From police procedurals in film and TV, to real life criminal cases, we have seen how law enforcement can secure convictions by planting evidence. What we saw Thursday during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the allegation that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh committed a sexual assault as a teenager was an official decision to withhold testimony that could corroborate or refute the charge against a member of the white male establishment. By refusing to subpoena Mark Judge, an alleged eyewitness to the assault, and other witnesses, such as the administrator of the polygraph test taken by Christine Blasey Ford, the all male Republican majority on the committee ensured that justice would be blind as well as deaf and dumb.
On Friday a semblance of fair play returned to the committee. Though a party line vote sent Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate for consideration, Arizona senator Jeff Flake said his aye vote would be contingent on the FBI doing an investigation of the charge, a request Democrats continually made Thursday.
Mark Judge’s cooperation is not assured. Late Friday afternoon the president ordered a supplemental FBI probe to be completed within a week.
Meanwhile, what the divided nation is left to debate are the performances of Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford. Righteous indignation, even contempt, by the accused; anguish and trauma reluctantly displayed by the accuser.
They were the star performers. But the senators also provided fascinating but not uplifting displays of statesmanship. Both sides grandstanded, though none as over the top as Republican Lindsey Graham.
I’m most disappointed with the Democrats, or as I think we should henceforth call them, the Dumb-ocrats. With the whole world watching they allowed Kavanaugh to bulldoze them, to fire up his base while they failed to dig deeply into his psyche.
The Dumb-ocrats kept asking him to call for an FBI investigation. The Dumb-ocrats kept asking if he was an excessive drinker, prone to blackouts. They kept asking if he sexulally assaulted women. Did they really think he’d surrender an “aha” moment and admit to being imperfect?
Dumb-ocrats, rather, should have gently probed his character, his judicial reasoning, his family values. By exposing them they would have made it clear to any who had not already committed to his confirmation that Brett Kavanaugh was not the all-American judge, father and coach he tries to put across.
If the questions the Dumb-ocrats posed were insufficient, what should they have asked? I provided some in my last blog (http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2018/09/nine-hours-of-she-said-he-said-leave.html), but a wider range of questions were submitted by New York Times readers from across the country (https://nyti.ms/2NNvgE7).
I liked the one from Lynda of Gulfport, FL: “Which actions in your life do you now regret taking but have learned from and have made you a better husband, father, teacher and judge? Have any of the mentors in your career been men you admired professionally, but that you had private concerns about with regard to their attitudes toward women in your workplace? As a father to two daughters, did you ever feel any responsibility to express a concern about the language used to describe women in any of your workplaces?”
I read somewhere the following question: Would you permit your daughters, when they are 15, to go to the type of parties you attended in high school?
Answers to these questions were insight opportunities lost because of Dumb-ocratic obsession with trying to reveal a smoking gun. As the Trumpster would say, Sad.
