Setting aside Brett Kavanaugh's long lists of lies to the Senate Judiciary Committee and his unwillingness to answer most of the key questions posed to him, and a great many others besides, Sen. Mazie Hirono on This Week singled out the other most disturbing part of Kavanaugh's testimony: The man is still the conspiracy-minded hyper-partisan he was as an underling probing Vince Foster conspiracy theories under Ken Starr.
The would-be Supreme Court justice appears to genuinely believe that the accusations from multiple former classmates of boorish, sometimes-criminal behavior a wide-ranging and decades-spanning plot for Democratic revenge against him.
“He came out at that hearing, which was shocking to me -- that he would accuse Democrats of a vast conspiracy to do him in and even dragged in Hillary Clinton," Hirono said. "I found that bizarre. But we hardly need somebody on the Supreme Court who has these conspiracy theory notions.” [...]“He totally showed himself [at the committee hearing] to be … a political operative and the partisan operative that he has been," Hirono said. "And he revealed himself as a partisan. I would think that if I were a Democrat going before him, I’d ask him to recuse himself.”
The reason Dr. Ford's accusations came forward at the last possible moment have been explained by her herself, at this point: After multiple attempts to get the Senate to consider her information in private were all, to her eyes, rebuffed, and as reporters following leaks began to track her down regardless of her preferences, she went to the press and told the story as the path of last resort. This act encouraged others who were victims of Kavanaugh's behavior to come forward as well, and here we are. It is not the slightest bit unreasonable that victims who had kept their secrets for decades would decide, at long last, that the Supreme Court was one promotion too far for a man they knew to be far less decent than his allies purported him to be.
But Kavanaugh himself, assuredly with goading from the same like-minded hyper partisans that both launched his career and have repeatedly rewarded him for it, instead sees all of this as being a plot of something-something-Clinton. He either cannot fathom the notion that his accusers would come forward in good faith or is calculatedly smearing them in his own attempt to rally partisan support behind him; we have gone from a man going through the usual rote declarations of nonpartisanship and balls and strikes to a shouting mess of a man who openly declares, in his public remarks, that the Senate's queries of his own history are illegitimate and conspiratorial in nature.
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