The Kavanaugh Nomination Corrupted Everything It Touched
The moment that made pretty much anything said about Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh credible was the moment in which he asked Senator Amy Klobuchar if she'd ever been blackout drunk. This was in the middle of his Republican-enabled counterattack to the accusations of Christine Blasey Ford. (At this point, Lindsey Graham was redfaced with hysteria in Kavanaugh's defense. I was ready to duck the skull shrapnel when his head inevitably exploded.) Klobuchar, in her persistent Minnesota prosecutor's way, kept probing Kavanaugh's self-confessed love for beer.
KLOBUCHAR: OK. Drinking is one thing, but the concern is about truthfulness, and in your written testimony, you said sometimes you had too many drinks. Was there ever a time when you drank so much that you couldn't remember what happened, or part of what happened the night before.
KAVANAUGH: No, I — no. I remember what happened, and I think you've probably had beers, Senator, and — and so I...
KLOBUCHAR: So you're saying there's never been a case where you drank so much that you didn't remember what happened the night before, or part of what happened.
KAVANAUGH: It's — you're asking about, you know, blackout. I don't know. Have you?
KLOBUCHAR: Could you answer the question, Judge? I just — so you — that's not happened. Is that your answer?
KAVANAUGH: Yeah, and I'm curious if you have.
KLOBUCHAR: I have no drinking problem, Judge.
The entire byplay was preceded by Klobuchar's account of dealing with her father's alcoholism, something that has become an essential part of her personal and political biography. There is no way that Kavanaugh didn't know what button he was pushing. This made Kavanaugh's dickitude in his response even more colossal and, for me, anyway, it made anything said about him possible. If he could do this in front of a Senate committee sitting in judgment for his fitness to be a Supreme Court justice, and do so when he was (presumably) sober, what would he do in a dorm room when he was sockless drunk? As far as I was concerned, the guy had a sociopathic streak you could see from the moon.
So, yes, I believe every word in the latest New York Times account which, mysteriously, deep in the text, speaks of yet another account of Kavanaugh's tendency to drop trou while sozzled, one that the FBI not-so-mysteriously declined to pursue during its brief "investigation" into Blasey Ford's charges prior to voting Kavanaugh into the job he now holds. (The Times story also reinforces Deborah Ramirez's similar account that emerged at the time of the Kavanaugh hearings.) From the Times:
We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)
(By the way, how much of an entitled slug do you have to be to allegedly subcontract the job of handing your penis to a stranger?)
Quite simply, we have on our Supreme Court someone who has been repeatedly accused of sexual misconduct and, more important in a strict constitutional sense, probably lied to the Congress about it. We have a corrupt Department of Justice that continues to run interference for him to the extent that Attorney General William Barr is preparing to bestow the DOJ's highest award on the lawyers who did the pass-blocking that allowed Kavanaugh to slime his way into Anthony Kennedy's chair.
There are a number of ancillary issues around this latest revelation. Why did the Times bury its new information deep in the story? Who at the paper deserves to be fired for the clumsy and revolting Tweet that originally was posted to hype the latest story? Why was the story posted under "news analysis" when it contains entirely new information? Why was it originally posted under "Opinion"? What the hell is going on at that newspaper, anyway? All good questions for another day, but, right now, it is clear that the Kavanaugh nomination corrupted everything it touched within the government, and that the people most corrupted by it see that corruption as an unalloyed triumph. Walk through that looking glass and you fall over a cliff.
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