Today we'll talk more about the sex assault accusations against Brett Kavanaugh. In particular, we'll discuss what makes an accusation credible or not credible. By way of comparison, we'll look at the rape allegations against Bill Clinton. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| Well, as it stands right now, next Monday, this coming Monday, Brett Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Ford, will both appear before a Senate committee to talk about the allegations that Ford has leveled against Kavanaugh. | |
| I was reading the CNN article. | |
| I don't know why I was doing that. | |
| But I was reading the CNN article. | |
| If you're wondering... Whether or not CNN might be biased. | |
| If you're wondering about that, here's the article on CNN.com about the hearing that's scheduled for Monday. | |
| This is what it says. It will be a public reckoning of a woman's courage, a man's character, and the capacity of Washington's leaders to show that some things matter more than politics. | |
| That's the lead paragraph of I mean, the news media, they get so offended, they get so personally offended when Trump constantly calls them fake news, but this is why. | |
| They're not even trying to disguise it. | |
| They're making no attempt whatsoever to disguise that they are all in on Christine Ford's side, and they're making no attempt to disguise it. | |
| The article goes on, an extraordinary American moment is scheduled to unfold next Monday when the accused When the accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his accuser, California professor Christine Blasey Ford, are due to appear before Senate committee, if it goes ahead as planned, the hearing will become a human drama that will be agonizing for Ford as she reveals the most intimate, painful details of an alleged assault. | |
| It will be grueling for Kavanaugh as he defends his reputation over an incident he is adamant never took place. | |
| So, yeah, if you're worried about, if you were curious about maybe, you know, if there's maybe a little bit of a bias problem in the media, then there you go. | |
| So I want to make a few more points about all this. | |
| First of all, you know, one of the most fallacious arguments that I've heard in regards to the Brett Kavanaugh sex abuse allegation, if you could even call it an argument, but I've heard this online, and people have said this to me over and over again, They've said, you know, what if it was your daughter who said that a boy attempted to rape her? | |
| What if it was your daughter? | |
| How would you respond? | |
| And I guess people are saying this to me because my position has been that I find these allegations to be extremely suspicious and dubious and unsubstantiated and uncorroborated. | |
| And so I think Brett Kavanaugh should still be confirmed, and he should be confirmed quickly. | |
| So people have said to me in response, well, what if it was your daughter? | |
| You wouldn't feel that way, would you? | |
| And you hear this stuff all the time. | |
| People try to frame conversations like this all the time, right? | |
| They ask you to imagine how you'd respond if your children were somehow personally impacted by the issue in question. | |
| But first of all, that's actually exactly the wrong way to think about situations like this. | |
| That is the wrong mindset to have. | |
| Our objective should be to figure out the truth. | |
| We should be trying to figure out what actually happened, what is true. | |
| And that requires cool heads and objectivity. | |
| It doesn't require strong, blinding emotion, which is the mindset that the, well, imagine if it was your child, people want us to adopt, but that's wrong. | |
| Because, yeah, if my daughter told me this story, and she told me right away, not 35 years later, then, yeah, I would go to the boy's house, and I would beat the crap out of him. | |
| That's what I would do. But that's because, as a father, my anger and my emotions and my protective instinct would take over, and they would completely override any rational part of my brain. | |
| So, I would not... | |
| I mean, that's how I would respond. | |
| I would respond in an emotional, angry, vengeful, violent way. | |
| I would respond probably in an irrational way. | |
| But irrationality is not the answer here. | |
| So every time we do this, where we say, well, imagine if you were affected by this. | |
| Imagine if you were personally involved. | |
| No, that's the opposite of what you should do. | |
| The fact that we're removed from the situation, that allows us to be objective, theoretically. | |
| But here's something else to consider. | |
| You know, this is what I've been thinking about. | |
| If we're going to play the whole, well, what if it was your child game, why don't we ever consider it from the other angle? | |
| Like, okay, what if it was your daughter? | |
| All right, but what if it was your son? | |
| What if your son was on the cusp of some huge achievement and And a woman came forward with no evidence and no witnesses and nothing else and accused him of attempting to assault her years ago, but she doesn't know exactly when or where. | |
| What if that happened to your son? | |
| Would you assume that he's a rapist and throw him to the wolves? | |
| Or would you demand that he be treated as innocent until proven guilty? | |
| I mean, how would you approach it then? | |
| Why are we only supposed to imagine ourselves in the position of the woman or, you know, related to the woman somehow? | |
| What about the man who is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty? | |
| And also, in fact, let me say this, that because this comparison doesn't really work, because the, well, you know, what if it was your daughter, that whole thing, obviously, in that situation, we're meant to imagine ourselves Being told this by our daughter right after it happened. | |
