Senator Susan Collins is a partisan Donald Trump loyalist who accepted huge amounts of GOP political money to support the Trumpian evil agenda

Susan Collins Delivered Maine Up to Trump

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Michelle Cottle

“I deliver for the state of Maine.” 🙄🤥💥

(Maine Writer:  Senator Susan Collins needs to know what our first heating oil bill is for the upcoming winter.  $598.96 including a 1% veterans discount. This oil tank will have to be refilled in December.  Maine people cannot afford this high cost to stay warm with heating oil. People will die. They will suffer frostbite, hypothermia, even freeze to death because Senator Collins voted to support the One Big Beautiful - Ugly- Bill, many lost access to health insurance and Medicaid.  But, in the political ads, we are supposed to say, "Thank you Senator Collins"❓  For what❓ )

These seven words, uttered by Senator Susan Collins in a recent sit-down with Politico, are the heart of her re-election pitch this election. Every election, really.

The sole Republican senator still hanging on in a blue state, Collins, running for her sixth term, has for decades defied political gravity by selling herself as a moderate, independent, bipartisan pragmatist focused on getting stuff done for Mainers — a voice of political sanity amid the growing din of polarization and dysfunction. It is an above-the-fray appeal that feels designed to flatter voters as much as herself.

But here’s the thing. However moderate or pragmatic or pleasant she may be, Collins has a limited ability to influence what happens in today’s Senate, a starkly polarized chamber dominated by leadership and currently functioning mostly as a rubber stamp for an authoritarian president. Too often she is left scrambling to do damage control in response to the chaos created by her own party. In this environment, her national-vibes-versus-local-results construct is, at best, outmoded. These days, Collins is not delivering for Maine so much as she is delivering up Maine to the Trump agenda.

Serving in the Senate is a team sport, now more than ever. Party leaders keep a tight grip on how the chamber functions, what legislation proceeds and how key pools of campaign cash get distributed among members. (Maine Writer:  In other words, politics has become obsessed like never before with money.)

Ideological heterodoxy (definition: any opinion, belief or practice that strays from official, traditional or accepted standards) is frowned upon. Cross-aisle cooperation is discouraged. As rank-and-file senators will grumpily tell you, gone are the days when iconoclasts and independent thinkers held serious sway. The chamber is increasingly dominated by a “maximalist partisan position,” as Senator Michael Bennet, the Colorado Democrat, put it to me last year.  Inside this polarized Thunderdome, Collins’s chief influence is as one more warm body giving her team the majority, and by extension the team leadership control over the agenda.

Also, respecting norms does not automatically make for moderate, sensible outcomes. Collins has cast some of her more upsetting votes in recent years under this banner. Her belief in granting as much deference as possible to presidential nominees, for instance, led her to support the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the head of health and human services, Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Last year, Collins supported a procedural motion to allow the president’s big signature bill — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — to come up for debate on the Senate floor. The senator did so, she explained, out of respect for the authority of her conference’s leadership.

Ms. Collins sometimes scores wins that a blue-state electorate would appreciate. Over the years, she joined Democrats in passing a host of bills, and she has provided a key vote to block measures backed by her party. During the first Trump administration, she was one of three Republicans who helped kill the push for the so-called skinny repeal of Obamacare.

On the campaign trail, Collins makes much of her focus on real results for her home state, putting her relationships and institutional knowledge to productive use. She and her campaign team can tick through numerous examples in which she secured federal investment in this business or protected funding for that public program. Forget the national vibes; she is all about getting stuff done for Mainers.

Except that, in recent years, this often involves merely undoing sweeping damage done by Donald Trump — getting grants restored to the University of Maine or preserving funding to hire seasonal workers at Acadia National Park. This summer, she won tariff exemptions for Canadian road salt and cement.

While Collins might be commended for calculated actions, like scoring road-salt relief — and for her outspoken criticism of tariffs more broadly — the Trump’s feud with Canada will still kick her state in the teeth. 

Winning seasonal workers for Acadia pales next to the pain caused her constituents by the administration taking a sledgehammer to the federal government. 

Whatever targeted funding she secures to sustain rural hospitals in Maine seems unlikely to make up for the harm inflicted by the Medicaid cuts in Republicans’ big, beautiful bill. And on it goes.

