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lindysalsagal

(20,727 posts) Fri Sep 21, 2018, 06:45 PM Sep 2018

WAPO OP ED: The Kavanaugh doppelganger theory shows how far the right has descended into madness

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/09/21/the-kavanaugh-doppelganger-theory-shows-how-far-the-right-has-descended-into-madness/?utm_term=.32f6b3089e85

The Kavanaugh doppelganger theory shows how far the right has descended into madness

By Max Boot, Columnist, September 21 at 3:29 PM

That Kavanaugh is the victim of mistaken identity was the implausible theory put forward by Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. On Thursday night he posted (and now has deleted) a long series of tweets, complete with links to Zillow and Google Maps, arguing that Ford had indeed been assaulted — but by a friend of Kavanaugh’s who looked a lot like him. And then he proceeded to name the friend and post his picture. In the long annals of American politics, a lot of people have done a lot of irresponsible things, but for sheer callousness and craziness it’s hard to top an accusation of sexual assault against a specific individual based on, essentially, nothing. This is McCarthyism redux — and if Kavanaugh is revealed to have any connection to the propagation of this loathsome falsehood, he should be voted down overwhelmingly by the Senate.

It tells you how far the right has descended into madness that this vile accusation did not come from an anonymous blogger on some online bulletin board or from professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. It came from someone with sterling establishment credentials: Whelan is a Harvard Law School graduate who has served as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a Senate Judiciary Committee staffer, and a deputy assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration. He is also friends with Kavanaugh and with Federalist Society executive vice president Leonard Leo, and has been involved in efforts to confirm Kavanaugh.

That someone so seemingly respectable was spreading this cuckoo conspiracy theory gave it instant validity: “Fox and Friends” aired it to a national audience Friday morning. Amplified by Russian bots, this theory went viral on social media, because it fit so neatly with what so many conservatives were already saying. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review, “[T]he unverifiable sexual-assault allegation against Judge Brett Kavanaugh bore ‘all the hallmarks of a set-up.’ ”

This makes no sense: Why would Ford “set up” Kavanaugh when the cost of doing so is to have her name dragged through the mud and forced to flee her own home to avoid death threats? If she is setting up Kavanaugh, why would she take (and pass) a polygraph test and insist on an FBI investigation, knowing that lying to the FBI is a federal crime? If she was setting up Kavanaugh, why would she place his friend Mark Judge in the room, knowing that his testimony could contradict hers? And, why if this is a set-up, did she relay the sexual assault allegation to her marital therapist in 2012? Did she intuit years in advance that Kavanaugh would be nominated to the Supreme Court — but fail to foresee that, like every other woman who has made such allegations against a powerful man, she would be subject to character assassination?