It was a long, embarrassing day of drama, tears and ugly partisan bickering.

But by the end of Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, I came to the conclusion that both Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford had told the truth.

I believed Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh never sexually assaulted Ford in 1982, when they were both teenagers.

And I also believed Ford really was sexually assaulted at age 15 — but not by Kavanaugh.

Some of my fellow Republicans have made the mistake of holding up Ford’s fuzzy or selective memory in her testimony as proof that she was not telling the truth about being sexually assaulted.

They shouldn’t.

When you are sexually assaulted, as I was repeatedly as a boy by a camp counselor in 1954, it can permanently mess up your memory.

The last time it happened to me, when I was 8 or 9, it occurred in the apartment of the man who abused me.

I don’t remember how I got home that night. I can’t tell you where his apartment was.

But I can tell you in detail what it was like being in his dark room where he developed the photos he took of me.

It does a giant disservice to Dr. Ford and the rest of us who’ve been sexually assaulted to distrust our imperfect memories of such a traumatic event.

But the greatest disservice to Dr. Ford — and Judge Kavanaugh — has been done by the Senate Democrats who sat on her allegation for weeks and then leaked it to the national media at the last minute.

For ten days Ford and Kavanaugh and their families were thrown into media Hell, had death threats made against them and were targeted on social media by the sleaziest operatives of both parties.

Watching the Senate Democrats’ play their slime-ball politics yesterday was an embarrassment to the Judiciary Committee, the U.S. Senate and the people of the USA.

At times it was pathetic.

We had to watch grown senators acting as if they had never been in high school or college.

We had to watch senators like Richard Blumenthal desperately trying to use goofy teen-age blurbs from a 1982 high school yearbook to prove somehow that Kavanaugh was a teen-age alcoholic who had sexually assaulted Dr. Ford in a blind stupor.

Or using another yearbook entry to make the absurd case that Kavanaugh and his friends had gang sex with a specific female schoolmate — whose name Blumenthal mentioned.

The Democrats on the committee didn’t care who their dirty tricks or sleazy accusations hurt — Ford and her family, Kavanaugh and his family or Kavanaugh’s high school friends.

My greatest worry Thursday morning was that Judge Kavanaugh was going to come out and act like he did on Fox earlier this week in the Martha MacCallum interview — like an altar boy.

He didn’t. He came out firing.

He had to do something he never had to do before in his life — defend his honor from partisan dirt bags.

He did an absolutely incredible job considering how hard the Democrats were working to destroy his reputation and stop his nomination.

Thank God, the Republicans stopped using that dull woman prosecutor they brought in to gently question Dr. Ford while the Democrats on the committee took turns trashing Kavanaugh.

That was a monumental mistake that largely let Dr. Ford off the hook.

When the woman prosecutor began questioning Kavanaugh, the whole country was starting to fall asleep.

Thank God, Sen. Lindsay Graham stepped in and delivered a powerful rant that called out the Democrats for their delay tactics and attempts to make Kavanaugh into a teen-age Bill Cosby.

All in all, Judge Kavanaugh acquitted himself very well yesterday.

Now his fate is the hands of the Senate Republicans. May God help him.

Copyright 2018 Michael Reagan