PICS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN?

It's possible that the new allegations against Brett Kavanaugh will persuade Republicans that it isn't worth fighting to save him. But if that were the case, there'd be silence right now on the right as the party assesses its options. Instead, we've got this from a top apparatchik at the Wall Street Journal editorial page:

The left made a mistake with this Ramirez story. It isn't just how embarrassingly flimsy it is; she was inebriated; took six days to find memories; everyone denies it. But it strongly suggests the Ford delay demands were about cooking this up. Destroys credibility all around.

— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) September 24, 2018

We've got this at Axios:

Brett Kavanaugh's allies plan to aggressively contest what they call the "foggy memories" of his accusers — an approach that's likely to lead to nasty confrontations at Thursday's showdown hearing on his confirmation to the Supreme Court.

... The plan is to fight back right away, and to emphasize denials and hazy recollections. And the mission is to portray the debate as cheap-shot politics orchestrated by liberals and abetted by the media.

It's theoretically possible that the president will be persuaded to withdraw the nomination, but according to The New York Times, that's not happening either:

The president was briefed on the allegation on Sunday, according to people in contact with him, and was remaining firmly behind Judge Kavanaugh, who is also scheduled to testify before the committee and who has vehemently denied the allegations. But one of the people said the president argued that the new charge showed why the White House should have fought back against Dr. Blasey from the beginning.

In a sign that the White House was prepared to take a more aggressive approach to the newly lodged accusations against Judge Kavanaugh, White House officials sent out a document around midnight on Sunday casting doubt on the article with a point-by-point list of rebuttals.

A woman named Deborah Ramirez is accusing Kavanaugh of waving his penis in her face during a night of heavy drinking when she and Kavanaugh were undergraduates at Yale. Eyewitnesses have denied that it happened, but it's not true that, as Strassel insists, "everyone denies it": Other classmates have contemporaneous memories of hearing about it, and one, without prompting, remembered details that matched Ramirez's account. This classmate also "recalled Kavanaugh as 'relatively shy' until he drank, at which point he said that Kavanaugh could become 'aggressive and even belligerent.'"

The new accusations were reported by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer at The New Yorker. There's also a less credible accusation from Michael Avenatti:

... Avenatti said he had evidence that at house parties in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh, his friend Mark Judge, and others plied women with alcohol and drugs "in order to allow a 'train' of men to subsequently gang rape them."

Avenatti did not identify any witnesses or disclose more details about the alleged incidents....

Avenatti elaborated to Politico later on Sunday that he represents a group of people, including one victim and multiple witnesses, who can corroborate allegations involving Kavanaugh and Judge.

The GOP seems dug in; the message from the right is, in effect, "pics or it didn't happen" (pics or at least documentation). Republicans will hang tough and refuse a further delay or an FBI investigation of any of the charges; they won't call Ramirez as a witness (assuming she'd be willing), and they'll declare Kavanaugh exonerated no matter how persuasive Christine Blasey Ford is in Thursday's hearing, or how evasive Kavanaugh is.

They need base voters to be fired up in November, and that won't happen, as I've said in recent days, unless they own the libs. So unless Kavanaugh himself gets cold feet, or unless Avenatti somehow produces credible witnesses to a gang rape, this process won't be derailed.

The key will be winning the spin war. They have to dominate the media with the message that Democrats and Blasey Ford didn't lay a glove on Kavanaugh. If he doesn't blurt out out a Perry Mason-style confession, they'll claim vindication no matter what happens.

They could ask Kavanaugh to withdraw, then run on a stab-in-the-back message in November -- we have to defeat every possible Democrat because they're evil liars who fabricate stories in order to destroy their enemies. But they believe that failure at lib-owning will be fatal to them in November. So they're going to press on, and in the end I still think they'll win.