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After several excruciating weeks, the sordid spectacle surrounding Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court is finally coming to an end. A Senate vote is expected imminently. Republicans seem confident that Judge Kavanaugh will be promoted to the highest court in the land, but nothing is over until it’s over. Regardless of the outcome, the Kavanaugh affair isn’t going anywhere.It will dog American politics for years, even decades to come. The partisan nastiness surrounding the Kavanaugh nomination is a hinge point in our political life – no matter what one thinks about the judge and his case.

The FBI’s additional background check on Brett Kavanaugh isn’t the only document regarding President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee being presented to the Senate today. On Wednesday night, the New York Times published online a letter headlined ‘The Senate Should Not Confirm Kavanaugh, Signed, 650 Law Professors.’ By Thursday, the number of signatories had jumped to more than 1,700. The letter comes as Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell set in motion events that will likely result in a final vote on Kavanaugh’s appointment early Saturday evening. Word had it that the FBI hadn’t found any additional evidence to corroborate Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation that Kavanaugh attempted to rape her when they were high school students.

Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona is a man on a mission. His goal: to turn back the clock and bring the Republican Party back to its roots, to a time before Donald Trump hijacked American politics and cloaked the GOP with a populist, anti-establishment veneer. Indeed, ‘make Republicans great again’ may make for a decent slogan in the event he tosses his hat in the 2020 scrum. Flake knows from experience how powerful and intoxicating the tribalism engulfing American politics has become. Relatively popular with his constituents with an immaculate record as a fiscal conservative, Flake has represented the state of Arizona in one way or another since the early 2000s.

Is Kellyanne Conway proof that patriarchy has no gender? That’s what the British journalist, Suzanne Moore, says in the Guardian today. She broods over Conway’s contention that she too was sexually abused once (is there anyone out there who wasn’t?) and considers whether she deserves a bit of empathy before concluding that, because Conway is gunning for Christine Blasey Ford, empathy would be wasted on her. Actually, it’s not just that Kellyanne Conway is pro-Brett Kavanaugh. She’s Not One of Us because ‘She is anti-abortion, and though a survivor of sexual assault, works for a man accused of multiple sexual assaults.’ By which she means Donald Trump.

No one knows for sure if Brett Kavanaugh is guilty of assaulting Christine Blasey Ford 36 years ago. But there is one thing he is definitely guilty of: being white. It’s written all over his face. All over his Caucasian face. He has committed what social-justice warriors and race-obsessed liberals consider to be the great crime of our era: he was born white. And male too! He’s the bearer of two original sins — whiteness and maleness — and his haters will never stop reminding him, and us, of this fact. The extent to which commentators have focused on Kavanaugh’s skin colour has been extraordinary. He is representative of ‘white male anger’, said the New York Times.

Of all the things candidate Trump said, nothing outraged the Democrats more than his claim that, under him, the GOP would become a workers party. The workers! The Democrats thought they had ownership of that label. And at one time they did. But that was long ago, and by appropriating it Trump was announcing a revolution in American politics. After past economic downturns the American economy always bounced back, but after the Great Recession of 2008-09 we experienced the slowest recovery since the Great Depression, in terms of jobs and wages. That was the new normal, we were told. Those manufacturing jobs were never coming back. We also told pollsters that we no longer thought that our children would have it better than we did.

A few weeks ago in these virtual pages, I wrote that ‘In years to come, no one is going to talk about ‘kavanaughing’ a candidate.’ Boy did I get that wrong. The word deployed may not be the mouthful ‘kavanaughed.’ Maybe it will, à la Lindsey Graham, be pleonastically expressed: ‘the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics’ about fits the case. I am writing on Friday morning. The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote this afternoon. Punditry is not prophecy, but I am nevertheless going to predict that Brett Kavanaugh gets an up vote from the committee and that Chuck Grassley will have learned his lesson and bring the matter to a floor vote tomorrow, Saturday, as he said he would.

George Washington couldn’t tell a lie. Donald Trump can’t help telling a lie. At his press conference today Trump suggested that not only wouldn’t Democrats vote to confirm the father of our country to the Supreme Court, but that Washington may not have had a spotless record when it came to his private affairs. ‘He may have had some, I think, accusations made,’ Trump said. ‘Didn’t he have a couple of things in his past?’ Who will Trump exhume next to besmirch? Honest Abe? The Gipper?However outlandish, the presser was no laughing matter.  World leaders didn’t laugh at him, he said, but with him yesterday as he proclaimed that he was the greatest president in American history.

‘BURN IN HELL OLD CRIMINAL!’ responded gem.1120. ‘THE ONE U RUSSIAN SELL OUTS WILL NOT BE ABLE TO RUN IS **THE DAY U MEET GOD**!’ What prompted such a tirade at Sen. Chuck Grassley’s Instagram account? The Senate Judiciary Committee chair, an Iowan, had posted lovely, innocent pictures of corn. ‘Wk 19 # cornwatch,’ his account posted. ‘Pic 1- ears of corn to feed the squarrels in the winter Pic 2- evidence of deer feasting.’ https://www.instagram.com/p/BoHuiX4lSOi/ Cockburn harvested the best responses. ‘Wow based on the comments of this photo people are really mad about corn!’ It seems the man charged with shepherding controversial Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination through committee can find no love on the net.

Here we go again. Another Trump administration official bites the dust. This time it was deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein who had supposedly submitted his resignation to White House chief of staff John Kelly, who reportedly is on the same glide path and views Trump, according to Bob Woodward’s new book Fear, as a 'professional liar.' Except that Rosenstein hadn’t. Or he did, but it wasn’t accepted by Kelly. Or something like that. As compensation, Rosenstein, we were told, got to attend an NSC principals committee meeting this afternoon. So it goes in Crazytown where, as the Atlantic’s Steve Clemons points out, things keep getting crazier.

I believe that Christine Blasey Ford is telling the truth when she claims that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a house party in the early 1980s, when she was 15 and he was 17. I believe her husband, Russell Ford, who has told the Washington Post that in 2012 his wife had recounted her experience during a couples’ therapy session, and named Kavanaugh. And I believe the story that Kavanaugh’s friend Amy Chua advised her female students that if they wanted to win a clerkship with him, they should dress like a model. All of which this leads me to conclude that Kavanaugh is not right for a seat on the Supreme Court. As Roger has written, the Democrats are doing everything they can to exploit Ford’s accusation for political ends.

This week in Washington, the big political stories centered on sex — one with an unfortunate lack of specificity, the other offering all too many details. After days of rumours that Brett Kavanaugh, President Donald Trump’s pick for the open Supreme Court seat, was facing an allegation somehow related to sexual assault, his accuser came forward and told her story to the Washington Post. Christine Blasey Ford shed her anonymity and said Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her when they were high school students. She remembered how the event occurred, she said, but not exactly when or where. These details are important, but it seems we’ll never know what exactly happened at a suburban Washington house party sometime in the summer of 1982.