Be the captain of a youth basketball team. You get stuck with Ralphie, an unathletic boy who can’t play. His parents made him sign up because they think he needs exercise and new friends, but he doesn’t want to be there, doesn’t want to try and screw up and be embarrassed. You know if you give him the ball, he’s more likely to give it away to the other team than do anything good with it.

But if you do. If the other team stops guarding him because they know he sucks, and you spot him all alone under the basket and throw it to him because time is running out, and he catches it and gets it through the rim….damn that’s huge for him. He will remember that shot and the high-fives you give him for the rest of his life.

That doesn’t mean you suddenly try to make him your star and feed him the ball every play. He still sucks at basketball. But maybe he has a different perspective now. Maybe now he doesn’t hate being there anymore, and he’d like to get better. Maybe he starts wanting to try other things he thought he couldn’t do, and discovers he can, and that he likes it.

That’s kind of how I see Lindsey Graham. He’s been one of those liberal/moderate Republicans for his whole career, frequently crossing the aisle to vote against conservative measures and piss off his party. When the Democrats said boo, he jumped. He was so dedicated to getting along and maintaining gentility that he’s never even helped another Republican run for Senate. He didn’t think it would be nice. There can’t have been much fun in that.

But the Democrats pushed too far this time, trying to destroy a man Lindsey knew was innocent – and he knew they knew it too, and were doing it out of pure partisan gain. So he went off and dunked on them. If you didn’t see it live, watch the short video below, because it’s awesome. His speech, along with Kavanaugh’s passionate self-defense and the fact that no-one believed Blasey Ford, won the day. It caught the Democrats totally by surprise, and they never recovered from being called out so honestly from a direction they never expected.

Yeah, next week he’ll probably be praising an amnesty idea or something, just like Ralphie will probably dribble the ball off his foot the next time you pass it to him. But not this week. This week you high-five him, because he damn well deserves it. And next week, who knows, maybe he will surprise you again. There were lots of surprises from Republican leaders in this deal, standing tall in ways they didn’t used to. It’d be great to see that continue. They can start by subpoenaing the documents that Ford’s lawyers refused to submit, which she claimed would back up her story.

Aaaaand it looks like a Democratic Senator was involved in hiring the “cybersecurity” companies that produced the claims that a Trump email server was communicating with nefarious forces in Russia. Seems like I wrote about that last summer. Maybe not on this blog. That might have just been on Facebook, where it would be a pain to track down. Or maybe it was a podcast. Great organization, huh?

Anyway, I explained then why it was nonsense, and how they were mixing up the jargon to make it seem like something it wasn’t. But it appears that turned out to be one of the things they used as justification for moar surveillance on the Trump campaign. Once again we see familiar names like Soros and Fusion GPS. Man, wiretaps, dossiers, moles, Russians requesting bait-and-switch interviews – they were all over that campaign. And yet they couldn’t come up with any crimes or get anyone to bite on any shady offers. Can’t wait to find out which Senator it was. This month just keeps getting better. Let’s get some declassification going!