WSJ Offers Inevitably Scorching Kavanaugh Take
By 
I have a piece coming tomorrow about why the Republicans should cut bait on Kavanaugh, but probably won’t. As evidence for the latter, the party’s print house organ has weighed in, and…
Instead Ms. Feinstein waited until the day before a committee markup on the nomination to release a statement that she had “information” about the accusation and had sent it to the FBI. Her statement was a political stunt.
She was seeking to insulate herself from liberal charges that she sat on the letter. Or—and this seems increasingly likely given the course of events—Senator Feinstein was holding the story to spring at the last minute in the hope that events would play out as they have. Surely she knew that once word of the accusation was public, the press would pursue the story and Ms. Ford would be identified by name one way or another.
This is a ludicrously dishonest smear. There is zero evidence that Feinstein’s timing was political. Her actions are fully consistent with respecting Ford’s wishes to keep her story private, and Ford’s own lawyer has backed this up.
GOP Senators should understand that the political cost of defeating Mr. Kavanaugh will likely include the loss of the Senate. Democrats are already motivated to vote against Donald Trump, and if Republicans panic now their own voters will rightly be furious. They would be letting Democrats get away with the same dirty trick they tried and failed to pull off against Clarence Thomas.
The political analysis her strikes me as massively wrong, but we’ll get to that tomorrow. What’s worth highlighting is the claim that Anita Hill coming forward with testimony that was almost certainly truthful was a “dirty trick.” Really says it all. But my guess is that this is how Republicans are going to play it.
To think that this is a conspiracy, you'd have to believe that Ford was planting the story by lying to her husband in 2002, lying to her therapist in 2013, lying to a newspaper in late 2017, all with some foresight that Kavanaugh would one day get SCOTUS nomination. https://t.co/uAIIrcInKB
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) September 18, 2018