My goodness, it all played out exactly as predicted a week before it even unfolded:

The inference that Republicans were caving in and would let the Democrats run out the clock on the Kavanaugh nomination was unduly pessimistic. Sen. Chuck Grassley meant business and was not going to reconvene the Senate Judiciary Committee after getting his 11-10 vote to send the nomination to the Senate floor. The FBI investigation would be conducted efficiently and expeditiously and would turn up virtually nothing new — and absolutely no corroboration of anything that Christine Blasey Ford alleged. Inasmuch as Mark Judge and Leland Keyser already had submitted statements to the Senate committee under penalty of felony, it was almost inconceivable that they would say anything different to their FBI interrogators. (As it emerged, the main new discovery from Keyser was the revelation that she had come under pressure from others to change her testimony. Paul Manafort had been locked in solitary confinement after allegations that he had done something like that.) The Democrats would scream and yell that the FBI probe was too short, too limited, too inconclusive — but the Republicans would not be dissuaded. Mitch McConnell would bring the matter rapidly to a floor vote as soon as the FBI report was submitted, no matter what the Democrats demanded. Jeff Flake would vote for confirmation, honoring his back-room deal with Sen. Grassley at the Senate Judiciary Committee by which, in return, he got Grassley to authorize the FBI investigation. Susan Collins likewise dependably would vote for confirmation, protected by the political cover of the supplemental FBI investigation. Lisa Murkowski would prove to be impossible. Once confirmation was assured with the Flake and Collins votes, Joe Manchin would jump in and vote for Kavanaugh’s confirmation, too.

Further — exactly as predicted — the FBI investigation proved a boon for the Kavanaugh nomination and the Republicans. It reflected GOP fairness and open-mindedness, took away from the Democrat Resistance their only solitary issue that bore even a modicum of moral decency, and created a stronger investigatory basis for deeming Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh to be a good man, decent, a wonderful husband, father, and son who was defamed brutally. The FBI investigation, rather than playing into Democrats’ hands, launched a new phase: the process of clearing Justice Kavanaugh’s good name.

And not insignificantly, the decision by The Resistance to devote five of the last nine weeks before the November elections to smearing Justice Kavanaugh meant that they had taken off the table the full smorgasbord of their trademark Liberal-Left talking points: Stormy Daniels, the Mueller investigation, Michael Cohen, children at the border, Rod Rosenstein, how the enormously successful tax breaks have not helped the middle class, how the enormously successful tax breaks that have helped the middle class should be attributed to Obama, the President’s mental capacity, Omarosa, the New York Times “anonymous” op-ed, the Woodward book, and all other such. All removed from the public discussion as The Resistance revved all cylinders to focus exclusively on destroying the Kavanaugh nomination.

Where does our further-tarnished national culture go from here? These seem to be some aspects and fall-out that will play out next:

1. We may return towards a consensus that it is un-American to assert that every allegation proffered by a woman against a man automatically must be deemed true.We already knew that Al Sharpton and Tawana Brawley had lied. That the stripper who was employed for a Duke University lacrosse team party had lied. That Lena Dunham had lied. That “Jackie,” the woman at the University of Virginia, had lied. Of course many women accusers tell the truth. But sometimes women lie. Indeed, sometimes women believe they are telling the truth, but they have their facts wrong. In this way, women are remarkably similar to men: often tell the truth, sometimes lie, sometimes intend to tell the truth but have the facts wrong. That is at the core of why we have limitations statutes — because, with the passage of time, memories fade and evidence becomes harder to identify. As a nation, our sense of fair play — whether at a criminal trial or even a job interview — begins with the presumption of innocence. In our contemporary world, where Democrats have elevated Identity Politics to a sacrament of the Left, they would have certain intersectionalist groups deemed better and more believable than their much-hated Caucasian male population. But that never has been the American way. And lots of women have sons, fathers, and husbands whom they love.