Collins’s electoral endurance has long driven the Democrats batty. This year, with the political winds blowing hard against the G.O.P., the blue team is more desperate than ever to crack the senator’s image as a different kind of Republican. They point out that she votes with Trump 95 percent of the time. They dismiss her breaks with her party as political theater likely coordinated with the White House. Her 2018, support of Mr. Kavanaugh is a hot line of attack.

But the real issue may be that it no longer much matters what kind of Republican Collins is. With Trump running amok, and congressional Republicans loath to stand up to him, Ms. Collins’s presence in the Senate is, on balance, costing her state far more than it is contributing. This cycle, the only way to really deliver for Maine is for its voters to reject Ms. Collins’s long-running yet increasingly specious argument that she is somehow above the political fray.

Truth is not "inconvenient"- an echo opinion letter

Classic reason for speaking truth to power is to combat "Inconvenient truths" (classic oxymoron) 

Letter to the editor of the Annapolis newspaper the Capital Gazette

You only have to look at the news from time to time to be convinced some people only want to believe in “convenient to them truth.”

Al Gore has been talking for years now about the “Inconvenient truth” of global warming. Scientist are becoming more and more alarmed about the changes they see coming in our planet’s climate. But you don’t need to be a scientist to be alarmed if you have been on this earth for more than forty years or so. You can see it for yourselves — if you don’t mind facing an inconvenient truth.

Then look at what happened with the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Anyone who saw the credible testimony given by Dr. Blasely Ford and then watched as Justice Kavanaugh stumbled through his testimony could see whose truth was convenient to whom. 

Who changed their testimony from what they swore under oath, from one time to the other?

Truth matters whether it is convenient or not. The excuse that everyone lies is no excuse at all. But especially in our leaders, and in people to whom we are trusting the dispensation of justice. How can there be justice without a commitment to the truth? How can we do something about all the world problems if we are not dealing with the truth? Will it matter to the results we get if we only accept the convenient truths?

I wish I could tell everyone that I have always accepted the truth in everything. But that wouldn’t be truth. However, I do try; to keep trying is the best any of us can do—and should do.

If you want justice —nobody should be disingenuous with the truth—no matter what that truth is. If you want leaders you can trust — you do not accept “alternative facts.”

Believing only the truths that are convenient is in no one best interest. From Alejandro Tamargo, Annapolis

Texas echo opinion about a Brett Kavanaugh flash back

This is another woman's point of view published in The Dallas Morning News.  A certain level of sympathy was extended to the Judge and now Justice Kavanaugh, in the defense of his unproven innocence, in the face of sexual misconduct. Yet, the compelling testimony given by Dr.Christine Blasey Ford had a heart breaking impact on many women who experienced similar or worse assaults.

Peggy Wehmeyer is the author of this opinion. She is an American journalist

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2018/10/02/gut-wrenching-flip-flop-brett-kavanaugh

Opinion by Peggy Wehmeyer 

I had made up my mind before the Brett Kavanaugh hearings that Christine Blasey Ford was most likely set up and manipulated by shrewd partisans hoping to derail Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court.

Maybe something did happen at a high school party where Kavanaugh and his buddies drank too much. 

But certainly, I thought, his inappropriate high school behavior shouldn't disqualify him from the Supreme Court more than three decades later. After all, he didn't rape her, and bad boys grow up.

I've changed my mind. Maybe because I turned on the hearings while I was rocking my 1-year-old granddaughter, Anita, to sleep in the same oak rocking chair I had rocked my daughter in and my mother had once rocked me. I've never identified with activist feminists, but the symbolism of that rocking chair, which has held three generations of women in my family, stirred something warrior-like in me.

I approached the hearing like a journalist — detached and skeptical. Earlier in the week, I told my grown daughters that I was prepared to judge whether Blasey's testimony was made up or exaggerated by how emotional she became.

"If she cries," I said, "and presents herself as a traumatized victim of something minor that happened decades ago, I won't believe her."

But as soon as Blasey began to describe her high school encounter with Brett Kavanaugh, clearly vulnerable and voice trembling, I knew she was sincere. I knew it because I've been to those parties. I know those stories. The details were credible and she delivered them with raw emotional force. Finding Blasey persuasive doesn't make Kavanaugh a liar to me. It brings up other questions in my mind, such as, how much he would remember if he experienced a night of excessive drinking.

With my granddaughter in my arms, I also couldn't help wondering, "Why have so many of us minimized our stories of sexual assault and predation?"

