Top Dems Need To Take It Back
For all their gripes about President Trump, most Democratic 2020 contenders plainly don’t see any problem with being fast with the Twitter finger. After that nownotorious New York Times piece went up Saturday, the candidates rushed to call for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
But now the Times has corrected away the story’s only real “news.” So when will the Democratic presidential candidates admit their mistake and retract their calls for Kavanaugh to be impeached?
Liz Warren, Kamala Harris, Julian Castro and Beto O’Rourke all tweeted out support for impeachment — mostly of both Kavanaugh and Trump. Pete Buttigieg issued a statement on the same lines.
The two most experienced 2020ers, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, held off on directly demanding impeachment, as did Amy Klobuchar, a relative moderate. Naturally, that earned them all the ire of the #Resistance.
But now the Times has posted its damning correction: The original story “did not in
clude one element” of the account in the book on which the article is based — namely, that the new supposed “victim” of the future justice doesn’t recall the alleged incident.
Which makes this no kind of “corroboration” of any of the other smears of Kavanaugh — all of them, mind you, already debunked by the denials of every named potential third-party witness.
On top of all that, the book itself reports that, despite the authors’ months of searching, there’s not a hint of such behavior in Kavanaugh’s three-plus decades’ of life since Yale. They write: “As reporters, we uncovered nothing to suggest that Kavanaugh has mistreated women in the years since.” So, once you get past their personal view that his accusers are “credible,” it amounts to complete vindication.
Sure, every candidate who dares retract his or her hasty impeachment call will anger the many Democrats who don’t care about no stinkin’ facts. But it might score some points with the voters who still care about things like truth and basic human decency.