As I reported earlier this year in Chronicles and in Splice Today, David Enrich, an “investigative reporter” at The New York Times who helped cover the Brett Kavanaugh nomination in 2018, apologized to me for his inaccurate reporting. Friends have told me that collecting his scalp is a rare win—liberal reporters just don’t admit they are wrong—but I’m not stopping there. I expect an apology from Sally Quinn. I also expect one from Jennifer Rubin.
Rubin’s the deranged former writer at The Washington Post. She’s the author of the terrible book Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump. Like Enrich, Quinn, and most of the media—even some on the right—Rubin isn’t competent. In the fall of 2018 during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, hearings that I was dragged into when I was accused of witnessing Kavanaugh sexually assault a girl in 1982, leftist nuts like Rubin claimed that I wasn’t participating in the hearings because it’d be bad for Kavanaugh. Rubin was wrong. I didn’t say anything, it was a fraud. Rubin had a chance to report on this, but because she’s a dingbat, she didn’t.
On October 3, 2018, in the wake of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, TV blowhard Joe Scarborough revealed that he’d been to some social events in Washington. He heard people expressing doubt about the stories told by Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford. Scarborough said: “Quite a few people that we talked to, and I think a lot of them were registered Democrats, raised questions about Dr. Ford’s story. Now that’s something in 24/7 news coverage, at least in mainstream media, you never hear anybody talk about. They won’t talk about it. They feel that if anybody sticks their neck out and says they disbelieve any part of her story or talk about how there are no corroborating witnesses, well, they’ll get absolutely slammed.”
He went on: “There has been the assumption that every single allegation was true… Nobody had dared say, even the Republicans, that part of Dr. Ford’s story might just not add up… I turned on all networks at all times and Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of being a serial rapist by columnists in national newspapers… the media has dropped the ball on this from the very beginning.”
The fact that the charges against Kavanaugh were false penetrated so deeply into the left that it was even heard by Ilyse Hogue, who at the time was the president of Planned Parenthood. Here’s what Jennifer Rubin writes in Resistance (italics in the original):
“Hogue found skepticism even among progressive donors. Did they really want to put all their eggs in one basket held by a single woman accuser? Despite skittishness among her donors and allies, Hogue had no option but to fight for every Senate vote. She kept up a steady drumbeat against Kavanaugh in the media and encouraged NARAL forces on the ground to make their voices heard.”
This paragraph wouldn’t get published unchallenged in The Unknown Hoya, the high school newspaper that I co-edited, which made it into the media in 2018. Rubin writes that Hogue found skepticism about Ford’s tale even in the crazier reaches of the hard-core left. It’s precisely the kind of lead that a good journalist would pursue. The questions are obvious: Who were the skeptics Hogue was referring to? How had they reached their conclusions? Why did they doubt, over and above their ideology? Would they go on the record?
A competent journalist would track down the donors, contract them, get the ones with any decency to admit that the Blasey Ford job was a scam. Jennifer Rubin had a chance to do that. Rubin writes that “despite skittishness among her donors and allies,” Hogue “had no option but to fight for every Senate vote.” Nonsense. But Hogue had the option to listen to the people in her own camp who were telling her that the Ford story was bunk—to say nothing of the wild stories at the time about Kavanaugh and drugs, crimes and gang rape.
I’ve grown so weary of people like Jennifer Rubin, who do drive-by reporting to destroy the lives of others yet never pay a price. David Enrich had the decency to apologize for his awful and inaccurate coverage. Rubin can now do the same.