One of the most striking things about the age of Trump is that Democrats have convinced themselves all the misogynists, racists, anti-Semites and moral cretins are on the right and everyone on the left is either pure as the driven snow or their motives can be explained away. Meanwhile, Democrats such as Les Moonves and Harvey Weinstein keep getting exposed. The left attacks white nationalists and excuses their kissing cousins in antifa. They attack conservatives such as David Horowitz and give progressives such as Linda Sarsour a podium. They are convinced they have a monopoly on truth while Republicans believe lies.

Progressive activist site ThinkProgress is screaming like a stuck pig because it got fact-checked on Facebook by The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine. Facebook has arranged for partners in the media across ideologies to serve as fact-checkers for news stories on the website. The fact-checkers stand apart from the partisan fray at the ideologically oriented sites, and The Weekly Standards fact-checkers are highly regarded.

On Sept. 9, ThinkProgress ran a story distorting Brett Kavanaugh’s views on abortion. Their claims had already been made by California Senator Kamala Harris, and multiple media outlets had thoroughly debunked the claims. The claims arose from Harris selectively editing a statement Brett Kavanaugh made about Roe v. Wade. Kavanaugh was explaining the ruling, and Harris edited a video of his statement to make it sound like Kavanaugh was expressing his own view.

Fact-checkers from various national news outlets, including The Washington Post, stepped in and not only exposed Harris’ lies but also rebuked her for a gross and willful distortion of Kavanaugh’s record. Undeterred, ThinkProgress tried to legitimize the same claim. When exposed on Facebook for lying, the progressives who run ThinkProgress were not upset at being exposed. They were upset at Facebook letting a conservative outlet expose them.

A person might be justified in wondering why the supposedly objective, mainstream outlets Facebook works with failed to expose ThinkProgress. One might even conclude these outlets did not want to expose a left-wing site as lying. Thankfully, The Weekly Standard stood its ground, and it was and is consistent with all the previous fact checks about Kavanaugh. It will come as no surprise that Hillary Clinton, a woman whose relation with truth has been as faithful as her husband, also recycled ThinkProgress’s claim to smear Kavanaugh.

Progressive activists, of course, have eaten it all up. Like so many Trump partisans who believe he did not sleep with Stormy Daniels while married, progressive activists are convinced the thoroughly debunked lie about Kavanaugh is true. When not screaming about Kavanaugh, they are screaming about Merrick Garland. The willingness of Democrats to fester in grievance over Garland is akin to green flies swarming around steaming brown mounds in cow pastures.

Barack Obama nominated Garland to the United States Supreme Court, but he had no power to put Garland on the Court unilaterally. Doing so required both the advice and consent of the Senate. The Republican Party advised Obama not to nominate Garland and refused to give consent. While Democrats have a legitimate grievance that Garland should have at least been considered, Joe Biden, in a prior role as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had established the precedent of not filling judicial vacancies in the run up to presidential elections.

Certainly if the Democrats take back the Senate in November and a Supreme Court vacancy opens, they will be well within their rights and privileges to refuse any hearings to fill the seat during the next two years. Republicans will complain. But I have a hard time believing the GOP will scream about stolen seats in the way Democrats still do.

The Democratic Party has become a party of grievance. By Oct. 1, 2018, it will have one more grievance about which it can whine: Brett Kavanaugh will be on the United States Supreme Court and Merrick Garland will not.

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