"False memories of sexual abuse lead to terrible miscarriages of justice/To avoid the innocent being convicted, police, lawyers and judges must understand the fickle nature of human memory."

No! That's not a new article. That's from 2010, in The Guardian, but I'm reading it now because my son John posted it yesterday on Facebook.

Typically such cases occur when a vulnerable individual seeks help from a psychotherapist for a commonly occurring psychological problem such as anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and so on. At this stage, the client has no conscious memories of ever being the victim of childhood sexual abuse and is likely to firmly reject any suggestion of such abuse. To a particular sort of well-meaning psychotherapist, however, such denial is itself evidence that the abuse really did occur....

During therapy, and often as a result of "memory recovery" techniques such as hypnotic regression and guided imagery, the client may gradually develop clear and vivid memories of abuse having taken place, typically at the hands of parents and other family members.

On the evidence of a huge amount of well-controlled research, we can now be confident that these memory recovery techniques are highly likely to give rise to false memories – apparent memories for events that never took place.

For contrast, here's WaPo yesterday: "The junk science Republicans used to undermine Ford and help save Kavanaugh."

Mara Mather, a professor at the University of Southern California, has performed laboratory studies in which volunteers are given electric shocks or subjected to loud noises while they look at a set of symbols — to find out which ones they remember while their brains are flooded with the same chemicals released during trauma.

“I guess the Republicans have been debating why does she forget getting home, but that sounds very plausible," she said. “It focuses the brain on whatever stands out at that moment. The things that are not standing out are even more ignored.”

Like other researchers, she could not recall a single case of a sexual assault victim misremembering a known attacker — save for rare instances in which people, often children, were coached into falsely accusing friends and family members....

IN THE COMMENTS: Michael K said: "I initially thought she had recovered memories but I have come to the conclusion that she is lying."

The Senators and pundits were operating under rules of engagement that put it off limits to inquire into whether Christine Blasey Ford might be lying. That led them into a lot of discussion of the mysteries of memory, and if the science got weak or bad, it might be because it stood in for something else that they were committed not to talk about. I'd like to see some serious defense of whatever good memory science there might be out there, but the WaPo article is not serious. It's propaganda, purporting to straighten us out on the science, but exploiting science in service to a political end.

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What does "Come Get Your People" mean?

I had to Google that question as I struggled to understand the NYT op-ed, "White Women, Come Get Your People," by Alexis Grenell. The phrase "come get your people" does not appear in the text of the column, only in the headline. There's a subheadline, "They will defend their privilege to the death." I guess "They" is the white women, not "your people." Is coming and getting your people another way to say defending your privilege?

We see photographs of Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, so I guess they're in the set of white women Grenell is addressing. Is Grenell white? It feels creepy to Google to check someone's race, but she made race relevant. The headline makes it seem as though she is not white, because why would you address a group as if they were other than you if they were not?

I've read the column already, and I found it strange and off-putting, so I'm going to read it again to examine my reaction and I'll also see if the meaning of the headline pops into clarity and, if not, examine what turned up in my Google search of the phrase "Come Get Your People."

It begins with melodrama and careless imagery:

After a confirmation process where women all but slit their wrists, letting their stories of sexual trauma run like rivers of blood through the Capitol, the Senate still voted to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. 

I say careless because "rivers of blood" is a lot of blood to flow out of "women" — which women? how many? — and yet they only "all but slit their wrists"? So what did they do in this metaphor, to produce all that blood, if they didn't open wrist veins?

With the exception of Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all the women in the Republican conference caved, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who held out until the bitter end.

So Murkowski counts as one of the good ones (despite the pairing with Daines). And Susan Collins, despite her beautifully brilliant speech, is deemed to have fought against the position she forthrightly took. Then, she "caved." She gave in to the men.

These women are gender traitors, to borrow a term from the dystopian TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale.” They’ve made standing by the patriarchy a full-time job. 

That's awfully presumptuous. The vote on Kavanaugh wasn't — at least not necessarily — a vote for or against "the patriarchy." I think this kind of overstatement and hyperventilating is repellent to a lot of women and men. "Gender traitors" is very insulting and closed-minded about what different women might be thinking. Feminists should offer women freedom, not more limitation.

The women who support them show up at the Capitol wearing “Women for Kavanaugh” T-shirts, but also probably tell their daughters to put on less revealing clothes when they go out....

Less revealing than T-shirts stating political messages, or did Grenell just flip into visualizing these women policing the display of sexuality in their offspring?

These are the kind of women who think that being falsely accused of rape is almost as bad as being raped. 

But being falsely accused is horrible! We rarely get the choice which misfortune will befall us, but it's not right to brush aside some misfortunes because we think other misfortunes are worse. But anyway, compare the least bad rape to the worst false accusations, and you will surely see an overlap. I think there are some men — you? — who would rather be raped than to have his 2 young daughters believe, falsely, that he is a rapist. Again, life doesn't work like that. You don't get that choice. But I think just the one effect, your 2 daughters believe you are a rapist, might be as painful as an actual rape, and I'm not counting all the other potential effects that Kavanaugh was looking at: loss of the Supreme Court appointment, loss of his existing judgeship, loss of his ability to teach and to coach, loss of his wife, loss of his friends, and even loss of his liberty (as some were arguing that he should go to prison for perjury). These are not trifles! And it's counterproductive to pretend that they are for the purpose of convincing people that rape is a terrible crime.

