"I never thought I’d be urging my daughter to attend parties with drinking, drugs and who knows what else, but..."

"... if she doesn’t experiment now, in the safe space of a nurturing high school and a loving home, won’t she be awkwardly out of step with her peers when she starts college next year?," writes Debby Berman in "I worry my homebody teen is too much like me. But she has something I didn’t at her age" (WaPo).

Is she isolating herself to her own detriment? The truth is that although she isn’t the life-of-the-party teenager I expected, she is hauntingly familiar. When I was her age, I hung out mainly with one close friend, color-coded my class notes and never partied or touched trouble...

College was an awkward awakening. The first frat party I was lured to, just a few days into freshman year, turned me off from ever attending another one. Nothing bad happened, I just hated the whole scene....

The hidden, unspoken similarity between mother and child unnerves me. Why does she delay drinking, drugs and romantic encounters when she has opportunities to engage? No one guided her to this slow path, and no one is holding her there, at least not that I’m aware of.....

My thoughts, in order: 1. I'd worry about this too, 2. Is this about Kavanaugh? 3. No, not even mentioned! Weird. 4. Humblebragging.

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Trump takes some questions today about the Kavanaugh investigation.

Trump delivers a virtuoso performance here (I've clipped the Kavanaugh-related part):



The best part is when the reporter (Kaitlan Collins) pushes Trump to answer the question whether he will pull the nomination if the FBI investigation shows Kavanaugh lied about drinking, and Trump offers a great nonanswer:

I don’t think he did. Look, here’s what — I’m just saying, I’m not a drinker. I can honestly say I never had a beer in my life. It's one of my only good traits. I don't drink. Whenever they're looking for something, I’m going to say I’ve never had a glass of alcohol. I have never had alcohol. You know, for whatever reason. Can you imagine if I had, what a mess I would be? I would be the world's worst, but I never drank. I never drank, okay? But I can tell you I watched that hearing, and I watched a man saying that he did have difficulty as a young man with drink. The one question I didn't ask is how about the last 20 years, have you had difficulty the last 20 years? Because nobody said anything bad about him in many, many years. They go back to high school.

You've got to watch the whole clip, because it's funny when Trump uses the phrase "You've had enough" to try (playfully) to cut off Collins. She isn't really cut off. She gets loads of time.

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Slate — at the behest of my son John — corrects a false accusation that Kavanaugh lied.

Here's a link to the tweet.

Here's the follow-up correction tweet:

On 9/12 I criticized @thinkprogress for a headline claiming that Kavanaugh "said" he'd overturn Roe. On Friday I made the same mistake, writing that Kavanaugh "claimed" he was legal to drink in HS. Thanks to @jaltcoh for catching my error.

That thanks @jaltcoh (my son) and links to the correction at Slate, where the article is still called "Kavanaugh Lied to the Judiciary Committee—Repeatedly."

Update, Sept. 30, 2018: This article originally said that Kavanaugh “claimed that his beer consumption in high school was legal because the drinking age in Maryland was 18.” Kavanaugh’s exact words were: “The drinking age, as I noted, was 18, so the seniors were legal, senior year in high school, people were legal to drink, and we—yeah, we drank beer.” These words could imply that his beer drinking at age 18 was legal, which would be false, since the drinking age in Maryland was raised to 21 before he turned 18. Alternatively, they could imply that his drinking at age 17 was understandable, if he was with 18-year-old seniors who were legal at the time. In keeping with the standard applied to others, it’s incorrect to report that Kavanaugh “claimed” his beer consumption that summer was legal. Therefore, the sentences have been removed.

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"But how can you love a liar?"/"I don't know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise there wouldn't be much love in the world."

Those are lines spoken in the play "Heartbreak House," by George Bernard Shaw, which we saw at The American Players Theater yesterday.



The 1920 play is set just before World War I. The line "But how can you love a liar?" is spoken by the rich bohemian woman Mrs. Hushabye, and the line that follows it is spoken by Ellie, a poor young woman who is in love with Mrs. Hushabye's lying husband, Hector. Ellie intends to marry a rich capitalist, Boss Mangan.

