I want to remind you of three things that you seem to have either missed in your righteous fury or deliberately ignored:

Firstly, this thread wasn't actually about Kavanaugh specifically, nor was my first reply to Jeo. He was the one who chose to make it all about Kavanaugh - so obviously my second reply went more in that direction, but I still tried to make it broader than that when possible.

Secondly, Jeo's comment that 'her accusation served absolutely no purpose other than to try and derail his job promotion'. I replied to that focusing on the purposes and intentions of Ford, or other people who take a similar step of speaking out about sexual assault many years after the facts and without much, if any, solid evidence that could lead to a conviction. With your 'Or at least what other issue is the business of the general public', you pivot away entirely from the question of Ford's own purposes, which is what I was commenting on.

Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, I repeatedly stressed the distinction between 'innocent until proven guilty' in the strict legal sense, which is a cornerstone of American or any western country's jurisprudence and should remain so, and 'innocent until proven guilty' in public opinion, or as the case may be in Jeo's individual opinion.

We agree, obviously, that she has no right to confront him based on intentionally false accusations. But I think you're smart enough to see the inherent logical problem with 'if she is wrong she has NO right to confront him'. If you are convinced that you have been, let's say, robbed by a particular person, I assume we would agree that you have the right to accuse that person. However, if it would then turn out that you were mistaken, then your right to accuse that person in the first place would be retroactively revoked - should you then be punished for having exercised a right that, in hindsight, it turned out you never actually had?

Either people have a right to confront someone who they believe had sexually assaulted them, or they don't. If they do have that right, then it's hard to see how that could be retroactively revoked afterwards based on the outcome of the investigation, even assuming that the investigation would provide conclusive proof that they were in fact wrong.

So really, what you are saying would come down to 'victims of sexual assault should not be allowed to speak out unless they have sufficient proof to secure a conviction'. And no, I don't think you actually believe that; I just think you didn't really think that one through.

I can't disprove that interpretation, but then neither can you prove it. I have a general tendency of believing what people say unless I see good reasons not to, and here it seems to me entirely plausible that the Republican senators - heck, even Trump at one point - meant what they said about Ford's testimony. Incidentally, that tendency might also explain why I believe that both Ford and Kavanaugh were honest, at least on the key questions. I do think Kavanaugh might have told what you might call white lies on the small stuff about his drinking or yearbooks, but not major lies about the essence of the accusation.

I do agree with that, but I really don't think that if they had not actually considered Ford to be compelling or credible, they would have had more to gain by hiding that assessment than by being open about it.

They were afford the opportunity to cross-examine her, they just chose not to and to bring in someone else to do it on their behalf.

Another case of you running off into irrelevant diatribes. I mentioned the point about the Republicans calling Ford credible in the context of a possible libel/slander case against her - i.e., on the topic of whether she deliberately made a false accusation.





All of this goes back to the above - you want to make it illegal to accuse someone of sexual assault without hard proof? No? Or perhaps make it illegal to accuse someone who is sufficiently famous or high-profile? Also not? Then all your rants won't change the basic fact that you can't block something like this from happening, however mad it may make you. If the hearings or investigations provide you with proof that the accusation is deliberately false, then you have options to make the accuser pay for that, as well as a very potent political weapon - but if they don't, as these didn't, then tough luck.

What the Republicans in the Senate could have done, of course, is to ignore the matter as long as there was no proof, and not organize the hearings at all. But that probably would have been even worse for both Kavanaugh's reputation and his chances of getting confirmed, as well as for the Republicans' chances in the upcoming election.