As of this writing, nothing significant has leaked from the supplemental FBI investigation into the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. The report arrived on Capitol Hill last night. The longer we go without a leak that is damaging to Kavanaugh, the less likely those kinds of leaks are to exist.
The material was conveyed to Capitol Hill in the middle of the night, just hours after Senate Republicans set the stage for a pair of votes later in the week to move to final approval of Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination. A statement issued by the White House around 2:30 a.m. said the F.B.I. had completed its work and that it represented an unprecedented look at a nominee.
Senators will be permitted to review the materials, in what the F.B.I. calls 302 interview summaries, in a secured room at the Capitol starting on Thursday morning, or they can be briefed by a handful of staff members who are cleared to examine the material. After a day of review, the Senate is on track to take an initial vote on Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation on Friday and possibly a final vote as early as Saturday.
I’m surprised at all of the secrecy involving the FBI report and the steps taken to minimize leaking. The public interest in this dispute is almost off-the-charts. If there’s anything in there that’s bad for Brett Kavanaugh, it’s going to leak from the Senate Democrats. If there’s anything in there that’s good for Kavanaugh, it’s going to leak from the Senate Republicans. You may get completely contradicting interpretations of the same information. It would be wiser to redact any information in the FBI report that is private, sensitive, or embarrassing to those interviewed by the bureau and then release the rest.
The Senate could use the public-address system known as Dianne Feinstein’s office . . . but the problem is that it would take seven weeks for the information to get out.
The New Yorker’s Story Falls Apart
What the heck happened to The New Yorker?
What the heck happened to Ronan Farrow? The dragon-slayer of #MeToo is suddenly co-writing pieces like this:
Kenneth G. Appold was a suitemate of Kavanaugh’s at the time of the alleged incident. He had previously spoken to The New Yorker about Ramirez on condition of anonymity, but he said that he is now willing to be identified because he believes that the F.B.I. must thoroughly investigate her allegation.
Appold said that he was “one-hundred-per-cent certain” that he was told that Kavanaugh was the male student who exposed himself to [Deborah] Ramirez.
Appold said that he initially asked to remain anonymous because he hoped to make contact first with the classmate who, to the best of his recollection, told him about the party and was an eyewitness to the incident. He said that he had not been able to get any response from that person, despite multiple attempts to do so. The New Yorker reached the classmate, but he said that he had no memory of the incident.
So Appold repeated a story that he vaguely remembered and heard second-hand . . . and this was a central piece of supporting evidence at the heart of the previous New Yorker story about Ramirez’s accusation. This is what Jane Mayer dared claim was “the talk of the campus.”
This is bull-a-word-I’m-not-supposed-to-use-in-this-newsletter. The accuser said days before the article that she wasn’t sure it was Kavanaugh and only concluded it was him after “six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney.” Now the only other person who had allegedly witnessed the incident turns out to not remember anything.
Separately, Ramirez tells The New Yorker that the FBI interviewed her, but because the bureau has not followed up with other people she named, “I feel like I’m being silenced.”
See, when the FBI interviews you, you’re not being silenced. That’s the opposite of being silenced. You don’t get to just willy-nilly reinvent the meanings of words because you think it makes a more powerful political argument.
Personal Issues, Bad Experiences, and Modern Politics
Thanks again to Rush Limbaugh for again discussing an item from last week’s Jolt, contending that a significant number of political activists don’t see today’s disputes as questions of governance and policy at all, but as extensions of their own personal-psychological problems and issues. Authority figures, organized religion, members of whole groups or genders — everything is seen through the individual lens and thus every debate instantly becomes extraordinarily personal. In these activists’ minds, merely telling them that you disagree amounts to an extremely deep, cruel personal attack upon them and elicits a volcanically angry reaction.
It’s worth noting that everyone is shaped by their experiences and draws conclusions from those experiences. If you’ve had a good experience with law enforcement, you’re more likely to trust cops, and if you’ve had a bad one, you’re less likely to trust them — and that no doubt shapes how you view accusations of police brutality and groups such as Black Lives Matter. If you live outside the South and had a nice visit to Atlanta, or Charleston, or Raleigh some time, you’re more likely to have a positive feeling when people talk about “the South” — and you’re more likely to bristle when someone suggests it’s a wasteland of ignorant, violent, backwater hicks obsessed with glorifying their side during the Civil War. Similarly, if you’ve ever had a bad visit to a city or part of the country, that bad taste in your mouth probably lingered — leaving you suspecting that New Yorkers are rude, Los Angelenos are self-absorbed, and that everything’s bigger in Texas, including the egos. Everyone laughed at Casey Affleck’s Dunkin Donuts commercial on Saturday Night Live because lots of people have run into a not-quite-sober, chatty-to-loudmouthed Boston lout.
