by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:

I watched/listened to the entire thing — both sets of testimony.

I must say this — the prosecutor brought in from Arizona was good. She did her job, which is to try to get people to impeach themselves, since there were no other witnesses to impeach either of the folks testifying.

She failed to get Kavanaugh, and the Democrats did a poor job of trying to follow up after she had specifically asked him whether he was ever so drunk he didn’t remember something the next day. She went at it several times from different angles, and got exactly nowhere. The Dems tried the angle too — and got nowhere. When you boil it down that was all they had; fart jokes certainly weren’t going to score any points for their team.

But Ford was another matter.  She impeached herself twice on a clear basis.  And no, it wasn’t the flying thing — yes, that was probably impeachment too, but only maybe — because you can have a fear of flying yet still fly.  What she wasn’t asked, mostly because the Prosecutor lady was being nice, was a direct question on whether the claim was a function of delay (and that was in fact her intent.)  Then there was another soft impeachment regarding her therapy records and their release to the WaPo; if she didn’t give them out who did?  But impeachment of motive for delay or true investigation now doesn’t go to the truth of the underlying case — just what the complaining witness is trying to accomplish after the fact.  It’s powerful as it goes to one’s intent but only as a secondary factor once the fact that the events actually occurred as described is established.

Real self-impeachment — the sort that blows up the case in dramatic fashion — is a function of a direct contradiction by the person at interest in the fundamental facts of the alleged case.  We got that yesterday, and in any real proceeding it would be an instant destroyer of the complaining witness.  The first came with the recollection of the assault — remember, there are four or five people in the building in total, three of whom are in the room (Kavanaugh, Judge and her) according to her account.  One of them “turned up the music” for cover and she testified there was no other music.  Then the event happens, the boys go down the stairs laughing maniacally after turning down the music, and shortly thereafter she locks herself in the bathroom, waits for a clear path and runs down the stairs and out the door of the house.

Ok — all good here except she then testifies that her friend had no reason to recall the party because nothing of note happened from her point of view.

Wrong.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, 20 or 25% of the people at the party are gone and the one person present who just did that is the one who the alleged witness is close friends with.  She doesn’t bid her farewell, doesn’t tell her she’s leaving, she bolts out out the door while two boys are “yukking it up”, laughing maniacally which, given no other music playing, is very audible to everyone else there — after all she can hear it through a closed bathroom door.

That’s quite noteworthy — if you were at a party at which you knew at most two of the five people present and one of them suddenly disappears you would definitely wonder why, especially when half of the remaining people are suddenly slapping each other on the back and laughing like hyenas.  Think about it — you’re out with friends, maybe in a bar, pool hall, whatever — and you decide to leave.  Do you just bolt out the door?  No, and if you did in today’s world while two guys are obviously taking great joy in some event your best friend who just witnessed that would immediately call or text you when they realized you were gone to see if you were ok.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that something significant just happened.

Of course there were no cellphones then…. but it definitely would be noteworthy and in the time before cellphones it would have certainly merited a phone call the next day.

If your good friend actually was at a party where those events took place with those people.

That’s strike 1.

The second was equally bad and perhaps worse, in that it went directly to the question of whether she had been assaulted and then later on, after learning Kavanaugh was a potential Supreme Court nominee for Mitt Romney when he was running for President (which was discussed about that time in 2012 widely in the press; I remember it clearly) and assigned Kavanaugh to the role of the assaulting party — even though it wasn’t him.  Then, over time she reinforced it in her own mind through both repetition and time, larded up and cemented with personal animus founded in political bias.  In other words what started as a muddled memory was animated by animus and turned into what is now a claimed honest — but false — belief.

Right near the end of her testimony she was asked about the process of going over such traumatic events to get to the bottom of what actually happened and got a chuckle over a Senatorial hearing with 5 minute, no-followup questions not being the right means to discern what had happened.  The prosecutor then laid out the correct, psychologically-accepted means of trying to sort out what happened in a traumatic event — a one-on-one session where the person who underwent the traumatic experience does all the talking.

And then the bomb dropped — she got Ford to admit that she had never proceeded in such a fashion.  Not in 2012 with her therapist when the allegation allegedly originally surfaced, 2013, 2015, 2016 or now.  Remember, in her therapists notes from 2012 she never named Kavanaugh — or anyone else — as the assaulting party.

This was very significant and in fact a monstrous admission on Ford’s part, and she knew it.  She got visibly uncomfortable as that line of questioning was going on; it sure looked to me like she knew damn well she’d been caught with her pants down and the first flicker of panic crossed her eyes.  See, perhaps right now the time wasn’t right for that sort of process… but when she originally had the “revelation” and didn’t mention Kavanaugh by name it sure was.  And……. she’s a professor of psychology so she knew all this and didn’t proceed that way….. intentionally.  Rachel Mitchell, at that point, had her — a follow-up question or two and she was done on her primary claim — that she was 100% sure it was Kavanaugh.

Ford was lucky this wasn’t really an adversarial proceeding — she would have been skewered right then and there.

This is not to say that nobody assaulted Ford at roughly that point in her life, at a party.  It’s not even slightly implausible that the predicate element of the act occurred.  But there’s literally zero evidence that Kavanaugh was the person responsible and plenty of direct evidence that he was not.  It is never the job of an accused person to prove a negative.  It is nearly impossible to do that under any circumstances, but Kavanaugh has come damn close given his contemporaneous calendars and the physical facts on where he and the other allegedly-involved boys lived, plus the claimed details of the alleged assault itself, as I’ve previously covered in these pages.

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