[guest post by JVW]

This is painful. Just watch the video (2:15 in length):

I have no comment outside of urging everyone to watch this incredible clip.pic.twitter.com/e19hQSDNug

— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) September 15, 2019

So in 135 seconds, we have the following:

* Long-winded Joe story from nearly 60 years ago told in front of a crowd of young people who look bored as all get-out.

* Joe with, what, three buttons undone on his shirt, just like the sexy mf’er that he has always been, using his cool aviator sunglasses for sweeping gestures.

* A mild cuss-word used, and then taken back, so that he can show us Joe is just a blue-collar Man of the People but also a good boy who doesn’t work blue.

* An archaic reference to a Hollywood star of the 1940s that no one in Joe’s audience has ever heard of.

* Macho posturing where Joe, the authority figure, lays down the law on a young rapscallion.

* A Joe altercation with life hanging in the balance, involving straight razors and chains, which comes off as cribbed from West Side Story.

* A Joe promise (though not quite “my word as a Biden”) that this story is true, even though at least half of it probably isn’t.

* The appearance of an elder white authority figure who steels Joe’s resolve and turns him into the street warrior that he was destined to become. (Dammit, Joe, he’s supposed to be black or Latino in this story!)

* Incoherent babbling as Joe adds unnecessary details.

* A helpful tutorial from Joe regarding how to properly prepare your straight razor for a street fight.

* Macho Joe swaggering up to the four razor-bearing black teens ready to rumble, but using his incredibly-honed diplomatic skills to defuse the situation.

Apparently there is at least a kernel of truth to this yarn, though I would bet dollars to dimes that Slow Joe has larded this story with details from the old Archie comics he read as a teenager and maybe a few episodes of Happy Days he watched from his Senate Office. Notice the young black kids who were no doubt coaxed or even prodded into participating in this blarney fest, and look at how they simply can’t believe that this ancient ofay is wasting their time with his noise.

And to think that it’s still nearly five months away to the first primary, eleven months to the Democrat National Convention, and fourteen months to the election. I don’t think I’m going to make it.

– JVW

Robby Soave at Reason:

Associate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh faces another accusation of sexual misconduct. Details of the previously unreported incident appeared in The New York Times on Sunday. The article is adapted from a forthcoming book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation, by Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly.

The essay concerns an allegation by Deborah Ramirez, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s at Yale, who previously told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow that “after six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney,” she recalled Kavanaugh drunkenly exposing himself to her at a dorm room party 35 years ago.

To bolster this account, Pogrebin and Kelly have produced an additional, similar accusation. During the Kavanaugh hearings, Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service and an attorney with a history of defending the Clintons, allegedly told the FBI that at Yale he saw Kavanaugh “with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student,” according to the Times. In its original form, the article continued:

Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)

Mr. Kavanaugh did not speak to us because we could not agree on terms for an interview. But he has denied Dr. Ford’s and Ms. Ramirez’s allegations, and declined to answer our questions about Mr. Stier’s account.

The Times story was later amended to add a rather important missing detail: “the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say she does not recall the episode.”

Whoops!!

Soave’s post relies to some degree on a book co-written by Mollie Hemingway, a shameless Trumpist hack who might accidentally tell the truth if the truth happened to coincide with the Trump agenda (as it does here), but who is not a reliable source for anything that is not otherwise obvious or well documented elsewhere. In short: if it is true and it doesn’t benefit Donald Trump, you’re not going to hear it from Mollie. Period. That said, although I disavow any part of Soave’s post that relies on Trumpy McTrumpingway, the initial omission by the NYT of the detail that Soave identifies is utterly hacky and shameless.

There are very few people or institutions you can trust in these hyperpartisan times. Keep a watchful and skeptical eye.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]