Judge Brett Kavanaugh testifies during the second day of his US Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing to be an Associate Justice on the US Supreme Court, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, September 5, 2018. - President Donald Trump's newest Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is expected to face punishing questioning from Democrats this week over his endorsement of presidential immunity and his opposition to abortion. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images) WASHINGTON, DC - SEPTEMBER 04: Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh is sworn in before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill September 4, 2018 in Washington, DC. Kavanaugh was nominated by President Donald Trump to fill the vacancy on the court left by retiring Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) (CNN) — In an unsigned editorial Tuesday morning, The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote this about the planned Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on sexual assault allegations made by California professor Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh: “This is simply too distant and uncorroborated a story to warrant a new hearing or to delay a vote. We’ve heard from all three principals, and there are no other witnesses to call. Democrats will use Monday’s hearing as a political spectacle to coax Mr. Kavanaugh into looking defensive or angry, and to portray Republicans as anti-women. Odds are it will be a circus.” That argument is part of a broader case made in the WSJ piece that the timing of Ford’s decision to come forward, her hiring of a lawyer with a past of Democratic activism and the decisions of Judiciary Committee ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein all reek of politics – of an attempt by the opposition party to do whatever it takes to besmirch a good man and, by doing so, hurt President Donald Trump and the broader conservative movement. The problem with the editorial (or I should say, the main problem, because there are several – which I’ll lay out later) is this: It makes the argument for less transparency, less disclosure, less light. We can’t know who is telling the truth here, so we can’t possibly try, is the underlying argument. This is never an acceptable argument when dealing with allegations of sexual assault of the sort Ford is making. That’s particularly true given the stakes here. We are talking about a lifetime appointment for Kavanaugh to the highest and most influential court in the country. In the last decade, we have seen the Supreme Court legalize gay marriage, reshape campaign finance laws and uphold the Affordable Care Act and Trump’s travel ban. It’s a hugely influential role, and knowing the character of the people you are putting on the court is absolutely essential. Ford’s husband, Russell, put that idea nicely in an interview with The Washington Post, which initially broke the news of the accuser’s identity. “I think you look to judges to be the arbiters of right and wrong,” he said. “If they don’t have a moral code of their own to determine right from wrong, then that’s a problem. So I think it’s relevant. Supreme Court nominees should be held to a higher standard.” At a minimum, given the allegation and the stakes, the senators who have to decide whether Kavanaugh is fit to sit on the court should not only get to hear directly from both Ford and Kavanaugh, but also to ask questions of both of them as well. (Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley announced late Monday that a public hearing featuring both Ford and Kavanaugh would be held next week.) The idea that we should just ignore Ford’s allegations because we are unlikely to know beyond a shadow of a doubt who is lying and who is not is beyond ridiculous. While that’s the biggest problem with the Wall Street Journal editorial on Ford and Kavanaugh, it’s not the only one. Here’s a few more: The WSJ editorial board views the timing of Ford’s accusations as clearly politically motivated and therefore, not worth paying serious attention to. While there’s little question that we are very late in Kavanaugh’s confirmation process, Ford sent a letter to Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and anonymously tipped off the Post, back in July. And according to one of her friends quoted in this Mercury News story , Ford told her about the alleged assault by Kavanaugh in 2017 – long before he was Trump’s pick to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. The Journal notes that Debra Katz, Ford’s lawyer, “has a history of Democratic activism and spoke in public defense of Bill Clinton against the accusations by Paula Jones.” But that description of Katz sells the lawyer short. The Post story describes her as a “Washington lawyer known for her work on sexual harassment cases.” Katz’s own website notes that she was named as one of Washingtonian’s top lawyers from 2003 to 