The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Will the Media Ever Admit That Christine Blasey Ford Slandered Brett Kavanaugh?

Posted on | November 21, 2022 | Comments Off on Will the Media Ever Admit That Christine Blasey Ford Slandered Brett Kavanaugh?

Few recent episodes more perfectly capture the wretchedness of liberal media bias than the way journalists amplified the smears against Brett Kavanaugh. In my very first post about the subject (“Democrats Pull the Sleaziest Smear in Their Long History of Sleazy Smears,” Sept. 15, 2018), I said that the way Democrats pushed the accusation “stinks to high heaven and reeks of election-year desperation.” At that point, we had not yet learned the name Christine Blasey Ford, but I did notice this sentence in the very first article I read about the case: “Kavanaugh’s classmate said of the woman’s allegation, ‘I have no recollection of that.'”

It was subsequently reported that “Kanavaugh’s classmate” — accused of being an accomplice in the sexual assault of Blasey Ford — was conservative journalist Mark Judge. As he later discovered, a Democratic research operative had seized upon Judge’s 2005 memoir, God and Man at Georgetown Prep: How I Became a Catholic Despite 20 Years of Catholic Schooling, as a sort of roadmap for planning the smear against Kavanaugh. In his memoir, Judge had talked about the wild escapades that were unfortunately common for teenagers back when the legal drinking age was 18 in many states. This wasn’t just the behavior of a decadent handful of affluent students at swank prep schools, either. Growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta back in the 1970s . . .

Well, I could tell you a lot of stories that in retrospect might seem too wild to believe, but none of my high-school buddies got nominated to the Supreme Court, so I guess we can skip that digression. The point is that Democrats knew in advance that Kavanaugh was likely to be nominated for a Supreme Court seat, and because Mark Judge had been one of Kavanaugh’s buddies at Georgetown Prep, one of their research operatives latched onto Judge’s tales of teenage debauchery as the key to crafting a smear against Kavanaugh. Judge has now told the story of what he endured during that 2018 confirmation carnival in a new book, The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi:

The actors in this malicious and cynical plot [against Kavanaugh] were an informal cabal of partisan reporters, Democrats in Congress, and shadowy opposition researchers: a “Devil’s Triangle” whom Judge aptly compares to the Stasi, the dreaded East German secret police who terrorized citizens during the Cold War.

In an excerpt of his book published in The Federalist, Judge observes:

The most shocking instance of journalistic malfeasance is the failure of the [Washington] Post’s Emma Brown to include any reference to Leland Keyser in her initial story about the Ford memo. This was noticed right away thanks to the watchful eye of Kimberley Strassel [of The Wall Street Journal]. It should have been enough to get [Brown] fired, but apparently suppressing exculpatory facts in a high-profile confirmation hearing is not considered malpractice by current journalistic standards.

This is crucial: Blasey Ford had claimed that Keyser was present at the party where Blasey Ford was allegedly victimized, but Keyser said she had no memory of any such party and, although the Post was aware of this denial, they omitted it from their first story about the case.

What’s astonishing is how, even after most intelligent people concluded that Blasey Ford was a liar — probably motivated by pure partisanship — the media refused to confront the reality that they had promoted a perjurious false accuser to defame an innocent man. Instead, as Judge remarks, they doubled down, with Vanity Fair publishing a rehash of the smears in July 2019, months after Kavanaugh had been confirmed to the Supreme Court. The Vanity Fair article was written by Evgenia Peretz, daughter of Marty Peretz, longtime publisher of The New Republic. Evgenia’s mother was an heiress whose ancestors included the Confederate general (and Episcopal bishop) Leonidas Polk. The idea of Evgenia Peretz calling other people “privileged” may seem ridiculous, yet still she presumes to write an exposé of Georgetown Prep that, of necessity, borrows heavily from Judge’s memoir. The main purpose of Peretz’s article is to suggest that George Prep alumni are protected by a code of silence (omerta) among alumni, thus to make it impossible to know whether Kavanaugh actually did assault Blasey Ford.

Blasey Ford’s accusation simply did not withstand scrutiny, being contradicted by both of those she named (Keyser and Judge) as potentially having knowledge of the alleged party in question, to say nothing of the fact that Kavanaugh kept a calendar/diary of his senior year in high school, which likewise contradicted Blasey Ford’s claim. Yet the media refuse to admit this, continue to pretend that Blasey Ford’s accusation was credible, because otherwise, the media might have to confess their own wickedness in promoting this defamation.

Judge notes “this astonishing passage” in Peretz’s article:

“To many Americans, Kavanaugh didn’t seem like a sexual predator—but that wasn’t the point. The point was that he couldn’t give an inch of possible culpability. He couldn’t say, ‘I’m sorry for what I might have done.’”

Judge comments:

To anyone who has escaped a Communist country, that aside is deeply chilling. Why should a man apologize for something he insists he didn’t do? But it no longer matters if one is innocent or not. We are living in the age of the show trial and the forced apology. All that matters is that we submit to our liberal betters.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)




 

Category: Media Bias, Supreme Court

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