The kind of women who agree with President Trump that “it’s a very scary time for young men in America,” which he said during a news conference on Tuesday.

But the people who scare me the most are the mothers, sisters and wives of those young men, because my stupid uterus still holds out some insane hope of solidarity.

She's reduced herself and others to an internal organ. Uteri cry out to other uteri: Sisters! But every young man is here because a woman was a mother, and the solidarity within a family is the strongest solidarity of all. That scares you? It scares you that mothers love their sons? The love of mothers toward their sons makes us want to see them free from false accusations AND want them not to be rapists. It's not one or the other. The 2 desires are mutually reinforcing. And it really is, as you say, stupid to think otherwise.

Since when do people on the left think fairness to the accused should be sacrificed in the interest of fighting crime? That's traditionally what lefties call a right-wing idea.

We’re talking about white women. 

Because black men are not susceptible to false accusations?! That's a ludicrously convenient assertion.

The same 53 percent who put their racial privilege ahead of their second-class gender status in 2016 by voting to uphold a system that values only their whiteness, just as they have for decades....

The effort to inject race into the Kavanaugh problem is embarrassing. We have enough racial problems without seeing them appropriated as a makeweight in an argument about women. And it's ridiculous and contemptuous toward women to say that when we vote we're just choosing whether to vote based on race or based on sex. Stop globbing us into big groups and ordering us what to do. It's not even effective persuasion, quite apart from its being plainly factually wrong and actively destructive.

I'm cutting a few sentences that lead up to this over-the-top statement:

So it seems that white women are expected to support the patriarchy by marrying within their racial group, reproducing whiteness and even minimizing violence against their own bodies....

I think by "minimizing violence against their own bodies" she means acting as if the violence against them isn't as bad as it really is, but the language is carelessly ambiguous in a way that doesn't serve her propagandistic agenda. The phrase could also mean doing things that lessen the extent of the violence. A woman who knows self-defense and keeps alert and aware of her surroundings is "minimizing violence." Perhaps Grenell is so focused on how women feel about what other people do to them that she didn't notice the double meaning that had to do with what women can do for themselves in this world. What's important is that the Democratic Party can endlessly offer to help women with their desperate, crying needs. And if you're a woman and you don't agree, you're a gender traitor.

Look at this logic:

During the 2016 presidential election, did white women really vote with their whiteness in mind? Lorrie Frasure-Yokley, a political scientist at U.C.L.A., recently measured the effect of racial identity on white women’s willingness to support Trump in 2016 and found a positive and statistically significant relationship. So white women who voted for him did so to prop up their whiteness....

A statistically significant relationship doesn't tell us what was in the voters' mind! White women voted for Trump to prop up their whiteness? How do you know they didn't vote because they hate abortion or because they wanted better trade deals or they don't trust the Clintons or, hell, maybe they still held out some insane hope of making America great again?

This blood pact between white men and white women is at issue in the November midterms. President Trump knows it, and at that Tuesday news conference, he signaled to white women to hold the line: “The people that have complained to me about it the most about what’s happening are women. Women are very angry,” he said. “I have men that don’t like it, but I have women that are incensed at what’s going on.”

I’m sure he does “have” them; game girls will defend their privilege to the death.

Grenell is insulting women again. Because they're not on her political side, she disparages them as having no mind at all. Hypocritically, she's saying about them what she's accusing Trump of saying about them, that they're conned and witless. But that isn't what Trump is saying. He might be thinking it, but Grenell is saying it.

But apparently that doesn’t include Ms. Murkowski anymore...

Meanwhile, Senator Collins subjected us to a slow funeral dirge about due process and some other nonsense... 

Due process is nonsense. 

... due process and some other nonsense I couldn’t even hear through my rage headache....

Grenell is presenting herself as a lunatic. She's doing that openly and intentionally. She's less aware, it seems, that she's also betraying the most treasured liberal values.

... as she announced on Friday she would vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh. Her mostly male colleagues applauded her.

The question for white women in November is: Which one of these two women are you?

I fear we already know the answer.

So it ends. Awful. She should fear that her histrionics and stark illiberalism will drive voters, female and male, into voting against Democrats. I don't like rivers-of-blood melodrama and race jammed in anywhere you can think of anything to say about it and contempt for the intelligence and independence of women. What an awful opinion piece! And I still don't know what "come get your people" means!

Okay, I'll look at the stuff Google found for me. First, there's "Picking Up the Trash of White Supremacy," by Abby Norman in something called SheLoves:

Recently my friend Danielle has been tagging me in posts on Facebook about white people making unfortunate missteps, whether blatantly or accidentally, in the realm of racial reconciliation.

“Abby Norman, you better come get your people.”

At first I laughed. What do you mean my people? I do not know these people. They do not speak for me. Why do you think every dumb white girl is my people, what are you trying to say?

What Danielle was trying to say was that as a white woman, with white privilege, it is my responsibility to educate other white people so everyone can live in a better world. Too often white women, and specifically I, have depended on black women to educate white communities about their lived experiences....

White Ladies, the white community is our space and our responsibility....

Second, there's a tweet from Brittney Cooper (AKA ProfessorCrunk) that says:

White feminists, when we say come get your people, we mean come get your girl, #PermitPatty, out here harassing little Black girls. This kind of thing makes me feel the opposite of non-violent.