When I enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin as a freshman in 1973, my chauvinistic father told me to join a sorority, find a rich husband and major in home economics so I could become a good wife. When I pledged, a couple of popular senior girls prepped me on dating in college, winking and joking about sex.

I came to the university from a small town near Houston. I was a virgin, and I didn't drink. When glamorous and experienced sorority sisters described specific sexual acts I should prepare for, I was shocked.

But nothing prepared me that freshman year for the party at the house of a senior boy, whose parents were out of town. He was my date and a member of the elite Cowboys organization at the university. They were usually the best-looking, most privileged men on campus. They graduated to become U.S. senators, ambassadors and, yes, federal judges.

The Cowboys still swagger onto the field during football games in their leather chaps, cowboy boots and hats, and fire their Civil War replica cannon after touchdowns. It was a quite a coup for a freshman girl to be set up with a senior Cowboy.

On this night, our first date, students crowded into his parents' empty Austin home and he played the role of bartender from the kitchen. I knew little about alcohol so I let him choose my drink. He mixed a Harvey Wallbanger, which tasted more to me like a delicious orange juice concoction than a potent vodka cocktail. I drank one after another, until I was dizzy and slurring my words. Before I knew it, I was the only one left at the party with my date, and I found myself coaxed into a room, with him on top of me on the bed.

He hadn't dragged me into that room unexpectedly, or covered my mouth until I feared suffocation. To be sure, a random assault, like the one described by Blasey, makes her an innocent victim. But hearing her story, I couldn't help thinking that many thousands more of us also are victims, just ignorant ones.

I was frightened when my date wrestled me on the bed. I knew I was in trouble and at risk of being raped. While the Cowboy pressed for sex, I pleaded with him to drive me home. Once in the car, he tried to persuade me to check into a nearby hotel with him. I protested. Exasperated, he pulled up to my sorority house, leaned over to open my passenger door, and watched me tumble out. I crawled on my hands and knees over the curb to the front door and staggered up the winding staircase to my sorority sisters' rooms. I didn't feel like a victim. Just a college co-ed who needed to get smarter about protecting herself.

It would take a while. And maybe I was just lucky. I wasn't attacked or gang-raped like some of the girls we whispered about on campus days after a wild drinking party. Greek life on college campuses often revolved around alcohol and sex. At another party with a boy I actually liked, I ended up in his room, again resisting the pressure to unclothe, only to have him annoyed because his fraternity brothers, two of whom were crouched outside the window and another in the closet, had made bets on how far my date could get me to go. I escaped that room and felt more like a champion than a victim because I had triumphed in their gamesmanship.

And that's what it was. A game. We knew the rules. For the boys, winning had to do with sexual conquest. For the girls, it was getting the right boyfriend. But just because many girls danced flirtatiously and wore sexy clothes didn't mean they wanted to take them off. What we didn't fully grasp at that age was that alcohol and limits don't mix well. People get hurt, usually women.

The game changer for me came my sophomore year, when I had a spiritual conversion. It led me to care more about the state of my soul and character than Friday night fraternity parties and catching a potential husband.

On the night the SAEs serenaded us from the garden below our balcony, swinging girls' panties in the air and singing, inebriated, about their sexual prowess, I did the unthinkable. I led an entourage of freshman girls in protest off the balcony — a direct affront to the most powerful men's fraternity on campus. Officers of my sorority stormed into my room after the walkout, accusing me of destroying our chances at becoming SAE "sweethearts."

My guess is that both Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh are telling their truths about that night as best they remember. Until last week's hearings, I was rooting for Kavanaugh. There was a lot I liked about him. But Blasey's testimony has cast new light on my experiences as a young woman. And if it's determined her story is true, I'll wonder whether Brett Kavanaugh is the kind of justice I can count on to make the world a little safer for girls like my granddaughter.

Peggy Wehmeyer is a writer in Dallas and a former news correspondent for WFAA-TV (Channel 8) and ABC News. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

Political over reach by Senator Susan Collins

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-susan-collins-kavanaugh_us_5bba611ee4b028e1fe3e99e4

The Fraudulence Of Susan Collins

Senator Susan Collins lost her moderate label with the wrong minded vote to support Brett Kavanaugh; but, even worse, she went beyond the mistake in her decision and went on to bring into doubt the trauma memory of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.  It was political over reach.

By Robert Kuttner

People who expected Sen. Susan Collins, allegedly one of two remaining Republican moderates in the Senate, to save us from Brett Kavanaugh have not studied her record.