| But if I were Christine Ford's dad, you know, right now, he must be in his 70s or 80s or whatever, And if my daughter told me that she planned to publicly accuse a prominent figure of a sexual assault that supposedly happened 35 years ago, | |
| and that she never before mentioned to me or anyone else, and that she has no evidence to prove and no witnesses to corroborate, and she doesn't even remember all the details like when and where it happened, in that case, you know what? | |
| I think I'd probably advise her against it. | |
| I think in that case, well, it's hard for me to know exactly what I would say to my daughter, because I can't even imagine having a daughter who's in her 50s. | |
| But I think there's a very good chance that I would advise her, no, I would not go forward with allegations like this in this situation. | |
| Now, there's no statute of limitations for accusations whatsoever. | |
| Of course. So you can accuse anyone of anything, anytime. | |
| But there's a reason why they have a statute of limitations in a court of law. | |
| Because if you wait too long and then you make your accusation, there's absolutely no way to prove or disprove anything you're saying. | |
| So the accusation can damage the person that you've accused, but he's not going to have the opportunity to vindicate himself. | |
| So I think it's reasonable to expect someone, if they're going to come forward with an accusation, to do it, I don't know, within what? | |
| Like a decade? | |
| Two decades? | |
| I mean, sometime before the middle of the third decade? | |
| I think that's reasonable. | |
| I think if 35 years have passed and you haven't said anything by now, then I think it's reasonable to say, well, you know, it's kind of too late. | |
| It's too late to come forward with this. | |
| You had 35 years to do it, and you didn't. | |
| So to do it now, it can't accomplish anything except cause much chaos, hurt this guy's reputation, but that's all it can do. | |
| You can't prove anything. To come out publicly against somebody 35 years later with a vague memory, I mean, I think in most cases it's not right to do that. | |
| And notice how she remembers all these details except the two that would allow him to vindicate himself and prove his innocence. | |
| Okay, so she remembers all this stuff. | |
| She doesn't remember exactly where or when, though. | |
| That seems kind of convenient to me because those are the two details that could potentially allow him to prove that he was innocent because he could say, oh, well, I was overseas in France. | |
| I mean, I was on vacation with my parents in Canada on that day. | |
| Or, you know, he could, I mean, potentially he could maybe prove his, or you could, or on the other hand, If you had an exact day and location, then that would allow you to find some evidence to prove his guilt. | |
| But when somebody says... | |
| Even if it's like 10 years later, 5 years later, a year later, and somebody says, well, sometime within a span of like, you know... | |
| Sometime within this large span of time, in some location in the general vicinity of this county, this person did this thing. | |
| Well, there's just no way. | |
| There's no way. If someone said about you that between 10 and 15 years ago, in this general vicinity of this particular county, you did a horrible thing. | |
| There would be absolutely no way for you to prove your innocence. | |
| You could not do it. Because it's just, it's too broad of a time frame. | |
| So, it's just not right. | |
| I don't think it's right. I mean, at the very least, if you're going to come out 35 years later, you should have every last detail down. | |
| Starting with when and where. | |
| If you don't even have that, then I don't know how you come forward. | |
| Now, I think... | |
| Liberals are saying that, and if you go online or go on Twitter, the phrase that you're going to see repeated over and over again is, credibly accused. | |
| They're saying that Kavanaugh has been credibly accused, which is just another way of them saying that he's guilty. | |
| When you say, credibly accused, It's just another way of straight up saying the guy's guilty. | |
| Credibly accused. It's a euphemism for guilty. | |
| But we're told that this is a credible accusation. | |
| An accusation that's 35 years old, don't know exactly when, don't know exactly where. | |
| Both the other witnesses have denied it. | |
| That's a credible accusation, supposedly. | |
| I don't know if I would call that a credible accusation. | |
| But then you could say, well, if that's not a credible accusation, what is? | |
| I'm glad that you asked. | |
| Just by way, this is not a whatabout thing, it's not whataboutism, but just because we're throwing around terms like credible accusation, I think it could be helpful to look at what an actual credible accusation looks like. | |
| So for that, I go to Juanita Broderick. | |
| Who accused Bill Clinton, as I think everyone knows now, accused Bill Clinton of violently raping her. | |
| This was not an attempted rape. | |
| This was violent actual rape that Bill Clinton is alleged to have done to Juanita Broderick. | |
| Now, let me... This is actually, funny enough, this is from BuzzFeed. | |
| Okay, BuzzFeed actually did a very thorough article a couple years ago about this accusation. | |
| So let me read just their description of what happened, of the accusation itself from Juanita Broderick, okay? | |
| Broderick... This is the accusation. | |
| Broderick, then 35, first met Bill Clinton when he was 31 and the Attorney General of Arkansas during a campaign stop he made at her nursing home where she worked. | |
| They discussed her business and his campaign. | |
| Broderick wasn't much into politics, but she had recently started volunteering for him with a friend. | |
| And Clinton told Broderick to call his office if she was ever in nearby Little Rock. | |
| A few weeks later, she did just that while attending a nursing seminar there. | |
| They arranged to meet one morning in the coffee shop in the hotel where the seminar was held. | |
