Thread by @asymmetricinfo

Okay, y'all, my beloved Yankees are having ... let us call it a slow start to this playoff series. We're going to get it back, of course, and crush our historic enemies into fine, red-and-white dust. But in the meantime, I'm breathing deeply and focusing on my happy place.

This seems like a good time to tweetstorm my most recent two--and I hope, final--columns on The Kavanaugh Saga.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-ma…

washingtonpost.com/opinions/there…

I think there are a few things that tie them together.

The first is just the obvious: basically all of the left who read my coverage of Kavanaugh assumed that this was a crypto-brief for confirming him. It wasn't. Right up until the end, I was emailing with other folks on the right saying I didn't know. That's still where I am.

My first column on Kavanaugh, months ago, expressed my honest position, which is that democratic legitimacy and holding the country together matter more to me than any ruling the court can make, or overturn. washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-par…

I'll be honest, I didn't always feel that way.

But court maximalism on both sides has been a disaster; it turns everything into a high stakes battle to get control of a supra-legislature that has functionally no check on it except the death of its members.

I don't want "my side" to win the super-legislature. I want my country to find a way to hold together.

Merrick Garland was bad. The way this rolled out was bad. Whatever Dems do in retaliation when they have control will be bad. Politics shouldn't be this bitter and horrible, and the court shouldn't be this powerful. Those are my sincere priors.

But this was a binary. One side had to win. All I cared about was that the side that won would be the side that was best for the country holding together and the legitimacy of the court. Which side was that? Ask me an easy one.

I defended Kavanaugh from what I thought were unfair attacks because I don't like unfair attacks. And in the last three weeks, he got a lot of them. Doesn't mean he's innocent; I have no way of knowing that. Nor that he's guilty. It's a hard problem.

Which brings me to my second point: that for a lot of folks on the right, to an extent I don't think most folks on the left ever grasped, this stopped being about control of the seat a few weeks ago. It was about what was happening to one guy.

They stopped caring what was politically most advantageous. They stopped focusing on what maximized their chance of filling the seat. They were just mad about the insane, often vicious, pile-on to a guy being treated by half the political spectrum as a convicted sex offender.

And people on the left kept completely ignoring this fact--that Brett Kavanaugh's life was being *wrecked*, real time and on 24/7 national television. I mean, maybe you think he deserves it because he *is* a sex offender. But almost no one made that case.

They just kept saying "job interview" or "all that happens to him is that he goes back to his old seat" or "boo-hoo, privileged prep school kid". And look, you want to argue that this should make Republicans more sympathetic to defendants who don't look like Brett Kavanaugh! Yes!

Yes! Yes it should! Yes, conservatives, all the stuff you said about teenaged offenses and "presumed innocent" and "beyond a reasonable doubt" and procedural protections--remember all that stuff! It will be on the exam later!

But the fact remains that something really, really horrible was happening to Brett Kavanaugh and so many people seemed to be somewhere between indifferent and actively in favor of this even though there simply was not enough evidence to be sure he deserved this.

If this had happened in a "boys will be boys era" where he could just quietly go back to his old seat, then as I told a friend yesterday, it would be a no brainer: NEXT!

But in the era of #MeToo, that's not an option.

The way that this was leaked, and forced into a public hearing rather than private withdrawal, set up a binary: vote him down (or have him withdraw) and either way, basically confirm you think he's a rapist.

Or put him on the Supreme Court.

There are a lot of lessons in that.

I think maybe the right thing to do for the country might have been to do that terrible thing to Brett Kavanaugh. But it's a hard thing to look at someone who might well be innocent and say "brand the guy a rapist".

There are other lessons too, but I've already rambled for quite a bit here, and now I need to go make a wax figure of Mookie Betts and stick pins into it. So I'll just remind you to read the columns:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-ma…

washingtonpost.com/opinions/there…

But one final thought: the only way out of awful times like this is to come together as a nation over things that matter. Things that express shared values, and unite us in a good cause. Like hating the Red Sox, and rooting for them to lose.

E pluribus unum. Red Sox delenda est.