2. This marked a turning point for those among the intersectionalist “Women’s March crowd” who have attempted to transmogrify the #MeToo movement into their own tyrannical Reign of Terror. That movement had begun with so much potential to right critical historical wrongs against women. Sexual assault — not just rape like Bill Clinton and Juanita Broaddrick, but even unwanted groping like Cory Booker in his article “So Much for Stealing Second” — is evil. For many women (and for assaulted men, too), sexual assault often derails their lives grievously. And yet, as all too often happens, some in the movement have sought to descend into a Reign of Terror. Yes, Harvey Weinstein is a pig. Louis CK — pig. Al Franken — pig. Kevin Spacey — pig. So many of these highly publicized exposures of evil men sexually abusing others helped do a great service to our society, even if Meryl Streep called Weinstein “God” and stood and cheered with her Hollywood crowd for child rapist Roman Polanski. But the Left, the Resistocrats, and the Hollywood-Academia-Media axis soon bought into the intersectionalist narrative. In time, the media asked whether America now was ready to play by new rules, to change the basic standards of justice and fairness that had played out in the Anita Hill hearings. And the thunderous answer now is: NO — the tyranny stops here, and the rules of fairness do not change. Anita Hill’s gambit failed a quarter century ago, and the new gambit failed the same way now. The #MeToo campaign has gone as far as it should go: changing perspectives, raising awareness — but not changing the rules of fairness and law. Americans still are not prepared to throw a good man under a bus just because someone proffers an unsubstantiated allegation of wrongdoing thirty-six years earlier.

3. The #MeToo / Radical left / Resistocrat gambit of piling on additional accusations against Justice Kavanaugh backfired beautifully. Sometimes when someone tries to grasp too much, he ends up dropping even what he is holding. Whatever one makes of Christine Blasey Ford’s narrative, that case was sabotaged when Deborah Ramirez entered the fray with her nutty allegations. Ramirez turned a scandal into a joke. And then when Julie Swetnick entered with her even more absurd allegations, she and Attorney Avenatti turned the joke into a farce. The entire matter devolved into a circus, marked not only by potentially serious allegations but by crazy allegations. If you are a woman at a party where people are being gang-raped, do you go back to the next party involving those same people? Do you continue, going to ten such parties? Thus, thanks to Swetnick and Ramirez — and their media enablers who irresponsibly gave them time on air — many who had been sitting on the fence came to see the whole underlying strategy for what it was: a brutal, vicious, take-no-prisoners Democrat-Liberal effort to destroy a conservative man so that, like Clement Haynesworth and G. Harrold Carswell and Robert Bork and almost Clarence Thomas, he could be kept off the Court, no matter the cost to his name, his lifelong reputation, and his family.

4. The best evidence is… evidence. No one expected that Justice Kavanaugh, when he was a teen, already was maintaining a relatively comprehensive daily planner. Moreover, even if he had kept such a diary, no one would have expected that he still would have it thirty-six years later. That was a solid piece of circumstantial evidence. By contrast, Ford had no evidence. Instead, for each and every witness she claimed had been and had seen, each came back with denials under penalty of felony and further denials when questioned by the FBI. Along the way, though, Ford’s own testimony came up very short, leaving serious questions not only about her memory but also about her veracity. She testified that she fears flying; yet that falsehood was shattered by her own subsequent testimony under questioning by gentle, sympathetic sex-crimes prosecutor Rachel Mitchell. Her story about doing a home remodel and putting in a second front door because of a claustrophobia condition was demolished, as reports later emerged that the second door simply was put in to allow for renting to a lessee who would want a separate entrance and exit. Ford’s testimony that she did not know that Sen. Grassley and his committee were prepared to fly to California to accommodate her left viewers startled: How could she not know what everyone else in America knew? More and more, all the contours of her story did not hold water. Her attorneys refused to share critical therapist notes with the Senate committee. What were they hiding?

5. The Democrats overplayed their hands from Day One by opposing the Kavanaugh selectioneven before his name was announced. Had they been more politic, they would have treated him publicly with a modicum of respect, while plotting secretly to destroy him. Instead, they made clear overtly from Day One that they were intent on destroying him. Even after they received more documents to review than ever before had been submitted in a Supreme Court nominee’s vetting, they demanded thousands and thousands more pages. Their questioning was vicious. At the initial hearing, Kamala Harris interrupted Sen. Grassley right off the bat, even as the chairman merely was uttering some opening remarks. The Senate’s most unworthy member, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut who lied publicly about serving in Vietnam, immediately interrupted, demanding to adjourn the hearings. Cory Booker was Spartacus. Fair-minded observers soon saw that Brett Kavanaugh was finding himself a pawn in a Kafkaesque drama for Democrats to vie at his expense for donations to their 2020 Presidential campaigns. Meanwhile, the hearing room was filled with screamers disrupting every few moments, getting dragged out, and then new waves of screamers — what Dick Durbin called the “noise of democracy.” Thus, even before anyone besides Dianne Feinstein ever had heard of Christine Blasey Ford, it already had become clear that the Democrats were determined to stop at nothing — disruption, heckling, circus atmospherics — to sabotage and destroy Justice Kavanaugh. That is why the Ford allegations, unsettling as they initially were, lost much of their edge from the outset: because Republicans and middle-roaders already had seen the Democrats overplay their losing hand hysterically for three months. By the time Ford appeared on the scene, Republicans were less inclined to recoil than to look more closely at the shenanigans at play: that the Ford letter had been written months earlier, that Feinstein had sat on it as long as she could to maximize her delay and to help her with her own tough reelection race in California against an even farther-Left Democrat who was blaming her for not stopping the Kavanaugh nomination, that the Feinstein people had connected Ford with an anti-Trump legal team. The fingerprints of The Resistance were everywhere. And then came Ramirez and Swetnick.