So there's this specifically racial meaning, it seems, that comes from black people who are tired of getting stuck fighting racism on their own and want white people to see it and to take the lead disciplining other white people. But Grenell isn't black, and though she tries, she's not really talking about race. She's a white woman demanding that other white women discipline white women, and not about race but about getting tripped up in the nonsense of due process rather than just automatically and uncritically believing a woman's accusations.

If it's some specifically black slang, why not let black people have it? Speaking of white privilege. Do you think everything is yours?

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SNL's "Lindsey Graham" says: "Let's keep this horny male energy going 'til the midterms!"

The cold open shows GOP Senators celebrating their Kavanaugh victory in sports-locker-room style and "Chuck Schumer" weakly whining over the Democrats defeat and then getting punched in the balls by "Joe Manchin":





You can watch the whole sketch if you scroll back to the beginning, but I'm setting it to start at the depiction of Susan Collins, who, of course, can't be shown as a strong, principled woman who gave the best speech anyone can remember a Senator giving. No, she's a witless patsy, just vaguely realizing she's been had:



If it were funnier, I'd make a new tag, Kavanomedy. But it isn't funny. The main idea is that the American people were overwhelmingly opposed to Kavanaugh and are ferociously angry now and will let the clueless Senators feel their wrath in the midterm elections. If the Kavanaugh-haters who watch the show could really believe that, maybe they'd laugh, but there's no evidence that's what's happening out there in the real world. Oh, what am I saying? Who needs evidence?! Live within the fantasy for as long as you can, and "SNL" wants to be inside your bubble. Not much comic potential there, but who cares? It's the Era of That's Not Funny.

IN THE COMMENTS: gilbar — quoting my "SNL" wants to be inside your bubble — links to the "SNL" sketch that acknowledged the bubble within which it pictures its audience:

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"The crowd in front of the U.S. Supreme Court is tiny, looks like about 200 people (& most are onlookers)..."

"... that wouldn’t even fill the first couple of rows of our Kansas Rally, or any of our Rallies for that matter! The Fake News Media tries to make it look sooo big, & it’s not!"

Trump tweets.

Also at Twitter, I'm seeing Jordan Peterson promoting (but not necessarily endorsing) the idea that Kavanaugh, confirmed, should step down. Responding to him is Scott Adams, who says, "This feels like a terrible idea to me, but because smart people are saying it, I’m open to hearing the argument."

Peterson replies: "I'm not certain that is the right move. It's very complex. But he would have his name cleared, and a figure who might be less divisive might be put forward."

And Adams says, "Quitting would clear his name? I'm not connecting any of these dots."

I agree with Adams and would add that a "less divisive" figure is a fantasy. If the Democrats dream of stopping Kavanaugh were to come true, they would be fired up to use any means necessary to stop the new nominee. I'm reminded of this passage in the Susan Collins speech:

The President nominated Brett Kavanaugh on July 9th. Within moments of that announcement, special interest groups raced to be the first to oppose him, including one organization that didn’t even bother to fill in the Judge’s name on its pre-written press release – they simply wrote that they opposed “Donald Trump’s nomination of XX to the Supreme Court of the United States.” A number of Senators joined the race to announce their opposition, but they were beaten to the punch by one of our colleagues who actually announced opposition before the nominee’s identity was even known.

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The Senate is about to call the roll on Kavanaugh...

... just as soon as these protesters can be cleared out of the gallery.

AND: That's it! Kavanaugh has survived the ordeal. 50-48, confirmation.

I was touched that Senator Murkowski withdrew her "no" vote in deference to Senator Daines who wanted — needed — to be present at his daughter's wedding, so that he did not need to rush back in the middle of the day to register the "yes" vote that was his to give.

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"The Me Too movement is real. It matters. It is needed, and it is long overdue... I found [Ford's] testimony to be sincere, painful and compelling.

"I believe that she is a survivor of a sexual assault and that this trauma has upended her life. Nevertheless, the four witnesses she named could not corroborate any of the events," said Senator Susan Collins, explaining her vote for Brett Kavanaugh. "We will be ill-served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence."

Reported in "Collins and Manchin Will Vote for Kavanaugh, Ensuring His Confirmation" (NYT).

Here's a comment over there (with over 1,000 up votes):

Thank you Heidi Heitkamp, and thank you Lisa Murkowski for standing up for women and against sexual predators. And how about you Susan Collins? Do you want to be the only woman in the Senate to put a man creditably accused of sexual assault against multiple women who has clearly demonstrated his intent in the very recent Jane Doe case to eviscerate, if not overturn, Roe v. Wade? It's time to stand with your sisters and vote "No!" to white male power and privilege to avoid responsibility for sexual misconduct by blaming and mocking the women.

ADDED: Here's the Susan Collins speech:



Full text (NYT):

Informed by Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 76, I have interpreted [the Senate's advise-and-consent role] to mean that the President has broad discretion to consider a nominee’s philosophy, whereas my duty as a Senator is to focus on the nominee’s qualifications as long as that nominee’s philosophy is within the mainstream of judicial thought....

Some argue that because this is a lifetime appointment to our highest court, the public interest requires that doubts be resolved against the nominee. Others see the public interest as embodied in our long-established tradition of affording to those accused of misconduct a presumption of innocence. In cases in which the facts are unclear, they would argue that the question should be resolved in favor of the nominee.

