Because I am no longer on Facebook, I didn't get to use my standard Facebook line, which works on most crises. Wait and see. This will become clearer. Not because I know anything secret about the Kavanaugh case, but because I can read the times. Wait and see.
From a purely competitive political standpoint, I think rushing to judgement generally favors liberals, waiting and watching favors conservatives. I don't mean whether the leaders and opinion-makers rush to judgement or wait and see. I mean what they want us to do.
Makes sense. If you panic, you must need a leader to help take charge. If you don't, you can often figure it out yourself. I think I can detect a pattern of centralized vs distributed decision-making there.
ReplyDeletePushing forward in a rush only works if the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor. You may think you have all the facts and a bullet-proof plan but it's not likely to survive contact with the opposition.
ReplyDeleteI don't know what happened to Ms. Ford 30 years ago. I'm not ever going to know, no longer how patient I am about waiting and seeing, any more than I'm likely to find out what happened in private between any two other relatively (then) obscure young people thirty years ago. It follows that, for now, I'm not going to assume it was something bad that reflects on the one who's now being vetted for an important position of responsibility.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't help much that, if the story Ms. Ford more or less appears to be telling were perfectly true, I still wouldn't care much. It seems trivial. It's not worth the considerable effort it would take to find out whether she's lying. Even if the details were more shocking, there's a reason we have statutes of limitation, and it's not that we think crimes become less important with the passage of time. It's because after enough time has passed, it's impossible to reach closure on most crimes in a way that's even remotely fair to the accused. This kind of nonsense forfeits my respectful attention.