Character assassinations have an incubator in the dirty politics of the Washington, D.C., swamp. In recent days we’ve seen liberal Senators like New York’s Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono and California’s Rep. Adam Schiff assailing the character of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

It’s gutter politics at its worst. To label Kavanaugh guilty of anything before hearing from his accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, is not the way our justice system operates.

First there is no evidence with the charges amounting to a “she said, he said.” Ford has not even stated the basic who, what, when and where details. The only witness in the Ford letter released to The Washington Post is Patrick J. Smyth, who attended the same school, and he denies any knowledge of it.

“I have no knowledge of the party in question, nor do I have any knowledge of the allegations of improper conduct she has leveled against Brett Kavanaugh,” he said in a released a statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, adding that he knows Kavanaugh to be a friend with great integrity and has never witnessed any improper conduct by him toward women.

The 11th-hour attempt to derail a conservative nomination is not a new tactic by liberals.

In 1987, Judge Robert Bork, a Ronald Reagan nominee, endured violent criticism and an intense smear campaign from Democrats who vowed to oppose any “ideological extremist” nominated.

To Block Bork, Sen. Ted Kennedy launched a vicious attack, using incendiary language about back-alley abortions, black segregation, rogue police breaking down citizens’ doors in midnight raids and schoolchildren not being taught about evolution. Bork denied every charge in Kennedy’s speech.

Note that it was Kennedy who attempted to cover up his causing a woman’s death in Massachusetts during one of his drunken escapades on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969. When Kennedy died in 2009, the media called him “The Lion of the Senate.”

Bork was also attacked as an extremist by television advertisements produced by People For the American Way and narrated by actor Gregory Peck. Liberal Democrats like Kennedy teaming with Hollywood types in an attempt to smear and destroy the character of a conservative candidate. Sound familiar?

Another conservative nominee who endured intense character assassination was Clarence Thomas, who President George H.W. Bush nominated after Justice Thurgood Marshall’s retirement in 1991. After the conclusion of the confirmation hearings, the left launched its eleventh hour attack when Anita Hill, a black attorney who had worked for Thomas, accused the justice of sexual harassment.

In his rebuttal summary, Thomas called the hearing a circus and a national disgrace.

“From my standpoint as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree,” Thomas stated.

Thomas, who was confirmed by a 52-48 vote, has since stated that the reason he rarely does interviews is because the media often “has its own script.”

Charles Lawrence, a university law professor, once said: “I shall support the law, for the law gentlemen, is the firm and solid basis of civil society, the guardian of liberty, the protection of the innocent, the terror of the guilty, and the scourge of the wicked.”

From all that we’ve heard in the hearings, Judge Kavanaugh would be a relentless guardian of our liberties in upholding the constitution. What we’re seeing in Washington from a group of Democratic senators, however, is the kind of public lynching through character assassination that Justice Thomas referred to 27 years ago and that liberal tactic still reeks of rotten politics.

By Jim Zbick | tneditor@tnonline.com