Mr. President, I understand both viewpoints. This debate is complicated further by the fact that the Senate confirmation process is not a trial. But certain fundamental legal principles—about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness—do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them.

In evaluating any given claim of misconduct, we will be ill served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness, tempting though it may be. We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.

The presumption of innocence is relevant to the advice and consent function when an accusation departs from a nominee’s otherwise exemplary record. I worry that departing from this presumption could lead to a lack of public faith in the judiciary and would be hugely damaging to the confirmation process moving forward.

ADDED: I'm only quoting a portion of Collins's speech, which is quite substantial. Here is a much shorter speech from Senator Lisa Murkowski, the one Republican who is voting no:

This hasn’t been fair to the judge, but I also recognize that we need to have institutions that are viewed as fair and if people who are victims, people who feel that there is no fairness in our system of government, particularly in our courts, then you’ve gone down a path that is not good and right for this country. And so I have been wrestling with whether or not this was about qualifications of a good man or is this bigger than the nomination.

And I believe we’re dealing with issues right now that are bigger than the nominee and how we ensure fairness and how our legislative and judicial branch can continue to be respected. This is what I have been wrestling with, and so I made the — took the very difficult vote that I did.

I believe Brett Kavanaugh’s a good man. It just may be that in my view he’s not the right man for the court at this time. So I have taken my vote here this morning, I’m going to go back to my office and write a floor statement that is more fulsome and have the opportunity to have that.

But this has truly been the most difficult evaluation of a decision that I have ever had to make, and I’ve made some interesting ones in my career. But I value and respect where my colleagues have come down from in their support for the judge, and I think we’re at a place where we need to begin thinking about the credibility and integrity of our institutions.

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Acting!

Michael...WE LOST

What more could we have done? We don’t have the Senate or the Presidency.

What more can we do for god sakes?

We should focus on the midterms but stop criticizing without a real world solution.

And frankly what were you doing? https://t.co/Gsg0YX26Wy

— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) October 4, 2018

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Right now: the Senate is voting on cloture for the Kavanaugh confirmation.

Only about 30% of the Democrats seem to be there.

UPDATE: Manchin voted aye. Murkowski no. Collins and Flake voted yes. Stragglers coming in and voting.

UPDATE 2: 51-49. Ayes have it.

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Slate: "The Kavanaugh Hearings Have Women Fired Up… to Vote Republican."

The article, here, is by Ruth Graham.

The titanic anger of progressive women has been a dominant theme in the media since President Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton two years ago. Two major books about female rage have been published this fall, including Good and Mad by writer and reporter Rebecca Traister. “This political moment has provoked a period in which more and more women have been in no mood to dress their fury up as anything other than raw and burning rage,” Traister wrote in the New York Times on Saturday. “Many women are yelling, shouting, using Sharpies to etch sharply worded slogans onto protest signs, making furious phone calls to representatives.”

But women’s rage is not a chorus performed in unison. Atlantic reporter Emma Green talked with about a dozen female conservative leaders across the country for a story this week that puts flesh on the Marist poll’s finding: that the Kavanaugh hearings have electrified conservative women too. “I’ve got women in my church who were not politically active at all who were incensed with this,” the chairwoman of the West Virginia Republican Party told Green. The Indiana state director for the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, Jodi Smith, told Green that “people in Indiana are angry.” In her view, the hearings are “one of the best things that could happen to us” as she looks forward to a hotly contested Senate election in the state in November.

Here's the Emma Green article, "Conservative Women Are Angry About Kavanaugh—And They Think Other Voters Are, Too/Local- and state-level leaders across the country say they’re ready to lash out against Democrats in the midterm elections."

ADDED: Also in Slate, "Christine Blasey Ford Changed Everything/#MeToo was just the beginning. For these women, the Kavanaugh hearings have incited both hotter rage and a deeper personal reckoning." You know, some of us women are put off by hot rage — especially, for me, if you're simultaneously trying to disqualify Kavanaugh for expressing anger and if all the rage is in service to Democratic Party politics.

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"My hearing testimony was forceful and passionate. That is because I forcefully and passionately denied the allegation against me."

Writes Brett Kavanaugh in The Wall Street Journal (not blocked by a paywall):

At times, my testimony—both in my opening statement and in response to questions—reflected my overwhelming frustration at being wrongly accused, without corroboration, of horrible conduct completely contrary to my record and character. My statement and answers also reflected my deep distress at the unfairness of how this allegation has been handled.

I was very emotional last Thursday, more so than I have ever been. I might have been too emotional at times. I know that my tone was sharp, and I said a few things I should not have said. I hope everyone can understand that I was there as a son, husband and dad. I testified with five people foremost in my mind: my mom, my dad, my wife, and most of all my daughters.

Going forward, you can count on me to be the same kind of judge and person I have been for my entire 28-year legal career: hardworking, even-keeled, open-minded, independent and dedicated to the Constitution and the public good....

A good effort at striking the right note. Not too conciliatory.  I'd like to know exactly what were the "few things I should not have said." I'm sure one was to Senator Klobuchar: "You're asking about blackout, I don't know, have you [ever had an alcohol-induced blackout]?" And — after she suggested that he's not had a blackout and "Is that your answer?" — he said "Yeah, and I'm curious if you have." He already apologized for that at the hearing: "Sorry I did that. This is a tough process. I'm sorry about that."

