The Republican strategy was to fashion at least a tie that naturally would go to the privileged Republican male from Yale.
It was to limit the focus to he-said, she-said. It was to disallow any other accounts and forbid any additional FBI fact-gathering.
It was then to declare that, gosh-darnit, the rotten luck is that we're hopelessly stuck on two credible accounts here; that, absent any evidence to support Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's compelling accusation (since we're not going to seek or allow any), we have no choice but to assume that somebody other than this nice man Brett Kavanaugh executed something like that horrid sexual assault she describes by a drunken preppie behaving as a drunken preppie 36 years ago.
The faux-beleaguered Republicans were left with no viable option, you see, other than to put Ken Starr's old hit-man and George W. Bush's political operative in a lifetime seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, where, quite coincidentally, he could do damage to a woman's rights to her own body.
If they could not get Kavanaugh confirmed quickly--or if they had to abandon him--then it was possible that Democrats could push the replacement nomination past the next election in which it's conceivable they could take the Senate.
As a best-laid plan, it went awry. An unexpected development necessitated its fluid revision.
That development was that Ford was a more powerful witness than probably their worst fears. She proved hard to hold to a tie.
She was clear, direct, vivid, understandably scared, appropriately emotional and all the more credible in both the details she provided and those she readily admitted she couldn't remember.
If she was making it all up, then why not ... you know ... make it all up?
Regarding not knowing when the incident occurred, she recalled that, not soon after it, she was unnerved to run into Mark Judge, Kavanaugh's buddy who she said had been in the room laughing with Kavanaugh during the assault.
She said she saw Judge at a Safeway grocery store where, to her surprise, he worked. She suggested checking Judge's work record to narrow toward the date.
The Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee weren't going to do that. More facts were not part of their plan.
And they didn't want to hear any testimony from Judge. You can't assure a calculated he-said, she-said stalemate if some informed third party is allowed a version.
That led to a wryly poignant moment: When Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy asked Kavanaugh about something Judge had written, Kavanaugh replied, "You'll have to ask him." Leahy said he'd love to, if only he were allowed.
Because of the strength of Ford's morning testimony, it became necessary for Kavanaugh in the afternoon to prove himself to his audience of one, Donald Trump. He had to do that in the only venue that matters to that pop-culture simpleton, meaning the television screen.
Trump had sent Kavanaugh to Fox News a couple of nights before and been disappointed that Kavanaugh was nice. Trump men are about bluster.
A political being more than a person of traditional judicial temperament, Kavanaugh dutifully wound himself up and roared into that committee room like Trump at a West Virginia rally lacking only the ball cap.
He channeled Clarence Thomas' angry "high-tech lynching" response to Anita Hill in 1992, except he couldn't use that imagery. So, he declared the committee--the no-account Democratic members--to be a "national disgrace" engaged in "search and destroy."
Trump liked "search and destroy" so much he tweeted it.
The White House began to leak that the First TV Watcher was pleased and that the nomination was back on track. Why? Because Ford had been discredited? Oh, no. Because Kavanaugh was feeding red meat to the Trump base and changing the subject, that's why.
One more fluid revision in the plan became necessary. With Kavanaugh having laid out in his tactically faux-fiery opening statement that the fight was one of partisan politics, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham found it advisable to cast aside the strategy of having a woman prosecutor ask questions for the male Republican senators.
The woman hired hand was ruining Kavanaugh's partisan-anger momentum by asking boring on-point questions.
Graham declined to cede his time to the woman and instead used it to reprise and fortify Kavanaugh's partisan assault on the dastardly Democrats for honoring Ford's desire for anonymity for weeks.
He made the issue not the allegation but the timing of the allegation's unveiling. The Republican argument was that maybe the assault happened, but the bigger sin was that Democrats didn't betray Ford's confidence sooner.
By 4 p.m. the frightening ordeal that Ford had spoken of powerfully five hours before was a sub-headline to the spittin'-mad privileged male from Yale.
The Republicans were back on their game, at least until the next day when one of their few compromise-inclined members, U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, suggested a reasonable one-week delay for a little more FBI fact-gathering.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 09/30/2018