All indications are that Dr. Ford is not alone. Buckle up - that includes you Mark Judge. #Basta
And to those that have criticized our media strategy: this will be yet another example of why we used it - because it works!Here's my concern: Avenatti is ambitious. Ambition may impede judgment. If other claimants have come forward, have they been vetted?
One faker or fabulist could prove invaluable to the Trumpers. There are women out there who have trouble discerning reality from imagination.
That said, we've all heard the rumors about other women who have privately made claims against Kavanaugh. It would make sense for those other women to seek help from Avenatti.
If there are other women out there, the time for them to come forward is now. That said, I still believe that Michael Avenatti must be kept away from the 2020 Democratic nomination.
A question about high school. Is my experience so different from others? I'm not much older than Kavanaugh, and I came of age in licentious Los Angeles during the sin-filled '70s. Yet nobody I knew indulged in the kind of heavy drinking and wild partying that has now become synonymous with Georgetown Prep.
Granted, I was a nerd, a geek, an anti-social oddball -- an outsider. But was I that much of an outsider?
Back then, my favorite after-school pastime was taking a bus to UCLA to sit in on Bob Rosen's film history classes. He showed excellent 35mm prints of classic films, straight from the studio vaults, and the projection at Melnitz Hall was fantastic. After the movie, I usually spent a few hours in the research library, reading about everything from the JFK assassination to military history to...well, anything.
UCLA has one of the world's great libraries. Those nights were amazing. New ideas electrified my thinking every few minutes.
Was I really that different from others my age? The Kavanaugh types, the guys who lived lives of trite debauchery, no doubt would have considered me freakish. To me, they were unfathomable and alien.
10 comments:
I can tell you about UCLA. Around 1987 I was making a couple of my Season's Greeting's Generics that I was trying to sell to individual cable companies across the U.S.
I met a composer who was also a property manager of an Apartment in one of the UCLA Dorms area. After going there a couple of times to work with him on the music, I noticed that every time I either got out of my car, or went back to my car after a session, there would loud banter from one of the surrounding dorms, and the banter was ALWAYS about BOOZE.
On my last visit for the music project I said to my composer friend / manager, I'll make a bet that the first thing you hear when we go outside is talk of alcohol. The composer had let me park in his garage space and had to move his car so I could leave. We go outside and not 10 seconds had gone by when some kids go by with a huge shopping bag full of BOOZE. We could hear the bottles clanging around and the discussion was about alcohol.
The composer looked at me was quite blown away. I recall sometime about a decade ago, or about 20 years later, UCLA imposed some kind of ban on booze either in the dorms, or at parties, or some kind of ban. I am going to assume that Booze was the segue that allowed people's inhibitions to be lowered so whatever happened next, happened.
Alessandro, thanks for the personal recollection of UCLA.
I started "hanging out" there in the 1970s (while still in middle school) and of course I eventually attended college there. People drank, of course. But I don't recall a HUGE booze culture. Perhaps that frenzied "party hearty" thing took hold in a major way as the 1980s wore on.
The people I knew in that school liked to quaff a pint at the King's Head Inn in nearby Santa Monica, L.A.'s best-known British pub. Word had it that lucky customers might run into Patrick McGoohan. He would glare at you and insult you if you annoyed him -- and he was easily annoyed. It was considered quite an honor when Patrick told you to fuck off.
I think a lot of people you knew engaged in heavy drinking and drug use while in high school. I’d imagine, if you think about it, that at least some of your friends ended up in AA down the road, and that if that’s the case, that was probably a part of their high school experience. That would be my guess—70s/80s, highschool and all.
The party-and-booze culture sounds almost like a rich kid thing, whether or not the kids attend public or private schools. When I think of the current Kavanaugh controversy, I think immediately of convicted (since released) rapist Alex Kelly, who was also a part of that booze, party, and drug culture of the rich kids.
I am a decade or older than Kelly and Kavanaugh, graduating from high school in the early 1970s. Since I was never a drinker, not even in high school, I did much the same thing you did, Joseph. I went to libraries, and I enjoyed the great outdoors. I still do this now in my sixties.
