Two things you need to know before reading this post. One is that at the age of 15, Sen. Cory Booker tried to get to first base with a girl he was making out with but was rebuffed. The second is that “Spartacus” is not the only film Sen. Mitty pictures himself in. As Booker recounts of that night in 1984:
With the ‘Top Gun’ slogan ringing in my head, I slowly reached for her breast. After having my hand pushed away once, I reached my ‘mark.’
A third thing: Booker was evidently the most introspective 15-year-old who ever lived. After the girl pushed his hand away, he recalls thinking, “It was a wake-up call. I will never be the same.” In other words, as Chris Cillizza of CNN writes, “that moment, and his work on the issue after, had changed him — and his views on women, consent and assault — forever.”
But enough on Booker. What does this all have to do with Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who has endured a week of continuous pounding by Democrats who “believe” as-yet-unproved accusations of sexual misconduct leveled against him? This: On Thursday a The Daily Caller ran an article that quoted Paul Mulshine, a columnist for the Star-Ledger, who wrote, “Based on that Stanford Daily column [detailing the sexual encounter], Booker should be giving Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt.”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Cillizza never mentions the column in the Star Ledger, which is hardly a bastion of conservative thought, but never mind that. His argument is that this is all so much “whatboutism” and that Booker should be held to a different standard because he confessed his crime whereas “Kavanaugh has never mentioned the alleged episode with Ford publicly.” Of course, that presupposes that Kavanaugh ever heard Christine Ford’s allegations against him, which he now refutes.
Cillizza’s argument was always pretty weak tea, but it is weaker still now that he has gone back and annotated his column with parenthetical criticism by Kavanaugh and “his defenders” — which still miraculously manages to miss the point. Those of us who find the Democrats’ guilty-until-proven-innocent posture odious and unfair object to it on the grounds of principle, not on behalf of any one victim. Interestingly, the Democrats, were the target of the verbal attacks one of their own, would behave the same way.