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"To think, just a few short weeks ago, we were getting lectured about how unfair, sexist, and racist it was to judge a woman for expressing anger during a tennis game."

Wrote Lyssa in the comments to yesterday's post "The intemperance of the law professors' 'judicial temperament' letter."

I had to go back to see what I'd written about Serena Williams back on September 9th:

I felt that Williams was trying — very hard — to intimidate the umpire. She was actively bullying him. Hey! That reminds me of Trump. People say he's lost it and is raging when he's using a style of emotional manipulation.

As I've already written (somewhere in the Kavanaugh posts and comments) that I think Kavanaugh made a decision — after his calm, bland interview on Fox News — to allow his experience of emotion to be visible during the Senate hearing. He's getting criticized and mocked for letting emotion show, but that doesn't mean he'd have been more successful if he had maintained a stoical front.

As I said, above, about Serena Williams and Donald Trump, I think the emotion is displayed as a means to an end. The emotion isn't completely fake, but it's not out of control. There's real emotion, but it is also performed, with an idea of getting something the emoter wants. We need to be careful not to get conned, so we're right to be somewhat skeptical of those who let emotion show. But everyone's trying to get something they want, and people who suppress their emotion aren't inherently trustworthy.

Someone who truly loses control belongs in a different category. But you have to watch out for the accusation that someone has truly lost control. The accusers — like everybody else — are human beings with a will to get something they want. Sometimes their game is so obvious — like the lawprofs' "judicial temperament" gambit — that no one is fooled (though many are fooled into thinking that others will be fooled, because what they want is for those others to be fooled).

IN THE COMMENTS: Noting my statement, “But you have to watch out for the accusation that someone has truly lost control," Kevin writes: "Because those accusations are civility bullshit." Yes. Thanks for reminding me that this is the "civility bullshit" problem I've written about so many times. Calls for civility — don't get angry and emotional, speak only with cool rationality — are always bullshit. In our present-day American political discourse, it's always an effort to get your opponents to unilaterally disarm. When the tables are turned, and expressing emotion is what the people on your side are doing, you'll vaunt their passion and commitment and scorn your opponents for their bloodlessness.

ADDED: Remember when liberals thought this was exactly what was needed:

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"The reason to bring up 'Porky’s' now is the laughter — the uproarious laughter. Last week, when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was asked..."

"... what she most remembered about the night she says Brett M. Kavanaugh drunkenly assaulted her, she offered, with some quavering, that it was the laughter between Mr. Kavanaugh and his friend. She told the Senate Judiciary Committee: 'indelible in the hippocampus' — Dr. Blasey’s a professor of psychology — 'is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense," writes Wesley Morris in an article on the front page of nytimes.com right now, "In ’80s Comedies, Boys Had It Made. Girls Were the Joke."

Why talk about "Porky's" when Kavanaugh mentioned 3 movies of the time that influenced him and his friends: "Animal House," "Caddyshack," and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High"? Well, it's the movie that the NYT critic Wesley Morris "suddenly found" his "mind... on a journey back to."

Morris brings up a number of other 80s movies that centered on young men: “Risky Business,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” “Three O’Clock High,” “Revenge of the Nerds,” “Bad Boys,” “Hot Pursuit,” “Weird Science,” “Teen Wolf,” “License to Drive.” “The Secret of My Success,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “Soul Man,” “Losin’ It,” “The Last American Virgin,” “Stripes,” “Sharky’s Machine.” “Stakeout,” “Like Father, Like Son,” “Big,” “Goonies," and "Zapped."

Is there any evidence that Kavanaugh even saw these movies? Morris makes this very loose connection: "From the sounds of what Judge Kavanaugh has disclosed about his high school and college self, he seemed part of that landscape." Morris does name the 3 movies Kavanaugh mentioned, and Morris goes so far as admitting that "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" (a movie made by a woman) "could be construed as feminist."

Speaking of feminism, Morris remembers "Carrie," the 1976 movie in which a high school girl, enraged when her classmates all laugh at her, uses her telekinesis to (spoiler alert) kill them all.

Morris cannot resist asserting that men are laughing at Christine Blasey Ford now!

At a rally the other day in Mississippi, the president lampooned Dr. Blasey to big cheers. Even now, men are laughing at her.

It seems to me people took Christine Blasey Ford extremely seriously. We've been talking about her for over a week, giving her the top spot in the news, after she came forward with an uncorroborated memory fragment from 1982. Kavanaugh was mocked for showing emotion in response to the ugly accusation, but Ford was held immune from comedy. Trump mocked her statements, playing up their fragmentary nature, but he didn't imitate her voice or call her names or talk about how she looked and acted. She was not mocked. "Saturday Night Live" did a 13-minute cold open about the hearing and Ford wasn't even one of the characters! Only Kavanaugh was ridiculed.

Laughter is an interesting topic, and I like the idea of taking "a journey back" to the 1980s and to examine how young men laughed at the expense of women, especially with the inclusion of "Carrie," the movie about a young woman committing mass murder because she was laughed at. That's a fascinating parallel to Christine Blasey Ford!

What's the right kind of laughter? And what's the right amount? If the new idea is no laughing at the expense of women, it's not going to work (as Trump obviously knows and will use against all the no-laughing! crowd).

