The historical model for Sen. Kamala Harris (D, Ca.) at the Kavanaugh hearings is Stalin’s prosecutor Andrey Vyshinsky.
During the purge trials of the 1930’s, the fate of the defendants was sealed before interrogations and evidence. The trials were extravaganzas to create an aura of malevolence over the subjects in the dock and thereby justify the political and physical necktie party (actually, a shot to the back of the head after a lonely walk down a basement hallway). The defendants didn’t even have to be present to be found guilty.
I wonder if comrade Harris closely studied the Vyshinsky playbook. She was among the Democrat claque on the committee who didn’t wait for the public announcement of the nomination to proclaim their “no” vote. California has given us a senator who has taken on the role of prosecutor as political attack dog, like Andrey Vyshinsky. Her goal isn’t truth. It’s conviction without the formality of just cause.
Her questions were littered with loaded and partisan political rhetoric in which any answer would be tantamount to accepting a distorted and one-sided storyline. For instance, she, like her other Dem colleagues, kept interrogating with questions freighted with “voter suppression”. It’s lefty code for regularly clearing voter registration rolls of deadwood, reducing voter fraud, and implementing voter ID, three very popular fixes to our election system. A good Vyshinki tactic is to hide the obvious details behind an odious conceptual accusation, place it within a question, all to embarrass and trip up a witness.
Another favorite slander was the attempt to plaster Jim Crow on the witness. Racial disparities, whose causes run deeper than Kamala’s makeup, were reduced to the toddler-like reasoning of “racial disparities = hidden racists everywhere = you must be a racist if you oppose me”. It’s a new take on the loaded question gambit of “When did you stop beating your wife?”, only understandable as a natural law in the Leninesque world of the ends justifying the means. The macabre scene is plainly revolting.
Is Comrade Harris in the running for the Order of Lenin? I can’t think of a more deserving candidate.
RogerG