When George Bush nominated Samuel Alito to replace Sandra Day O’Connor the Supreme Court in 2005, there was a real excitment at my law office. Not so much because Alito was an originalist; that certainly wouldn’t have made my liberal co-workers excited, but because one of our partners, “John” (not his real name) had clerked for Alito at the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. He had nothing but wonderful, wonderful things to say about him. He was a man he really admired, for his opinions, his meticulous judicial reasoning, and decency in dealing with everyone. Sure politically they were on opposite sides, but he said President Bush could have selected no one better.  A fair, studied jurist to whom the facts and law were sacred.

I got into the office early one morning – early even for me. Summary Judgment motions will do that – paper and labor intensive. Best to get the tough stuff done early. I was rather surprised when John walked through the lobby doors with me. When I asked the reason for his early arrival, he explained that he would be getting a call from the FBI as part of Judge Alito’s background investigation and he thought best to take it at the office, away from anticipated interruption from home – wife, kids, dog – and before the day’s work needed to be started. We chatted, he listened for his phone and sprinted away when it rang. An hour and a half later, he emerged from his office. It was a LONG interview.

When the televised hearings began on C-Span, we drifted in and out of the conference room where John has set up the TV and a satellite office.  As they proceeded he became indignant, and completely disgusted by the questioning by the Democrat Senators, especially Ted Kennedy, the Snake of Chappaquiddick, who attempted to paint Alito as a racist and bigot because of his association with the Concerned Alumni of Princeton.  Was Alito aware that a member of that group had authored a rather dreadful screed on women, blacks and latino?  Kennedy was especially obnoxious, going back over and over again how he wasn’t satisfied that Alito wasn’t some sort of racist, thinking blacks, women and latinos needed to “know their place” as stated by the author of the article. He was assisted in these smarmy endeavors by Chuck Schumer, who was a walking turd even then.

You might remember Mrs. Alito being in tears during these hearings. Well, so was John. A lifelong Democrat and liberal, he could not believe the brush they were painting Alito with. “There isn’t a bigoted bone in his body!” he told me “he’s the most decent man I’ve ever met! This is despicable!” I just looked at him and said “it’s what they do, John, it’s what they do. Alito’s a bigot. Thomas harassed women. Rehnquist wants to bring back Plessy.” John has since left the firm, but the last time I saw him he was still bitter over Alito’s treatment at the hands of the Democrats.

And now the same Democrats are turning on another good man – Brett Kavanaugh.  John Scalia once described to me the process of becoming a Supreme Court judge as an investigative endoscopy.  Sure, they vet and investigate when you get elevated to the Court of Appeals, but that is junior varsity compared to the character autopsy performed on your life when you are nominated to the pinnacle of the legal profession.  If the FBI isn’t interrogating everyone that has knowledge about you since you emerged from the birth canal, the vetting team from the White House is subjecting you to intense examination – is there anything we need to know about your background.  Don’t hold back, we need to know everything. They even go back to your elementary school days and find out if you were a bully.

So here it is.  If you believe that Brett Kavanaugh is really the sexual predator and monster the Democrats and their willing media cohorts want you to accept that he is, you have to somehow manage to convince yourselves that Kavanaugh agreed to a Supreme Court nomination knowing that in his randy high school past there is a girl named Christine that he and Mark Judge assaulted at a party; that there were chronic incidents of being blind drunk at Yale parties and groping every woman in sight and exposing himself like a common street flasher, and worst of all, multiple parties where he engineered the disabling of women in order to facilitate their gang rape.  Not once, mind you, but almost a dozen times.  And you have to believe that Kavanaugh was secure in the belief NONE of this is going to be revealed in the most intense background check and vetting process there is.  That in interviews with his secondary and higher education contemporaries, no one was going to tell the truth.

Even if you accept that okay, maybe he really didn’t do the more salacious acts attributed to him by Debbie Ramirez and Julie Swetnick, and there’s nothing to corroborate their tall tales that he did, there’s still that incident with Christine at the party.  After all, he COULD have done it.  Except he knows precisely what happened to Clarence Thomas in 1991.  He knows what happened to Sam Alito in 2005.  He knows that Democrats are going to be actively looking for someone, something – anything –  to blacken his good name and record – heck, they’ve already telegraphed their hostility to his nomination in every way possible.  So tell me – how could he possibly assume, with any assurance, that Christine would not step forward and tell the Committee about the incident, and provide names, a date and a place where it happened.  He could not have anticipated or relied on the possibility that she would not remember the specifics or counted on no one at the gathering supporting her story when asked.  After all, she had run out on her best friend.  If Christine didn’t remember, certainly Leland would.  If he had really done this horrible thing, he would have been sweating bullets that at the very least, one of them would turn this information over to the Committee and they in turn would have been able to provide verification for every aspect of it.

And you would also need to accept the premise that Kavanaugh is such a narcissic, ambitious “privileged” man that was so obsessed with being on the Supreme Court and overturning Roe that he wasn’t even remotely concerned for the pain his wife and daughters, who he no doubt loves more than life,  would experience upon learning that he spent his youth being the worst type of predatory lecher.  Or given a whit that his colleagues on the Circuit Court, his neighbors and friends, would discover that he was not indeed the man they thought they knew.

As that distinguished jurist Judge Judy (and she really was when she was on the New York bench) often says – “if it doesn’t make sense, it isn’t true.”

No, there is only one genuine monster, one true evil-doer in this affair.  I can even picture her chatting with those two little girls as they seated themselves behind their father; she may even inquired about school, asking if they were excited to be there.  And they probably were; oh certainly the content of the proceedings were lost on them, and no doubt boring, but it was probably very thrilling for them to go home and see that they were on TV, and look – there’s their mom and their dad is famous.

And this sinister Senator, a grandmother herself,  looked at those little girls, smiling like a spider, knowing all along that sitting in her office was the instrument with which she was going to destroy their lives and unleash the Seventh Circle of Hell on the man they loved so dearly.