I appreciate your work. BUT how many false assults/rape claims by woemn happen each year? Over the last 10 years? If your answer is that we “can’t” know then you would have to concede that we can’t know how many valid claims went unreported over those time periods. Do you know how many valid assault/rape cases, battery, kidnapping, torture, murder of women by men occurred last year? Over the last 10 years?
My grand, not incredibly well articulated point is this: A number of your posts over the year you have expressed repeatedly a strong antipathy towards women, claims of mistreatment by women, etc. iIt kind of shocks me whenever I read it because your reasoning otherwise seems clear and rationale. Maybe some gal did you wrong. But this history of women being abused is as old as time. The gross circus regarding the nomination (which we witness in real time and in living color) strips away the suspension of disbelief we all must exercise to accept being ruled over and cheated by those who are supposed to represent us. Revealed in this nomination is the disgusting tacit approval of the demeaning of women in general by press, politicians, government officials. You've seen comments from tTrump, Hatch, Graham, etc., Why focus or even refer in the "potential" for female decipt which you can have no reason to believe such claims makes up anything close to even 1% of known VALID claims, let alone ALL VALID claims whether knoan or not. Anyway, 2 cents.
* Avenatti 2020 will take of itself. I don't think I've read anybody who isn't immediately turned off by it. Then again, in a world where Trump is the President and Avenatti has landed real body blows against him with a fairly inconsequential civil court case, I guess if I were in his shoes I would think I could be President too.
* Having said that, it's possible Avenatti is getting duped. The good news, though, is that I have full confidence that the Democrats won't use any of them unless they are fully vetted as the Democrats are smart enough to know that a false accusation will derail this whole operation. The Dems have played this entire Kavanaugh nomination masterfully, and there's no reason to expect that to change.
* If what Kavanaugh did is true (and it's looking more and more like it is given how pathetic their defense has been and how strongly they are trying to intimidate Ford into not speaking), given his personality, privilege, and sense of entitlement, it seems hard to think he never did this again. I think it's more likely than not that there are more women, so if this development comes through it would not surprise me.
* Lastly, regarding the partying culture in high school, I think you are atypical in that you didn't know about this. It's like throwing a frat party, and there's people in high school who definitely do this kind of stuff. Kavanaugh and his buddies also seems like the archetypal personalities that would do something like this. He reminds me of people I knew in high school and college. Just a comically stereotypical frat bro douche.
Kavanaugh is officially toast. Avenatti has the goods on him, Mark Judge, and probably others who were involved in gang rapes during the early 1980s. If you haven't seen the tweet, do so, especially paying attention to the six questions Avenatti asks. Avenatti clearly knows the answers to the questions.
I expect Kavanaugh will withdraw. He will need a good attorney to stay out of prison himself.
This is pure speculation on my part, but my impression has been that raising the drinking age to 21 had the opposite effect than its intention, which was to curb drinking among teenagers. It seems to me that once alcohol became illegal for most college students, it brought out the worst in people, broadly speaking.
It's my experience that jocks exclusively act in such a manner because they can. They're privileged and daddy can stop any sort of trouble they get into before they get charged. The parents of jocks are the cops, lawyers and judges of the city anyway so they all watch each other's backs (and probably drink together in the local masonic lodge).
I grew up in the 80s and was part of the headbanger crowd. We drank as much as the jocks though we also smoked hash and dropped acid. Anyway, we didn't act that way toward girls and if we did it was taken care of on the street or in jail - you go to jail for sex crimes and you are the lowest of the low, along with the rats. Criminals have a stronger moral code than jocks. Think about that.
Fraternity culture in some colleges is seriously toxic; young men die every year or two from horrific tortures disguised as "initiations". Anthropologists see these rituals is as a warrior initiation, group bonding through pain, humiliation, and mutual shame, that can last a lifetime. There isn't much difference in attitude between an elite, Ivy League-school all-male fraternity, a motorcycle gang, and a Chinese Triad.
Humiliating vulnerable young women is a mark of social dominance, something the modern GOP is very proud of: it's a political cult of dominance, humiliation, and control, and not surprisingly, Trump is the exemplar of that. The issues for the GOP don't matter; what unites them are feelings of dominance and control.
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