But if he hadn't had daughters, just sons, then he'd have been fine? Really not a fan of this 'imagine it were your own daughter' kind of arguments, as if men couldn't possibly try to empathize with the victims themselves. Or as if something comparable couldn't possibly have happened to a man.

Watch, no. Read, yes. Not sure if that makes a difference - it does, often, but in this case I get the idea that I'd have gotten an even worse impression if I'd watched it instead.

Either way, most of the worst parts in what he said were actually in his opening statement, before it even got to the questions. But when those questions did come, yes, they were rather adversarial, like how prosecutors in a trial would ask questions. It wasn't a trial, but given the nature of the accusations against him, it seems logical enough to me that it resembled one in that regard. And then it got worse because he was giving evasive, flippant answers which in some cases certainly didn't seem like 'the truth, the full truth and nothing but truth' as he had promised. Sure, about small embarrassing stuff that nobody would like to talk about, but that excuse won't save you in a trial, nor should it save a candidate to be a SC justice in this case.

If you had been accused of rape? Would you seriously expect them to just ignore something like that in the yearbook of an accused rapist? Or expect to get away with angrily refusing to answer questions about it, or giving answers that seem to contradict your own earlier statements as well as those of your friends?

And yeah, for the record, I've also played online computer games where people had an unfortunate habit of using 'raped' as a synonym of 'attacked and killed in an unfair fight'.

Who said he's not entitled to sue his accusers and their law team? But going by the hearing and the judgement of even conservative senators and commentators afterwards, he'd be rather unlikely to win such a case against Ford. Against the others, he might win it, but on the other hand he'd have to go into even deeper detail into his private life to actually prove his case, so I'm not so sure if he would want to do that.

The thing is, that too was part of his prepared opening statement, as I saw it in the transcript. And as I recall, both Ford's and his opening statements had been published beforehand - but then he went and rewrote his the night before the hearing, to this new angrier, more paranoid version. So as far as I'm aware, the Clinton thing, too, was part of his prepared remarks.

And sorry, but I'm again coming back to how the situation you describe holds even more true for the accused in an actual criminal trial, where actual punishment is on the table and not merely the refusal of a promotion. If a judge isn't capable of acting and speaking in a calm and reasonable manner when put in a similar though less serious position, how can he expect others to do so?

None of that last part, as we have surely seen often enough by now, says very much about whether he might have been guilty of sexual assault in the past, or even recently for that matter.

There was a credible sexual assault allegation against him - lacking corroborating evidence, yes, but with a witness who was universally described as compelling and credible. Given that, it seems rather absurd to expect anything else than a hard, prosecutorial-style grilling during such a hearing, at least from those people who hadn't already committed to voting for him. And given the man's profession, I hardly think I'm unreasonable if I was expecting him to handle such behaviour in a professional and correct way - not that he had to hide being upset about it by any means, but he didn't need to play the martyr, attack the Democrats or avoid answering questions.

You realize we're talking about the Senate, right? Democrat and Republican senators don't hate each other, and go on the record expressing respect or friendship for the other side all the time. And if you want to look at attitude towards nominees, well, obviously Gorsuch and most of Trump's cabinet appointees got a number of Democratic votes in the Senate, and even Kavanaugh got one.

To be clear, I don't approve of that either and as I wrote somewhere else, before the Ford hearings I would've leaned to voting yes on Kavanaugh if I'd been a senator. On the role of the SC, my thinking is more 'conservative', though that may just be since I'm a foreigner used to civil law systems, where nobody would even dream of having important policy decisions made by the courts rather than the legislature.

But of course, Republican complaints about their nominees not being given a fair hearing by Democrats ring rather hollow now after the Merrick Garland affair. I might be persuaded that Democrats bear a larger share of the blame than Republicans for how badly the SC nomination process has broken down in the last two decades (and although I think Graham embarrassed himself during the Kavanaugh hearings, I haven't forgotten his admirable position of voting for Sotomayor's and Kagan's nominations because he wanted to do his part to reverse the trend towards political polarization of SC votes), but the Republicans certainly did some very questionable things as well.

Uh, yeah, that's not how it happened? Ford did choose to initially send that letter to her Congresswoman, and then once the story got out in September, chose to speak to the WaPo and identify herself. And as far as I'm aware, when it got to the point of hearing her testimony, Grassley was negotiating with Ford's lawyers about the details of what and how and where and when (and for what it's worth, I commented at the time that the Democrats were seriously exaggerating in their attacks on Grassley for not bending over backwards enough to accommodate Ford on every single point).

And honestly, they were going to vote no anyway regardless of the accusations - as far as I know, only 7 senators' position was actually still up in the air by that time, from both parties. Though if Kavanaugh had come out of the hearing looking rather guilty, one assumes he'd have lost most of the Republican votes in his favour.

To be honest, I'm not quite sure what happened because I'm unclear both on what Ford wanted to happen, and then what Feinstein wanted to happen. Surely Ford sent that letter to Eshoo initially with the intention that, one way or another, Democrats should take this into account in the nomination process. Then in September at the time the story became public, the reports also said that Feinstein was hiding the letter not merely from the press and Republicans, but also from her fellow Democrats, and I'm honestly not sure what precisely her intentions were.

Of course I'm serious. We've seen in the Cosby case, the Weinstein case, plenty of others, that someone can go for years or decades without any public allegations of sexual assault against them, but then one story becomes public, and suddenly more follow - people who had never dared to go public take courage from the first story to follow suit. Or, fantasists or mentally disturbed people read about the story and decide to make something up. Both are possible and so every case should be considered on its own merits, whereby the first accuser has the advantage, at least, that she or he can't be suspected of just having jumped on the bandwagon.

Point is, having multiple such allegations cropping up in short succession after the first one becomes public, is par for the course. It doesn't mean that all these stories are true, but it's ridiculous to think that the release of additional allegations somehow invalidates the initial ones.

Ironically, your theory about how 'the Democrats made the accusations so appalling' has, wait for it... not the tiniest shred of evidence. At least none that I've seen. Or do you claim to have evidence that Ramirez, Swetnick or Avenatti are conspiring with Feinstein or other Democratic politicians, or with Ford, about these allegations? And no, the fact of them cropping up in short succession is not evidence of conspiracy, as I discussed above.