They're all going to laugh at you!!!

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Trust the FBI! The FBI is the expert authority! Bring in the FBI! FBI!! FBI!!... ... The FBI did it wrong!

So annoying.

They cried out over and over for the FBI. The FBI was called in because it was supposedly neutral and expert and the proper authority. Then, when they didn't like what they got, they immediately flipped to saying the FBI didn't do it right.

I've seen this kind of game play before, and I when I see it, I get out my old Russ Feingold video:



"The game's not over until we win!"

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The intemperance of the law professors' "judicial temperament" letter.

I see over 1,000 names on this anti-Kavanaugh letter, many of them names of people I know. I've been with a lot of law professors over the past 4 decades, and the best law professors I have known have routinely expressed disbelief that the judicial opinions they read state the real reasons why the judges decide the cases the way they do. And I don't believe the law professors when they say they oppose Brett Kavanaugh because they have concerns about his "judicial temperament."

From the letter, which I'm reading in the NYT:

We regret that we feel compelled to write to you, our Senators, to provide our views that at the Senate hearings on Sept. 27, Judge Brett Kavanaugh displayed a lack of judicial temperament that would be disqualifying for any court, and certainly for elevation to the highest court of this land.

The question at issue was of course painful for anyone. But Judge Kavanaugh exhibited a lack of commitment to judicious inquiry. Instead of being open to the necessary search for accuracy, Judge Kavanaugh was repeatedly aggressive with questioners.

He was confronted with devastating allegations that were vague and uncorroborated. He knows his own life, yet he was supposed to be committed to "judicious inquiry" about it?! He was supposed to be "open"?! He was supposed to act as though he were absorbing the facts for the first time, like a judge deciding a case? Who wrote this letter? Why did so many law professors sign this text?

Even in his prepared remarks, Judge Kavanaugh described the hearing as partisan, referring to it as “a calculated and orchestrated political hit,” rather than acknowledging the need for the Senate, faced with new information, to try to understand what had transpired. 

But the hearing really was partisan! Yes, the Senators were in a tough spot, since they were trying to figure out what happened, but Kavanaugh knows what he himself has done. Kavanaugh was supposed to be supportive of the predicament the Senators got themselves into and not defend himself vigorously?

He was under a vicious attack, and he knew it was unfair and cruel — unless he was lying. If he was lying, then that's why he shouldn't be on the Court. But this "judicial temperament" idea is designed to work even if he was telling the truth.

So we need to read this letter in light of the professors' intent. Imagine an innocent Kavanaugh, under an outrageous attack and subjected to a horrendous ordeal. He expresses indignation and challenges his accusers. But he was supposed to remain calm and be deferential to the Senators, and because he didn't — and for no other reason — he doesn't belong on the Court. Who believes that?!

Instead of trying to sort out with reason and care the allegations that were raised, Judge Kavanaugh responded in an intemperate, inflammatory and partial manner, as he interrupted and, at times, was discourteous to senators....

Why would Kavanaugh need to "to sort out with reason and care the allegations that were raised" — he knows what happened in his own life — and why would 1,000 law professors say that he should have?!

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"White House Finds No Support in FBI Report for Claims Against Kavanaugh/Senators are set to review the FBI’s findings Thursday."

Reports the Wall Street Journal, but I don't have a subscription, so let's move on to the NYT.

The NYT headline plays it so neutral — "White House Sends F.B.I. Interviews on Kavanaugh to Senate" — that I infer the FBI report supports Kavanaugh.

“The White House has received the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s supplemental background investigation into Judge Kavanaugh, and it is being transmitted to the Senate,” Raj Shah, a White House spokesman, said in the statement, which was posted on Twitter. “This is the last addition to the most comprehensive review of a Supreme Court nominee in history, which includes extensive hearings, multiple committee interviews, over 1,200 questions for the record and over a half million pages of documents,” he added. “With this additional information, the White House is fully confident the Senate will vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.”

The White House statement gave no further details about the material, but an official briefed on the F.B.I. review said the bureau contacted 10 people and interviewed nine of them. It was not clear why the 10th person was not interviewed. The White House concluded that the interviews did not corroborate sexual misconduct accusations against Judge Kavanaugh.

That last sentence meets my idea of journalism better than does the WSJ headline. We only know what the White House says, not what it really found. It could be lying. Maybe it found some support but chose to make an absolute statement.

Let's check WaPo: "In 2:30 a.m. tweets, White House says FBI report supports Kavanaugh confirmation." That's neutral, but with colorful facets — tweeting, early morning hours — that might seem to minimize the seriousness with which the White House assessed the report. A reader of headlines might picture Trump — impetuous Trump — tweeting again, but it was Raj Shah (the spokesman cited in the NYT article).

Also in WaPo  "Senate moves ahead on Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination with a procedural vote expected Friday."

The Senate Judiciary Committee announced Thursday that it has received the FBI’s completed report on Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh, as partisan rancor continued to grow over the scope of the investigation into sexual assault allegations that have endangered his confirmation.

In anticipation of the report’s arrival, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Wednesday night teed up a key vote to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination for Friday. Until that vote, senators will be rushing in and out of a secure facility at the Capitol to review the sensitive FBI report that the bureau has compiled, looking into allegations of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh.

“There will be plenty of time for members to review and be briefed on this supplemental material before a Friday cloture vote,” McConnell said Wednesday night.

