The game seems clear now.

For Democrats and their allies in the press, the goal isn’t to sink Brett Kavanaugh with credible allegations of sexual misconduct. The goal is to sink him under the sheer weight of the number of accusations.

It doesn’t matter if the stories are unverified. So long as alleged victims continue to come forward with increasingly lurid and fantastic stories of violent sexual assault, Democratic lawmakers and their supporters can continue to characterize the Supreme Court nominee as an accused serial predator, his confirmation clouded by multiple allegations of sexual deviancy.

Consider, for example, the supposed bombshell NBC News published Wednesday evening titled, “ Senate probing new allegation of misconduct against Kavanaugh.”

For those of you playing at home, this makes four allegations lodged against Kavanaugh. The latest claim, which NBC included in its Wednesday evening network broadcast, alleges the Supreme Court nominee “physically assaulted a woman he socialized with in the Washington, D.C., area in 1998 while he was inebriated.”

The fourth accuser claims the incident involved “her own daughter, Kavanaugh and several friends in 1998.”

“When they left the bar (under the influence of alcohol) they were all shocked when Brett Kavanaugh, shoved her friend up against the wall very aggressively and sexually,” the accuser said in a letter addressed to the office of Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo. “There were at least four witnesses including my daughter.”

That’s all well and good until you take a step back and appreciate this fourth allegation for what it is: An anonymous letter citing anonymous sources regarding a supposed assault on an anonymous woman who wishes to remain anonymous. The author of the letter isn’t talking about herself. She’s not even talking about her supposed daughter. She’s speaking on behalf of her alleged daughter's alleged friend who is the alleged victim of an event the accuser did not herself witness.

This is NBC’s big scoop? This met their editorial standards? That four journalists, including Kasie Hunt, Leigh Ann Caldwell, Heidi Przybyla, and Frank Thorp V, contributed to this report makes it seem like an absurd joke. There is no version of reality where NBCs’ decision to publish this less-than-flimsy story makes sense. There is no version of reality where it’s ethical. The only reasonable explanation for why NBC would run a story as thin and uncorroborated as this one is that its authors and editors want to add to the weight of scandal currently dragging down Brett Kavanaugh.

This is almost as bad as when the New Yorker published unverified allegations that Kavanaugh exposed himself during a drinking game at Yale (the authors, Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, couldn't confirm whether the judge was even at that party). And it's about as bad as when NBC scrambled to report on a Facebook post written by a former Ford classmate who claimed to have knowledge of her assault. The former classmate, who deleted her Facebook post even before NBC published its story, said later that in an interview with NPR, “That [the attack] happened or not, I have no idea.”

Here’s a copy of the letter Sen. Gardner’s office received:

Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee responded to the NBC report Wednesday, saying in a statement that they saw “no reason to assign the letter credibility, and even if we did, we’d have no way to investigate the allegation as it was made anonymously and cannot be corroborated.”

“The committee regularly receives anonymous letters, some of which are viewed with credibility, but many of which are not. To make sure no stone was left unturned, the committee asked Judge Kavanaugh yesterday about this anonymous letter. Judge Kavanaugh flatly denied any such event ever happened,” the statement added.

Their response was accompanied by a transcript of a Sept. 25 interview between Kavanaugh and committee investigators wherein the judge was asked repeatedly about the allegations against him.

The transcript shows that, among other things, Kavanaugh was asked about the fourth allegation, which he denied outright, as well as another tip alleging he was involved in a sexual assault aboard a boat in 1985, which he also denied. That brings us to five accusations of sexual misconduct, none of which have been corroborated.

The first allegation comes via Christine Blasey Ford, who says Kavanaugh tried to rape her at a house party when they were both in high school. The second allegation comes from Deborah Ramirez, who claims Kavanaugh exposed himself during a drinking game when they were both students at Yale. The third allegation comes from Julie Swetnick, who claims she witnessed Kavanaugh participating in gang rapes when he was roughly 15-years-old.

None of the accusers have provided contemporaneous evidence or witness testimony to corroborate their claims, despite that their combined allegations implicate literally dozens of individuals.

Some of the accusations against Kavanaugh may very well be true. It’s not out of the realm of possibility. Ford's allegation, for example, doesn't ring out immediately as absurd. But the larger game for Democrats seems clear now.

By propping up whatever half-cocked, lunatic claim they can find, by rushing to highlight unverified and unproven claims, Democratic lawmakers and their boosters in the press are going for quantity, not quality. So long as Kavanaugh addresses the allegations, as he must when he is asked by committee investigators, unscrupulous journalists will have a weasely excuse to cover every absurd and unverified accusation lobbed in his direction. After all, they’ll say, his responses are a matter of public record. Their ideological counterparts on Capitol Hill will then point at their unethical, slipshod coverage and say, “Look at all of these allegations!”

add "and to get media people to embarrass themselves" to the "republicans released the bs accusations to discredit the credible ones" theory pic.twitter.com/KxRNBvc3S4 — Almaqah (@_Almaqah) September 27, 2018

For Democrats and certain politically active reporters, it doesn’t matter if the claims are totally unverified. It doesn’t matter if they sound completely insane. It matters only that they add to the total number of allegations against the judge.

It sure seems like the fix is in.