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Sept. 29, 2018 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
22:52
Episode 239 Scott Adams: The Kavanaugh One-Week Delay
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Hey everybody!
Come on in here.
We got news breaking.
It's breaking all over the place.
It's so broken. I don't know if we can put it back together.
But... So, I went offline for just a few hours, thinking to myself...
I'm thinking to myself, hey self, it looks like there's nothing going to happen Friday afternoon.
Yeah, this Kavanaugh things, they'll just take the vote next week.
And then I turn on my phone, and it turns out we have a one-week delay.
So President has agreed.
I think he just took the lead of Congress to request it, but he's agreed for a one-week delay.
To investigate with the FBI the accusations, the credible accusations, against Judge Kavanaugh.
Now you're probably wondering, will this be a big deal or a little deal?
Should we worry about this?
What's going to happen?
Well, I'll give you my best take on this.
Sue, as I often say, your filter on the world depends on your experience and a little bit about how you were born.
So if you're looking at the Kavanaugh situation, you're saying to yourself, well, if you're a woman who's ever had any run-in with sexual abuse, which turns out to be just about every woman, you're automatically looking at it through a filter of, hey, people who are accused are usually guilty.
If you are a man who has been accused, if you've been unfairly accused of anything, You might be looking at it like Kavanaugh is being unfairly accused.
Everybody's bringing their filter to this.
You're a Democrat, you're a woman, you're a man, you're a Republican, whatever you are.
But the other filter that I like to put on this, I got from my corporate days.
Let's call this the corporate filter.
Now the corporate filter is really about any large organization.
There are things that are true of a large organization in terms of their inefficiencies, the way they operate, how fast or slow they are.
They're sort of common across all large organizations.
So the FBI in this case Would be a large organization.
So I'm gonna apply the corporate filter, you might call it the Dilbert filter, to this situation.
Do you like that name, the Dilbert filter?
Could be a book someday.
And here's the filter I put on the one week delay.
Number one, the Democrats painted themselves in a corner.
All right, so there's sort of good news, bad news situation here.
I'll just spell it out. The bad news for the Democrats is that they made such a big deal about saying, it's just one week.
What's one week? You only need one week.
And they repeated one week so often that it's sort of hardened in our minds as, yeah, these things take one week.
It's a one week situation.
One week. So the clever thing that the Republicans have done, and President Trump and whoever asked for it, the clever thing they've done...
Let me just tell Christina I'm on a periscope.
Because she's much more important than all of you.
Sorry. Sorry.
I'm gonna say I'll get her in 20 minutes.
All right, now we're back to you.
Back to you! You have my full attention now.
So, the first thing is, the Democrats painted themselves in a corner by saying one week so often that if the Republicans give them one week, it's going to be harder for them to say, ah, I don't know, that one week wasn't enough.
Now, of course they will say that.
So there's a 100% chance they'll say that one week isn't enough.
We need more. But they did kind of paint themselves in the corner with that one week stuff.
So the president says, I'll give you a week.
I'll give you a week.
Now, here's the fun part.
Here's the Dilbert filter on this.
No organization can do anything in one week.
That's it. That's the only filter you need to know.
Nobody can do anything in a week.
Now, they can move and make phone calls and write stuff down, but they can't really do much.
What they can do in a week is going to look like a few days of interviews and a few days of writing stuff up and a few days of travel.
It's going to be so little that they can do that they're basically going to be talking to the same people they talk to.
Now, is there a risk that they'll find some new thing about Kavanaugh?
Yes. The odds of them finding something new are very high.
But probably will be easily dismissed as just another thing that somebody's trying to pile on.
But here's the other interesting part.
You know how people said if Kavanaugh were really the person he was portrayed to be, then you would see a pattern of it.
People who are abusers tend to be abusers.
And then sure enough, you saw some low credibility accusations, but people aren't quite giving them the same amount of weight, so it doesn't really look like there's a pattern.
But here's another pattern.
People who have false memories and people who accuse other people of doing bad stuff accuse other people of doing bad stuff.
So I will be very interested to know, and this would be a good question for the FBI to ask Dr.
Ford, have you ever accused anybody else of something that didn't pan out in terms of a conviction?
Have you ever had a memory problem?
Have you ever taken any kind of pharmaceutical or recreational drug that would cause a memory problem?
Wouldn't you like to know the answers to those questions?
