Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's public testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thu., Sept. 27, 2018.
It’s certainly welcome that Republicans finally were shamed into approving an FBI investigation into accusations of reprehensible conduct by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh before they “plow right through”—as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promises—to vote Kavanaugh onto the court. But there’s really no mystery to investigate about how a vulnerable, traumatized woman who survived a terrifying attempted rape as a teenager and her snarling, angry, vitriol-spewing accused attacker could tell completely contradictory stories about the same incident in high school with both swearing with 100% certainty they’re telling the truth.
Many of us who drank way too much in our youth and into adulthood heard descriptions of our embarrassing and even appalling behavior while we were drinking which we could not remember once sober. That’s why I no longer drink alcohol. That’s also why, to me, the most glaring weakness in Kavanaugh’s testimony was his total failure to recognize the serious drinking problem that was obvious to many others around him, including friends.
Kavanaugh repeatedly minimized his drinking. “I drank beer with my friends. Almost everyone did. Sometimes I had too many beers. . . I still like beer.” Dozens of others said Kavanaugh’s drinking went wildly beyond the usual heavy drinking at both his high school and Yale: “Frequently drinking excessively and becoming incoherently drunk.” “He frequently drank to excess. I know because I frequently drank to excess with him.” “I definitely saw him on multiple occasions stumbling drunk where he could not have rational control over his actions or clear recollection of them.”
Kavanaugh’s high school graduation yearbook page contained the sort of embarrassing revelations that destroy young people’s job opportunities on Facebook these days. He described himself as treasurer of the “Keg City Club (100 Kegs or Bust!).” He called himself the “biggest contributor” to the Beach Week Ralph Club, a reference to drunken vomiting Kavanaugh dishonestly tried to pass off to senators as having a weak stomach after… eating spicy food.
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Justice Mean Drunk
Donald Trump reportedly hated Kavanaugh’s wimpy performance on Fox Television portraying himself as a high school choirboy focused on athletics, church and public service projects. So, after Christine Blasey Ford’s compelling public testimony about his alleged drunken sexual attack, Kavanagh came out shouting belligerently at opponents of his nomination just like the “mean drunk” his former classmates have described.
Questioning his fitness for the court, Kavanaugh raged, was “a national disgrace,” a “search-and-destroy” mission designed “to blow me up and take me down” as “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.” The scathing political attack on every Democrat in sight was startling from an applicant for a non-partisan judicial position on the nation’s highest court. Kavanaugh lashed out personally at Democratic senators who asked him about his drinking. “Senator, what do you like to drink?” he kept repeating to Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. When Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar described the pain of growing up with an alcoholic father and asked whether Kavanaugh had ever blacked out or forgotten what he’d done while drunk, Kavanaugh said he wondered the same thing about her.
Kavanaugh claimed Blasey Ford’s allegation was “refuted by the very people she says were there, including a longtime friend of hers.” That wasn’t remotely true. No one else had any way of knowing whether Kavanaugh was assaulting her in a locked bedroom while he and his seriously alcoholic friend, Mark Judge, laughed together. For everyone else, it was just another party.
Kavanaugh made many other misleading and provably false statements in his testimony, including his laughable explanations of references to drunken and salacious behavior on his yearbook page. Lying under oath to the U.S. Senate is a crime, too. That’s why the political battle that immediately broke out between Republicans and Democrats over whether the White House was placing limits on the FBI’s investigation into Kavanaugh is important.
One of the biggest lies perpetuated by Kavanaugh and his Republican supporters is the claim that Blasey Ford’s testimony was some kind of 11th-hour or last-minute Democratic sabotage of Kavanaugh’s nomination. The U.S. Senate is free to take as many hours or minutes as it needs to investigate any information it receives about a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.
Blasey Ford comes from the same sort of conservative, Republican, suburban Maryland family as Kavanaugh. She first identified Kavanaugh as her attacker to her husband and a therapist in 2012—long before he was ever mentioned for the U.S. Supreme Court. She said she began thinking about coming forward confidentially when Kavanaugh was added to a list of possible nominees, so Trump would choose someone else from his list of strong conservatives.
The FBI should be allowed to follow its investigation where ever it leads. The only political conspiracy so far is among Republicans hell-bent on confirming Kavanaugh despite all his sordid baggage and dishonest testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
