Back at Georgetown Prep, Kavanaugh Is Hailed as a Hero

Justice Kavanaugh vehemently denied ever assaulting anyone, and he was confirmed and sworn in as a Supreme Court justice earlier this month. At Georgetown Prep’s annual reunion weekend, he was hailed as a conquering hero.

.. Tobin Finizio, a radiologist who was the quarterback on Justice Kavanaugh’s football team, was there. So were Bernard M. McCarthy Jr., now a managing director at a Washington real-estate company; Michael Bidwill, the president of the Arizona Cardinals; and Tim Gaudette, a consultant in Colorado. The three friends were among those drawn into the controversy after Christine Blasey Ford accused him of sexual assault at a 1982 house party at which there was heavy drinking.

.. Mark Judge — an author and filmmaker who, according to Dr. Blasey, witnessed the alleged assault — was a no-show. So was Christopher Garrett, otherwise known by his high school nickname “Squi.” Mr. Judge and Mr. Garrett were so closely associated with the young Justice Kavanaugh — appearing regularly in entries in his personal calendar in the summer of 1982 — that they became part of a “Saturday Night Live” skit about the Senate confirmation hearings.

.. At one point during the football game, Justice Kavanaugh prepared to pose for a picture with former classmates. First, though, he instructed everyone to put down their beers, according to a person who witnessed the exchange. (Justice Kavanaugh didn’t appear to be drinking.)

.. Justice Kavanaugh skipped the evening event — but his presence loomed large. Addressing the crowd, Georgetown Prep’s recently appointed president, the Rev. James R. Van Dyke, noted how the firestorm around the nomination had united the Class of 1983 and the entire school.

.. Again his voice was drowned out by a chorus of whooping and cheering, as the crowd screamed some of those names: “Squi!” “P.J.!” That would be Patrick J. Smyth, another classmate whom Dr. Blasey said was at the party where she was assaulted. Mr. Smyth was at the Pinstripes event.

Why Brett Kavanaugh Wasn’t Believable

Judge Kavanaugh, when it was his turn, was not laughing. He was yelling. He spent more than half an hour raging against Senate Democrats and the “Left” for “totally and permanently” destroying his name, his career, his family, his life. He called his confirmation process a “national disgrace.”

“You may defeat me in the final vote, but you will never get me to quit,” Judge Kavanaugh said, sounding like someone who suddenly doubted his confirmation to the Supreme Court — an outcome that seemed preordained only a couple of weeks ago.

Judge Kavanaugh’s defiant fury might be understandable coming from someone who believes himself innocent of the grotesque charges he’s facing. Yet it was also evidence of an unsettling temperament in a man trying to persuade the nation of his judicial demeanor.

.. As he put it in his testimony, “What goes around, comes around,” in the partisan vortex that has been intensifying in Washington for decades now. His open contempt for the Democrats on the committee also raised further questions about his own fair-mindedness, and it served as a reminder of his decades as a Republican warrior who would take no prisoners.

.. He gave coy answers when pressed about what was clearly a sexual innuendo in his high-school yearbook.

He insisted over and over that others Dr. Blasey named as attending the gathering had “said it didn’t happen,” when in fact at least two of them have said only that they don’t recall it — and one of them told a reporter that she believes Dr. Blasey.

.. Judge Kavanaugh clumsily dodged a number of times when senators asked him about his drinking habits. When Senator Amy Klobuchar gently pressed him about whether he’d ever blacked out from drinking, he at first wouldn’t reply directly. “I don’t know, have you?” he replied — a condescending and dismissive response to the legitimate exercise of a senator’s duty of advise and consent. (Later, after a break in the hearing, he apologized.)

.. Judge Kavanaugh gave categorical denials a number of times, including, at other points, that he’d ever blacked out from too much drinking. Given numerous reports now of his heavy drinking in college, such a blanket denial is hard to believe.

.. then there’s the fact that she gains nothing by coming forward. She is in hiding now with her family in the face of death threats.

.. cowardice of the committee’s 11 Republicans, all of them men, and none of them, apparently, capable of asking Dr. Blasey a single question.

.. Eventually, as Judge Kavanaugh testified, the Republican senators ventured out from behind their shield. Doubtless seeking to ape President’s Trump style and win his approval, they began competing with each other to make the most ferocious denunciation of their Democratic colleagues and the most heartfelt declaration of sympathy for Judge Kavanaugh, in a show of empathy far keener than they managed to muster for Dr. Blasey.

.. Pressed over and over by Democratic senators, Judge Kavanaugh never could come up with a clear answer for why he wouldn’t also want a fair, neutral F.B.I. investigation into the allegations against him — the kind of investigation the agency routinely performs, and that Dr. Blasey has called for. At one point, though, he acknowledged that it was common sense to put some questions to other potential witnesses besides him.

