What Is Wrong With Us?

If I'm honest I really don't know what to think about this whole Brett Kavanaugh business, other than it is, beyond a doubt, a supreme sort of a mess. There is not likely to be an adequate resolution to the matter that befits the austerity of the Supreme Court, but then again, Clarence Thomas has been a justice for nearly 30 years.  As a teenager I chuckled through watching Ted Koppel dourly discuss "Long Dong Silver," and pubic hair laden cans of Coke.  Honestly, I thought it was funny then (because I was 14), but that joke isn't funny any more.  There are a lot of jokes that aren't funny anymore when you're concerned that the honor and function of important institutions may not survive human stupidity.
As to the question(s) surrounding Mr. Kavanaugh, they are important questions that need answers, not things that should be brushed aside because one political party is afraid they're about to get their butts handed to them in November.  I make no presumption of guilt or innocence, nor do I necessarily think there can be a completely satisfactory verdict based on proof in this case.  The things that weigh against him, are highly subjective, but given what I know about the times, the setting, and the general behavior of Prep School rich kids and College Frat boys, I do not find the accusations utterly unbelievable.  In fact, I might even go so far as to conjecture that they are believable, because such behavior, in the era of my youth, rather commonplace.  So much so that, given a bit of alcohol and the guise of goofing around, Mr. Kavanaugh and Mr. Judge, might have done such a thing to a young girl, and thought very little about it.
It's effect on the victim however, would have been rather different.  Do you remember a time you got bullied?  In my school it was rather common place for certain people to walk by and punch other people in the arm, or shove them in the back, sometimes pushing them into metal lockers, violent acts that sometimes hurt.  As the victim of those actions, I remember them, but I'm reasonably sure that the people who did them do not.  What about gossip and taunting? Do you remember everyone you ever whispered foul things about or teased in High School?  I will bet the victims probably do.
Which leads me to the first thing that bothers me about the whole thing: the categorical denial.  I have done some drinking in my time, during the college years it was rarely well controlled social drinking.  I know there are things that happened while I was drinking that I am not proud of, and there is a fair to middling possibility that there are some of those sorts of things which I do not remember.  I'm not talking about black out drunk either, but in the course of an evening of party hopping there are just things that you might forget very easily, especially if you, in your addled mind, didn't really think they were all that memorable.  I know why Kavanaugh categorically denied it, but I would feel a lot more comfortable if he at least acknowledged that his accuser might have some grounds for making such a claim.  Once he categorically denies it, any evidence, however slim, that confirms an encounter between the himself and young Ms Blasey, makes him a liar in the here and now.  It speaks to a lack of humility and repentance if he did actually do what his accuser claims he did.  That, and not whether he was a 17 year old idiot (most of us are idiots at 17) is what would disqualify him from being a Supreme Court Justice.
The second thing that actually bothers me a lot more than anything Mr. Kavanaugh has done, or might have done in the past, is the way that our systems of government are demonstrating their own decrepitude.  George Will makes this point rather well in a column from Friday's Washington Post regardless of what the truth might be here, the process is being revealed as deeply flawed and partisan in a way it is not intended to be, ever.  He traces the root of this phenomenon back to the failed nomination of Robert Bork by Ronald Reagan.  Bork was the guy who finally helped Nixon commit the "Saturday Night Massacre" and thus had a political taint on him that was a bit of a bridge too far for congress back in those days, but the confirmation hearings were something of a farce, as were the Thomas hearings, as was the stonewalling of Merrick Garland.  Farce and Supreme Court of the United States of America are not things that should ever go together.  As Will lays out though, perhaps we have already crossed that line.
If the Senate treats Dr. Ford in a similar way to how they treated Anita Hill, the legitimacy of the court will be called into question, not because of Mr. Kavanaugh, but because of the process by which he was confirmed.  This would be true, whether or not Mr. Kavanaugh was the depraved Frat boy from a John Hughes film, or whether he was actually a virtuous young man who was falsely accused.  The process deserves time to be done properly, after all, they kept Scalia's seat open for over a year, so what's the hurry?
The consequences the Judicial panel not doing their duty are grave, even if Kavanaugh is an honorable man, in fact, they may be more grave for any legacy he leaves on the court if he always has an unproven and yet un-disproven allegation, as Ross Douthat argued in the NY Times last week, hanging over his tenure.  I have a bad feeling that the truth, as has happened so often lately, is going to go begging in the halls of our government.  The old white men in charge seem to be committed to trashing the integrity of the system of late, and the Diane Feinstein's of the world aren't exactly stopping them by mismanaging and grandstanding.
The aftermath of the Thomas/Hill "investigation" was that some people believed him, and some people believed her, the lines of who believed what tended to be largely drawn down the liberal/conservative divide.  Division is what happens when people can't agree on the facts, in those moments the process by which you make decisions becomes very important.  We have an obvious problem with agreeing on facts right now, and thus this abuse and abrogation of the processes of our most important institutions is all that much more dangerous.