Why did I ever think it would matter?

Michelle Goldberg at the Times:

The restarted F.B.I. background check that seemed, a week ago, like a merciful concession to decency has instead been a cover-up. Agents didn’t even question Blasey or Kavanaugh. It’s not clear if they interviewed any of the more than 20 corroborating witnesses named by Deborah Ramirez, who claimed a drunken, aggressive Kavanaugh thrust his genitals into her face when they were students at Yale. The New Yorker reported that witnesses who tried to contact the F.B.I.were ignored; some ended up submitting unsolicited statements to the bureau.

Which were filed in the bottom drawer of a rusty filing cabinet in a sub-basement filled with piranhas.

Ultimately, according to the White House, the F.B.I. interviewed a total of nine people in its new review. Based on what they said, Republican leaders have declared that Blasey’s story remains uncorroborated.

In other words the Republicans told the FBI not to do anything that would actually turn up evidence, and Republican leaders have declared that Blasey’s story remains uncorroborated. It remains uncorroborated because they didn’t try to corroborate it.

Conservatives will say that they’re protecting an innocent man unfairly accused, not standing up for white male impunity as a principle. They either don’t believe Blasey, or they think that, in the absence of further proof, Kavanaugh should be given the benefit of the doubt, which in this case means a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. They think they’re the ones who are being fair and judicious. “One side is standing on evidence,” tweeted Commentary’s Noah Rothman. “The other on intuition and sentiment.”

Evidence! What evidence? There is no “evidence” that Kavanaugh did not assault Ford, there’s only his denial that he did. There’s also no evidence (that I know of) that he did, but that doesn’t equal “it’s just intuition and sentiment.” And there’s plenty of evidence that Kavanaugh is an angry hater of all things lefty, which is not a good quality in a supreme.

No Democrat or feminist cares that Kavanaugh drank a lot in high school; personally, I couldn’t have endured high school sober. We care that he described his younger self as a chaste innocent who was, as he said in his Fox News interview, “focused on academics and athletics, going to church every Sunday at Little Flower, working on my service projects, and friendship.” In fact, by multiple accounts, Kavanaugh was a mean, rowdy drunk and a sexist bully.

Which is not what we expect in a Supreme Court justice.