.. When Senator Patrick Leahy asked whether the judge was the inspiration for a hard-drinking character named Bart O’Kavanaugh in a memoir about teenage alcoholism by Mr. Judge, Judge Kavanaugh replied, “You’d have to ask him.”

Asking Mr. Judge would be a great idea. Unfortunately he’s hiding out in a Delaware beach town and Senate Republicans are refusing to subpoena him.

.. Why? Mr. Judge is the key witness in Dr. Blasey’s allegation. He has said he has no recollection of the party or of any assault. But he hasn’t faced live questioning to test his own memory and credibility. And Dr. Blasey is far from alone in describing Judge Kavanaugh and Mr. Judge as heavy drinkers; several of Judge Kavanaugh’s college classmates have said the same.

.. If the committee will not make a more serious effort, the only choice for senators seeking to protect the credibility of the Supreme Court will be to vote no.

Mark Judge’s Name Keeps Coming Up. Here’s What We Know.

Weeks later, Dr. Blasey testified, she saw Mr. Judge working at a Safeway grocery store in Potomac, Md. In his memoir, Mr. Judge mentioned that he had worked for a few weeks at a supermarket in the summer before his senior year, helping people load groceries into their cars. He wrote that he often showed up at his early-morning shift hung over from the night before.

.. Some former classmates of the two men have said that aspects of Dr. Blasey’s recollections of Mr. Judge rang true.

The book describes a person named “Bart O’Kavanaugh” as having “puked in someone’s car the other night” and “passed out on his way back from a party.” A former classmate of Judge Kavanaugh’s said that the judge earned the nickname “Bart” after a Georgetown Prep teacher garbled his name.

.. Judge Kavanaugh about the “Bart O’Kavanaugh” passage. Mr. Kavanaugh said that the book was a “fictionalized” account and that only Mr. Judge could answer about his intention.

..  statement by Ms. Swetnick painted a similar portrait of the two young men as “attached to the hip” in high school and made allegations of parties where women were drugged and “gang raped.”

.. Under questioning Thursday, Judge Kavanaugh said that he and Mr. Judge became friends in ninth grade and that they shared the same group of friends. Mr. Judge was popular in school, Judge Kavanaugh said, and a talented writer.

 

Pigs All the Way Down

Kavanaugh and our rotten ruling class.

.. Despite Donald Trump’s populist posturing, there are few people more obsessed with Ivy League credentials. Kavanaugh’s nomination shows how sick the cultures that produce those credentials — and thus our ruling class — can be.
.. According to The New Yorker, Judge confided in an ex-girlfriend, Elizabeth Rasor, about an incident where he and other boys took turns having sex with a drunken woman. (Judge denies this.)
.. From Georgetown Prep, Kavanaugh went to Yale. There he joined the fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon, or DKE, which was, according to The Yale Daily News, “notorious for disrespecting women.” (Long after Kavanaugh graduated, the fraternity, once headed by George W. Bush, was banned from campus after video emerged of pledges chanting, “No Means Yes! Yes Means Anal!”)
.. Kavanaugh was also a member of an all-male secret society called Truth and Courage, which had an obscene nickname affirming its dedication to womanizing.
.. It may not be fair to judge Kavanaugh by the company he kept. But it’s telling that these were the crucibles in which he and other members of our ostensible meritocracy forged their identities and connections.
.. “Is it believable that she was alone with a wolfy group of guys who thought it was funny to sexually torment a girl like Debbie? Yeah, definitely. Is it believable that Kavanaugh was one of them? Yes.”

.. There’s no equivalent culture in which girls reap social capital for misbehaving. You rarely see women in politics or law who flaunt college reputations as party girls; the women who make it are expected to show steely self-control. In the rarefied social world that produces so many of our putative leaders, a young man who frequently gets blackout drunk, as Kavanaugh reportedly did, is a fun guy. A young woman who does so is a mess.

.. Kavanaugh went on to become a protégé of appeals court judge Alex Kozinski, for whom he clerked in the early 1990s. Last year, Kozinski resigned after multiple accusations of sexual harassment by former female clerks and junior staffers; two said he showed them porn in his office. The judge’s lewd behavior was, by many accounts, an open secret.

.. “All the clerks and former clerks in Kozinski’s ambit knew and understood that you assumed the risk and accepted the responsibilities of secrecy,”

.. both of whom had a reputation as gatekeepers for students who hoped to land coveted clerkships with Kavanaugh. Sources told The Guardian that Chua instructed female applicants to exude a “model-like” femininity, a claim Chua denies. One prospective clerk said Rubenfeld advised her, “You should know that Judge Kavanaugh hires women with a certain look.”

.. As they realize that, their incandescent fury is remaking our politics. We’ll know things have changed when palling around with sexual abusers carries more stigma than being abused does.