Sick to your stomach over proceedings in D.C.? #MeToo

Maureen Dowd

The Capitol is covered in mud. Again.

I can vaguely remember a time, back before the travesty of Bush v. Gore, when I felt awe walking past the Supreme Court. And if I try hard, I can summon the lost sensation of pride in covering the White House. But all that is utterly changed.

It was wrenching to watch the futile Iraq War unfold, with its tragic echoes of Vietnam. It is jarring to think I could live through three sagas of impeachment. But I most dread the rhyming history we are plunged into now: the merciless pummeling of a woman who dares to obstruct the glide path of a conservative Supreme Court nominee.

It is unnerving to think how far women have come, only to find ourselves dragged back to the same place. It has been almost exactly 27 years since the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, and we are still defensively explaining — including to our troglodyte president — why women do not always tell authorities about verbal and physical sexual assaults, why they bury episodes or try to maneuver past them.

We are still watching a bookish university professor from the West, who tried to anonymously report an alleged blight on the character of a man about to ascend to a lifetime of power, get smeared as a demanding, mixed-up, uptight, loony fantasist.

We are still watching on the Republican side of the panel an all-white male chorus — two of these singers were there tormenting Hill three decades ago — plotting to win at all costs.

His friends and supporters had talked publicly about how, at Yale

Law School, Thomas was a regular patron of X-rated movie houses and enjoyed describing the porn to friends afterward. But that was not introduced into testimony by either the Republicans or the Democrats. Instead, Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch — who is still on the Judiciary Committee at age 84 for this new kangaroo court — suggested that a man as esteemed as Thomas could not possibly know the language of porn, that anyone who talked like that was “a psychopathic sex fiend or a pervert.”

No one was trying to figure out the truth or do what was best for the court and the country. Republicans only cared about ramming through a right-wing justice. Even though they were the majority, Democrats were cowed by Thomas wrapping himself in the charged symbolism of the civil rights movement he had always scorned. And they were gun-shy after criticism of their initial bungling of

Hill’s revelation. (Does that ring a bell?) Joe Biden, the committee chairman, canceled the testimony of Hill’s backup witnesses from work. Teddy Kennedy was mute, hobbled by his own past sins. Feminists were less concerned with Hill’s humiliation than with using her as a bludgeon to block a justice who would be devastating on women’s rights.

After a three-day FBI probe, the White House declared Hill’s charges “unfounded.” She was alone, in a hearing room of GOP liars and Democratic cowards, getting ripped apart as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty,” in the immortal words of Kavanaugh pal turned Hillary henchman David Brock.

Blasey is dealing with some demonic forces not in play with Hill: a vicious partisan internet that drove her out of her house and being discredited not merely by the White House but by a president who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault, and who has defended predators such as Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly and Roy Moore.

We haven’t forgotten our history. But we still seem doomed to repeat it.