We are losing our country, all due to politics - a partisan circus of tears

Joe raises some VERY good points here.  This country is ripping itself apart, the politicians who are supposed to be representing us directing the orchestra of discontent.  They have been in office far to long.  They now serve the party rather than the people, and if you are Red you are hated by the Blues, and if you are Blue you are hated by the Reds.  And this hatred if vitriol nasty physical hatred.

And these two people we watched or listened to on Sept. 27th have now lost any semblance of dignity they may have had, their lives open to the microscope of sound bytes.  And these nasty bytes are  making it to SNL and TWITTER and people are believing it all as news.  This is not my America.

__________________ Posted for archival purposes _________________

https://www.twincities.com/2018/09/29/soucheray-a-sad-american-spectacle-in-a-small-senate-hearing-room/

On a walk Thursday afternoon, I heard radios. There was a guy loading luggage into his car but he didn’t want to miss a word so had the car radio on. I heard the transistor radios that a roofer and a painter had brought along for the day. They were listening to the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings — testimony? — the way people listen to baseball pennant races in late September.

A block or two of silence, but then another radio and I didn’t know what to think until I realized I was listening to the one of the saddest American spectacles I had ever heard. Two such accomplished people with their shiny, prosperous, achievement-driven lives now in ruin. They will never be looked at the same way again. They might as well have been fully flowering trees suddenly stripped bare and snapped apart in a storm.

All for a teenage mistake that might or might not have happened more than three decades ago.

Another radio, this one perched on the sill of an open garage window. Brett Kavanaugh was sniffling, trying to compose himself. Hard to listen to. Christine Blasey Ford had choked back her own tears earlier in the day.

All because of a teenage mistake that either did or did not happen.

And we certainly didn’t reach any conclusions. We only saw and heard the dysfunction of such political divisiveness that Lindsey Graham, speaking on behalf of Kavanaugh, at one point said, “you’ve come to the wrong town and at the wrong time.’’

Meaning that politics are no longer useful, they are merely a tool for cutting opponents apart. Both parties do it. The center is not holding. We get nowhere. We learn nothing from these supposed learned elected worthies. We are poorly served by the lot of them.  I was struck by how many times I heard “in my 27 years, in my 30 years, in my 20 years.” Yes you have all been there too long and you have come to believe you are there to serve your party and not us.

What disgrace we witnessed, what calamity and confusion.

All day Thursday I was on a texting string involving kids I used to have. One kid I used to have now has two teenagers of his own. He wrote at one point, “interview my teenagers about any period of time over the past year and tell me how comfortable you are with their level of precision and accuracy.”

Other comments were not as charitable to Kavanaugh, but their comments were fair and reasonable. None of them — the kids I used to have — had similar incidents in high school. I would have known. But you have daughters, the chorus of public opinion might tell me, you would not have known. I would have known, which I mention only because I am eternally grateful that they will never be part of such a sad and unfortunate experience as having your life peeled apart by rabid partisans. Life is hard enough.

Two accomplished people with lives ruined and we followed it on TV or radio like it was the play-by-play of a reality TV show called “Watch America Split Apart at the Seams.’’

What I keep wondering about Kavanaugh is why, if he was a molester in high school, did he stop molesting? When did he have a conversion? Who turned him around? There is no evidence that he has ever behaved poorly in his adult professional life.

On Ford’s behalf she was credible, right down to throwing in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that remembers stuff I guess. I can’t pretend to be able to identify with her anguish.

Neither of them will. They went home with security guards. Their teenage years were pulled into the present as though by a time machine and now, faced with modern sensibilities, their lives were left in ruin after just one single day in a small Senate hearing room.My walk was ending and I heard on yet another radio Kavanaugh saying, “I will never get my life back.”

Where they had laughingly gone for clarification.