The Committee vote on Kavanaugh is scheduled for noon Eastern Time.

I'm watching the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning, voting along strict party lines. The Democrats moved to subpoena Mark Judge, and that failed. The Republicans voted to schedule the vote for noon, and that succeeded.

Now, some Democrats have walked out. Three I think. They've found microphones out in the hallway, and others remain in place, delivering statements. Right now, Leahy is repeating Dr. Ford's phrases — "indelible in the hippocampus" and "uproarious laughter."

His side has already lost, but it has not lost the midterm elections, and both parties have staunchly closed ranks for that upcoming battle.

"The drinking was unbelievable," said Bernie Ward, who was the sex-ed teacher at Georgetown Prep in the Kavanaugh years...

... and who — according to "'100 Kegs or Bust': Kavanaugh friend, Mark Judge, has spent years writing about high school debauchery" (WaPo) —  "later spent two decades as a radio talk-show host in San Francisco and served six years in federal prison for distributing child pornography."

“It was part of the culture. A parent even bought the keg and threw one of the parties for the kids.”..,

[Mark] Judge wrote that he came to view Ward as an example of his school’s fall from Catholic orthodoxy and traditional discipline into a New Age emphasis on feelings and liberal notions about faith and politics.

"What [Christine Blasey Ford is] describing, I saw at parties in 2003 and ’04. Boys trying to take advantage of girls who were drunk."

Said Eric Ruyak, who attended Georgetown Prep in the 2000s — long after Kavanaugh left — quoted — for what it's worth — in USA Today.

"It’s predominantly white, very homogeneous," Ruyak said. "There’s a tremendous amount of wealth, no women, and, quite frankly, male teachers making lewd jokes. I feel badly. I know plenty of wonderful guys who went to Prep. "When I went to Northwestern (University), I saw then how malignant that environment really is.”

The article also quotes Elizabeth Mitchell, "a 1995 graduate of Georgetown Visitation, an all-girls Catholic school whose students often interacted with Georgetown Prep's."

"The re was definitely a heavy-drinking, country club-entitled, future-kings idea that I think prevailed," she said. "You had this culture where mom and dad weren't home, and you had these massive mansions."

Why — given that we're so ready to talk about race in connection with this story — are we not talking about religion? These are Catholic schools, and the teachers there attempt to shape the character of the students.

People are talking about Mark Judge's book "Wasted: Tales of a Genx Drunk," but I'm reading his other book "A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll." And there's also "God and Man at Georgetown Prep: How I Became a Catholic Despite 20 Years of Catholic Schooling," but at the moment it costs $1,500, so I can't tell you about that, but you can see from the title Judge is highly critical of his own Catholic schooling.

We're too afraid to talk about religion, even though we've plunged deeply into sex and even thrown race in where there's scarcely any reason. Why don't we talk about religion? There are so many Catholics on the Supreme Court that it's bizarre not to talk about it. Only Breyer and Ginsburg are not Catholic. (Gorsuch was raised Catholic and, like Kavanaugh, attended Georgetown Prep, but since marrying, he has attended Episcopal services with his wife and, I'm reading, refrains from saying whether or not he is Catholic.)

The sex-ed teacher at Georgetown Prep had filled Mark Judge's "vocabulary with words like clitoris, orgasm, and ejaculation."

"What he hadn’t prepared me for was falling in love with a real person. To be sure, hormones were driving me to have sex with Donna. But it was also something more transcendent. As Saint Ambrose once put it, lovers embracing seem to be attempting to breathe their souls into each other. Again, rock ’n’ roll seemed to describe the powerful parallel world I was entering. Where my parents and their generation considered lovemaking a wonderful taboo not to be spoken of in detail, and [the sex-ed teacher] Mr. Ward reduced it to Marxism and moving parts, the songs I loved told me that it could be both—the swiveling hips of Elvis and the tender ballads of the Fab Four; the erotic dynamism of Little Richard and the moonlit romance of Van Morrison. To put it in theological terms, the music made the connection between agape, the love of God, and eros, physical desire. At night, from Joe’s room, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, the Allman Brothers, and the blues musicians he loved would serenade me with the wonder of love."

From "A Tremor of Bliss: Sex, Catholicism, and Rock 'n' Roll," by Mark Judge.



Mark Judge was the other boy in the room with Brett Kavanaugh and her, according to Christine Blasely Ford.

About the Kavanaugh accusation, Trump says "I don't want to play into their hands."

I think the Democrats believed the Kavanaugh accusation would play out differently, that Republicans would resist and obstruct, but Trump saw how they were playing and chose not "to play into their hands."

