Is the FBI on it -- or IN on it?

All through the weekend, we read articles indicating that the FBI investigation into Kavanaugh was being restricted and stymied. In response, Trump tweeted that the FBI investigation had no constraints. Like all Trump tweets, this statement will be taken at face value by the kind of people who buy herbal remedies from Alex Jones. This CNN report indicates that Trump wants to force the Kavanaugh probe into the tiniest of all Procrustean beds.

Reminder: There is a pro-Trump faction within the FBI -- a faction which (arguably) engineered Trump's election by forcing the revelation of the Wiener laptop. For this reason, I doubt that the current drama will end well.

Infuriatingly, the polls haven't moved nearly so far as one would have expected.

Did you find Kavanaugh believable?

44% Yes
45% No

Did you find Dr. Blasey Ford believable?

50% Yes
39% No

These are the numbers after the nation watched Christine Blasey Ford come across as The Most Credible Woman Anyone Ever Met while Brett Kavanaugh impersonated a drunken Godzilla. Such is the power of the right-wing media -- the same media that convinced the nation that Saddam Hussein did 9/11.

Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow offer the closest thing to an inside view of what's going on. The news is not good. Consider, for example, the tale of a Yale alum who, we are told, can corroborate the story told by Deborah Ramirez...

The classmate said that he was “one-hundred-per-cent certain” that he had heard an account that was practically identical to Ramirez’s, thirty-five years ago, but the two had never spoken about it. He had hoped to convey this to the F.B.I., but, when he reached out to a Bureau official in Washington, D.C., he was told to contact the F.B.I. field office nearest his home. When he tried that, he was referred to a recording. After several attempts to reach a live person at the field office, he finally reached an official who he said had no idea what he was talking about. At this point, he went back to the official at the F.B.I.’s D.C. headquarters, who then referred him, too, to an 800-number tip line. (He eventually left a tip through an online portal.)

“I thought it was going to be an investigation,” the Yale classmate said, “but instead it seems it’s just an alibi for Republicans to vote for Kavanaugh.” He said that he had been in touch with other classmates who also wanted to provide information corroborating Ramirez’s account, but that they had not done so.

There is also the troubling case of former Mark Judge girlfriend Elizabeth Rasor, who has sought to speak to the FBI. So far, investigators have ignored her.

Rasor dated Judge on and off for two to three years while they were students at Catholic University, and she is now a public-school teacher in New York. After hearing Judge’s denials, Rasor came forward, offering to give a sworn statement to the F.B.I. challenging Judge’s credibility. According to Kaplan, the F.B.I. has so far shown no interest in hearing what Rasor has to say, and efforts to contact the Bureau have gone nowhere.

She recounted that Judge had told her ashamedly of an incident that involved him and other boys taking turns having sex with the same drunk woman. Rasor said that Judge seemed to regard it as fully consensual. She said that Judge did not name others involved in the incident, and that she had no knowledge about whether Kavanaugh participated.

It is instructive to compare Rasor story to the tale of Julie Swetnick's former boyfriend, who broke with Swetnick acrimoniously and disputes her credibility. Naturally, the right has fastened onto the former boyfriend's story like a puppy worrying a bone. Please understand that I am not arguing that this ex should be ignored; quite the contrary. I'm arguing in favor of uniform standards.

Right now, we have conflicting information as to whether the Bureau will look into the Swetnick story -- but if they do, I have little doubt that investigators will also interview her disgruntled former lover. And so they should. But at the same time, they should also talk to Elizabeth Razor, whose testimony is far more germane to the Kavanaugh case.

Mark Judge and the frat boys. The Twitterati have rediscovered a piece Mark Judge wrote in 2015 called "Real Men Don't Join Fraternities." It's an interesting article, very well-written, and quite germane to our present discussion -- especially when viewed in light of Rasor's claim.

