Smoke signals

Veteran national political analyst Stu Rothenberg put on Twitter late Sunday a difficult message to ignore, at least if you cover Arkansas politicians.

“Watch the Tom Cotton interview on Face the Nation, if you missed it,” Rothenberg wrote. “Then contrast that interview with the following one with Amy Klobuchar. Substance and tone. Quite a difference.”

Something about the phrasing seemed to suggest that Cotton might be the supposed loser in that contrast from Sunday morning on CBS.

That Cotton is Cotton and Klobuchar is Klobuchar—that was another such indication.

He’s the bellicose right-wing senator from Arkansas; she the softer-spoken liberal senator from Minnesota. He acts as if he’s about to slug you for being moderate or liberal. She acts as if she is saddened—stricken, really— by your being conservative.

So I watched.

—————— Cotton went first on the program, started defiantly—like Matt Damon doing Brett Kavanaugh—and irrelevantly and steadily remained in character. He repeatedly refused to answer moderator John Dickerson’s simple opening question about his assessment of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony.

Over and over again, he responded instead to accuse Democratic senators, primarily Dianne Feinstein, of doing the real abuse to Ford by thrusting her into the public to testify.

Time and again, Cotton declared Ford’s real ordeal to be the abuse of Feinstein’s failure to keep in confidence the letter she had sent months ago about her accusation from high school days against Kavanaugh. If Feinstein had quietly shared the letter with Chuck Grassley, the Judiciary chairman, then, Cotton argued, the FBI could have been discreetly notified, and her accusation could have been checked out absent the public circus that Democrats purposely created.

Cotton said Democrats didn’t care about Ford’s story, but only its political value.

That led moderator Dickerson to point out that Cotton had yet to respond to his inquiry about how he assessed Ford’s story, or to extend compassion toward her regarding the essence of her testimony. Instead he had merely berated Democrats.

Dickerson asked: Did Cotton find Ford credible?

Cotton said he found her “sympathetic.”

That’s a nice way of saying the poor woman is all mixed up.

The state’s junior senator said all the witnesses had failed to corroborate her account. He said Kavanaugh’s testimony had been strong and that there was no reason to think he wouldn’t be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

As Ford had explained, her fear of coming forward had been of precisely what Cotton was doing—of her being dismissed summarily, of being, as she put it, annihilated by a train.

Coming after, Klobuchar said the process in handling Ford’s letter indeed had been lacking. She said that had happened primarily because Feinstein felt hamstrung by sensitivity to Ford’s desire for anonymity.

Klobuchar said that, in time, the Senate can examine that process.

But for now, she said, the more compelling matter is that, while Ford did explain in her testimony that she was fearful of coming forward, her greater account of abuse was the sexual-assault allegation she leveled with “100 percent certainty” against Kavanaugh from their teen days.

Klobuchar said Cotton and Republicans can fault the subtext of process all they want, but that they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with trying to overpower the charge against Kavanaugh by making the process the only or at least paramount issue.

The process is a Senate failing. The charge against Kavanaugh is one of human cruelty by a man presuming to go straightway amid conceivably false denials to a life term on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Cotton might be right about the Democrats. As a group they tend toward ineptitude, as evidenced by the fact that they couldn’t even beat the preposterous Donald Trump.

But Democratic blunder offers no remote semblance of a relevant defense against charges of long-ago physical abuse, and contemporary dishonesty about it, by a Supreme Court nominee.

That Feinstein blew the handling of Ford’s letter would be no reason to put Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Supreme Court.

It is, however, a convenient way for a smart, cynical, message-disciplined young Republican hyperpartisan like Tom Cotton to blow thick smoke throughout a television studio on a Sunday morning.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas

Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett @arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.