6. The Tea Party movement began a process that has changed the Republicans to a more conservative party. It no longer is the GOP of a Nixon who imposed wage-and-price controls, made nice to the Soviets and the Chinese, and named justices who were not conservative. Nor is it the Bush GOP that failed to roll back regulations, became enmeshed in foreign regime-change entanglements, and that almost granted amnesty to millions more illegal entrants. Rather, many RINOs now have been primaried out of office. Along the way, the Tea Party made some crucial errors and lost some important GOP seats by running a few sub-par candidates. Even so, the Tea Party effort, amplified by the Trump Revolution, has changed the GOP into a more dependably conservative party. If this were the Republican party of George H.W. Bush, with all those RINOs in the Senate, they would have caved on Kavanaugh. And then they would have come back with an outright liberal like a Harry Blackmun or David Souter or with some other historically disastrous compromise like a William Brennan, a John Paul Stevens, or a Harriet Miers. But the league in which Trump plays is not the Bush League. And this time the Republican Senators included the likes of Tea Party stars Ted Cruz and Mike Lee on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Most of the RINOs are gone. President Trump drew out the others to expose themselves. Jeff Flake will be history in a month. Other borderline RINOs are emboldened now to act like Tea Party conservatives. The only other outright RINO in the Senate seems to be Lisa Murkowski. Alaska is a red state, and hopefully she will be ousted the next time Alaskans get a chance.

7. Joe Manchin inadvertently and unintentionally highlighted that Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota are plain-and-simple Democrat Resistance “Yes Votes” in Schumer’s pocket. (Also, by the way, Doug Jones in Alabama.) Manchin secured his reelection by voting for Justice Kavanaugh. It will be interesting to see how the Democrats treat him for breaking ranks. If they begin mistreating him and deny him plum committee assignments, he may jump over to the GOP. Interestingly, if the other four Democrat senators also facing tough reelection campaigns in deep-red states had joined with Manchin, then the impact of the five voting with Kavanaugh would have been nil — just typical cynical election-year politics. Instead, Manchin stood alone because the tyranny of the #MeToo movement terrified the other four from breaking ranks from The Resistance. Their claims to their respective red-state constituencies that they work across the aisle are exposed transparently as false — and only a month before the elections. They are The Resistance. This should help their GOP opponents. It probably also will help Rep. Marsha Blackburn in her tough race against popular “moderate Democrat” former Gov. Phil Bredesen in the race for the seat being vacated by Bob Corker, and perhaps Rick Scott in his race against Bill Nelson in Florida and Martha McSally against Kyrsten Sinema for Flake’s opening seat in Arizona. Many Republican voters now are more energized, having seen the GOP finally fight to win. Some Democrat voters are demoralized and feel the way about their representatives that Republicans usually feel over their RINOs. Hopefully, too, Republican voters in red states with tight races now will avoid the foolishness of wasting their precious votes by voting Libertarian (despite the appeal of the philosophy), with so much on the line and so few votes to waste.

8. Brett Kavanaugh and his name and reputation will survive this. It will be tough for a few months, perhaps even a few years. Really, such a terrible, terrible thing, but he will survive it. Until a few weeks ago — and resuming tomorrow — today’s generation knows nothing of Anita Hill but knows that Clarence Thomas is a distinguished Supreme Court justice. That is how these things work. Time heals wounds, and time settles accounts. Liars become exposed over time. Few learn history. Even intelligent young adults today do not know who Bobby Kennedy was; just ask them. Alas, even outright public scoundrels and thugs like Al Sharpton, after a few years, end up as TV news pundits; people forget his thuggery, anti-Semitism, and his race baiting. Meanwhile, good people gain public respect over time. Just keep looking at what Clarence Thomas made of his reputation. So it will be for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. He has gotten a terribly raw deal, but he will be vindicated. And just as Anita Hill has long been forgotten, except to be pulled out of mothballs for special Leftist campaigns, so shall it be for Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick — and, I suspect, for Christine Blasey Ford.