This confirmation process has become a national disgrace. The Constitution gives the Senate an important role in the confirmation process, but you have replaced advice and consent with search and destroy...You sowed the wind for decades to come. I fear that the whole country will reap the whirlwind...This is a circus. The consequences will extend long past my nomination.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, speaking before the Senate Judiciary Committee, September 27, 2018.

With all due respect to Brett Kavanaugh, his confirmation process has not been a national disgrace; I for one do not sense the slightest bit of national dishonor in these proceedings just as I did not personally or on behalf of my country feel humiliated by Mitch McConnell's shelving of Merrick Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court.  (And professional Republicans must be with me on this one since I am not aware of any publicly expressed professional Republican opinion (including from Brett Kavanaugh) that what McConnell did was a national disgrace.)

It will be good for those of us who hope to prevail in our present national travails to recognize exactly where we are.  Evidently, when seen from a certain mistaken perspective, America is just moving from one national disgrace to another--and we are warned at the juncture of each "disgrace" that what we have just done will send us further down the road to hell.  Just this morning I read an article from Nicholas Kristof in which he worried that the credibility of the Supreme Court would sustain long-term damage from the fall-out of the Kavanaugh proceedings.  I was a little surprised to find a professional journalist of Kristof's caliber still clinging to the notion that within our on-going national political ordeal the Supreme Court would be able to retain what little credibility it has left.  But then, Kristof is a mainstream media journalist who by definition must identify with what he sees as the establishment, and who therefore in transitional times like ours must always be living a little in the past.  How much credibility does the Supreme Court actually have for those who have been paying attention?  It cannot still have more than little, and for Kristof to lament a future loss of Supreme Court credibility I suspect that he may be worrying, whether he is aware of it or not, that more Americans will begin to see the truth about the Supreme Court--which is that it should not be believed.  The Court has already been too severely damaged in a national struggle for power.  Sometimes it is just best to let go of your illusions.

Democrats warned Republicans after McConnell abrogated long-standing Senate norms to effectively cancel President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland that McConnell was inflicting long-term damage to public perceptions of the Senate's institutional probity.  Now, Brett Kavanaugh warns Democrats that for what they have done to him they will "reap the whirlwind."  Then, overcome by his emotions, Kavanaugh spilled the beans: "What goes around comes around."  In keeping with the aura of arrested development that now envelops him, Kavanaugh issued a threat appropriate to high school, but a threat that also reflects his accurate awareness of where we really are as a nation--in an all-encompassing power struggle.  Power struggles when institutions have already been weakened, and in the struggle institutions will be further damaged, if not destroyed.

Brett Kavanaugh should know because he began his move toward the Supreme Court as a foot soldier in the power struggle that has been on-going for decades and has intensified year-by-year.  Kavanaugh joined the Federalist Society (the "conservative," plutocratically-dominated institution that serves as the "pipeline" to the Supreme Court for ambitious young Republican lawyers) in 1988 when he was 23, and is still a member (although in 2001 when he was working in the George W. Bush White House Kavanaugh claimed to have resigned from the Society.)  Kavanaugh clerked with Ken Starr, and later when Starr was appointed independent counsel to investigate Bill Clinton, Kavanaugh served with the Starr team on one side of the power struggle between Congressional Republicans and the Democratic president.  Then, Kavanaugh avidly sought to humiliate Clinton (see https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/20/politics/kavanaugh-lewinsky-email/index.html) proposing in an August 15, 1998 memo to Ken Starr that Clinton should be forced to publicly account for his sexual misdeeds:

It may not be our job to impose sanctions on him, but it is our job to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear--piece by painful piece--on Monday.  I am mindful of the need for respect for the Office of the President.  But in my view, given what we know, the interests of the Office of the President would be best served by our gathering the full facts regarding the actions of this President so that the Congress can decide whether the interests of the Presidency would be best served by having a new President.  More to the point:  Aren't we failing to fulfill our duty to the American people if we willingly "conspire" with the President in an effort to conceal the true nature of his acts?

Kavanaugh's plan for refusing to conspire with Clinton "to conceal the true nature of his acts"?  Place Clinton under oath and ask a series of detailed, prurient, highly embarrassing questions.  An example from Kavanaugh's ten proposed questions: "If Monica Lewinsky says you inserted a cigar into her vagina while you were in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?"

Now, on a different president's side of the power struggle, Kavanaugh has given no indication of being displeased by anything this exceedingly controversial president has done, but instead has offered public praise, including a false claim regarding Trump's involvement in Kavanaugh's selection: “No president has ever consulted more widely, or talked with more people from more backgrounds, to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination,” Kavanaugh said.  In truth, the Federalist Society did all of the work and presented Kavanaugh's name to the president on a short list.

Now, on the receiving side of the pain from sexual allegations, Kavanaugh is not disinclined to "conspire" to conceal the true nature of his involvement:  He reaches for the obfuscatory power of emotional display: indignation, self-righteousness and blame-shifting to cloud the facts, distract from the issue of sexual assault, and divert suspicion onto the other side in the power struggle.  It is not pretty to watch, but it is what you get in a power struggle where the norms, rules, laws and institutions are breaking down, and where the quality of Republican Supreme Court nominees has not been screened according to the older, traditional methods, but by a Federalist Society sharply skewed to plutocratic requirements.  In other words, so concerned is the Federalist Society with being certain about how their Supreme Court nominee candidates will vote if placed on the Court, it apparently has forgotten to consider certain other small things, like for example: character.

We are in a national power struggle, not merely witnessing an arbitrary series of national disgraces that we should worry about avoiding.  These "disgraces," this "circus,"--they are going to come; they are the symptoms of the deeper power struggle.  Just as symptoms in the human body can point to the nature of the underlying illness, so can these "national disgraces" tell us about America's disease.  As symptoms can point to the truth, so do our "national disgraces."  For that, there is reason to be grateful for them, and not to decry them.

American would-be plutocrats like Charles Koch and his associates, and their servile foot soldiers like Brett Kavanaugh are out to take democracy out of the American Way.  The evidence has been gathering for decades, despite the Koch machine's relatively effective efforts to keep it concealed.  There is little doubt now.  There are well-connected and super-wealthy Americans out to take away our democracy.  It is only natural, and right that there is a power struggle between the People, who, whether they are Republican or Democrat want to keep their democracy, and those who despise democracy and ache to get rid of it.