I think the author went deeper & shows how flawed Kavanaugh is, too flawed for this position.
What Kavanaugh deserves — and what we deserve from him
Matt BaiNational Political Columnist,Yahoo News•September 20, 2018
in part:
This, however, leads me to what I think is now the central question surrounding Kavanaugh’s imperiled nomination.
Is Kavanaugh lying to us now when he says that none of this could possibly have happened? And what does that categorical denial tell us about his fitness to serve?
Because whatever else is or isn’t true, whatever has been clouded in memory by 36 intervening years, a few things about Kavanaugh back then seem undeniable.
He traveled in the same social circle as Ford, or at least for a while. He was immature and callow. He probably wasn’t great to the girls he knew. He drank more than a kid should.
It’s something he himself alluded to, later, when he joked to graduates of his fancy prep school: “What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep. That’s been a good thing for all of us, I think.”
Judge, the buddy whom Ford places in the room that night, later wrote a fictionalized addiction memoir, in which a character named “Bart O’Kavanaugh” drinks himself into a vomiting fit.
Like I said, high school isn’t the totality of a life. But here’s the point: There are plenty of ways someone as eloquent as Kavanaugh could have responded publicly to the allegation against him.
He could have said: “Like a lot of misguided teenagers, I drank irresponsibly, and I have only vague memories of that time. I am certain as I stand here today that I never attacked anyone, and I have no specific recollection of Dr. Ford. But if I or any of my friends were involved in immature behavior that was painful to anyone at the time, I regret it.”
He could have said, in effect: Judge me for my lifetime of service, not for whatever may have happened at 17 that I was too stupid and drunk to remember.
But that’s not what Kavanaugh is saying. He dismisses not only the allegation but the context around it. He says he wasn’t that kind of kid. He says he wasn’t there, in the house Ford can describe in detail.
He makes a victim of her all over again, by essentially calling her delusional. He makes no allowance for the possibility that his own memory is blurred by inebriated youth.
And maybe there is a pattern here. This is essentially what Kavanaugh did when he was asked, during his last confirmation hearing for the federal bench, whether he had been involved in internal discussions over the detention of enemy combatants during the George W. Bush administration.
He denied it completely, when in fact the more complicated truth, that he had been tangential to those discussions but sometimes involved, would have sufficed. Just as he flatly rejected the assertion that he’d ever lived beyond his means and racked up credit card debt to pay for it, even though the truth was probably more shaded than that, and not really so damning.
My fear about Kavanaugh isn’t that he’s a sexual predator; barring new revelations, there’s no evidence to suggest he is.
My fear is that his experiences as a partying teenager didn’t actually teach him a hell of a lot about fallibility or shame. He seems not to have emerged with much appreciation for the gray areas in which most larger truths reside.
A Supreme Court justice doesn’t need to be a perfect person, or to have led an unfailingly exemplary life. None of us can say that. But, especially on a divided court in a divided nation, we deserve a justice who demonstrates a capacity for nuance, reflection and humility.
Whatever else is true about him, Brett Kavanaugh doesn’t seem to be that guy.
http://www.yahoo.com/news/kavanaugh-deserves-deserve-090043068.html
DO SOMETHING!
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