2017. Shrinking her portfolio to “Democratic activist” seems unfair to Katz. (Sidebar: Ford is also a registered Democrat.) The issue is whether or not what Ford is saying is credible. She or her lawyer’s political affiliation is worth noting, sure, but far from any sort of definitive proof of, well, anything. The editorial questions whether Ford actually was reluctant to come forward with her allegations – noting that she hired Katz, took a polygraph test, sent a letter to Feinstein about the alleged incident and contacted the Post’s anonymous tip line. According to the Journal: “The more relevant question is why go to such lengths if Ms. Ford really wanted her name to stay a secret? Even this weekend she could have chosen to remain anonymous. These are the actions of someone who was prepared to go public from the beginning if she had to.” Um, what? How someone processes an event as traumatic as what Ford alleges happened in high school is an incredibly complex emotional and intellectual process. How and why Ford went from wanting to preserve her anonymity to being willing to publicly talk about the incident isn’t a process that should be chalked up simply to politics. It’s at least as likely that, witnessing the #MeToo movement and feeling as though this whole thing was bigger than just her, Ford changed her mind on speaking out. The Journal piece offers a barely veiled threat at Senate Republicans. “GOP Senators should understand that the political cost of defeating Mr. Kavanaugh will likely include the loss of the Senate,” the piece reads. The argument is that a Kavanaugh defeat would badly demoralize the Republican base in advance of the 2018 midterms – and that depression coupled with Democrats’ huge enthusiasm to vote would flip control. I’m not sure, politically speaking, that’s actually true, but it’s also beside the point. The point is this: Republican (and Democratic) senators should have as their first and only priority getting as close to the truth of the allegations made by Ford against Kavanaugh as possible. Ask the questions – even the uncomfortable ones – that help them and us get the best sense possible of what really happened and what (if anything) it tells us about Kavanaugh. But don’t be held hostage to the idea that if Kavanaugh doesn’t wind up on the court – no matter what he and Ford say next week – it will be curtains for Senate Republicans. The Journal editorial isn’t totally wrong. It is likely that the hearing will be an absolute circus. And that we won’t likely get the unvarnished truth of what happened at that party in the 1980s. But Ford knew all of that. And yet, she decided she was willing to come forward and tell her story. The least we can do is hear what she has to say – and how Kavanaugh responds.<doc-sep>Several far-right news websites, amplified by The Drudge Report, published articles on Monday saying that Christine Ford, the college professor who accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of attempted sexual assault, was a “mad” and “troubled” professor. But the stories identified the wrong Christine Ford. The real accuser is Christine Blasey Ford, who teaches psychology and statistics at Palo Alto University. The one the right-wing sites targeted was Christine Adams Ford, a professor of human services at California State University, Fullerton. The incorrect articles went viral, prompting the web sites to pull them down and issue corrections. Those doing so included Gateway Pundit and Grabien, along with right-wing agitator Jack Posobiec. Grabien, a news website, sent readers to student reviews of the wrong professor. “Many interested in learning more about who Ford is have come across her students’ reviews on RateMyProfessors.com,” read the article, which had no author listed. “They’re… not good.” Grabien issued a correction within hours, but the story had already gone viral, receiving a link on The Drudge Report’s homepage. “CHRISTINE FORD’S STUDENTS RAVAGE HER IN REVIEWS,” the link read. Fox News host Laura Ingraham also shared the Grabien post to her Facebook followers and later deleted it. Posobiec, one of the initial pushers of the Pizzagate hoax, linked directly to the wrong RateMyProfessors.com page from his Twitter account on Sunday night. The wrongly identified Ford, Christine Adams, said she was giving a speech as a keynote speaker at a conference for the Los Angeles Department of Mental Health when the sites began inadvertently began misidentifying her as Kavanaugh’s accuser. “Given that [Christine Blasey Ford] was trying to remain anonymous for a while there, I’m sure she must be a little relieved they didn’t find her real page,” Ford said. Christine Adams Ford told NBC News she hadn’t yet seen the articles about her RateMyProfessors.com page, but accurately remembered the reviews being “pretty mixed.” “It was just yesterday my oldest daughter brought [Ford’s accusation] to my attention. I said, ‘Oh, she used her given name as a middle name like me,’” she said. “I thought, ‘Phew, that way when people look her up, they’ll know it’s different.’ I guess not.” Ford added that she was not aware of any threats or abuse as a result of the stories. The extra name was not enough for many conservative websites to differentiate between the two California professors. The wrongly identified review page was the center of a Gateway Pundit story titled, "Kavanaugh Accuser Is Unhinged Liberal Professor who Former Students Describe as Dark, Mad, Scary and Troubled,” which was shared over 7,400 times on Facebook. The story was later updated to say that the website “learned this was a different educator with the same name,” but the story still calls the accuser a “far-left activist.” Gateway Pundit has a track record of misidentifying newsworthy people based on social media accounts. Since January of 2017, it has incorrectly identified perpetrators of four different terror attacks, including claiming the Charlottesville car attack was perpetrated by an “anti-Trump protester” who was several states away. Last month, the site wrongly claimed a mass shooting at a Madden video game tournament in Jacksonville was committed by a “member of the anti-Trump ‘resistance,’” citing a Reddit account that did not, in fact, belong to the shooter.<doc-sep>“This story doesn’t have anything to do with justice actually, or even with what Brett Kavanaugh may have done in high school, underneath it all, anyone who lives in Washington can tell you, it’s about abortion,” he said, bringing up Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy, for his role in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. “And yet Clinton and Kennedy supported abortion in all cases and therefore the left treated them as heroes and swept, speaking of under the rug, their crimes into the dustbin of memory. Kavanaugh though may not support Roe v. Wade, we don’t really know, therefore he must be destroyed, it’s pretty straight forward.”<doc-sep>
Conservative media just learned what college students have known for years: the website Rate My Professors can’t be trusted. Outlets like The Gateway Pundit and Grabien News seized on a story about Christine Blasey Ford, a professor of social work at Palo Alto University who, over the weekend, accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault. The sites attempted to discredit Ford by weaponizing her Rate My Professor reviews. She has an average rating of 3.2 out of 5, which is a middling score. But the people who dislike her seem to really dislike her. One student wrote Ford “has something wrong with her.” Another called Ford “the worst teacher I ever had” and said he was “scared of her.” Media personalities like Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Chuck Woolery and Matt Drudge seized on this as proof that Ford couldn’t be trusted. There’s only one problem: they were talking about the wrong Christine Ford. The Christine Ford with terrible reviews is Christine A. Ford, a social worker who taught at California State University, Fullerton from 2010 to 2014. Christine B. Ford actually doesn’t have a page on Rate My Professor. It’s not clear whether the page was simply never created, or if it was deleted in light of the Kavanaugh accusations. Observer has reached out to Rate My Professor for clarification. To their credit, all of the conservative commentators who initially shared the Rate My Professors story deleted their tweets after a barrage of social media criticism. a strong answer to "why didn't she come forward earlier?" is that when she did come forward an entirely different person with a similar name got dragged by a right-wing media apparatus that is too dumb/vicious/incautious to properly aim its fire https://t.co/dhUrKlZmyv — Simon Maloy (@SimonMaloy) September 17, 2018 Grabien also admitted its mistake, putting strikethroughs in the entire story to keep it readable while showing it was incorrect (for example: B̶r̶e̶t̶t̶ ̶K̶a̶v̶a̶n̶a̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶C̶h̶r̶i̶s̶t̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶B̶l̶a̶s̶e̶y̶ ̶F̶o̶r̶d̶). The site further added a lengthy editor’s note. “There are two Christine Fords working in clinical psychology in California and we wrote this report about the wrong Christine Ford,” Grabien said. “We regret not going to greater lengths to ensure this was indeed the same Christine Ford.” Even Gateway Pundit backpedaled, deleting the portion of its story about Ford’s reviews. “An earlier post referenced Ford as an unpopular professor, but we have since learned this was a different educator with the same name,” the note read. This isn’t the first time right-wing media has failed at outsmarting the internet. When White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen restaurant in Virginia in June, Twitter trolls and Yelp reviewers started bashing the eatery online. But the restaurant they were trashing was a Red Hen in Washington, D.C. that had nothing to do with the Sanders incident.