Nine, nueve, siyam

If you were one of those who watched the US Senate hearing last Thursday on Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the US Supreme Court in which his sexual assault accuser Christine Ford testified, and you watched it on CNN, then you would not have missed the fact that the network assembled a panel of nine people to discuss the proceedings at each break in the hearings.

That is correct. Nine. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Uno, dos, tres, quatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, nueve, if you counted them in Spanish. Even in Cebuano it amounted to the same thing --usa, duha, tulo, upat, lima, unom, pito, walo, siyam.

But this is less about such a huge number comprising the panel of discussants than it is about the fact that all nine, without exception, openly held views that hewed to that of the Democrats who openly supported the accuser and openly opposed the nominee openly supported by the Republicans.

Ever since Donald Trump ran and won the US presidency, CNN has increasingly showed its bias for the liberal Democratic left. But at no time was CNN more shamelessly open in its bias and loss of objectivity than at last Thursday's Kavanaugh hearing. Imagine assembling a panel of nine with not a single soul to take up the perspective for the other side.

So there they were, all nine stooges, reduced to doing what we Cebuanos would call as "nagkinalutay sa ilang kaugalingong mga lubot." And because the hearing turned out so badly for them, not having risen beyond a mere "she-said-he-said" performance with nothing proven, the panel hemmed and hawed and hissed and sputtered without saying anything.

At best, all the panel could do was turn on the incidentals, like how the private prosecutor hired by the Republicans to do some questioning was left underutilized. And because the panel that was assembled to trumpet victory was left holding an empty bag instead, it was left to non-panelist Chris Cuomo to declare in a subsequent program that the affair had no winners.

Cuomo and CNN just could not man up to admit that they lost. They had counted on the accuser to make a good account of her narrative.

But beyond her narration of unsubstantiated claims, she brought no real goods to the market, making it easy for Kavanaugh to just as simply deny them flatly.

Now, she could have been telling the truth that Kavanaugh tried to force himself upon her in high school. But in the absence of proof, and all things being equal, Kavanaugh could have also been telling the truth that it was all a lie. One thing that got me about Ford, though, was that while her voice cried, the rest of her didn't. Unlike CNN, I find that very telling.