Maybe Sen. Dianne Feinstein had another cold, deciding to release a letter the author requested be kept confidential, a letter accusing Judge Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct in high school.  In what was hardly a "Spartacus moment," the cowardly Feinstein withheld its existence during public and closed-door testimony, a private meeting, and personal phone calls with Kavanaugh.

After the Democrats prattled on about not having all of Kavanaugh's documents, here was the self-righteous Feinstein, withholding a document until all else failed to derail Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court.  Liberals insist that all accusers be deemed credible and heard, but they forget about the presumption of innocence and the right of the accused to confront his accuser.  Kavanaugh deserves that right and might yet get it, but in the meantime, we know that for Democrats, the politics of personal destruction is not dead.

And just who is Kavanaugh's accuser, Christine Blasey Ford?  Let us ask the obvious question that always comes when such accusations are leveled decades after the alleged occurrence when a Republican is nominated for a high post or runs for high office: why now?

As a statement from the Senate Judiciary Committee notes:

"It's disturbing that these uncorroborated allegations from more than 35 years ago, during high school, would surface on the eve of a committee vote after Democrats sat on them since July.  If Ranking Member Feinstein and other Committee Democrats took this claim seriously, they should have brought it to the full Committee's attention much earlier.  Instead, they said nothing during two joint phone calls with the nominee in August, four days of lengthy public hearings, a closed session for all committee members with the nominee where sensitive topics can be discussed and in more than 1,300 written questions," Grassley's office released in a statement Sunday afternoon.  "Sixty-five senators met individually with Judge Kavanaugh during a nearly two-month period before the hearing began, yet Feinstein didn't share this with her colleagues ahead of many of those discussions.

We also know she is a liberal activist, a college professor whose political views are seemingly at odds with Kavanaugh's originalist interpretation of the Constitution:

Ford is a registered Democrat who has given small monetary donations to political causes, according to The Washington Post.

She has donated to ActBlue, a nonprofit group that aims to help Democrats and progressive candidates, The Wall Street Journal reported.

She is also among the thousands of medical professionals who signed onto a Physicians for Human Rights letter in June decrying the practice of separating children from their parents at the border and urging the Trump administration to stop it.

We do know that when Mitt Romney looked like a shot at winning in 2012, Blasey was being held in reserve amidst speculation that Kavanaugh was likely to be Romney's first SCOTUS pick:

In 2012, Romney ran against Obama.  Up until his 47% gaffe, Romney was doing well.  He actually had a shot of winning.  For the Democrats, as has been the case since Bork, having a Republican in the White House, especially with the ever-aging but never retiring Ruth Bader Ginsburg a perpetual risk, raised the specter of a conservative judge getting appointed to the Supreme Court.  With that in mind, one Twitter user, who must have an amazing memory, remembered something interesting he'd read back in 2012:

March 2012, the left was preparing for a possible Romney win. They assessed that Kavanaugh would be his Supreme Court pick and this accusation was ready to go. Then Obama won so the story died. Now its reemerged. Read last few lines of this 2012 article.

– Stonewall Jackson (@1776Stonewall) September 16, 2018

Her alleged trauma does not jibe with her persistent reticence, whose end seemed politically timed to any possible Kavanaugh nomination to the Supreme Court.  Otherwise, she was quite fine with alleged teenage predator Kavanaugh spending twelve years on the federal bench, deciding public policy and influencing the course of individual lives and the nation as a whole:

Russell Ford, her husband, also told The Washington Post that his wife detailed the alleged assault during a couple's therapy session in 2012.  During therapy, he said his wife talked about a time when she was trapped in a room with two drunken boys, and one of them had pinned her to a bed, molested her and tried to prevent her from screaming.

He said he remembered his wife specifically using Kavanaugh's name.  She said during the session, Russell Ford recalled, she was scared he would one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.

Yet she kept quiet as Kavanaugh was appointed to the federal bench, got married, raised two daughters, and coached their basketball team.  Timing is everything in politics, and it is painfully obviously how well timed this resurrected memory was.

Parallels to the last-minute defamation of Justice Clarence Thomas by Anita Hill during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing are clear:

The 27-year-old "Anita Hill" strategy of digging for dirt on a Supreme Court nominee didn't work with Clarence Thomas back in 1991.  But desperate times for liberals call for desperate measures.

Just as with Anita Hill, no doubt it took a concentrated effort of importuning by a host of liberal Senate staffers and interest-group partisans to wrest from another college professor a last-minute allegation of sexual misbehavior designed to sink a Supreme Court appointment at the eleventh hour[.] ...

At the time, Kavanaugh and Mark Judge, the friend she alleges was with him, were both students at Georgetown Preparatory School.

Judge told The Weekly Standard last week that the allegation against Kavanaugh is "just absolutely nuts."  A total of 65 women who knew the judge in high school sent a letter to the Senate last Friday stating, "He has always treated women with decency and respect."

As Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley pointed out, "Judge Kavanaugh's background has been thoroughly vetted by the FBI on six different occasions throughout his decades of public service, and no such allegation ever surfaced."  Perhaps also of note is that Ford seems to have airbrushed all politics out of her online profile, including her professional bio on LinkedIn, though according to public records she has made small contributions to the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Friends of Bernie Sanders[.] ...

Regardless of the validity of the accusation, the timing on it is straight out of Anita Hill.  The woman is said to have approached Senate Democrats in July, but two months later, in the public hearing, Kavanaugh was never asked about the incident, nor did it come up in the 1,278 written follow-up questions he has since answered.

The timing is indeed straight out of Anita Hill.  These charges are reminiscent of the campaign of smear and innuendo leveled at former GOP presidential candidate and successful black American conservative businessman Herman Cain.  Cain's candidacy derailed after repeated and unproven sexual harassment allegations by former employees.  Like Harry Reid's tax lies about Mitt Romney, the strategy worked.

Liberal accusations against Republicans are accepted as credible immediately.  Smear first, prove later.  Guilty until proven innocent.  To various extents, it worked with Romney and Cain.  Why not Judge Brett Kavanaugh?

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor's Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.