Benjamin Wittes: "I Know Brett Kavanaugh, But I Wouldn't Confirm Him"

One of the best anti-Kavanaugh pieces I've read.
   IMO it leans too heavily on subjective impressions of the two parties' testimony. And...as is apparently the case with everyone but me...he reports that he found Ford extremely credible. He also deploys the Kavanaugh lost his temper argument as well as the Kavanaugh showed himself to be a partisan argument, neither of which impress me much under the circumstances. (The latter seems stronger than the former to me, but I'm trying to ignore the question Should Kavanaugh be confirmed?)
   Wittes writes:

   On one side of the ledger, Ford is wholly credible. Yes, her story has holes. The location of the event is unclear in her memory, as is—importantly—how she got home and what happened after she left the house in question. Yet few observers seem to dispute her credibility. Not even Kavanaugh and his supporters contend that she is lying or making up the incident in question, merely that she is mistaken as to his involvement in it. [My emphasis.]
   Her story is certainly plausible, and certain details she offers lend it additional credibility. She correctly identifies, for example, a social circle that appears actually to have existed around Kavanaugh during the summer in question. A fabulist likely would not know, for example, of Kavanaugh’s friendship with Mark Judge and their propensity to drink beer together in the relevant period with other individuals she named. While Kavanaugh said he didn’t recall meeting Ford but that it was possible they had interacted, it seems overwhelmingly likely that her claim to have known him and his circle socially while the two were in high school is true.

   As for the emphasized contradiction...well, what can one say at this point? That big is kind of a summary of analyses from the left. If her story has holes, then its not "wholly credible"...unless Wittes means something like "I have a subjective impression of veracity when I listen to her talk."

   The second paragraph, however seems more important to me. It's a point of such background importance that it's easily ignored. It's tried to poke itself into my head a couple of times without success. I say it's worth thinking about. Of course Ford might have learned about this from being in an adjacent social circle, or from someone else, or even, perhaps, from reading Judge's book (if the information is given there). But it bears thinking about, I'd say.

   Witte's article starts out exciting, because it sounds as if he's going to fill us in on personal information about Kavanaugh that disqualifies him. However--though a few important points are made along the way--it's really just another attempt to analyze the disagreement from afar. Wittes has nothing much to add. And, in fact, the personal stuff he has to say about Kavanaugh strengthens the pro-Kavanaugh case rather than weakening it.
   But anyway, worth a read if you're obsessing about all this along with me.