“Nobody’s got the guts to say it because of all this sexual harassment crap…”
by digby
Here's Susan Collins commenting on Kavanaugh's high school yearbook page: pic.twitter.com/HQuHxdOTmL— Igor Bobic (@igorbobic) September 25, 2018
Huh. Where did she get that I wonder?
Well, it turns out that it comes from Alex Jones’ Info-wars:
Jones seized on a picture from the yearbook that shows a girl posing in a skirt. The girl pictured has a black bar covering her face, and neither the Infowars aggregation nor Cult of the First Amendment identified the individual as Ford (nor did the original yearbook page, as shown on either site). Still, Jones not only repeatedly said it was her in the photo but also suggested that the person’s decision to wear a miniskirt — which, to be clear, is innocuous in its own right and not probative of anything — made her a “hussy” and “captain of the sluts.”
The sainted “moderate” Susan Collins is pushing this garbage? That makes her no better than that creep Alan Simpson in the Anita Hill hearings:
In his questioning Saturday of Judge Clarence Thomas, Senator Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, said:
“I really am getting stuff over the transom about Professor Hill. I’ve got letters hanging out of my pocket. I’ve got faxes. I’ve got statements from her former law professors, statements from people that know her, statements from Tulsa, Okla., saying, ‘Watch out for this woman.’ But nobody’s got the guts to say that because it gets all tangled up in this sexual harassment crap.”
Senator Simpson’s press secretary, Stan Cannon, said the Senator would not make the correspondence public nor describe it more fully because “he would prefer to wait if Anita Hill comes back to ask her about it directly.” The committee announced this evening that Professor Hill was expected to testify again on Monday.
Interviewed this morning on the NBC News program “Meet the Press,” Mr. Simpson elaborated. He said he had received a letter on Saturday from a female lawyer in Tulsa, calling it “the most derogatory letter I have seen to date.”
“I’m not going to use it,” he said. “It’s not sworn to. The woman said she would give an affidavit.”
The Senator’s staff said the letter had come from Mary Constance Matthies, a lawyer in private practice in Tulsa. Reached by telephone, she said she had indeed faxed a letter on Saturday to the majority and minority counsels of the Senate Judiciary Committee. ‘For What It’s Worth’
Ms. Matthies would not discuss the substance of her letter except to say it did not refer to Judge Thomas nor to sexual harassment. She said the information she had passed along was “third-hand to me, and I passed it on in the for-what-its-worth category.”
Asked whether she thought Senator Simpson had described her letter properly, Ms. Matthies replied: “People make different interpretations of things. I don’t want to call Senator Simpson a liar. I don’t know what else he was referring to. It would not be the way I would characterize the letter.”
When Mr. Simpson refused in his television interview this morning to describe the information he had received more fully, Andrea Mitchell, an NBC News correspondent, said, “You’ve raised this now at the hearings, and you’ve raised it just now on national television. Isn’t this McCarthyism of the worst order?”
Mr. Simpson responded: “Well, not in my mind. McCarthyism in the worst order is to have someone gather up everything on a man for 105 days that has nothing to do with his ability to serve on the United States Supreme Court. Your people have done a magnificent job of that, going into his garage to see what the titles of his books are.
Maybe if the Republicans stop nominating right wing hit men like Bork and sexual harassers like Thomas they won’t have these problems. Kavanaugh is both.
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