The Maine senator has reduced the choreography of legislative head-fakes to a sublime art, in order to preserve her bogus reputation as an independent-minded centrist. 

When a contentious issue arises, Collins will elaborately explain that she hasn’t made up her mind yet. She needs to give the issue careful study. And then, wondrously, after very careful and well-advertised study, she almost always votes with Mitch McConnell. Funny how her research invariably leads to that conclusion.

She is especially loyal to her party when her vote is pivotal on important legislation or nominations. She has voted to confirm virtually all of President Donald Trump’s nominees. 

Collins also voted for the Trump tax bill (which passed 51-49) and for the confirmation last year of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

In the most drama in which she played a critical role, Collins joined two other Republicans in calling for what turned out to be a rigged FBI inquiry. She then voted to confirm Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court ― not with ambivalence but almost giddy enthusiasm. In her floor speech on Friday announcing the decision, she did not present her conclusion as a close or difficult question. To hear Collins tell it, Kavanaugh’s record on a federal appeals court shows that he’s the most even-handed and brilliant jurist since King Solomon.
In 2017, according to a tabulation by CNN, Collins voted with her party 87 percent of the time. The average Republican backed the GOP caucus position 96 percent of the time.

For the most part, the times when she broke ranks were not decisive. One exception when defying the Republican leadership proved important was her vote (with Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and then-Sen. John McCain of Arizona) in 2017 to save the Affordable Care Act.

If anything, though, Collins has become far less of a maverick of late. Under Barack Obama’s presidency, she voted with Republicans only about half the time, compared to almost 90 percent today.

What’s at work? Three things. First, Republicans have become far more unified ― in the country and in the Senate ― as a far-right party. Second, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) plays serious hardball to enforce caucus discipline. But the biggest influence is Collins’ fear of the Tea-Party far right in Maine.

The state has twice elected a far-right governor, the thuggish Paul LePage, who prefigured Trump. LePage, who steps down after this year, did not win a majority of votes either in 2010 or 2014. But given the unfortunate habit in Maine of spoilers throwing elections to Republicans, LePage squeaked through both times in three-way contests.

Maine as a whole is not a far-right state. Its other senator is Angus King, a moderately liberal independent who caucuses with the Democrats. But the Tea Party right is a majority of the Maine Republican Party.

Thus Collins, according to my sources, felt she had more to fear when she runs for re-election in 2020 from a GOP primary challenger than from newly energized Democrats.

Both fears may well be exaggerated. She is broadly popular as a Maine icon, and is still the odds-on favorite to win re-election.

When Collins does break ranks with her party’s Senate leadership, as in her vote to save the Affordable Care Act., it’s often because the vote is popular in Maine. Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, for instance, had broad public backing, despite LePage’s efforts to delay it.

To put it charitably, the popular Collins could afford to take more risks on behalf of whatever principles she still professes. In the Kavanaugh affair, the senator was far from a profile in courage.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. 

Judicial temperament is the echo subject in multiple opinions

Hartford Courant letters - serial skepticism voiced about the Brett Kavanaugh judicial temperament from Higganum, Coventry and Woodstock in Connecticut :

#1 Not Justice Material

I found Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's testimony powerful, moving, and credible. Apparently much of the country did as well, including many Republicans and even President Donald Trump, who called her "compelling ... and she looked like a very fine woman".

But regardless of Dr. Ford's veracity, Judge Kavanaugh's vengeful rant following her time showed him to lack the calm, apolitical, impartial, fair temperament to be a traffic court judge, let alone a Supreme Court Justice.

His insults of Senators and his claim that this judiciary hearing was a last-minute smear campaign by Democrats and "left-wing opposition groups" fueled by anger at President Trump and revenge for the Clintons was unhinged.

Can anyone believe that a Justice Kavanaugh would be an unbiased arbiter when presented with a case brought by a Democrat? This man should not be on the Supreme Court.

Scott MacDonald, Higganum

#2 Impartiality Required

The spectacle of the Judge Brett Kavanaugh's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee has certainly made for excellent daytime television drama.

However, Judge Kavanaugh's last appearance before the committee -- when he raged against his accuser and senators as well -- revealed one character flaw that truly casts doubt upon his suitability for the highest court in the nation.

The concept of impartiality is essential to factual findings based only on the evidence presented before the court, and the loss of this sort of impartiality is obviously improper.