Here's the quote in context:



"I feel so badly for him that he's going through this, to be honest with you. I feel so badly for him. This is not a man that deserves this... this should have been brought up long ago and that's what you have hearings for, you don't wait until the hearing is over and then all of a sudden bring it up. When Senator Feinstein sat with Judge Kavanaugh for a long period of time a long, long meeting. She had this letter, why didn't she bring it up? Why didn't she bring it up then? Why didn't the Democrats bring it up then? Because they obstruct and because they resist. That's the name of their campaign against me. Resist. And they just obstruct. And, frankly, I think they're lousy on policy and in many ways they're lousy politicians, but they're very good on obstruction. And it's a shame. Because this is a great gentleman. With all of that, I feel that the Republicans, and I can speak for myself, we should go through a process, because there shouldn't even be a little doubt. There shouldn't be a doubt. Again, they knew what they were doing. They should have done this a long time ago, three months ago, not now. But they did it now. So I don't want to play into their hands."

You can think about how the hand would have played out if the Republicans had been the ones to "obstruct and... resist." I think that's what the Democrats pictured, when they waited until after the hearings: "They did it now." Trump sees that as a deliberate play, and he's not going to let it work the way they planned. After what they did... "we should go through a process." That's surprising. Now, what are they to do?

I think they are scrambling. Today, we see that the accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, might not appear at the scheduled hearing — "Kavanaugh’s Accuser Has Yet to Confirm Appearance at Monday Hearings" (NYT):

The mysterious silence from Dr. Blasey and her lawyers was another turn in a drama that has gripped the Capitol since Thursday....

Dr. Blasey, thrust suddenly into a spotlight that she never sought, has been inundated with vulgar email and social media messages, and even death threats.... Dr. Blasey, who has two teenagers, has moved out of her house, is arranging for private security for herself and her family, and is effectively in hiding, [an unnamed person close to her told the NYT]....

Democrats and Republicans, meanwhile, are clashing over the scope and shape of the hearings. Mr. Grassley said Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey would be the only witnesses, prompting pushback from top Democrats, who are demanding an F.B.I. investigation to search for additional witnesses or evidence, and to avoid the specter of a “he said, she said” debate that will not get at the truth.

One possible witness is a friend of Judge Kavanaugh’s, Mark Judge, who Dr. Blasey said was in the room with Judge Kavanaugh when the assault occurred. Mr. Judge had told the Judiciary Committee that he does not remember the episode and has nothing more to say, seemingly foreclosing the possibility of an additional witness interview, at least for now.

He could be asked about his problems with alcohol-induced amnesia, his observation of Kavanaugh's drinking, and any alcohol-induced amnesia he saw in Kavanaugh, and he could be pressured to admit that he's unreliable as a witness to the nonoccurrence of any event from his heavy-drinking years.

“We have two diametrically opposed stories,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said on the Senate floor. “My view: Professor Ford is telling the truth. But if you don’t want the hearing to be just a ‘he said, she said’ affair, an independent investigation, a background check by the F.B.I., is essential.... We must not repeat the mistakes of the Anita Hill hearings,” he said. “They were rushed, and they were a debacle.”

That is, once the hearing was scheduled, Democrats switched to saying they didn't want it. And Blasey (Ford) seems to have become unavailable. Going public with the accusation now looks a bit like a bluff. But — not wanting to play into their hands — the bluff was called. And now they want a new deal: an independent investigation. Trump rejected that (in the clip above).

Anita Hill has been brought in, with an op-ed in the NYT, saying the Clarence Thomas hearings were not done right and the Senate needs to handle the woman's allegations about sexual misconduct properly this time. She says "The job of the Senate Judiciary Committee is to serve as fact-finders, to better serve the American public, and the weight of the government should not be used to destroy the lives of witnesses who are called to testify." But her idea of fact-finding is not for the Senators to question Blasey directly, according to Hill, who says:

Select a neutral investigative body with experience in sexual misconduct cases that will investigate the incident in question and present its findings to the committee. Outcomes in such investigations are more reliable and less likely to be perceived as tainted by partisanship. Senators must then rely on the investigators’ conclusions, along with advice from experts, to frame the questions they ask Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey. Again, the senators’ fact-finding roles must guide their behavior. The investigators’ report should frame the hearing, not politics or myths about sexual assault.

So the new hand has been dealt. How do you not play into that? I'm using Trump's idiom. If it seems wrong, let's talk about that.

ADDED: This post caused me to do a fair amount of research into the phrase "play into their hands." I'm not sure what the original metaphor is, but you can see from the post that I assumed it was poker. Anyway, the phrase means to do something that unwittingly advantages your opponent.

