"A Complete and Utter Disgrace"

Due to circumstances beyond my control I did not watch the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings yesterday. If circumstances had been within my control I would have been sorely tempted to skip the degrading spectacle.

By all accounts, Bret Kavanaugh acquitted himself very well. By all accounts, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford presented a thoroughly credible account of her experience.

Predictably, the conservative and Republican media are strongly defending Judge Kavanaugh. Predictably, the liberal press has declared that he should not be confirmed because he did not display a judicious temperament.

Its reasoning is appalling and deplorable. When people are trying to destroy you, an absence of anger would have been deafening.

Piers Morgan, of all people, offered a balanced appraisal in The Daily Mail. His article bears the title:

The day DC should have died of shame as it watched two broken souls be publicly tortured over their pasts in a viciously partisan bear-pit

DC could not have died of shame because DC no longer has a sense of shame. About that we can agree.

Morgan continued, calling it: “gladiatorial barbarism.” The description seems apt:

What I can say though is that this was one of the most disgusting, disgraceful things I have ever witnessed.

For these two previously unknown people to be dragged through such a revolting public court of gladiatorial barbarism for the delectation of a mass TV audience was painful, so painful I could barely watch at times.

Yet it was an absolutely inevitable consequence of the way Washington has spiralled in recent years into a vile cesspit of extreme partisan bullsh*t – fuelled by rampant, vicious social media.

Today was a dark, tragic day for America.

It was a day when the whole country, and indeed much of the rest of the world, tuned in to see two people tortured and humiliated.

I get that Supreme Court nominees have to be vigorously vetted, and have to be held to a different standard of behaviour to the rest of us.

An appalling spectacle, mounted by Democrats to gin up votes and to sink the Kavanaugh nomination… Apparently, no one considered that Kavanaugh was a human being, that he had a family, and that destroying human beings for partisan political reasons is abject.

Morgan continued:

But what we watched today was nothing short of a circus - a long, disturbing, wretched circus; a circus watched by a baying global mob, most of whom decided long before the hearings began whom they believed.

Kavanaugh looked unhinged today – perhaps too unhinged to ever sit on the Supreme Court - but if I’d been falsely accused of the stuff he’s been accused of in the past fortnight, I’d probably be pretty damn unhinged too.

He was fighting not just for a place on the Supreme Court, but for his reputation, his dignity, his family.

To see his loyal wife silently weeping throughout his testimony was agonising.

She knows that everything her husband has worked for in his entire life is now imperilled. Every security she took for granted about their family life is now threatened.

If this is not deplorable, I do not know what is. You would think that Kavanaugh was a Kennedy or a Bill Clinton. Apparently, his life experience and his record on the bench were for nothing… they did not even accord him the presumption of innocence.

The problem everyone is facing is simple: what if they were both telling the truth?

Morgan continues:

If Kavanaugh is guilty, then he deserves to be duly punished.

But what if he’s innocent?

What if Ms Ford, who was just a young teenage kid at the time, has got the wrong guy?

I don’t think she’s a liar, but maybe she made an honest mistake.

How do we know for sure?

How will we EVER know?

Where are the cold hard FACTS?

There aren’t any, there can’t possibly be any after 35 years.

There are no facts. There is no way to prove or disprove the allegations.There is no corroboration beyond that of a psychologist who pretended that science was on her side.

At the least, it was a bad day for America. And it was a bad day for democracy… though one wonders how Democratic senators, the ringleaders of this horror show, can declare themselves to be the guardians of democracy. In the end, they care far less about election results than about packing the courts with judges who will help them impose their agenda on America… like it or not.

Morgan concludes:

That such an important moment in American history should be reduced to this horrific bear-pit is as absurd as it’s unacceptable.

Every American who genuinely cares about their country should share my outrage about what they watched today.

At one stage, Kavanaugh was actually grilled about flatulence - in the United States Senate by a serving United States senator.

Think about that for a moment.

The whole thing was a complete and utter disgrace.

Or as Senator Lindsey Graham put it today: ‘The most despicable thing I have ever seen in politics.’

Shouldn’t we all agree on that?