Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Preface for The Libertarian Enterprise:

This article was originally published on my two blogs on Monday October 1, 2018. Today Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed by the United States Senate to the Supreme Court of the United States. The political aspects are now resolved.

What is yet to be resolved are the questions of fact I raised in my article and similar questions raised in Senator Susan Collins (R-MEtoo) Senate floor speech yesterday. With all political players deflated there is no reason to think the factual questions will ever be investigated to conclusion -- but that's what investigative journalism was supposed to be for, yes?

—J. Neil Schulman
October 6, 2018

Google Translation:
“Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”

Does anybody actually care about the truth of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation that as a teenager President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh drunkenly assaulted her?

Democrats don’t. They were out opposing the nomination within minutes of the announcement. They have a fantasy that Kavanaugh would be the swing vote to overturn Roe v Wade.

Republicans don’t. The pro-lifers have a fantasy that Kavanaugh would be the swing vote to overturn Roe v Wade.

The #MeToo activists don’t. To them Brett Kavanaugh is an entitled male whom they see as a symbol for male domination and violence.

I’m a libertarian. I’m pro-choice. I’m opposed to how Brett Kavanaugh eviscerates the Fourth Amendment protections of privacy in his rulings allowing the government to collect personal information on private citizens.

I watched his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in which he made it clear that as a judge he ruled according to the text of the Constitution, of written law, and of legal precedent. The man thinks like a clerk, a bureaucrat. The idea that he’s some sort of incendiary judicial revolutionary that if he’s seated on the Supreme Court will vote to overturn apple carts is ludicrous.

But Democrats, liberals, progressives, feminists, all want the Kavanaugh nomination stopped, if for no other reason than that his nomination came from their nemesis, President Donald J. Trump. So if a scandal needed to be cooked up to stop him—“Borking,” it’s called—that’s D.C. business as usual.

Me, I’m a libertarian, and one of my mentors, Murray Rothbard, wrote that above all libertarianism requires “a passion for justice.”

That passion long ago infected me and I’ve never been cured of it, thank God.

Libertarian and anarchist friends of mine don’t care about the truth or falsity of the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh that Christine Blasey Ford has testified to in subsequent Senate hearings because Kavanaugh is a statist—so whatever happens to him, he has it coming.

That attitude is how over 15,000 people were murdered in what historians record as the Reign of Terror in the 1790’s French Revolution. They “had it coming,” too.

I believe in truth, justice, and the American way, just like my first childhood hero, Superman.

I found Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony emotionally authentic.

I found Brett Kavanaugh’s rebuttal testimony later the same day just as emotionally authentic.

Only one of them can be telling the truth.

Senator Jeff Flake was convinced to go along with his Democratic colleagues’ demand for a further FBI investigation. I’ll leave it to cable-news talking heads to debate the politics of this.

Given the history of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover—and latter controversies about how the FBI labs’ pseudoscience about fibers have put many innocent individuals behind bars—I’m not sanguine about the FBI as a fully competent investigative service.

But “investigation” is in their name so let’s put them to work investigating the charges Christine Blasey Ford has made against Brett Kavanaugh.

To start off, Christine Blasey Ford has testified that she knew and socialized with Brett Kavanaugh while both went to separate high schools, so she knew that it was him who assaulted her.

Let’s test that the way police always have: a line up. Now, this allegation dates back to 1982 when Brett Kavanaugh was 17 and Christine Blasey was 15. A line up is no longer possible.

But when a physical line-up isn’t practical police have relied on a photographic equivalent: asking the witness to make their identification of the accused by picking the suspect out of a stack—or array—of photographs.

There are landmines to test for familiarity of the witness from other encounters. Sometimes photographs of police, or models, made to look similar to the suspect, are used.

There’s a scene in the classic movie The Manchurian Candidate where the brainwashed Major Marco (Frank Sinatra) is shown a series of slides containing the communist scientists and political operatives who could have brainwashed him—mixed in with a bunch of slides of decoys. Marco is able correctly to pick out the genuine commie scientists and political operatives.

Let professionals in the field of photo identification put together just such a photo array to test Christine Blasey Ford’s “100 percent certainty” that her attacker was Brett Kavanaugh.

There are gaps in Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony and her prior interview with the Washington Post.

She can’t remember an address for the house this attack took place, nor a date. She can’t remember how she got to and from the party. I don’t actually have a problem with memory lapses such as this.

But I do have a problem with Christine Blasey Ford testifying that music was already playing when she was pushed into the bedroom, and that either Kavanaugh or Judge turned the volume up. If the two boys were already in the bedroom with music playing, why? Wouldn’t there have had to be someone else in the bedroom that the music was for? Or is she suggesting that these two totally-drunk-out-of-their-minds teenagers were sober enough to plan a rape that they were incapable of executing?

And what was the music playing during the assault? I guarantee you that this song would be burned into her memory by the trauma and she’d be so freaked out by the association she’d react to it every time she heard it forever after.

Christine Blasey Ford says she went to the second floor of this house seeking a bathroom. That implies a full bladder, perhaps from the beer she remembers drinking.

She then testifies that before she reached a bathroom she was pulled into a bedroom, tossed onto her back on a bed, and that Brett Kavanaugh threw himself on top of her, crushing her, and holding his hand over her mouth when she tried to call for help. She says she was afraid he might accidentally kill her.

So why doesn’t she testify to having wet her clothes and the bed? That would have been compelling detail. I wet my long underwear on a Boy Scout camp-out called Operation Zero, sleeping alone in a tent in the dead of winter. It was so humiliating it was the end of scouting for me. It’s the sort of detail it would be impossible to forget.

It’s been pointed out to me that she talks about Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge locking the bedroom door.

But she doesn’t mention unlocking the door when she manages to escape the bedroom to a bathroom across the hall—where once again she testifies to hiding but not relieving herself.

Then she testifies to running out of the house and feeling safe once she’s outside that she’s escaped and that Kavanaugh and Judge haven’t followed her.

But she never tells us why she feels safe just because she’s outside the house. How did she get outside without her attackers seeing her and why couldn’t they follow her outside?

I’m not calling Christine Blasey Ford a liar. I’m just saying that before anyone is judged guilty of anything, the testimony needs to be comprehensive and with certainty not only about the who, but certainty about the where, the when, and particularly the what.

There’s an FBI investigation?

Let them investigate this.

Washington Post Article

Video of Christine Blasey Ford’s Opening Statement to the Senate Judiciary Committe

 

Reprinted from J. Neil Schulman @ Agorist.com
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