During his testimony, Judge Kavanaugh opted for the Trumpian approach by blaming the Democrats for his perceived pillorying and suggesting "revenge on behalf of the Clintons." Whether of not this indignation was deserved or imagined, it revealed that his impartiality could be significantly affected.

That degree of anger exhibited during the Senate committee hearing should cause all to doubt if Judge Kavanaugh's temperament is suitable for the Supreme Court.

Gale Morganroth, Coventry

#3 Unfit to Judge

Regardless of whether the sexual abuse allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh prove true or false, Mr. Kavanaugh displayed a lack of emotional temperance during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings that shows he is unfit to make judgments in the highest decision-making body in our beloved country.

Karen Ryker, Woodstock

Character revealed ~ echo opinion by David Ignatius

This column is spot on one of my favorite "echo" articles re-blogged while scanning the nation's news.  David Ignatius is a columnist for The Washington Post and a pundit who frequently appears on MSNBC Morning Joe.  This opinion was published in the Wisconsin Kenosha News. 

America watched three searing versions of reality television this week. They all demonstrated that under the glare of the lights and the stress of questioning, character reveals itself.

David Ignatius opinion, published in the Kenosha News, a Wisconsin newspaper.

Christine Blasey Ford was a startlingly powerful witness before the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday, in part because she had been unknown to most Americans before the cameras started rolling. Her answers were clear and concise. 

She described what she remembered from 36 years ago, and what she didn’t. She never embellished her statements or added extraneous comments. With her simple responses of “yes,” “no” and “correct,” she maintained her dignity while describing the most upsetting experience of her life.

Ford seemed in some ways a modern American “Everywoman,” voicing publicly the often-hidden trauma that millions of women have experienced. She may have been “terrified” when the hearing began, as Republican interrogator Rachel Mitchell commented, but she gained confidence as the hearing progressed. 

It will be harder now for people to question her motives.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh followed with an enraged response and rebuttal. He’s usually a practiced performer before the cameras, but Thursday he was deeply shaken, pausing many times to control his tears and maintain his composure. In contrast to Ford’s quiet demeanor, Kavanaugh was almost shouting in his opening statement. He said that Democrats’ attempt to “blow me up and take me down” was a “national disgrace.”

As Kavanaugh struggled to prevent an emotional meltdown, you felt the tremors that have rocked American life as women have spoken out about abuse. Sometimes, when Kavanaugh spoke about the possibility that he might never teach or coach basketball again, he seemed to feel his life had been undone by the accusations from Ford and two other women.

Kavanaugh was least compelling when he took his defense into a political space, calling the accusations against him “a calculated and orchestrated political hit,” and “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.” It was hard to imagine a man so angry and traumatized serving as a dispassionate Supreme Court justice.

What Kavanaugh couldn’t do, even in his poignant denials, was to erase the impression that Ford’s testimony had left. Whether the Senate votes to confirm him as justice or not, Kavanaugh will struggle to recover from the hurt that was so evident in his face Thursday. We should want him to heal: Just as Ford could be your sister, Kavanaugh could be your brother.

On the eve of this visceral day of testimony, we entered the fever dream of President Trump, the man who has been popping the nation’s boiler at its seams. This was a very different self-portrait from the quietly anxious Ford, or the indignant Kavanaugh. In his 75-minute news conference from the United Nations in New York Wednesday night, Trump was rambling, evasive, boastful, contemptuous.

Trump often seems calculating in his tweets and tempests, but Wednesday night he seemed almost out of control. He bounced from topic to topic. One minute he was denouncing the “con artists” who had attacked Kavanaugh, the next he was insisting he had an open mind on Ford’s accusations, and then skittering back to discuss his own supposed victimization by the media and other tormentors.

Trump’s performance was a stream-of-consciousness tour of the world as imagined by what he called his “very, very large brain.” As he spoke, it was obvious that he truly believes what he told the U.N. Tuesday, that he had “ accomplished more than almost any administration.” The laughter that greeted that boast was quickly transformed in Trump’s mind, to a positive “they were laughing with me.” Communist dictators Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un were his friends — and even Iran’s President Hasan Rouhani got stroked as a prospective future friend of the great deal-maker.

Watching Trump in this ultimate reality show, viewers could see for themselves what has been described in recent books by Bob Woodward and Michael Wolff — a president who acts so unpredictably that his closest aides must work around his rants and impulses to keep the government running. The world watched this careening, self-obsessed president live on Tuesday night. What a disturbing show it was.

