Around seven o'clock on Thursday night, the electric Twitter machine entered the red zone and never returned. A guy named Ed Whelan, the head of the Ethics and Public Policy Institute, a relic of the golden first era of wingnut welfare, posited that perhaps Dr. Christine Blasey Ford had been sexually assaulted as a young teenager, but that she had mistaken another Georgetown Prep student for Brett Kavanaugh when she was asked to identify her attacker.

Mitch McConnell, Ed Whelan SAUL LOEB Getty Images

Whelan named the person he speculated had been the actual attacker—Yes, I hear the OJ echoes, too—but we are not going to do that here because Whelan is a libelous gombeen and we are not. His evidence was a strange conglomeration of GPS data, hazy reproductions of yearbook photos, and the floor plans of another house that Whelan claimed better conformed to Ford's original account of the attack.

Now, to be clear, this notion had been kicking around the rightwing circles in which Kavanaugh has spent most of his career for a while now. The Washington Examiner wrote on Tuesday that Kavanaugh himself told Orrin Hatch that he thought Ford might be mistaken about who tried to rape her. Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post wrote an entire column speculating on the possibility. When Whelan's tweet storm broke, Ross Douthat of The New York Times vouched for Whelan's bona fides as a Very Serious Person. And then the roof fell in.

First, Ford, whose lawyers are still in negotiations with the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding her possible appearance before that body, categorically rejected the possibility that she was mistaken about who tried to rape her. From the Washington Post:

Ed Whelan, a former clerk to the late justice Antonin Scalia and president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed to floor plans, online photographs and other information to suggest a location for the house party in suburban Maryland that Ford described. He also named and posted photographs of the classmate he suggested could be responsible. Ford dismissed Whelan’s theory in a statement late Thursday: “I knew them both, and socialized with” the other classmate, Ford said, adding that she had once visited him in the hospital. “There is zero chance that I would confuse them.”

Republicans on Capitol Hill and White House officials immediately sought to distance themselves from Whelan’s claims and said they were not aware of his plans to identify the former classmate, now a middle school teacher, who could not be reached for comment and did not answer the door at his house Thursday night.

As the night went on, it was discovered—by Josh Marshall, I believe—that the guy Whelan had proposed as a possible Kavanaugh doppelgänger had been one of the people who signed a letter supporting his nomination and vouching for his estimable character. This was embarrassing enough, but then it became apparent that Whelan wasn't simply a rogue blogger on a spree. Again, from the Post:

Whelan has been involved in helping to advise Kavanaugh’s confirmation effort and is close friends with both Kavanaugh and Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society who has been helping to spearhead the nomination. Kavanaugh and Whelan also worked together in the Bush administration.Kavanaugh and his allies have been privately discussing a defense that would not question whether an incident involving Ford happened, but instead would raise doubts that the attacker was Kavanaugh, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

If Kavanaugh played any role at all in concocting this fairy tale, not only should he not be confirmed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, but also he probably should lose the job on the appeals bench that he already has. That would be the entire ballgame, not least because it would open up (again) the work that he did in a purely political capacity during the second Bush administration, which the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee and the White House have been fighting ferociously to bury. It would lead one to the inescapable conclusion that Kavanaugh is and always has been a conservative true-believer and that any of his attempts at pretending otherwise in his testimony were as fanciful as whistling fish.

The larger story is that the Senate Republicans—who, by not calling a committee vote on Thursday already now have delayed the confirmation, which they swore up and down they wouldn't do—can't get out of their own way on this matter now. Something is buried in those documents, or in the memory of witnesses, that is giving the majority party pause. Dr. Ford has them running scared, or the nominee does.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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