I'm just a simple country blogger here, so bear with me. It seems to this reporter that there are, at the moment, three options regarding the proposed Monday hearing into the allegations of sexual assault levied by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford against Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the president*'s nominee for a lifetime seat on the United States Supreme Court.

On Tuesday night, Ford said through her attorneys that she would not participate in the hastily-called hearing until an FBI investigation into her charges was completed. (This, it should be noted, is what President G.H.W. Bush did when Anita Hill came forward with her charges during the confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas.) She has more than a few good reasons to make this demand, the best of them being that the whole thing is obviously a Thomas-Hill cosplay bag-job on the part of the Republican majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The way you know this is by the reaction of the members of said majority to Dr. Ford's quite reasonable request, which would be reasonable even if she hadn't gotten death threats and been driven into hiding—which she has been.

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Chairman Chuck Grassley, who has stayed too long at the fair, can't seem to muster up anything beyond take-it-or-leave-it. (He also commented to Hugh Hewitt that he would "hate to have someone ask me what I did 35 years ago." That would have been when Grassley was 50.) Orrin Hatch—who, with Grassley, was on the committee when Hill appeared before it—decided with some other prominent people to lie about how FBI investigations operate. And even Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, the two departing Republicans who initially seemed to be persuadable on Ford's case, are sadly agreeing that, if she doesn't take part in the proposed Monday carnival act, there's nothing they can do for her, poor dear.

So, to my mind, these are the three possible scenarios for Monday next.

1) They blow off the hearing, blame Dr. Ford for her own troubles, and move along to vote to confirm Kavanaugh, after the Democrats on the committee spend their time pounding the nominee with Ford's story.

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2) They have a public hearing at which only Kavanaugh shows up, thereby providing a television audience with the spectacle of 11 entitled white men, some of them well past their sell-by dates, propping up the testimony of another entitled white man against charges of sexual assault, while the members of the Democratic minority either decline to participate, or they spend the entire proceedings whacking their good friends and colleagues for ignoring a credible witness who says the nominee tried to rape her.

3) They have some sort of closed session at which everybody yells at everybody else, and Ford's charges disappear into the congressional ether, and Kavanaugh gets confirmed.

Can somebody point out which of these possible outcomes, in 2018, won't result in a gender gap the width of the Bering Strait come the first week in November? In all three scenarios, a plausible case can be made that credible charges of sexual assault—and, arguably, credible charges of lying under oath—lodged against the nominee have been dismissed with a hand wave and crocodile tears by an unfeeling pack of male Caucasian primates. The Trump base won't care. But all those suburban women who decided against all logic and good sense to give the disruptive power of a vulgar talking yam a try in 2016? This is not going to go down well with them at all, and they weren't very happy with the president* and his party going into this fiasco.

Aaron P. Bernstein Getty Images

From the start, this has been an extended farce. At the beginning of the hearings, Kavanaugh had the votes to slide through the Senate relatively unscathed. Enough of America's top lawmakers had pronounced themselves willing to pretend that Kavanaugh won't vote precisely the way he's been groomed to vote since he was a larval conservative attorney. Enough of them were willing to engage in a ridiculous puppet show for the purposes of cementing a retrograde conservative majority on the Supreme Court for the next several decades. Then, the nominee showed up, and everything went haywire.

He was ill-prepared. He was evasive, and not very good at it. He came off as a kid wearing one of Neil Gorsuch's old suits. And when the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee surprisingly came to play—Mazie Hirono deserves the thanks of a grateful nation—he looked like a deer trying to cross a highway. He appeared to be completely surprised that they wanted to talk about his time as a functionary in the Avignon Presidency. What did he know about torture? About the hacking of Democratic email accounts? This questioning also served to illustrate the transparent mendacity of his answers regarding how his lifetime of conservative activism would have no bearing on his performance in a job in which his actions are beyond review.

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In short, Brett Kavanaugh was a terrible witness on his own behalf. (And, it turns out, Mitch McConnell had warned the White House that he would be a dodgy nominee specifically because of his work for C-Plus Augustus.) And then, this latest hand grenade falls into the nation's lap, and nobody, least of all Grassley, has the faintest idea what to do except trying to muscle the alleged victim in the course of muscling through a dubious nomination. Whatever, but anyone who thinks this is going to be over on Monday, or when Kavanaugh gets sworn into his new job, is out of their mind.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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