From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. What a difference three years make. In 2015, when federal judge Brett Kavanaugh offered this throwaway line in a law school speech, he got the expected snickers about the vague impropriety of prep school life.

What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.

That's been a good thing for all of us, I think.

This week, it sounds almost like a confession in the face of an allegation from

college professor Christine Blasey Ford that when she was a teenager at a house party, then 17-year-old

Kavanaugh and a pal attempted to rape her. Or maybe the judge was slightly confessing to

T-Ping the headmaster's oak tree. These are unknowns. What we have learned in the wake of this

bombshell in Kavanaugh's path to the U.S. Supreme Court is really what we already knew.

When the cameras are running, you can count on the actors to play to type.

If the stakes weren't so high for the individuals, for the Supreme Court, and for the nation, it would be almost comical politicians from both sides of the aisle

trying their hardest to project concern about the truth of a long-ago episode

when their overriding concern is the fate of Brett Kavanaugh's nomination.

Never mind, boys will be boys, this is Congress being Congress, part chess match,

part morality play, part Rorschach test. Republicans see just the latest borking of a conservative

high court nominee, a replay of the Anita Hill sexual harassment allegations about Justice

Clarence Thomas and the vilification in

1987 of Robert Bork himself.

Democrats see another panel of old white men deferring to a powerful male as a courageous

female victim is disbelieved and dragged through the mud.

They must, with all-do horror, consider the implications, as did

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. If he has this violent background where he has assaulted a woman and

...