In my search, I ran across the phrase in the famous and tragically hilarious NYT article "The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru/How Ben Rhodes rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age" (May 2016):

With three hours to go until the president’s address to Congress, Rhodes grabs a big Gatorade and starts combing through the text of the State of the Union address. I peek over his shoulder, to get a sense of the meta-narrative that will shape dozens of thumb-suckers in the days and weeks to follow. One sentence reads: "But as we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands." He retypes a word, then changes it back, before continuing with his edit. "Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks, twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages — they pose an enormous danger to civilians; they have to be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence."

AND: Something new from Dianne Feinstein, about Blasey: "I can’t say everything’s truthful. I don’t know."

Later, she said, “Look I believe she is credible... But based on what I know at this stage she is credible,” which doesn't explicitly walk back the idea that maybe not everything Blasey said is true.

But then Feinstein came back with a sledgehammer: "During every step of this process, I’ve found every single piece of information from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford eminently credible, sincere and believable. She knew this would have a huge effect on her life and she was incredibly brave to come forward."

PLUS: Just last August, Dana Milbank (at WaPo) had a column titled "Journalists are playing into Trump’s hand":

Trump is making us the story by making us the in-house villain of his rallies.... My colleagues’ instinct has been to fight back. During a live stand-up from Trump’s Tampa rally this week, CNN’s Jim Acosta was taunted by the crowd, which had been chanting “fake news,” “go home” and “CNN sucks.” Said Acosta: “We’re staying right here. We’re going to do our job and report on this rally to all of our viewers here tonight.”

A noble sentiment, but better to “go home” — so Trump can’t use the scenes to his benefit. Eric Trump retweeted video of Trump supporters chanting “CNN sucks” at Acosta during his stand-up, adding the hashtag #Truth. The president retweeted his son....

Stop letting him make us the story.

UPDATE: I just heard on the Tucker Carlson show that Blasey has announced that she will not testify until after an independent investigation is done.

The question that can destroy Brett Kavanaugh: Have you ever been so drunk you could not remember what happened?

Kavanaugh's accuser might never be able to provide a specific time and place for the alleged attack, and you may think Kavanaugh will do all right simply avowing that he has no memory of ever doing anything like that. That answer creates the occasion for any other woman to come forward and say he did something like that to me, and it will be relevant not just to his actions long ago, but his truthfulness in the present.

But the bigger problem is that Kavanaugh can only say he has no memory of something. And Kavanaugh's accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, is telling us that he was very drunk, so maybe a failure to remember could be attributed to drinking. He could honestly testify to no memory of the incident, but still need to establish that he didn't have a memory blanked out by alcohol use. Now, since we're not going to hear of the specific time and place of the incident, Kavanaugh will need to say that he never, in that entire period, experienced alcohol-induced amnesia. (And what if he can only say I have no memory of losing my memory?!).

If Kavanaugh denies ever experiencing alcohol-induced amnesia during that period, anyone who hung out with him back then is a potential source of testimony that they saw him drunk and, especially damning, they had reason to know that he couldn't remember what he had done. Is there anybody who knew Kavanaugh in high school who has tales of things  Kavanaugh couldn't remember later? Did Kavanaugh ever have a discussion with anyone about alcohol-induced amnesia?

Once we get this far, you can see that whether Christine Blasey Ford's story is accurate or not, Monday's hearing can be used to trap Kavanaugh in lies, and then it's not a possible attempted rape from 30 years ago but perjury in the present.

Remember, the other person in the room, according to Ford, was Mark Judge, and Mark Judge seems inclined to corroborate Kavanaugh, but Judge is on record as a having been "completely annihilated" in high school. I'm reading that in HuffPo:

But Mark Judge, now a writer and filmmaker, wrote [a] memoir two decades ago... Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk, of getting drunk his first time at age 14, binge drinking at teen parties and a struggle with alcoholism. His “immersion” into alcohol began the end of his sophomore year during a typical annual “beach week,” when Catholic high school students headed to the shore after school was out. “Now I had an opportunity to make some headway [with girls]. Most of the time everyone, including the girls, was drunk. If you could breathe and walk at the same time, you could hook up,” he wrote.

His drinking became so extreme that he had blackout episodes, and woke up on the floor of a restaurant bathroom with no memory of how he got there. Once “I had the first beer, I found it impossible to stop until I was completely annihilated,” he wrote.

Judge said last week he had no memory of the incident described by Kavanaugh’s accuser.

