be judged in the court of public opinion.
Mark Judge, one of Kavanaugh’s classmates at prestigious Georgetown Prep High School in Bethesda, Md., was allegedly in the same room when the alleged sexual assault occurred. “I have no recollection of that,” he said, perhaps because he was drunk or because it didn’t happen. A lot of spurious sexual assault allegations are being thrown around today and a “guilty until proven innocent” mindset seems to prevail at too many colleges and high schools. The facts be damned; convict the accused before investigating the alleged “facts.”
The Democrats’ desperate ploy was so egregious and transparent Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s hometown newspaper, the liberal San Francisco Chronicle, called her long-delayed decision to submit Ford’s ancient accusation to the FBI “unfair to Kavanaugh, unfair to his accuser, and unfair to Feinstein’s colleagues — Democrats and Republicans alike — on the Senate Judiciary Committee.” Amen!
The Chronicle noted Feinstein waited almost a week after Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings were over “to ominously announce that she had turned over information about Kavanaugh to the FBI.” Wow, what a bombshell!
Writing in the liberal Washington Post, Michael Gerson, a moderate Republican who was a speechwriter for former President George W. Bush, said “Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee set out to prove that Kavanaugh is a mendacious political hack by acting like mendacious political hacks.” Gerson wrote Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J. ), a potential 2020 presidential candidate, “offered to sacrifice his political career in a move obviously calculated to serve his political career by boldly releasing ‘confidential’ committee documents that had already been released.”
“Progressive” Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), another potential presidential candidate, earned “four Pinocchios” from the Post for suggesting Kavanaugh must be guilty of something for reading a swiped Democrat briefing memo as he prepared for his chaotic confirmation hearings. To his credit, Kavanaugh kept his judicial cool as Senate Democrats shouted insults at him for several days.
“Each political side has chosen to live in a post-truth world,” Gerson concluded. “In one case, deceit serves the president’s interests and ego (and) in the other case, deceit serves progressive ideology. But in both instances, loyalty is proven by lies” in a world where “truth” is whatever our side says it is.
I’ll close with a question: Did you do or say anything that might be deemed “inappropriate” in today’s politically correct world when you were in high school many years ago? I did, and so did you. Confess!
Guy W. Farmer is the Appeal’s senior political columnist.
