Opinion

This article was originally published at Salon

I think that we ought to do what we can to make sure that we do all due diligence with a nomination this important. I think it would be proper to delay the floor vote for up to but not more than one week, in order to let the FBI do an investigation, limited in time and scope to the current allegations that are there.

Until that moment, it had been assumed that the Republicans were going to "plow through," as promised by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. When Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said they were with Flake, McConnell and the White House knew they had to go along. They didn't have the votes.

The political fight over whether to seat Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court -- a man who has been accused of sexual assault and was nominated by a man who has bragged about sexual assault -- seems, to most people anyway, to be a fight primarily about gender. But if you flip on Fox News these days, you would think this battle is largely about race, and that white men are being subject to false rape allegations to perpetuate some kind of anti-white oppression — an inverse of the way false rape accusations were used as pretext for lynching black men in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Although Joe Scarborough—the ex-Republican and former Florida congressman who now hosts “Morning Joe” with Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC—has been one of President Donald Trump’s most prominent critics on the right, he offers some valuable insights when it comes to explaining Trump’s appeal. Scarborough dislikes Trump vehemently, stressing that he believes the president has been terrible for the GOP and the conservative movement. But Scarborough is also quick to point out that Trump can be really effective when it comes to rallying his base.

In a new piece for the New York Review of Books, historian Christopher Browning warns that there are troubling parallels between the present-day United States and the days of fascism's rise in Europe.

One of the great things about computer games is that anything is possible in the almost endless array of situations on offer, whether they are realistic or fantasy worlds. But it has been reported that gamers are boycotting Total War: Rome II on the grounds of historical accuracy after developers introduced women generals, apparently to please “feminists”.

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family Anatidae on our hands. – Douglas Adams

To understand the panic that white men in the Republican Party are in these days, it’s useful to go back to April of 2016, when Trump was still running for the nomination. He held a rally at the Grumman Studios, located in what used to be the Grumman Aircraft factory in Bethpage, a community adjacent to Levittown, Long Island in suburban Nassau County, east of New York City. Levittown was the first suburb built on Long Island after World War II, a tight grid of narrow streets lined with wood frame houses that could be had for five or six thousand dollars.

Brett Kavanaugh has repeatedly lied under oath about his drinking habits in an attempt to refute claims that he drunkenly assaulted women on multiple occasions. These are the witnesses who have come forward to tell the truth about Kavanaugh’s drinking.

On his way out of town on Tuesday afternoon, President Trump took some questions from the press corps and defended embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's youthful drinking habits. Trump said that while he has never had a beer himself he knows lots of people who have and he doesn't consider it a problem.

In The War Years Lincoln biographer and poet Carl Sandburg wrote,“Lincoln was the first true humorist to occupy the White House. No other President of the United States had come to be identified, for good or bad, with a relish for the comic.” More recently Richard Carwardine has devoted a whole book to Lincoln's humor. In contrast, former FBI director James Comey has stated that he never personally witnessed President Trump laugh, and conservative columnist Max Boot has written, “Has there ever been a president as humorless as Donald Trump? Doubtful.”

Recognizing that his 10,000-word essay was potentially "a lot" for some consumers, Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine, has created a video version with the same title—"How We Know Kavanaugh Is Lying"—for those who might find it easier to digest.