Quote:The landscape of presidential nominee coverage is littered with examples of picks who withered under political and media scrutiny, like Harriet Miers under George W. Bush or Tom Daschle under Barack Obama.

Yet a string of would-be media hits on President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, have fizzled on impact -- doing little to dent his image and, in some cases, backfiring on the news outlets that published them.

This includes articles 'exposing' how he spent big bucks on baseball games and, most recently, a detailed New Yorker analysis of his college sports reporting three decades ago -- which quotes one academic, somehow, asserting that Kavanaugh's college basketball articles show he would endorse "unlimited Presidential power" under Trump.

To conservatives, the stories speak to a still-struggling effort to "smear" an otherwise qualified nominee.

Quote:Last month, The Washington Post was mocked for a report that Kavanaugh racked up credit card debt on Washington Nationals baseball tickets -- even though he paid off the bill. The paper homed in on Kavanaugh incurring “tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt buying baseball tickets over the past decade” and waited until the fourth paragraph to mention that he paid the bill.

ProPublica then took things a step further last week, soliciting readers to help figure out who attended the games with a headline, “Did You Go to a Washington Nationals Game With Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh?” The bizarre post has the subhead, “Trump’s pick is a baseball fan who racked up considerable debt buying season tickets. Help us figure out who went with the nominated judge.”

“Hope, it seems, springs eternal in a newsroom with a political agenda,” National Review’s Thomas Jipping wrote in reaction to the ProPublica’s piece.

Quote:Then there's The New Yorker's newly published deep dive on college sports articles Kavanaugh wrote for the Yale Daily News in the mid-1980s -- searching for clues "to how he might rule on critical issues.”

The article asks, "Could there be hints of potential Supreme Court rulings under headlines like ‘Elis Trounce Jaspers’ and ‘Hoopsters Head West?’" The prestigious magazine brought in “experts,” including a veteran Sports Illustrated writer and a professors from Northwestern, Harvard and Yale to explain that his sports articles from three decades ago could foreshadow his position on Supreme Court decisions.

One example was that every college hoops player was described as either “blazing or ice-cold,” which the Sports Illustrated writer said could indicate “a kind of good-evil, hot-cold, Manichean world view.”

“His tendency to approach his stories from the angles set forth by the coach indicates that he doesn’t want to buck authority figures … It would make sense if he supported unlimited Presidential power,” Northwestern’s J. A. Adande also told the magazine.

Quote:The Washington Post in July also published a feature on the “elite” world of Kavanaugh. In addition to tales of attending an expensive prep school and living in a nice house, the story noted that Kavanaugh’s neighborhood bartender knew a “a middle-aged guy named Brett who likes to pop in for a Budweiser and a burger” and didn’t have any idea he was a judge.

RedState’s Sarah Rumpf wrote, “Sounds like a very humble, down-to-earth guy,” and suggested the Post’s headline should have been something along the lines of, “SCOTUS nominee so humble he didn’t even tell his favorite bartender he was a lawyer.”

(08-20-2018 03:55 PM)TechRocks Wrote:  Yeah, Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh attended baseball games, but the story of the century, that America's intelligence services were used by the party in power to sabotage the campaign and incoming administration of the opposition?

Meh.