Good! The vote should indeed take place on Friday (unless there's something specific and substantial in the FBI report that justifies cautious delay). If there's no corroboration, I'm glad for Kavanaugh and his supporters. I'm sorry for private citizen Christine Blasey Ford if she believes what she said and that the Senate would keep her accusations private, and I'm extremely critical of the Senators who allowed her accusation to become public. They ought to have made their own attempt at corroboration — or did they try and fail? — and we should never have been subjected to this ordeal. It was a shameful display, painful for just about everyone and the pain isn't over yet.

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"Conservative Women Are Angry About Kavanaugh—And They Think Other Voters Are, Too."

"Local- and state-level leaders across the country say they’re ready to lash out against Democrats in the midterm elections" — Emma Green in The Atlantic.

By and large, these women were not swayed by Ford’s testimony. Tamara Scott, the Republican national committeewoman for Iowa and the state director of Concerned Women for America, says she was even more skeptical of Ford’s claims after Thursday’s hearing. “I found her testimony to be inconsistent, from a woman who seemed to be confused at best,” Scott says. To her, Ford “overplayed her hand as the scattered and scared fragile female”: The professor’s “glasses were filthy and oversized, she looked scared and frazzled, [and] she refused to fix her hair caught in her glasses,” says Scott. “It was a purposeful disheveled look.”...

Laurie Lee, a Navy veteran who runs a political-consulting firm in Arkansas, has... been hearing over the last couple of weeks... that Democrats have “overplayed” these accusations. “It’s a disservice to women that have had horrific stories,” she says. She was open to believing Ford: “It doesn’t matter to me if it’s Bill Clinton or Brett Kavanaugh. We want to make sure that sexual predators are dealt with.” But like other women I interviewed, Lee believes the professor’s account is faulty, and that Democrats are using her for their own political ends. “This whole process, to me, comes across as something that has been crassly weaponized for political purposes,” says Kathleen Hunt, a political donor in Florida who spent 20 years in the CIA....”

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The cruelest anti-Kavanaugh argument yet.

From "How This Brutal Confirmation Process Could Shape Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court Justice" (Time):

Even if Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, he will carry scars from the brutal process to get him there.... [A]s he limps over the finish line... the question could soon shift from whether he will be confirmed to what kind of justice he will be.

Will Kavanaugh... dig in on the far right, radicalized by the experience? Will he swing the other way towards the middle, determined to improve his reputation among women? Or will he be able to move past it entirely?...

“What [Kavanaugh said at the hearing] was so explicitly partisan, so permanently political, so grudge-bearing, that I don’t see how somebody puts on a new robe, goes to a new court and forgets about that,” says John Q. Barrett, professor at St. John’s University School of Law. “The public will never forget about that. This guy, if he’s going to be confirmed, will now be heckled and protested and a pariah for the rest of his life for a segment of the country.”...

“It will raise questions about whether he could ever view any issue that touched on questions of sexual misconduct fairly, given what has happened,” says Melissa Murray, professor at New York University School of Law.

The linked article doesn't come out and make this argument, but it caused me to see it: Kavanaugh should be rejected because the confirmation experienced has ruined his mind. He's damaged now and can no longer think in the properly judicial way that was once within his capacity. A moderated version of that argument is that people will worry that he's now damaged and skewed and that's reason enough to keep him off the Court, to preserve the belief in the legitimacy of the institution.

I'm not making these arguments. I'm just seeing them and finding them horrendously perverse and cruel. Why not devise a confirmation process that is such an ordeal that it will drive out the very qualities we want in a judge? First, it would be torture, and second, you could never confirm a nominee. It's an inherently self-defeating process.

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"Students Filed Title IX Complaints Against Kavanaugh to Prevent Him From Teaching at Harvard Law."

The Harvard Crimson reports, naming a student who supposedly said she'd filed a complaint with the University’s Office for Dispute Resolution and has been urging other students to do the same. We're told that "at least 48 students had signed an online petition certifying they had filed a Title IX complaint against the nominee."

The student who got this started argued that Kavanaugh could be accused of gender-based harassment under Harvard's definition: "verbal, nonverbal, graphic, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostile conduct based on sex, sex-stereotyping, sexual orientation or gender identity." Kavanaugh's mere presence on campus, she and others said, makes a "hostile environment" under Harvard's definition.

[The student] said she hopes students who have previously felt reluctant to file complaints with the University — whether related to Kavanaugh or to other experiences — will see that the formal process gives them “power” and “a right to our feeling of being safe.”

“I hope that, as students file these complaints and engage with this process of singling out accusers and harassers on campus, that it actually can be seen that this process is a little less formidable than the reputation of the process is on campus,” she said.

Another leader in this activism said:

“If you had a meeting in Wasserstein, you don’t know if he’s going to be there... It would be pretty terrifying for any survivor or any person to walk into a building on campus and see someone who has been alleged of a very serious crime.”

Terrifying to see a person accused of a serious crime? Kavanaugh's temperament is being questioned, but what about the temperament of these potential lawyers? Do they not feel called to deal with the difficult world of legal problems? This made me think about one of the most reviled Supreme Court cases, Bradwell v. Illinois, which allowed the state to bar women from the practice of law, back in 1873. From the concurring opinion of Justice Bradley:

The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.... 

