From Bill Clinton to Anthony Weiner to Roman Polanski to Harvey Weinstein, past liberal winners of the Alyssa Milano Award for Cognitive Collapse have found a bevy of assorted predators and perverts as useful tools for their career advancement in politics and cinema, to be condemned with Casablanca-like shock only when their usefulness had ended.

No stranger to this phenomenon is Hawaii Democrat Sen. Mazie Hirono, who famously told male defenders of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to shut up and step up as he was politically blindfolded and shot by an assortment of Democratic wife-beaters and draft-dodgers on the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Hirono made some truly remarkable statements last week.  "Not only do women like Dr. Ford, who bravely comes forward, need to be heard, but they need to be believed," she insisted.  She added, "I just want to say to the men in this country: Just shut up and step up.  Do the right thing for a change."

Yet Mazie Hirono failed to step up and believe Hawaiian women accusing Daniel Inouye in 1992, who would go on to become, like Sen. Ted "Chappaquiddick" Kennedy, a celebrated and honored senator.  A recent letter to the editor in the Maui News gives us a hint of her volcanic hypocrisy and double standards regarding the late Sen. Inouye, accused of being a serial sexual predator by a bevy of women one might say were, what's the word, credible:

I challenge Sen. Mazie Hirono to revisit the sexual allegations against the late Sen. Daniel Inouye as she is now doing to President Donald Trump's nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh.  She claims to be a strong defender of the #MeToo movement.

Google "Inouye accused of sexual misconduct" and you will find that Sen. Inouye was accused by no less [sic] than 10 women of sexual misconduct and rape in 1992, but due to the powerful Democratic Party machine, he was never truly investigated.  I see nothing from her or the other three Democratic congressional members from Hawaii ever addressing this accusation.  Instead, the Honolulu airport was renamed to honor him.

Google it, indeed.  An Associated Press article from 1992 notes that the code of silence applied to these Hawaiian women in much the same way that Hillary Clinton handled the "bimbo eruptions" and the assault and rape charges against her husband, William Jefferson Clinton, during his 1992 presidential campaign, organizing a campaign to defame and threaten them:

Hawaii's powerful Democratic machine and a tightly knit island culture have allowed Sen. Daniel Inouye to shrug off allegations of sexual misconduct, observers say.

Of his 10 accusers, most have refused to reveal their identities.  One whose name was made public says she has forgiven him.  "In Hawaii, the smart ones keep silent," said Toni L. Worst, a spokeswoman for Code of Silence-Broken, a committee established to press the allegations[.] ...

Allegations emerged in October that Inouye forced his former hair stylist to have sex with him 17 years ago.  His unsuccessful challenger for the Senate, Republican state Sen. Rick Reed, released a tape recording of Lenore Kwock, 40, discussing the incident.

Kwock, who accused Inouye of forcing himself on her in 1975 when she went to his apartment on an errand, says she forgives Inouye and would never have brought charges against him[.] ...

Nine other women later reported sexual abuse or harassment by Inouye to a state representative[.]

Women must be believed, Hirono insists, except she refused to believe the women who accused her political mentor, Daniel Inouye, whom she needed to advance her political aspirations.  This despite the fact that their charges actually had dates, places, and times; were not induced by hypnosis decades after the fact; and had, what's that other word, corroboration.

As John Fund notes in National Review, Senator Hirono didn't always tell men to "shut up" and believe accusers:

When it mattered in her own backyard, with a male Democratic senator, she turned a blind eye to sexual abuse. ...

It would be too easy to suggest that Hirono was flirting with McCarthyism in her brazen comments.  She is actually flirting with medieval standards of justice, when those in power arbitrarily decided who was telling the truth and who was a traitor.

Hirono believes Blasey Ford and her therapy-induced "recovered memory."  A New York Times article went into some more detail about the code of silence that Hirono and others used to protect Inouye:

While few public figures here impugned the 40-year-old hairdresser, Lenore Kwock, neither did they raise their voices in curiosity or censure of Mr. Inouye.  In large measure, political, civic and business leaders chose guarded silence, which some of them attribute to fear that the party machine, which controls nearly all state and Federal positions and programs here, might derail their careers or strip their projects of government money[.] ...

The silence is part "cowardice" and part "lack of opportunity," asserts Neal Milner, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii.  "Without a Republican Party to speak of and without newspapers interested in investigative reporting," Mr. Milner said, a stir that would be "taken for granted" elsewhere was unlikely to occur in the Aloha State.  In a one-party government, he went on, "everything depends on behaving yourself," so people who want to keep their patronage jobs or their program financing learn to hold their tongues.

It was Hirono and the Hawaii Democratic machine, who was telling Inouye's female accusers to shut up and go away.  There would be repercussions if any Hawaiian lawmakers took up their cause, championed their cause, fought for the victims, and believed them:

One female Hawaii leader doesn't believe that Inouye – who died in 2012 at age 88 – was innocent.  Former Democratic state representative Annelle Amaral, head of the State Senate Women's Caucus back in 1992, recalled to reporters just last year that Inouye "had been accused and I have said there were nine women I talked to who had told me stories of molestation and rape."  But the women refused to file reports, and a Senate ethics panel dropped its investigation.

Mazie Hirono didn't believe them.  She was a political coward and arguably still is, a hypocrite who claims she is fighting serial predators as she defends and believes serial liars, who claims to be fighting for the honor of women when all she wants, along with her Democrat brethren, is raw political power.  She is quite willing to sacrifice a bedrock principle of our democracy, the presumption of innocence, in exchange for an American Inquisition conducted by a powerful elite that believes in sentence first, trial later.

Indications are that voters are no longer falling for it, as women who we were told would be put off by old white Republicans defending a conservative predator now seem to be realizing that their husbands, fathers, brothers, and uncles could be targets if they hold politically incorrect views or that three decades from now, one of their sons could have his life, family, and career shattered by similar false and defamatory allegations as those thrown at Judge Kavanaugh.

I look forward to the look on Mazie Hirono's face on election night when voters reject the sexual McCarthyism of herself and her Democratic colleagues.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor's Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.