Kavanaugh: Justice requires accusers to prove their case

The campaign to destroy Judge Brett Kavanaugh is the latest explosion of Trump Derangement Syndrome – the frenzied inability of the entitled Left to accept that the electorate has removed it from office. We in Britain are uniquely equipped to recognize the phenomenon as we experience the Brexit Derangement Syndrome of ultra-Remainers.

In America the leftist enforcers succeeded in creating a situation in which a major Senate committee was toyed with by Democratic manipulators, denied access to available evidence at the appropriate time and compelled to delay its confirmation of a Supreme Court justice. Beyond that, the accuser was allowed to dictate terms and was even excused cross-examination by senators in case the “optics” looked bad to women. Instead she was only questioned by a fairy godmother-like prosecutor who asked oblique questions.

Overnight, Christine Blasey Ford became a saint of the Left; to criticize her or question her veracity in any way is to blaspheme. Once such prejudicial privilege is accepted in any investigative forum, justice and objective truth are expelled. Dr Ford’s claims must be challenged when she is attempting to destroy the life of a man of impeccable reputation who has given enormous public service to his country.

Groupthinkers are gushing in the media and online about Ford’s “credibility”. Yet to more forensic-minded observers that was precisely what she lacked. The robotic recitation of an over-rehearsed accusation, the psychobabble, the would-be disarming kittenish smile when caught out in a false claim, these were not attributes to inspire confidence.

The reason for the delay in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s deliberations was Ford’s alleged fear of flying, though she flew to Washington for the Senate hearing. Bravely she told the committee: “I eventually was able to get up the gumption, with the help of a few friends, and get on the plane.” Under cross-examination from fairy godmother it emerged she is a frequent flyer, for pleasure as well as business: from California to Delaware, Hawaii, Costa Rica, the South Pacific islands, French Polynesia, Tahiti.

Smilingly she answered, when asked if she had travelled by air to all those destinations: “Correct.” This aerophobe has more air miles than Henry Kissinger. Every seagull on the control tower of San Francisco airport knows Dr Ford’s face. Each time she boards a plane in pursuit of her hobbies such as Polynesian culture does a posse of friends accompany her to the airport to help her get up the gumption to travel?

However, although she flies for recreational purposes, she did not feel able to make the same effort to fly to Washington to fulfil her “civic duty” to reveal an alleged assault that has supposedly clouded her life for thirty-six years. She wanted Senate officials to travel to her in California: “I was hoping that they would come to me but then I realized that was an unrealistic request.”

No, it was not. The Senate Judiciary Committee offered to do precisely that. But when prosecutor Rachel Mitchell asked Ford if she had been told the committee had offered to interview her in California her lawyer objected that an answer would violate “privileged conversations” between her and counsel. In fact the whole world knew the committee had offered Ford an interview in California. A committee spokesman told the media about the offer on 19 September.

Ford then admitted she had known, but “I wasn’t clear on what the offer was.” In his letter to her mentor Dianne Feinstein, committee chairman Senator Grassley wrote, after listing the four options he had offered Ford: “I am even willing to have my staff travel to Dr. Ford in California – or anywhere else – to obtain her testimony.” What part of that offer did a university professor not understand? An offer that was virally relayed online and across the media.

These facts are significant, not only because they demonstrate that Ford has departed from the truth in recent, verifiable instances but because they betray the extent to which she is complicit in the Democrats’ agenda to delay Kavanaugh’s confirmation. This is not someone with a grievance who has gone to her attorney to file a complaint: she is embedded within the Democratic war machine.

Most disturbingly, her whole testimony was marinated in psychobabble, drawn from her academic background, and overhung with the personal experience of therapy. For three decades the name of Brett Kavanaugh never passed her lips; she eventually disclosed details of her alleged high-school experience “in the confines of therapy where I felt like it was an appropriate place to cope with the sequelae of the event.”

How was she sure the man who attacked her was Kavanaugh? Because of “the level of norepinephrine and epinephrine in the brain”. Didactically she opined to US senators: “I think the etiology of anxiety and PTSD is multifactorial.” Her most memorable quote, in the process of trying to paint Kavanaugh as a heartless monster, was: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter…”

This introverted self-analysis suggests the possibility of a self-induced belief her attacker was Kavanaugh, or even a delusory imagining of the incident. That is a hypothesis that, in identical circumstances, would be advanced in a court of law. The sacrosanct status being awarded to Ford by interested parties should not preclude such objective appraisal of her wholly unsupported testimony.

Not one of the witnesses she has cited supports her claims. Her hippocampus has indelibly retained how many beers she drank (one) and her alleged assailant’s identity, but not the venue or date of the alleged incident, nor how she travelled to the gathering. One would have expected her to remember at least the approximate venue, as a locality with traumatic associations, to be avoided in future.

The women of America – the real women, not the strident tricoteuses arrogating to themselves the right to speak for them – have emerged with great credit from this shameful travesty. Disdaining the attempt by extremists to represent human existence as a war between men and women, all those who grew up with Kavanaugh, socialized with him, worked with him, had their careers assisted by him, have testified to his true character and worth.

They are the voice of sanity that will need to be raised constantly, when we can expect a blizzard of ever more extravagant accusations against the nominee. At times last week grown-up Americans had to pause and remind themselves that an episode, real or imagined, that was routinely being linked to the tragic term “rape”, was an accusation of schoolboy groping that, if real and reported at the time, would have been dealt with in a juvenile court.

How Kavanaugh and his family will “cope with the sequelae of the event” is difficult to imagine. If it is any consolation to him, this persecution is not personal. If any of the other three candidates on the Supreme Court shortlist had been picked, they would have undergone similar allegations of sexual or, since one of them was a woman, some other kind of misconduct.

The once distinguished Democratic Party has become a squalid lynch mob. Indelible in the hippocampus is the spectacle of an historic American institution turned not just feral, but rabid.