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I realize I’m dipping into fading memories here. It’s been a long while since the Kavanaugh hearings, maybe as long as a couple of weeks — a full geologic era in the Twitter age. But despite all that has occurred since — Canadian MPs’ end-of-the-world emergency debate on climate change (it got a whole night); Donald Trump calling a former paramour “horse face;” and the all-consuming Jamal Khashoggi crisis — it may be vaguely recalled that for six or seven days the world turned only on Brett Kavanaugh and how much he loved beer and frat parties, and allegedly sexually assaulted a young woman when at university.

I’m probably alone in this, but there are still aspects of that now-forgotten moment that perplex me. Not the least of which is how matters that were all-consuming in the Western world for a while simply evaporated from the public agenda. Who talks of Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford now? Two matters in particular are troubling: the strange bend of the hearings, and what they said of the nature and essence of the U.S. Supreme Court itself.

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How is it that matters that were all-consuming in the Western world … sinply evaporated from the public agenda?

It was distressing from the very first to see how automatically Blasey Ford was acknowledged, it seemed almost universally, as credible. I simply didn’t understand that, and never for a moment subscribed to the ludicrous and banal slogan of “Believe the Victim” — a classic example of the lexicon’s most misunderstood phrase, begging the question.