(Lest anyone think I’m not willing to mock my home regions — I grew up south of The Sopranos and north of the Kevin Smith movies in New Jersey, and it would have only taken one or two wrong turns in life to turn me into a character in Mallrats. And I observed last year, “Every time I travel to someplace else in the country, I think, ‘Wow, everyone is so nice and polite here!’ Then I suddenly realized, it isn’t that everyone else is exceptionally nice; it’s that my baseline expectation of human interaction is set by the colder, ruder, nastier people in the Washington area.”)
Everybody has bad experiences. A teacher that castigated us, a relative who relentlessly criticized us, a boss who belittled us, the coworker who took credit for our work, the company that without warning, laid us off. Almost all humor involves some element of shared bad experiences. Comedians’ routines such as, “What is the deal with airline food, huh? Did they scrape this stuff off the engine?” only work if you’ve had airline food that wasn’t so good.
Conservatives like to joke that government handles every problem the way it handles the Department of Motor Vehicles, because lots of people have a lousy experience at the Department of Motor Vehicles: long lines, long waits, tons of paperwork, surly staff who act like they don’t want to be there. (Hey, pal, at least you’re getting paid to be here, we’re not.)
When liberals need to defend government, they point away from the DMV and towards firefighters, and hospitals, and depending upon the day, police. I suspect very few Americans have ever had a bad experience with firemen. They show up fast and save people and save our homes from burning down. Surely some folks have had bad experiences with hospitals, particularly the billing departments, but every day, hundreds of thousands of people go into the hospital with a serious health problem and thankfully most of them walk out okay a few days later.
But we run into problems when we draw sweeping conclusions from our bad experiences. And sometimes the distinctions that people draw in making those classifications and conclusions are so small that they’re imperceptible to others.
Ross Douthat observed that much of the discussion of Kavanaugh’s younger years amounts to fuming about “those damned Ivy League elitist prep school boys” from writers and journalists who went to different prep schools and attended the same Ivy League universities.
The story Miller is telling is about how a jock from the No. 5 private high school in Maryland was a jerk to his roommate who went to the No. 2 private high school in Connecticut, and who years later communicated the story to a reporter who also went to that same No. 2 private high school, who then wrote it up as a tale of social stratification for our times.
A lot of our modern politics is driven by the cultural gap between mostly progressive cities and mostly conservative rural areas, with the suburbs making up the purple parts in between.
I could be wrong, but I suspect most folks on the center and the right would rather not have a cultural war. If San Francisco, Berkeley, Boston, Portland, and other heavily progressive cities want to pursue hard-left policies, knock yourselves out, guys. These things tend to generate their own backlash — like when Seattle tried to enact a new annual $275 tax per employee for big companies, and then rescinded it a few months later once Amazon and Starbucks threatened to leave town.
Let the cities and states be laboratories of democracy and allow other parts of the country be as conservative as they like, as long as their laws are consistent with the Constitution. Let Amarillo and Tulsa and Colorado Springs and Omaha and Huntsville and Jacksonville enact conservative ideas, and the liberal cities enact their ideas, and let Americans vote with their feet. (Some would argue they already are, considering state-to-state migration.)
But as Jonah has noted many times, liberals are the aggressors in the culture wars. They’re fine with banning large sodas, banning guns, requiring religious institutions to provide birth control, public funding for abortion, restricting Airbnb rentals, limiting ride-sharing services, and instituting “bias response teams” on college campuses. They are not comfortable leaving you free to make decisions that they think are wrong.
They appreciate every kind of diversity except people who disagree with them.
ADDENDUM: The latest NPR/PBS/Marist poll: “Just over a month away from critical elections across the country, the wide Democratic enthusiasm advantage that has defined the 2018 campaign up to this point has disappeared.”