Why don't activist, feminist women aspire to strength?  Promoting the timidity and delicacy of women and running to the authorities with specious, backhanded complaints — what lowly, destructive activism!

IN THE COMMENTS: Lyssa said:

Every now and then, quote-unquote feminists have s minor freak out because some female celebs or young women in general don’t want to be associated with the word “feminist.” This is why. I don’t claim to know what feminism really means; it seems to be something different to everyone, so I generally avoid the term entirely. But if feminism involves this kind of weakness, I want absolutely no part of it.

If I were still in law school, I’d get that Bradley quote put in a t-shirt. It’s awsome.

"Awsome" = a typo or a word that means cute (that is, inspiring people to say "aw").

Anyway, I've had that problem with feminism for close to half a century, but I still care about salvaging the word. Why give it away to people who are undermining the very cause that matters to you? I remember saying — 35 years ago — that I didn't want to call myself a feminist because I didn't want to wear a label with a meaning that wasn't clear and stable and within my control. But that never meant I didn't care about participating in the struggle over the meaning of the word. It's a big struggle, and I say never surrender.

CORRECTION: I thought the activist students were law students, but now I'm seeing the word "undergraduate" in the first and second paragraphs and have deleted the references to law students. I hope it is true that law students know better than to engage in this maneuver and that they are leaning into strength and readying themselves to confront the roughness of the real world.

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Venturing into the territory of mocking Christine Blasey Ford, Trump makes a misstep.

I think it's very dangerous to privilege some people to make ruinous accusations against another person, and we've got to find a way to challenge accusers, even though it is important to protect real victims and to encourage them to come forward.

It's incredibly difficult to figure out how to do this, and it's especially hard when quite a few people want the accused taken down whether the accusations are true or not, and they can and do intimidate those who want to put the accuser to the test. Christine Blasey Ford testified in a supportive environment, and those who hope she's wrong were afraid do anything to test her credibility.

But Trump isn't one to be intimidated, and he is plunging in, attacking the credibility of Christine Blasey Ford. I'm reading "Trump Taunts Christine Blasey Ford at Rally" (NYT):

Playing to the crowd of thousands gathered to cheer him on [at a rally in Mississippi], the president pretended to be Dr. Blasey testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday. “Thirty-six years ago this happened. I had one beer, right? I had one beer,” said Mr. Trump, channeling his version of Dr. Blasey. His voice dripping with derision, he then imitated her being questioned at the hearing, followed by her responses about what she could not recall about the alleged attack.

“How did you get home? I don’t remember. How’d you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. What neighborhood was it in? I don’t know. Where’s the house? I don’t know. Upstairs, downstairs, where was it? I don’t know,” Mr. Trump said, as the crowd applauded. “But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.”

"Dripping with derision"? "Pretended to be" her — but did he imitate her voice and mannerisms? I don't see video of this at the NYT, and I haven't tracked it down myself, so I don't know if that is accurate. Is Trump showing people the way to challenge an accuser or engaging in antics that no one else should attempt and that Trump alone seems able to get away with?

I suspect the latter. But there's one thing he's plainly done wrong. Christine Blasely Ford did not wonder if it was upstairs or downstairs. She clearly testified that it happened upstairs. You're critiquing someone else's presentation of the facts. You'd better get your own in order!

ADDED: Here's how WaPo presents the "imitation" in video (along with other Trump imitations):



So there you can see that Trump absolutely does not attempt to copy Ford's voice. It's full-on Trump voice. He does not use any mannerisms to depict Ford. It's all in words, the text you see above. WaPo's other examples are all different, not much of a pattern. There's the problematic gesturing while copying the words of a disabled reporter, but really nothing else. The rest is just dramatic speaking and gesturing. He is mocking people, but there should be mockery in politics — not mockery of anyone's disability or possible victimhood — but mockery of the arguments and statements that you're trying to refute.

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"There's really no point in risking injury, if the result of a fight is predictable."

I'm quoting Sir David Attenborough, transcribed from a video at "When a hippo is angry, even other hippos get out of the way/Hippos are huge and possess powerful teeth, so real fights are rare because the risk of injury is so great" (BBC).

I stumbled into that after beginning the day posting about the death of Peggy Sue Gerron, which felt off because I'd received the clear impression — as I scanned the news on my iPhone while still in bed and listened to the NYT podcast as I made my coffee and toast — that the theme of the day was anger. Why angry hippos? I had the idea that there was an old children's game called "Angry, Angry Hippos," and the rest is blogging happenstance. I can't embed the Attenborough video, so here are some children, viewing hippos, noticing the teeth — which Attenborough says are for threatening violence — and receiving the fake news from a woman that the hippos are smiling:



• Here's the NYT podcast. The episode is "Kavanaugh's Classmates Speak Out." It's not mostly about anger, but drinking. I learned the jocular phrase "holding up the wall." It means so drunk you need to lean against the wall.

• Here's the main article that influenced me to believe the subject of the day is anger: "'The trauma for a man': Male fury and fear rises in GOP in defense of Kavanaugh" (WaPo). I'm going to do a separate post about that. I'm just warming up. I have an aversion to anger, and I have a sense of how that can be used to manipulate me — me, a microcosm of women. Don't make me angry!, smiles the hippo.

• And here's the real children's game that became more ominous in my imperfect memory: Hungry, Hungry Hippos:

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