Not all anonymity is equal!

In American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson weighs in on the accusations made by Christine Blasey Ford against Brett Kavanaugh. His this for a sentence:

What is left unsaid is that we will no longer have a free country or enjoy civil liberties and the safety of a Bill of Rights, if any American, at any time, can be ruined by an allegation of unproven sexual assault of some 36 years past, when the accused was a 17-year-old teenager, by an accuser who initially trafficked anonymously in such allegations, came forward only as part of a wider, more intensified and collective last-ditch effort to destroy the reputation of the accused, and yet has no clear memory of exactly where she was at 15, or the approximate date, when she claims that she was assaulted, or why she made no such accusation for 30 years—or when she raised the issue some six years ago privately during counseling, why her therapist’s notes of such revelations do not now match her current version of the incident.

Anonymity has never become more disreputable—and legitimized. An unidentified source is the new American means that is to be justified by noble progressive ends, often in the context of somehow delegitimizing Donald J. Trump and anyone or anything remotely connected to him.

…We have forgotten how in the last four decades since the appearance of All the President’s Men just how the Woodward method has become institutionalized by the national press. We know the familiar modus operandi: the journalist is contacted by a leaker or indeed trolls for the leak. The “source” demands to remain anonymous. Negotiations follow about the terms of cloaking the informant. The motive of the unnamed source—whether it be patriotic, careerist, self-interested, or venomous—is immaterial.

…How strange, then, that some government leaks to the press are replete with names, and so damn the innocent like Carter Page. Yet at other times official government documents use redaction to protect the identity of the culpable. So the final irony of the new cult of anonymity is that not all anonymity is equal.

If an official is willing to offer dirt on the current president, then journalists peddle the gossip and innuendo through the use of anonymity to “protect” a valuable source.

Yet if a name is legally protected from disclosure, but its release might fuel an anti-Trump narrative, then it is usually leaked.

Noble progressive ends justify any means necessary to obtain them—and increasingly anonymity is the preferred method.

Read more here.