A nice compilation by David Rutz of the Free Beacon featuring a familiar face at the end of the clip. I mentioned this Kavanaugh-era talking point in a post on Friday. It was everywhere at the time, as you’re about to see. Watch, then read on.

FLASHBACK: Democrats Said Kavanaugh Was Undergoing ‘Job Interview,’ Didn’t Deserve Presumption of Innocence https://t.co/6dherKS2Fv pic.twitter.com/MrdKZgYrxc

— Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) May 4, 2020

We don’t want to send Kavanaugh to prison, said Democrats of Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation, we just want to deny him a job to which he’s not entitled. It’s not like Chuck Schumer’s going to nominate the next candidate if Kavanaugh is borked. Trump will simply go back to the drawing board.

But that was far too cute. It’s not “just a job interview” if the candidate’s being disqualified based on an unsubstantiated allegation of attempted rape. That’s a reputation-destroying claim. If supported, it would have made us question whether Kavanaugh belongs in civil society as a free man, never mind the Supreme Court. If you apply for a job and you’re turned down for some pedestrian reason, like not having enough experience, them’s the breaks. If you apply for a job and you’re turned down because someone emailed the hiring coordinator afterward and claimed without evidence that you’re a child molester, you have a grievance.

But if an unsupported accusation of a sexual offense was sufficient to deprive Kavanaugh of a job according to Democratic thinking, why isn’t it sufficient to deprive Biden of one? He hasn’t clinched a majority of delegates yet. Even if he had, surely the DNC would find a way to step in and deny the nomination to a candidate who’d been charged with a serious crime even if he hadn’t yet been convicted. It’s a matter of protecting the party’s honor, not to mention its chances in November. You don’t anoint someone as nominee when there’s good reason to believe he’s committed a felony, whether or not that’s been proven in court.

And there must be good reason in this case. Believe all women, we’re told. Tara Reade’s a woman. Whether Biden belongs in prison or not is between him and the relevant D.A. For the DNC’s purposes, it’s enough to say that … it’s just a job interview. Next.

DNC chief Tom Perez isn’t following that standard, though, surprisingly enough:

“There’s been so many investigations of the vice-president. The most comprehensive investigation of the vice-president was when he was vetted by Barack Obama in 2008. I’m very familiar with the vice-presidential vetting process. They look at everything about you,” Perez said on ABC News’ “This Week.”

“They looked at the entire history of Joe Biden, his entire career. And I’ll tell you, if Barack Obama had any indication that there was an issue, Barack Obama would not have had him as his vice-president. Barack Obama trusted Joe Biden. I trust Joe Biden. And those investigations have been done.”…

“This is like the Hillary emails, because there was nothing there,” he said.

It’s true, Team Obama had every reason to vet Biden thoroughly and skeptically. And they did, according to David Axelrod, and found nothing regarding Reade.

But Team Trump had every reason to vet Kavanaugh thoroughly. As did Team Bush, which first brought him on as White House staff secretary and then nominated him to the D.C. Circuit. I can’t remember a single Democrat citing the fact that Kavanaugh had been vetted and received a vote of confidence by multiple Republican administrations as evidence that he must be innocent of the accusation against him.

The best Dems can do to distinguish the two cases is to say that Biden’s been chosen by the people while Kavanaugh was seeking confirmation by the Senate. In a democracy the people are always right; if Democratic voters decided that Biden’s passed his “job interview” then it’s not for the party to second-guess them. Except … virtually every ballot for Biden was cast before the Reade allegation broke big. And if Democrats insist on adopting this standard of “the people have spoken” for their nominee, presumably they agree that the many allegations of sexual misconduct pending against Trump have also been rendered moot politically by his election. If Republican Party delegates concluded this summer that there’s too much smoke around Trump for there not to be fire and declined to nominate him, Democrats would have to reluctantly conclude that that’s inappropriate and undemocratic and that the president should be rightly nominated anyway.

I assume they’d try to distinguish the cases of Biden and Trump by pointing out that there’s one accusation against Biden (not including the creepy hair-sniffing stuff) versus dozens against Trump. But if we’re going by numbers then we’re back to the Kavanaugh comparison. Why was one allegation enough to end his Supreme Court candidacy but not enough to end Biden’s presidential candidacy?

The best thing going for Joe right now is that Trump is in a uniquely poor position to accuse him of sexual offenses. Righties like me can make hay of it all day long but the White House and the party leadership is necessarily forced to stay away. Team Trump is also having to tread lightly on its other big weapon against Biden, his apparent senescence. The RNC has leveraged that, cutting clips of Biden’s “senior moments” in interviews and posting them to YouTube, but reportedly the White House is nervous about how that’s going to play with the electorate. “Several political advisers, including White House senior aide Kellyanne Conway, have warned his allies against relentlessly mocking the 77-year-old Biden’s mental acuity because the president has already lost ground with senior citizens, people familiar with the matter said,” according to WaPo. Declining popularity with seniors is Trump’s biggest electoral problem right now. If he goes all-in on mocking Biden for having “lost a step,” how does that play with people 65 and older?