It was gratifying to see that Judge Kavanaugh and Senator Lindsey Graham followed the strategy I recommended yesterday morning in "It's jiu-jitsu time on the Kavanaugh accusations."  The two salient points I made were that Judge Kavanaugh and his family are the real victims here and that the Democrats needed to be called out for their callous brutality toward innocents, especially the Kavanaugh children.

Judge Kavanaugh seems to have surprised many observers and shocked the Committee's Democrats with his emotional testimony on the impact on his children of seeing their father portrayed as a horrendous brute.  I was not in the least surprised that he switched from the posture he and his wife took in their interview with Martha MacCallum on September 24, that of sadness, demonstrating their status as the real victims, to a position of righteous anger.  It was a natural progression, as well as a strategically obvious move to make.

I take him at his word that he composed the opening statement he offered the night before.  He certainly spoke it with passion and sincerity that would be difficult for even the finest actors to perform, and impossible for a highly controlled, church-going, enemy-forgiving (and praying for!) Catholic choirboy to fake.

A couple of hours after Judge Kavanaugh's emotional statement, Senator Lindsey Graham delivered the knockout punch, denouncing his former "friends" on the committee for their duplicitous handling of the July 30 letter to Senator Feinstein, victimizing both Professor Blasey Ford (and her family) and Judge Kavanaugh (and his family).  If you missed his use of his five minutes to question Judge Kavanaugh, watch it below.  It was a historic moment, one that will be mentioned in Senator Graham's obituary and cited by historians of our era's politics:

Yesterday, I called for someone other than Judge Kavanaugh to shame the Democrats in the same manner that Joseph Welch, counsel to the United States Army, shamed Senator Joe McCarthy in 1954.  That is precisely what Senator Graham did.  Jeffrey Lord called it Senator Graham's "Joseph Welch moment."

I claim no credit for guiding either the senator or the judge.  They acted out of sincere conviction and emotion and sensed the same turning point that I did.  I am proud to share this understanding with them and to have had my GMTA moment.