Hearings on Judge Barrett

 

Regardless of whether one likes the nomination of Judge Barrett to the Supreme Court, and I would have preferred a libertarian leaning judge of the sort Trump would never nominate, she is competent, intelligent, and qualified.  Yet during their speeches and questioning the Democrats have made it clear that their disgraceful behavior with Kavanaugh  was less an aberration than a template.

Democrats have spent a lot of time making campaign stump speeches, asking  Barrett questions about specific possible cases that they knew no nominee would answer, impugning her character,  and trying to make her guilty by association for Trump’s real or imagined failings. It's a repulsive display of phoniness, ignorance, pettiness,  irrelevance, and malice.

Senator Hirono went beyond even her colleagues and asked Barrett if she had ever sexually assaulted anyone. One presumes the senator was hoping Barrett would confess to holding victims down while Kavanaugh raped them. Hirono and others also pretended to be offended when Barrett spoke of sexual preference instead of using the supposedly correct term “sexual orientation”.  In the first place the two terms are fairly synonymous in ordinary usage. Beyond that it is a little strange for people who believe that a person’s manifestly genetically determined sex is merely a matter of choice to pretend to be morally outraged over any suggestion that a person’s conjecturally genetically influenced sexual preference might be other than determined at birth and from on high.  One can wonder if they have ever known a person whose preferences changed over time from heterosexual to homosexual or vice versa. Such people are not that rare, but as we are dealing with politicians, it is probably useless to look for much of a connection between their statements and experience or reality.   

Still the show has been useful. It has been a good reminder that the Dems in the senate are what they are, and that if one cannot stomach Trump, one should vote for other Republicans in races where they are the lesser evil while picking a third party person in the presidential contest.

I wish some Republican toward the end of the day would do something like the following:

“In an effort to match the level of intellect and relevance of the questioning from some of my Democrat colleagues I will now ask you three questions. 

Do you like pancakes?

Were you ever stung by a dead bee?

And, finally, do you know the way to San Jose?”

 

It would be an appropriate way to wrap up the farce.