with very little defense from Dems. Arlen Specter was the prosecutorial attack dog; Alan Simpson received information "over the transom"; and Orrin Hatch was the clean up hatchet man who also read passages from The Exorcist to denigrate Anita Hill's testimony.

From the NYTimes coverage:

In his questioning Saturday of Judge Clarence Thomas, Senator Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, said: "I really am getting stuff over the transom about Professor Hill. I've got letters hanging out of my pocket. I've got faxes. I've got statements from her former law professors, statements from people that know her, statements from Tulsa, Okla., saying, 'Watch out for this woman.' But nobody's got the guts to say that because it gets all tangled up in this sexual harassment crap."

Senator Simpson's press secretary, Stan Cannon, said the Senator would not make the correspondence public nor describe it more fully because "he would prefer to wait if Anita Hill comes back to ask her about it directly." The committee announced this evening that Professor Hill was expected to testify again on Monday.

Interviewed this morning on the NBC News program "Meet the Press," Mr. Simpson elaborated. He said he had received a letter on Saturday from a female lawyer in Tulsa, calling it "the most derogatory letter I have seen to date."

"I'm not going to use it," he said. "It's not sworn to. The woman said she would give an affidavit."

The Senator's staff said the letter had come from Mary Constance Matthies, a lawyer in private practice in Tulsa. Reached by telephone, she said she had indeed faxed a letter on Saturday to the majority and minority counsels of the Senate Judiciary Committee. 'For What It's Worth'

Ms. Matthies would not discuss the substance of her letter except to say it did not refer to Judge Thomas nor to sexual harassment. She said the information she had passed along was "third-hand to me, and I passed it on in the for-what-its-worth category."

Asked whether she thought Senator Simpson had described her letter properly, Ms. Matthies replied: "People make different interpretations of things. I don't want to call Senator Simpson a liar. I don't know what else he was referring to. It would not be the way I would characterize the letter."

Specter badgered Hill with specious claims that she had committed perjury and should be prosecuted. Coverage of this part of the nomination hearing entrenched "he said/she said" in MCM coverage, altho Time used "She Said, He Said."

God, it was so ugly. It was sickening. Those three senators still give me the creeps.

How many here recall watching those hearings? And how angry did it make you? I recall heated conversations about sexual harrassment at work and lots of men --and women-- who still "didn't get it."

The Dem senators were no knights in shining armor and it was said Teddy Kennedy was stymied in any defense bcz of Chappaquidddick.

According to Joe Cannon, at Cannofire there is only one post at Daily Kos about the fax campaign, and it's written by our very own hipparchia.

Single Payer is something anyone who calls hirself a liberal can get behind. But they aren't pushing it.

And that speaks volumes about their agenda, which is about Obama, not the American people.