| At the last second, Clinton called up to Broderick's room and asked if they could meet there instead, since there were reporters in the lobby below. | |
| She said yes. Minutes after entering her room, he tried to kiss her, she says, biting her upper lip hard. | |
| Shock, Broderick says, she resisted Clinton, even telling her she was not only married, but having an affair with another man. | |
| Who would later become her second husband. | |
| He ignored her, she says, and pushed her on the bed and raped her. | |
| Afterward, she says, he put his sunglasses on and told her to get some ice for her swollen lip before leaving the room. | |
| There was no remorse, Broderick told me. | |
| He acted like it was an everyday occurrence. | |
| He was not the least bit apologetic. | |
| It was just unreal. She rushed to the door and locked it, she says, afraid. | |
| Afraid that someone would come back to kill her. | |
| Two of Broderick's friends, who had also attended the nursing conference, found Broderick in tears, her lips swollen and blue. | |
| She told them what had happened, but made them swear not to tell anyone else. | |
| She was scared of retaliation, didn't think anyone would believe her, and blamed herself for allowing Clinton to come up into her room. | |
| I had never known anyone that had been raped, she told me. | |
| I could not imagine anybody that could get in that situation and not get out of it. | |
| Soon after, Broderick says she ran into Hillary Clinton at a political rally, and Hillary shook her hand and thanked her for everything she had done for Bill. | |
| To Broderick, the gesture felt like a threat to stay silent. | |
| As Attorney General and later Governor, Bill Clinton was, quote, the main person that regulated my business and my income, Broderick said. | |
| After she said what she did to me, I just thought, I will keep quiet. | |
| Okay, so, what makes that credible while the accusation against Kavanaugh is not as credible? | |
| Well, quite a few things. | |
| Number one, she remembers exactly where and when it happened. | |
| She remembers all the details. | |
| She remembers how she ended up there. | |
| She remembers everything. Number two, she told two people about it moments after it happened. | |
| And not only that, those people found her bruised and bloodied. | |
| So those are two really important aspects of this whole thing. | |
| Number three, she has a reason. | |
| She has a rational reason. | |
| Now, she didn't come public with these accusations, I don't think, for another until like 98, 99. | |
| So for her, it was about 20 years before she came out publicly with these accusations. | |
| But she didn't wait 20 years to tell anybody. | |
| She waited hardly even 20 minutes to tell anybody. | |
| She did tell her friends. But it makes sense why she would have waited 20 years. | |
| And she said it right there. | |
| First of all, she felt like Bill Clinton's wife was threatening her. | |
| Second, Bill Clinton exercised a lot of control over her personally, given what she did for a living and his position. | |
| Third, he was a very powerful man as Attorney General. | |
| He became even more powerful as Governor. | |
| Then he became even more powerful as President. | |
| So she was worried about the power that he had and about what she felt was an underhanded threat from his wife. | |
| So we have that. So we have exact day and time and location. | |
| She reported it to two other people right after it happened. | |
| She has an actual reason she can get for why she didn't tell anybody. | |
| And then the fourth thing, which is also really important, that this fits a pattern of behavior. | |
| There are several other women who came out and accused Bill Clinton as well. | |
| And so we have an established pattern of behavior where it's pretty much an accepted fact that Bill Clinton is a sexual deviant scumbag. | |
| So with all of those things taken into consideration, the evidence is overwhelming. | |
| That there's actually no reason to disbelieve Juanita Broderick. | |
| There's no rational, reasonable justification for disbelieving her. | |
| The evidence is overwhelmingly in her favor. | |
| So that unless you are a total partisan hack... | |
| You would believe Juanita Broderick. | |
| Because in Juanita Broderick's case, it's her word, along with all the other women that accused Bill Clinton, against Bill Clinton, who he knows is a pathological liar and sexual deviant. | |
| So it's just, I mean, again, there's no reason not to believe it. | |
| It's entirely a different case with Christine Ford and Judge Kavanaugh. | |
| Doesn't remember exactly when. | |
| Doesn't remember exactly where. | |
| There was alcohol. | |
| She admits herself that I believe that she was drinking as well. | |
| There was alcohol involved. They were both kids. | |
| It was 35 years ago. She didn't tell anyone for at least 30 years. | |
| No other women have come forward. | |
| As far as we know, there is no established pattern of behavior here. | |
| No other women have come forward to accuse him. | |
| So it is entirely her word against his. | |
| And he's also got plenty of other women who knew him at the time and have vouched for his character. | |
| So it's just, in his case, I think the evidence is much more in his favor. | |
| And so that's the difference. | |
| That's a credible accusation versus a not-so-credible accusation. | |
| So, if you are among the many liberals who have found Christine Ford's accusations very credible, yet somehow Juanita Broderick's accusations not credible, then you really need to look in your heart and in your mind to figure out what's going on with you, because there's something going seriously wrong with you in that case. | |
| You have been totally blinded by your partisan affiliations. | |
| Which is shameful. | |
| All right, I'll leave it there. | |
| Thanks for watching, everybody. Thanks for listening. |