I have not often been an enthusiastic fan of Susan Collins (R-ME). But I am today:
“Kavanaugh fight: Susan Collins stands up to Democratic bullies and becomes a profile in courage”
If you have the time and the interest, listen to her speech on the floor of the Senate. It is a model of reasoned discourse on a matter of deep public political concern.
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I also like this statement from Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), which was kindly brought to my attention by my friend and very kind neighbor Tom Pittman:
https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=E4121F3B-AD4F-408B-B08B-6A48EBDE41AB
For what it’s worth, Marco Rubio was my preferred candidate during the Republican presidential primaries in 2016, and, back in 2012, I was hoping for a Romney-Rubio presidential ticket.
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The battle over the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States has been an ugly and a divisive one, a terrible little chapter in the history of our nation. It will certainly not fade away soon, and will probably never altogether do so during the lives of those who are now adults.
I know this ugliness personally. I’ve tried to avoid contributing to it myself. Still, insignificant as I am in this matter, I’ve received some exceedingly nasty comments and have been harshly maligned for my stance on the matter at various places on the Web. I receive vicious anonymous emails on most days for my religious views, and, for my defense of the Restoration, am demonized on more websites than I can count. But some of the recent attacks have been politically motivated.
Fortunately, I have a thick skin. Or, if you prefer, I lack empathy, am impervious to reason, and am past feeling. Some of those who write to me — and some who have written to me several times each week for many years now — would, I think, be both shocked and deeply disappointed to realize how little their attempts to wound me actually hurt. On the whole, I simply find them very, very odd.
Some such folks are, probably, pretty much beyond fixing. I can’t imagine what sort of curious personality defects would motivate a person to email anonymous obscene insults to somebody else for the better part of a decade. It just seems unfathomably weird to me, and, frankly, not very interesting.
“If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how — the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what’s said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.” The Inner Life of Abraham Lincoln: Six Months at the White House by Francis B. Carpenter (Lincoln, Nebraska, University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp. 258-259.
But normal, decent people must now work hard to prevent our society from sinking deeper still into the horrifying kind of political discourse — if we dare call it that — that has engulfed Washington DC during the Kavanaugh hearings.
Abraham Lincoln led this nation through a crisis that was considerably worse than that occasioned by the Brett Kavanaugh nomination.
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861.
That is what he said. That is what Abraham Lincoln said.
Posted from Park City, Utah
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