You can run, but you can't Heidi

What a maroon:

North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, one of the most vulnerable Democratic senators up for re-election this year, apologized Tuesday for a newspaper ad run by her campaign which, without permission, named some women who had experienced sexual assault and some who were not victims of abuse.

The ad was structured as an open letter to Kevin Cramer, Heitkamp's Republican opponent, chastising him for comments he made during the Supreme Court confirmation process of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In September, Cramer questioned whether the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh disqualified him from serving on the court, even if they were true. Heitkamp voted against Kavanaugh's confirmation.

However, many of the 127 women named in the open letter had not given their permission for their stories to be told.

So, let's help victims, even if they aren't victims, by identifying them. Heitkamp's statement is beyond stupid:

"In an attempt to bring awareness to this issue and push back against dismissive comments toward sexual assault survivors by Kevin Cramer, our campaign worked with victim advocates to identify women who would be willing to sign the letter or share their story. We recently discovered that several of the women's names who were provided to us did not authorize their names to be shared or were not survivors of abuse," Heitkamp said in a statement from her campaign on Tuesday. "I deeply regret this mistake and we are in the process of issuing a retraction, personally apologizing to each of the people impacted by this and taking the necessary steps to ensure this never happens again."

How do you retract something like this? Once the information is out there, it's out there forever. And since some of the women weren't victims, how do you suss out what's true and what's not true?

There's some good news -- I'm reasonably certain this will never happen again, because Heitkamp will be leaving the Senate soon enough.