To which I said: So what? Those passages didn’t have any bearing on sexual assault. To claim they do would be like saying that because she had a smart mouth, Amanda in “The Bad News Bears” deserved to get beaned with a pitch. Ford’s partying had no relation to assault any more than the partying my buddies and I did in high school made us rapists.

And there’s the heart of the matter. Had the Left not tried to whitewash Ford’s past and present her as Shirley Temple, her story ironically would have been more believable. Just as most fair-minded people could believe that as 1970s kids who became teens in the hard-partying 1980s, we threw a few parties, and that this did not make us rapists, they could believe that a socially active girl like Ford could have, at some time or place, been the victim of an assault, even if it was not at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh. Americans can hold two thoughts in their heads at the same time.

No, the truth wasn’t good enough. The Left had to try and move the needle. Their level of cynicism was such that many of them didn’t even care about guilt or innocence. A ridiculous Vanity Fair hit piece offered this astonishing passage: “To many Americans, Kavanaugh didn’t seem like a sexual predator—but that wasn’t the point. The point was that he couldn’t give an inch of possible culpability. He couldn’t say, ‘I’m sorry for what I might have done.’” Ana Marie Cox, once a respected journalist, tweeted this: “We need to judge Brett Kavanaugh, not just by what he may or may not have done, but how he treats a woman’s pain. Will he take her pain seriously? Do the people interrogating her take her pain seriously?”

In other words, the truth doesn’t matter.