And those are the types of things that would not be asked in front of Congress, but the FBI would certainly have a perfectly good reason to ask those questions.
Now, given that we have no witnesses who will say they were at the scene and saw something, and given that I think it's impossible that there will be physical evidence Really, it's just talking to people and asking questions.
And when they talk to all the people who would be potentially anti-Kavanaugh, they're going to say probably the same thing they said, which is we don't have any memory of anything like that.
So that's sort of a dry hole, right?
Every time you talk to somebody, if they say, there's no follow-up question to be had.
I have no memory of this.
That's as far as I can go.
But when you're talking about Dr.
Ford... You've got a lot of stuff you can ask because you're trying to find out about her credibility.
So you can expand those questions to anything she does or has done that gets to credibility.
Here's an example. One of the accusers who made the most outrageous claims about the gang rapes and stuff, apparently that accuser's ex-boyfriend has come public and said, I had a restraining order against her.
She has no credibility whatsoever.
Does Dr. Ford have anyone in her circle, an ex-patient, an ex-boyfriend, an ex-anything, who believes that she made something up about them?
Eh? How many people has she dealt with?
Is there anybody who would tell a story like a co-worker?
Imagine the most common thing you could think of.
If you've ever worked in a big organization, here's the Dilber filter again.
One of the most common situations you can think of is your co-worker imagined something that happened that didn't happen.
How many of you have worked in an organization where your coworkers were absolutely positive you did something that you didn't do?
They're positive you stabbed them in the back, but you didn't.
You're positive that they were the source of the rumor, but you weren't.
They're positive you were trying to undermine them, that you came in late and lied.
They're positive you've done these things.
But you didn't. So will there be people who say that Dr.
Ford has made claims about them that they know to be untrue?
Now here's the fun part.
Suppose Dr.
Ford has made claims about other people that were true.
But they can't be proven. And then you interview that other person and you say, oh yeah, Dr.
Ford is a serial accuser.
She accused me of, you know, running over a dog or something.
And then you can't prove it one way or another.
So maybe she was actually accurate.
Maybe her other accusations were actually absolutely true.
But if you've got somebody who goes on record and says, yeah, she also accused me of something I didn't do, and you can't tell if you did it or not, it doesn't help her story.
So I would say there's a slightly bigger risk to the accuser than there is to the accused.
Because the accused, so far there's no physical evidence and no human being who can put him in the situation.
Now, will they ask questions like, Brett Kavanaugh, you said you never pass out, but will you say under oath that you've never fallen asleep after having a beer?
So they might ask some gotcha questions, but remember, Judge Kavanaugh is probably one of the most qualified people in the world to avoid those very questions.
Can you think of anybody who would be more capable of avoiding a trap question?
I can't. He probably has just about the best kind of experience you would want for somebody to understand what legal jeopardy looks like, what a trap question looks like.
I like his odds.
So I would say that both of them are taking a risk.
So the extra week is a risk for Kavanaugh.
It's a risk for Dr.
Ford. If I were to compare those risks, it feels like she has a slightly bigger risk.
And the risk that is the biggest is that there would be something anecdotal in her situation, something she did at work, someone else she accused, some medicine she was on, some mental problem she had in the past that might have been perfectly normal when she's already completely recovered.
But if you have enough time, it's pretty easy to draw a picture Afford as a person who might make a false accusation.
Right now there's nothing in evidence that would give you any kind of character insight on the false accusation memory question.
And she might have other connections to other Democrats and that would work against her as well.
Garbage, somebody says.
He is guilty and lies a lot.
Well, we don't know.
But you see that a lot of people had the same...
Oh yeah, so there's the yearbook stuff.
Suppose they say to Kavanaugh, the devil's triangle definitely means three-way sex.
That's what I think it means.
I've never heard it in another context.
The only context I've heard is three-way sex.
So did Judge Kavanaugh lie about the meanings of the things in his yearbook?
Probably. Probably.
Did Dr.
Ford lie when she says she remembers having exactly one beer that night?
Probably. Probably.
But I'm not sure we should judge too much about the small lies, because really they weren't central to the question, or shouldn't have been, and they were just trying to make that stuff go away.
It's stuff that kids do.
All right. Her yearbook is worse than his, someone says.
I've heard that, but I haven't seen it yet.
How does it persuade the midterms?
Well, it depends. We'll have a week to find out.
And then we'll know.
Here's a question for you.
I'm kind of wondering about the mechanics of getting to the polling places.