But Ford said Judge was extremely drunk, so how good is the inference that it didn't happen? It's also possible that Judge had one of his admitted episodes of alcohol-induced amnesia. You can use Judge's statement in whatever way you think is correct (and nothing stops you from using it to support the conclusion you like). On its surface it corroborates Kavanaugh's lack of memory, but it also can support an alcohol-induced amnesia theory.

If you want to go further down into this dark place, here's some more from that HuffPo article:

Judge’s book changes the name of his high school to “Loyola Prep,” and makes a glancing reference at a character he calls “Bart O’Kavanaugh.” A girl at a party, wrote Judge, asked him: “Do you know Bart O’Kavanaugh? I heard he puked in someone’s car the other night.” Judge responds: “Yeah he passed out on his way back from a party.”

In his 2005 book God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Judge slammed his high school and the “insane liberalism” of Catholicism in the 1960s. He said the school was “overrun” by gay priests — part of the church’s “lavender mafia,” he later wrote in The Daily Caller — and was infused with alcohol.

“Only a person in denial still claims that something did not go terribly wrong in the Church after the 1960s, and that more often than not that thing was homosexual priests molesting teenage boys,“Judge wrote in the The Daily Caller in 2011. “My own take is that it had less to do with homosexuality than with the feverish libertinism of the 60s. Liberals have no interest in connecting the dots from liberalism to sexual abuse.... I’m guilty as well, at least of the bouts of dehumanizing lust that is part of the fallen world and being human ... we all have that monster to some extent.”

Does it smell funny in here?

When is it okay to shout "Fire!" and cause a panic? Brett looks more like he's smelling... not smoke but ... woman?!?... oh, I don't know, but now, I'm reading the Wikipedia article "Shouting fire in a crowded theater" and I see:

People have indeed falsely shouted "Fire!" in crowded public venues and caused panics on numerous occasions, such as at the Royal Surrey Gardens Music Hall of London in 1856, a theater in New York's Harlem neighborhood in 1884, and in the Italian Hall disaster of 1913, which left 73 dead. In the Shiloh Baptist Church disaster of 1902, over 100 people died when "fight" was misheard as "fire" in a crowded church causing a panic and stampede.

In contrast, in the Brooklyn Theatre fire of 1876, the actors initially falsely claimed that the fire was part of the performance, in an attempt to avoid a panic. However, this delayed the evacuation and made the resulting panic far more severe....

In his introductory remarks to a 2006 debate in defense of free speech, writer Christopher Hitchens parodied the Holmes judgement by opening "Fire! Fire, fire ... fire. Now you've heard it", before condemning the famous analogy as "the fatuous verdict of the greatly over-praised Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes." Hitchens argued that the socialists imprisoned by the court's decision "were the ones shouting fire when there really was a fire in a very crowded theatre indeed.... [W]ho's going to decide?"

When it's not a real fire, but a political situation, who's to say the perception of a smoldering fire is wrong? Me, I have very little sense of smell, so I've got to rely on other people to alert me about literal smells that signal danger. In the metaphorical realm, where the "smell" is of a developing political problem, those who "smell" it earliest could either be wrong or really giving us a useful early warning that we can pay attention to, contemplate, and maybe do something about before it's too late.

As for the smell of a woman — the smell I imagine Brett Kavanaugh to be screwing up his face about — I tried googling that...



"You know what's kept me goin' all these years? The thought that one day... never mind... silly. Just the thought that maybe one day, I'd -- I could have a woman's arms wrapped around me... and her legs wrapped around me.... That I could wake up in the morning and she'd still be there. Smell of her. All funky and warm. I finally gave up on it." That's the key "smell" quote from "Scent of a Woman."

These days, the idea that you'll wake up one morning with "a woman's arms wrapped around me... all funky and warm" feels metaphorical and horrible. Life was going so well. You were climbing the heights. What a good man you are, admired by all, up and up you go, and then you wake up one morning and she is "still... there..." and she's "wrapped around" you all right. Smell of her.

ADDED: What am I really saying here? Have I bitten off more than I can chew? It's my Kavanaugh gnaw.

AND: I am genuinely working my way toward what I want to say about Kavanaugh's predicament. The most straightforward thing I can say — and I have only figured this out after writing this post to pre-chew things — is:

1. This seat on the Court is especially important because of the threat to women's rights. Justice Kennedy was the 5th vote in key right-of-privacy cases, and women's continuing domain over our own bodies is at stake.

2. Kavanaugh has used his relationship to real-life women as some assurance that he will do right by women. We've heard much talk about his coaching girls' basketball and his hiring of female law clerks. He has forefronted his goodness with women, putting it in issue to meet very specific, important questions we have about him.

