It’s hard to imagine how Thursday’s Senate Judicial Committee hearing with Kavanaugh and Ford will be anything but a shudder-inducing orgy of GOP self immolation. Once again, we will watch open mouthed as the Eleven White Male Republicans on that Committee voluntarily push their faces into the whirring blades of a fan of female fury. When the Republicans have to grapple with women’s issues in public, the one thing you can be sure of is that they will leave their anemic blood splattered all over the walls.

You can’t fault them for not wanting anyone in America to watch Orrin Hatch interrogate Ford or to have to apologize for him the next day. Very bad optics, indeed! But their solution to that very real problem—to hire an outside female to do their dirty work for them—will leave each of them with a great big “C” for cowardice carved into the middle of his forehead. Instead of having the guts to do their jobs and question their tormentor themselves, they will literally hire a queen of the Quislings to complete the rape that Kavanaugh couldn’t finish. They will bravely hand their jobs over to the one person in that room on Thursday who will definitely know the least about what happened. As students of the Confederacy, they will be borrowing a page from the official slaveowner’s manual: when one of your human chattel needs a whipping, double the punishment by forcing another slave to wield the lash.

Supposedly each Senator will get five minutes—five minutes!—to question each witness. So viewers will see the Democratic senators, two of whom are former prosecutors, asking their own questions, as if they were real U.S. Senators, and then watch as each of their Republican colleagues cedes his time to the Great Inquisitor With A Vagina and then sit, mute, peeking through her skirts like the close-minded, sexist sphinx that he is.

Who on earth thought up this shit?

The horror movie won’t stop there. The Republicans will adamantly contend that they are defending an innocent man, but their actions will show them to be scuzzy mob lawyers who you can always count on to know an unlicensed doc who can patch up gunshot wounds on the sly or to create new, phony rules to “ram this thing through.” An innocent man would welcome the facts, but there will be, unlike other confirmation hearings, no FBI investigation. The only other person in that bedroom in 1982, Mark Judge, is in hiding and won’t be called as a witness. Nor will the corroborating witnesses of Dr. Ford. Nor will the second accuser and her corroborating witnesses. Nor will the former classmates who came forth yesterday to counter Kavanaugh’s claims of spotlessness in his Fox News interview. Nor will the third accuser who has hired Michael Avannati and is expected to explode upon the scene tomorrow night with tales of gang rape. But you can be sure that the Democrats and Dr. Ford will mention these people, and often.

Thursday’s hearing will be a sickening tableau, something between the Salem witch trials and the Stalinist show tribunals, but less entertaining.

Twelve hours later, on Friday morning, those eleven male GOP senators will nevertheless approve, thanks to their one-vote advantage on the committee, Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination, after which they will retire to their Washington, D.C. watering holes and strip clubs to savor the sweetness of their victory.

But there will be two more votes ahead of them. The vote on Kavanaugh by the entire Senate, and the vote on November 6th. That’s when the reviews of Thursday’s Grand Guignol spectacle will finally come in.