How many people drive to vote?
Most people, right?
Wouldn't you say? Probably 80%.
Is that a fair estimate, 80% drive to vote?
What about those families that are split?
So what about the families that have a Republican dad and a Hillary-loving mom?
Who drives them to the poll?
Well, if it's like just about every other family, if the man and the women are getting in a car and they're going someplace, who drives?
If it's just the man and the woman, they're a couple, and they're driving to the polling place, which one of them drives?
Well, it could be either one.
But who usually drives?
Right? Who usually drives everywhere?
Well, just look in the highway.
If you're driving, whenever you see a couple, who's driving?
Is it the man or the woman?
Pretty much it's the guy.
The guy is usually driving.
And you have an interesting situation where if the men decided not to drive anybody else, just themselves, what would that do to the election result?
So, I'm not suggesting this.
I was just thinking of things which could affect the midterms and how this has become sort of a gender midterm where it really is starting to look like the Democratic Party is shaping up as the party for and about women as the highest priority.
And again, every time I say this, I'm going to add to it, nothing wrong with that.
It's a free country, democracy, they can organize their party along any lines they like.
It might even be a good idea.
It's hard to judge, but it's just a reality that the Democratic Party is sort of a female-centric party.
And what would happen if the men who were Trump supporters said, this time I'll just drive myself?
And you know, there's nothing stopping you from going separately.
But you know, if it's really come down to a battle of the genders, Maybe men will drive themselves.
So... I'm not suggesting that's going to happen or that it should happen.
It was just a funny thought I had, which is the people who drive the cars create a lot of friction.
By friction, I mean anytime anything gets a little bit harder, it changes.
So if you made, for example, if voting was just a little bit harder for People from Elbonia, there would be measurably less voting.
As soon as you make things easier, there's more of it.
As soon as you make things a little harder, there's less of it.
So I can imagine if this becomes more of a gender-against-gender issue, that how you get to the poll might enter the conversation in a funny way that shouldn't.
So I'm not suggesting that's a good idea.
I just thought it might get to that.
All right.
I'm just looking at your comments.
You equate women with abortion, somebody says.
Not entirely.
That's a big part of it though.
It's a big part of it in terms of the way the parties are shaping up and specifically the Democrats.
So I watched some of the hearing today and I saw Ted Cruz talk and I thought Ted Cruz was sensational.
In terms of how well he presented a case, I'll tell you, Ted Cruz was not a perfect candidate.
Maybe he'll be better if he tries again later.
He seems to be getting better all the time.
But as a lawyer, he was really good.
And then following him was Chris Coons, the Democrat.
And Chris Coons was...
Even a little bit better.
I thought he was magnificent.
So agree with me.
Even if you might have disagreed with them, wouldn't you say that Ted Cruz did a really solid communication, persuasion, lawyer job of setting out the situation?
It was great. But then Coons, the Democrat, who was sort of the rebuttal, I thought he was even a little bit better.
He was really, really good.
Like, for a moment there, it didn't last very long, But for a moment, I was proud of my government.
Did you feel that if you watched it?
Did you have a moment where you watched Ted Cruz do a really smart, classy job, and then the Democrat does a rebuttal?
It's polite, it's professional, it's smart, it's great!
You know, you could agree with one of them or the other, but those were two smart people doing the people's work.
And for a moment, I watched these two people, and I had respect for my government.
And it felt good. I liked it.
It made me feel great. And then I tuned back in a little bit later and I watched Cory Booker.
And I watched Cory Booker until all of my hope had drained out of my body.
Cory Booker, compared to Chris Coons, it's Chris, I think, or to Ted Cruz, is just not on the same level.
I mean, he was very passionate, and that part's good.
You know, that will carry him far.
He was an advocate for women, and to the degree that that helps him on the Democrat side, that was probably effective.
But, man...
He is not good.
You put him on the stage with Ted Cruz and with Coons, and he's just going to disappear.
So I would say that there isn't a slightest chance you're going to have President Cory Booker.
He just disappears against the smarter folks, frankly.
All right. I do think Kamala...
I think...
Sorry, I got a funny meme from Christina.
I do think...
Kamala Harris, she's a much stronger player.
She's smarter. She's got more game in every way.
So you may not like her.
You may not like her politics.
You probably don't. But in terms of persuasion and game and intelligence, she seems to have the whole package.
Anyway, I am going to talk to you all later.
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