The New York Times news coverage of the Kavanaugh story has calmed down somewhat from its ridiculous partisan lows, but not universally, while the editorial page twisted facts two days in a row with solo editorials devoted to the dangers of Kavanaugh.
On Friday, Elizabeth Williamson swooned over the left-wing protestors rampaging through the Senate hallways as the Kavanaugh saga approached boiling point on Thursday: “Stories on the Court Steps and Mass Arrests as Capital Boils.”
She ignored their condescending disrespect toward a Republican U.S. senator, while accusing Sen. Orrin Hatch of being "dismissive."
It started almost plaintively. “Why aren’t you brave enough to talk to us?” a protester demanded of Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, as he waited for an elevator in a Senate office building on Thursday.
Mr. Hatch, shielded by aides, waggled his fingers dismissively at her. “Don’t you wave your hand at me!” she responded. “I wave my hand at you!”
Mr. Hatch waved her off yet again, telling her and other protesters that he would talk to them “when you grow up.” They exploded in fury.
“How dare you talk to women that way!” the woman said, as Mr. Hatch retreated to the back of the elevator car, then, grinning from behind his aides, waved off the women a final time.
The group rushed the door. “How dare you?” they said again and again.
On a steamy day in the capital on Thursday, there was singing, chanting and rage as several thousand protesters, most of them female, made a late stand against the nomination of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
Williamson took care to portray the left-wing protests in sympathetic terms.
One man carried a homemade sign that read “#MeToo Fraud,” before a protester tore it in half. He called out “God bless Trump; God bless Kavanaugh,” as rape survivors told their stories and two women, Michela Vawter, of Burlington, Vt., and Kiki Hackett, of Phoenix, quietly asked him to stop.
After the testimonials, protest leaders led the crowd, ranging from college students to octogenarians, to the Hart Senate Office Building, for a sit-down protest in the soaring atrium. Protesters filled three balconies overlooking the atrium, cheering, shooting cellphone video and raising their fists as the police made arrests. Signs reading “Kava Nope” and “Fighting for Our Lives,” water bottles and paper littered the marble floor alongside a towering Calder sculpture.
The paper ran a long solo editorial on Friday, “A Test of Mr. Kavanaugh, and America.” The online headline was blunter: “How Brett Kavanaugh Failed -- And why the Senate should vote to keep him off the Supreme Court.”
....As Judge Kavanaugh said in a 2015 speech, “to be a good judge and a good umpire, it’s important to have the proper demeanor.” He added: “To keep our emotions in check. To be calm amidst the storm. On the bench, to put it in the vernacular, don’t be a jerk.”
The next paragraph took some nerve on the part of the editorial writers.
Wise words. He wasn’t able to live by them when it mattered. At last week’s hearing, Judge Kavanaugh was a jerk. He spun dark visions of a Democratic conspiracy of vengeance against him....
After the left smeared Kavanaugh as a gang rapist in front of the nation, the paper says he is now unfit for office because he might harbor a little anger against those who tried to smear him.
While many of Judge Kavanaugh’s defenders leapt to exonerate him of sexual assault or excused his rage-bender as understandable, virtually no one has tried to deny his rank partisanship. Yet after last week’s testimony, how could any self-identified Democrat, or leftist, or sexual-assault victim, or anyone who is not identifiable as a Republican, expect to get a fair shake from a Justice Kavanaugh? If he is confirmed, that will pose a profound problem for the court.
Saturday’s solo editorial, “The High Court Brought Low,” included the online subhead, “Don’t let Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh have the last word about American justice.” The editoralists upped the ante:
Credible accusations of sexual assault, lies told under oath, explicitly partisan attacks on the senators trying to assess his fitness to serve: None of it was enough to give Republican leaders more than momentary pause in their campaign to seize decisive control of the Supreme Court.
They tried the smear again:
The nation is now facing the possibility of three or four decades with a justice credibly accused of sexual assault, one who may well be the deciding vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, or at least make it so hard for a woman to exercise her constitutional right to make her own medical decisions that the ruling is effectively nullified....
