Anderson Cooper hammers Cory Booker over his ridiculous Spartacus stunt. “I AM BREAKING THE RULES!”

Cory Booker REALLY wants you to believe he’s an outraged, principled, rule-breaker who’s willing to fall on the sword if it means revealing “the truth.” In reality, it’s exactly the opposite. He’s a charlatan who’s using a phony, self-indulgent, piece of theatre to prop up his midterm and 2020 efforts. Yesterday, both Dan and I wrote about his “Spartacus moment.” Booker announced that he was going to break the rules by releasing some of Brett Kavanaugh’s supposedly-damning confidential documents. These, we were led to believe, would show the world the kind of monster Donald Trump was appointing to the Supreme Court. If that meant expulsion from the Senate, so be it. A man like Cory Booker is too brave and edgy to care about such things.

In the end he succeeded in proving only that Kavanaugh is against racial profiling – an opinion I assume most Senate Democrats share. …Oh, and he also proved that Cory Booker is absolutely shameless in his self-promotion, since we later learned that the documents in question had already been cleared for release and that Booker knew that before the hearing began. I rarely say this, but kudos to Anderson Cooper for pressing the Senator on this issue: Booker, as you can see, is absolutely desperate for you to believe that he broke some rules. One suspects he wants the media – and left-leaning voters – to think he’s some sort of (dare I say it?) Maverick. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess that Booker witnessed a bit of McCain-mania last week and decided to position himself as America’s newest loose-cannon-for-justice. If Republicans had really gone after him, he’d spend the next several election cycles throwing the martyr card at anyone willing to listen. That strategy has, predictably, blown up in his face.