Judge confesses that he was a heavy partier during his high-school days. We already knew that. He insists that his heavy drinking did not lead to sexual assault:

In high school, some buddies and I always went down to the Eastern Shore every spring for “Beach Week,” the annual exodus of school kids to Ocean City, Maryland. At one party, we all had had a few beers and after the girls had gone home for the night, someone produced a camera and a couple guys started posing nude. It was a raucous evening and the intention was pure self-deprecation: guys were flexing like bodybuilders when they obviously weren’t, doing Mr. Universe poses and quoting Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. We had flirted with girls all night and mostly gotten nowhere (aside from a few kisses), and were now mocking ourselves as macho men. It was hilarious and completely healthy. The idea of stripping a girl naked and photographing her while she was unconscious was as plausible as the idea of walking up to our school headmaster and slapping him across the face.

The bit about the unconscious girl refers to an earlier segment of the article. Speaking of his college days, Judge says that he discovered just such a photo in the possession of a frat-boy friend -- "a guy who had been one of my best friends in high school."

Kavanaugh? Probably not; we are told that this friend went to a state school in Virginia, while Kavanaugh went to Yale. Of course, Judge might have changed that detail to protect a pal. (Before Christine Blasey Ford came forward, there was a rumor that Kavanaugh had a far worse skeleton in his closet.)

If you give Judge's 2015 piece a close read, you'll see undercurrents of both guilt and self-protection. One senses that he does not reveal all. Read his words in conjunction with Rasor's claim that Judge privately confessed to the "train" story, or something like it, while stipulating that the woman had given consent. (Obviously, at this historical remove it is impossible to determine whether consent was actually given or was even, in a legal sense, valid.)

Note, in particular, this passage:

I had a lot of friends and even family members in fraternities at the time, and the first thing I noticed was that the drug use was much worse than anything I encountered in high school (and this was the 80s!). The second was that a lot of the “brothers” weren’t very bright. They told broad, crude jokes that lacked the wit of the funniest guys in high school. At the time I was also into the punk and New Wave scene, which favored independence and creativity. The idea of having the Polo-wearing son of an investment banker bark at you to crawl through vomit so you could get a pin was laughable.

During my UCLA days, I had one frat-boy friend -- a hulking, friendly Li'l Abner type. We didn't have much in common and thus were not close. Everyone liked Li'l Abner, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he seemed perpetually inebriated, a situation that worsened over time. We both worked for the Daily Bruin, and my job was to translate his incomprehensible music reviews into publishable prose. Everyone wondered: How did that guy ever get into UCLA, a school with reasonably high admission standards? At the time, I didn't understand that frat culture was, to a large extent, drug culture. The "little grey cells" (as Poirot called them) can take only so much clobbering.

Which brings us back to Judge:

Yet what I saw at one fraternity party was almost identical to what I saw at all fraternity parties, and I went to a lot of them in college—and saw a few of them as an adult teacher for several years. There was the drinking and smoking and hooking up that had gone on when I was in high school, but in the wake of Animal House things had ratcheted up to a sadistic level. Beer wasn’t enough, there had to be cocaine and other hard drugs. These guys would drink and drug their way into oblivion, often verbally assaulting women in the process. Hangovers lasted for days. It was Animal House, yes, but it was also Lord of the Flies.

I think Judge is minimizing his own involvement -- after all, by his own admission, he went to a number of these parties.

(By comparison, I never went to a frat party, even though Li'l Abner often invited his editor to these gatherings. Abner had ambitions of getting the original Mr. Buzzkill to loosen up. Fat chance!)

A great deal of shame lurks behind Judge's words, here and elsewhere. I suppose he could be cajoled into revealing the things that are hardest to say, if he felt assured that he could do so in safety. But that won't happen. Liberals have their own resentments, and will reflexively go for the kill the moment they spot vulnerability. Kill kill kill, flay the skin, eat the meat, toss the bones to the dogs. This madness, which overtook the right about forty years ago, has spread across the political spectrum, though neither conservatives nor progressives will cop to it. We now live in a "no-forgiveness" culture, and a culture without forgiveness soon becomes a culture without truth.