3. It's not a case of whether it would be fair to prosecute him for sexual assault after so many years and with this little evidence, but a question whether this person should be confirmed to take Justice Kennedy's seat on the Court and to have power for a lifetime to make decisions that will quite specifically determine the scope of women's rights. He has no right to the seat that's comparable to a right to remain free from criminal penalties.

4. Why should we Americans accept this man's power over us? He's been portrayed as a super-human paragon, and I don't think that can be the standard for who can be on the Supreme Court. It's dangerous to go looking for paragons. Maybe they've got a hard-to-detect dark side that has driven them to a life of saintly good works.

5. I assume all of the Senators are thinking primarily of their own power and how all of this will play in the November elections and in future elections. They are power-seekers and Kavanaugh is a power seeker. I am not seeking power. I am wary of the people who exercise power. I don't trust any of them, and I find it very hard to decide whom to trust here. It's tempting to say, it's wrong to use this device to defeat Kavanaugh. But to say that is to join everyone who insists on thinking of this all in terms of partisan politics. I'm having flashbacks to the Bill Clinton era, when I saw so many fake feminists put party politics first. I didn't. I didn't do it then, and I'm not going to do it now.

Kavanaugh's accuser has come forward — now what?

WaPo reports that the woman who wrote the confidential letter accusing Brett M. Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when he was 17 is Christine Blasey Ford.

After so many years, Ford said she does not remember some key details of the incident. She said she believes it occurred in the summer of 1982, when she was 15, around the end of her sophomore year at the all-girls Holton-Arms School in Bethesda. Kavanaugh would have been 17 at the end of his junior year at Georgetown Prep.

At the time, Ford said, she knew Kavanaugh and [his classmate Mark] Judge as “friendly acquaintances” in the private-school social circles of suburban Maryland....

Ford said she does not remember how the gathering came together the night of the incident.... She also doesn’t recall who owned the house or how she got there.

Ford said she remembers that it was in Montgomery County, not far from the country club, and that no parents were home at the time. Ford named two other teenagers who she said were at the party. Those individuals did not respond to messages on Sunday morning.

She said she recalls a small family room where she and a handful of others drank beer together that night. She said that each person had one beer but that Kavanaugh and Judge had started drinking earlier and were heavily intoxicated.

In his senior-class yearbook entry at Georgetown Prep, Kavanaugh made several references to drinking, claiming membership to the “Beach Week Ralph Club” and “Keg City Club.” He and Judge are pictured together at the beach in a photo in the yearbook.

Judge is a filmmaker and author who has written for the Daily Caller, The Weekly Standard and The Washington Post. He chronicled his recovery from alcoholism in “Wasted: Tales of a Gen-X Drunk,” which described his own blackout drinking and a culture of partying among students at his high school, renamed in the book “Loyola Prep.” Kavanaugh is not mentioned in the book, but a passage about partying at the beach one summer makes glancing reference to a “Bart O’Kavanaugh,” who “puked in someone’s car the other night” and “passed out on his way back from a party.”...

Ford said that on the night of the party, she left the family room to use the bathroom, which was at the top of a narrow stairway. She doesn’t remember whether Kavanaugh and Judge were behind her or already upstairs, but she remembers being pushed into a bedroom and then onto a bed. Rock-and-roll music was playing with the volume turned up high, she said.

She alleges that Kavanaugh — who played football and basketball at Georgetown Prep — held her down with the weight of his body and fumbled with her clothes, seemingly hindered by his intoxication. Judge stood across the room, she said, and both boys were laughing “maniacally.” She said she yelled, hoping that someone downstairs would hear her over the music, and Kavanaugh clapped his hand over her mouth to silence her.

At one point, she said, Judge jumped on top of them, and she tried unsuccessfully to wriggle free. Then Judge jumped on them again, toppling them, and she broke away, she said.

She said she locked herself in the bathroom and listened until she heard the boys “going down the stairs, hitting the walls.” She said that after five or ten minutes, she unlocked the door and made her way through the living room and outside. She isn’t sure how she got home....

She said she recalled thinking: “I’m not ever telling anyone this. This is nothing, it didn’t happen, and he didn’t rape me.”

Years later, after going through psychotherapy, Ford said, she came to understand the incident as a trauma with lasting impact on her life.

“I think it derailed me substantially for four or five years,” she said. She said she struggled academically and socially and was unable to have healthy relationships with men. “I was very ill-equipped to forge those kinds of relationships.”

She also said she believes that in the longer term, it contributed to anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms with which she has struggled....