America is living under a volcano. Thursday’s competing testimonies from Ford and Kavanaugh will probably make a polarized nation even more divided. The healing begins when we have a leader who stops spewing lava and starts building unity, but that seemed a very distant hope this week.

David Ignatius can be reached via Twitter: @IgnatiusPost.

Does anybody in the White House understand the word "truth"?

Does anybody in the White House understand how to tell the truth?

Donald Trump is claiming that telling the truth puts him into a "perjury trap"?  That's ridiculous of course, because telling the truth cannot lead anyone into committing perjury. Yet, nearly everything being spewed from the Trump White House is weird, including how the staff understands the meaning of the word "truth".

Now, even a Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh must practice telling the truth! This is totally unacceptable.

This letter to the editor of the Iowa newspaper Quad City Times is asking the same question, in this echo opinion: 

Letter writer Tom Hebbeln: It doesn't look good that Brett Kavanaugh is practicing for hours at the White House for his potential testimony, instead of calling for an FBI investigation to clear his name. Why does he need practice telling the truth, since he's saying it didn't happen? It looks bad because Dr. Ford, is willing to answer these questions under an FBI oath, not to mention she passed a polygraph. Also, right or wrong, you can understand why Dianne Feinstein waited until the last moment. In face, Dr Ford was desperately hoping not to do this, hoping that something else would derail Kavanaugh. When it was apparent that wasn't going to happen, just like Anita Hill, she was willing to come forward. 

Appointments to the Supreme Court are important enough to bring out events that otherwise would never see the light of day. It speaks terribly to the Republican party that all the Republican senators are willing to follow McConnell, like lemmings, jumping off a cliff.

From Tom Hebbeln, Davenport Iowa

I believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford - echo opinion by Leonard Pitts

Republicans worked hard to create the appearance of enlightened compassion for Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.

Echo- Republished in the news PressofAtlanticCity in New Jersey

Scales of Justice - "You can’t find them both credible. You can’t believe them both. For the record, I believe her." ~ Leonard Pitts

Meaning, of course, Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing into accusations made by psychology professor Dr. Christine Blasey Ford that, 36 years ago, when she was 15 and he 17, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh drunkenly tried to rape her. With the ghost of Anita Hill staring over their shoulders, GOP lawmakers were desperate to stage-manage the optics.

To avoid repeating the ugly spectacle of a group of men questioning a lone woman on matters of sexual misconduct, they had a woman specially imported for that purpose — Arizona prosecutor Rachel Mitchell. Later in the day, when Kavanaugh testified in rebuttal, they elbowed Mitchell aside and took over the questioning themselves, competing with one another to offer ever more fulsome acknowledgments of his suffering. They were careful to extend equally effusive words to Ford.

Which made no sense. Both these people cannot be deserving of deference. One of them has, indeed, been wronged — but the other has lied his or her face off. Those are the only available options here — nutty theories about mistaken identity notwithstanding — and no amount of false equivalence can mitigate that.

You can’t find them both credible. You can’t believe them both. For the record, I believe her.

The Republicans did not. After all that show of false equivalence, the committee voted Friday to recommend confirmation. This was the opposite of surprising. Indeed, as Thursday wore on, it was ever more obvious that beneath the veneer of enlightened compassion lay a visceral and volcanic fury at the temerity of this challenge. That was particularly obvious in the nominee and in one of his chief defenders, Sen. Lindsey Graham.

The former issued an opening statement seething with resentment and testified with unseemly snappishness and contemptuous scorn for Democrats on the panel. The latter threw a hissy fit so epic you fully expected him to drop an accidental obscenity. A finger-pointing Graham scolded Democrats for supposedly politicizing the process of choosing a Supreme Court justice, calling it “the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics.”

One could only marvel at the self-control of Democrats who did not scream Merrick Garland’s name as a retort to this hypocritical and amnesiac attack.

And so it goes.

Twenty-seven years after Sen. Howell Heflin, R-Alabama, asked Anita Hill if she were not in fact “a scorned woman” by the hunk of burning love that is Clarence Thomas, a credibly accused attempted rapist may soon join Thomas on the Supreme Court. In the era of #MeToo, in the week that convicted rapist Bill Cosby was hauled to prison in shackles, this is a jarringly discordant note, a pointed reminder of how much hasn’t changed.

Leonard Pitts Jr., is a columnist for the Miami Herald