So the first thing is the Democrats painted themselves in a corner by saying "one week" so often that if the Republicans give them one week, it's gonna be harder for them to say, "I don't know, that one week wasn't enough." Now of course they will say that, so there's a hundred percent chance they'll say that one week isn't enough, we need more. But they did kind of paint themselves in a corner with that one-week stuff. So the president says, "I'll give you a week. I'll give you a week."

Now here's the fun part. Here's the Dilbert filter on this: no organization can do anything in one week. That's it. That's the only filter you need to know. Nobody can do anything in a week. Now they can move and make phone calls and write stuff down, but they can't really do much. What they can do in a week is going to look like a few days of interviews and a few days of writing stuff up and a few days to travel. All right, it's gonna be so little that they can do that they're basically going to be talking to the same people they talked to now.

Is there a risk that they'll find some new thing about Kavanaugh? Yes. The odds of them finding something new were very high, but it probably will be easily dismissed as just another thing that somebody's trying to pile on.

But here's the other interesting part. You know how people said if Kavanaugh were really the person he was portrayed to be, then you would see a pattern of it? People who are abusers tend to be abusers. All right, and then sure enough you saw some low-credibility accusations, but people aren't quite giving them the same amount of weight. So it doesn't really look like there's a pattern.

But here's another pattern: people who have false memories and people who accuse other people of doing bad stuff accuse other people of doing bad stuff. So I will be very interested to know — and this would be a good question for the FBI to ask Dr. Ford — have you ever accused anybody else of something that didn't pan out in terms of a conviction? Have you ever had a memory problem? Have you ever taken any kind of pharmaceutical or recreational drug that would cause a memory problem? Wouldn't you like to know the answers to those questions? And those are the types of things that would not be asked, you know, in front of Congress. But the FBI would certainly have a perfectly good reason to ask those questions.

Now given that we have no witnesses who will say they were at the scene and saw something, and given that I think it's impossible that there will be physical evidence, really it's just talking to people and asking questions. And when they talk to all the people who would be potentially anti-Kavanaugh, they're gonna say probably the same thing they said, which is, "We don't have any memory of anything like that." So that's sort of a dry hole, right? Every time you talk to somebody, if they say, "I can't," there's no follow-up question to be had. "I have no memory of this. That's as far as I can go."

But when you're talking about Dr. Ford, you've got a lot of stuff you can ask because you're trying to find out about her credibility. So you can expand those questions to anything she does or has done that gets to credibility. Here's an example: one of the accusers who made the most outrageous claims about the gang rapes and stuff, apparently that accuser's ex-boyfriend has come public and said, "I've got every — had a restraining order against her. She has no credibility whatsoever." Does Dr. Ford have anyone in her circle — an ex-patient, an ex-boyfriend, an ex-anything — who believes that she made something up about them? Yeah, how many people has she dealt with? Is there anybody who would tell a story like a co-worker?

Imagine the most common thing you could think of if you've ever worked in a big organization. Here's the Dilbert filter again. One of the most common situations you can think of is your co-worker imagines something that happened that didn't happen. How many of you have worked in an organization where your co-workers were absolutely positive you did something that you didn't do? They're positive you stabbed them in the back but you didn't. You're positive that they were the source of the rumor but you weren't. They're positive you were trying to undermine them, that you came in late and lied. They're positive you've done these things but you didn't.

So will there be people who say that Dr. Ford has made claims about them that they know to be untrue? Now here's the fun part. Suppose Dr. Ford has made claims about other people that were true but they can't be proven. And then you interview that other person. You say, "Oh yeah, Dr. Ford is a serial accuser. She accused me of, you know, running over a dog or something." And then you can't prove it one way or another. So maybe she was actually accurate. Maybe her other accusations were actually absolutely true. But if you've got somebody who goes on record and says, "Yeah, she also accused me of something I didn't do," and you can't tell if she did it or not, it doesn't help her story.

So I would say there's a slightly bigger risk to the accuser than there is to the accused. Because the accused, so far there's no physical evidence and no human being who can put him in the situation. Now will they ask questions like, "Brett Kavanaugh, yeah you said you never pass out, but somebody — will you say under oath that you've never fallen asleep after having a beer?" So they might ask some gotcha questions. But remember, Judge Kavanaugh is probably one of the most qualified people in the world to avoid those very questions. You know, can you think of anybody you would be more capable of avoiding a trap question? I can't. He probably has just about the best kind of experience you would want for somebody to understand what legal jeopardy looks like, what a trap question looks like. I like his odds.

So I would say that both of them are taking a risk. So the extra week is a risk for Kavanaugh. It's a risk for Dr. Ford. If I were to compare those risks, it feels like she has a slightly bigger risk. And the risk that is the biggest is that there would be something anecdotal in her situation — something she did at work, someone else she accused, some medicine she was on, some mental problem she had in the past that might have been perfectly normal and she's already completely recovered. But if you have enough time, it's pretty easy to draw a picture of Ford as a person who might make a false accusation. Right now there's nothing in evidence that would give you any kind of character insight on the false accusation memory question. All right. And then she might have other connections to other Democrats, and that would work against her as well.

Garbage. Somebody says he is guilty and lies a lot. Well, we don't know, but you see that. A lot of people had the same, "Oh yeah." So there's the yearbook stuff. Suppose they say to Kavanaugh, "The devil's triangle definitely means three-way sex. That's what I think it means. I've never heard it in another context. The only context I've heard is three-way sex." So did Judge Kavanaugh lie about the meanings of the things in his yearbook? Probably. Probably did. Did Dr. Ford lie when she says she remembers having exactly one beer that night? Probably. Probably. But I'm not sure we should judge too much about the small lies, because really they weren't central to the question or shouldn't have been. And they were just trying to make that stuff go away. It's stuff that kids do.

All right, her yearbook is worse than his. Someone says I've heard that but I haven't seen it yet. How does it persuade the midterms? Well, it depends. We'll have a week to find out and then we'll know.