Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell emerged from his shell Monday afternoon to address the furor around attempted rape allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. His strategy was a straightforward one: minimize the issue and blame Democrats.

“Now, now, an accusation of 36-year-old misconduct, dating back to high school, has been brought forward at the last minute in an irregular manner,” McConnell said. “It is an accusation which Judge Kavanaugh has completely and unequivocally denied.”

MConnell went on to read Kavanaugh’s statement denying that he committed that particular attempted rape, but mostly, McConnell was incensed at that “last minute in an irregular manner” part. ”It is an accusation which the ranking member of the committee of jurisdiction has known about for at least six weeks. Known about for six weeks. Yet chose to keep secret until the 11th hour,” he complained—and he’s not wrong that Sen. Dianne Feinstein has been terrible on this issue. She should have acted on Christine Blasey Ford’s letter more quickly and more decisively. However, McConnell went on to be completely dishonest about how it would have played out if Feinstein had raised the issue while preserving Ford’s anonymity; as Igor Bobic noted, Republicans had made clear that they would not take an anonymous allegation seriously.

If that’s the substance of McConnell’s complaint, that the correct Senate procedures were not followed in surfacing allegations of sexual assault against a Supreme Court nominee, he doesn’t have much. “Kavanaugh says he didn’t commit that attempted rape, but let’s brush by that and really focus in on how this happened ‘at the last minute in an irregular manner’” does not exactly scream “I believe Kavanaugh and there’s no substance to any of this,” now does it.

McConnell has to be outraged about something, though, because his emotional register is about half an inch wide and varying shades of self-righteous offense and pious outrage take up about 80 percent of that half inch.