Brett Kavanaugh

‘Who the hell would want to go through this?’ Former president Richard Nixon posed that question to me on October 11, 1991, as we discussed the spectacle of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings taking place before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the nation. While I thought Thomas would survive the fusillade of sexual harassment allegations made against him by Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill and win confirmation to the Supreme Court, I also believed that the trauma of the circus might discourage future outstanding candidates from accepting nominations or running for office.

Just when you think it’s all Brett Kavanaugh, all the time, up pops Stormy Daniels as a reminder that Donald Trump faces multiple perils that he can’t simply wave away with a magic wand. Today, it’s a story in the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that is sometimes supposed by Trump’s detractors to be in the hip pocket of the president, but that is actually proving quite nettlesome to him. It reveals that Donald Trump has — surprise! — been much more enmeshed in trying to squash the Daniels story than he has acknowledged. Recall that when quizzed about whether he knew the payment to Daniels on April 5 on Air Force One, Trump responded with a flat ‘no.’ That turned out to not be true.

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.

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.

September is one of the most packed months in the calendar for celebrities. You kick things off with New York Fashion Week, then jet over to London for its British cousin, and squeeze a scroll down the Emmys red carpet in between. But some designers are starting to go cold on attention-hungry celebrities. So what’s the best way to get some limelight? It shouldn’t take a heavy-handed Nike campaign to tell you the real currency in Hollywood is being performatively woke. That’s why Cockburn’s tip for getting seen this fall is a seat at the Kavanaugh hearings. Twitter activist and witch from Charmed Alyssa Milano was guest to Senator Dianne Feinstein at today’s grilling of Dr Christine Blasey Ford. https://twitter.

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.

‘There’ll be another woman.’ A friend of mine who has been in political journalism much longer than I have told me this weekend to expect another accuser against Brett Kavanaugh to come forward — and sure enough, the New Yorker on Sunday revealed one. Deborah Ramirez alleges that when they were students at Yale, a drunken Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a party and touched her with his penis. As yet, however, Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer write, ‘The New Yorker has not confirmed with other eyewitnesses that Kavanaugh was present at the party.

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.

Is Christine Blasey Ford stealing a page from Trump? She’s just pulled the kind of power move that Trump himself likes to make in dealing with the Senate Judiciary Committee. Told that she must respond by 10 a.m. Friday about whether or not she will show up, Blasey has now declared that she can’t appear to testify on Monday but would like to later in the week. A letter from her attorney to the committee states, ‘As you are aware, she’s been receiving death threats which have been reported to the FBI and she and her family have been forced out of their home. She wishes to testify, provided that we can agree on terms that are fair and which ensure her safety.

The difficulty in trying to assess the behaviour of Democrats these days is thinking sufficiently low.  When I wrote about Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in these virtual pages a couple of weeks ago, I predicted grandstanding from Cory ‘Spartacus’ Booker and Kamala Harris. I did not think low enough to suspect that the Democrats would help orchestrate a series of embarrassing outbursts from the NeverKavanaugh Left, but so it happened. Nor did I expect the Democrats to orchestrate a last-minute allegation of sexual abuse dating from 35 years ago when Kavanaugh was 17 and in high school.  As all the world now knows, that happened too.