Mangan, trying to extricate himself from the planned marriage, reveals what a liar and a cheater he is, but Ellie still wants to marry him. She says:  "If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all, Mr Mangan."

Hector explains his behavior:

HECTOR. What am I to do? I can't fall in love; and I can't hurt a woman's feelings by telling her so when she falls in love with me. And as women are always falling in love with my moustache I get landed in all sorts of tedious and terrifying flirtations in which I'm not a bit in earnest....

Mangan reaches a breaking point and declares he's getting the hell out of the house, "Heartbreak House," where all the action takes place. Hector makes a move to go too and to turn it into a ridiculous romantic escapade:

HECTOR: Let us all go out into the night and leave everything behind us.

MANGAN. You stay where you are, the lot of you. I want no company, especially female company.

ELLIE. Let him go. He is unhappy here. He is angry with us.

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go, Boss Mangan; and when you have found the land where there is happiness and where there are no women, send me its latitude and longitude; and I will join you there.

I thought you might enjoy those lines. There's much more, of course. Shaw was writing a play deliberately in the manner of Anton Chekhov. Note the seagull on the set in my photograph (at the middle of the right edge).

Chekhov famously said "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there" (and "The Seagull" is the Chekhov play with the last-act gunshot). So when Captain Shotover brought out a box of dynamite to tinker with in Act One, I figured Shaw meant us to see the Chekhov joke and to expect an explosion in the next act. We're expected to anticipate the whole lot of them blowing up and to contemplate, throughout, whether that isn't what they all deserve.

AFTERTHOUGHT: What is the difference between "escape" and "escapade"?

"Escape" + "ade" suggests a drink that produces escape.

Yes, I know that's not right! Do you expect me to look it up in a dictionary?

Speaking of drink, Captain Shotover (a very old man) speaks often of "the seventh degree of concentration," which seems to be some mystical state that he learned about in his seafaring journeys, some 1920s New Age-iness. Late in the play, Ellie declares:

ELLIE. There seems to be nothing real in the world except my father and Shakespeare. [Hector]'s tigers are false; Mr Mangan's millions are false; there is nothing really strong and true about [Mrs. Hushabye] but her beautiful black hair; and Lady Utterword's is too pretty to be real. The one thing that was left to me was the Captain's seventh degree of concentration; and that turns out to be—

CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Rum.

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"I reported the Bloomberg article to Facebook as 'False News.'"

Writes John at Facebook, linking to a Bloomberg article with the headline, "Kavanaugh Wrongly Claims He Could Legally Drink in Maryland."

From the hearing transcript:

My friends and I sometimes got together and had parties on weekends. The drinking age was 18 in Maryland for most of my time in high school, and was 18 in D.C. for all of my time in high school. I drank beer with my friends. Almost everyone did. Sometimes I had too many beers. Sometimes others did. I liked beer. I still like beer..

That does suggest he drank beer when he was underage, but I don't see him claiming that it was legal.

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"Kavanaugh’s ‘choir boy’ image on Fox interview rankles former Yale classmates."

WaPo reports on the inner feelings of a large group of human beings.

"... rankles former Yale classmates." There should at least be a "some" in that headline: rankles some former Yale classmates.... 

They're purporting to talk about a set of persons that includes thousands. I'd say "hundreds" if it was only Yale Law School, but this is about Kavanaugh's college years. Within such a large group, of course, you're going to find people who are rankled by Kavanaugh's self-presentation as a paragon of virtue. That would naturally happen even if this weren't a situation where many — most? — people are motivated by larger political goals.

I'm torn between wanting to say how can the Washington Post know what's going on in the nervous system of the set "former Yale classmates" and thinking it's completely obvious and unspecial for almost anyone to be annoyed or suspicious about anyone who tries to put himself across as good to the core. I've said the same thing myself a couple times: When someone relies heavily on his own purity, it makes me wonder about the dark side. Surely, if Kavanaugh were a fictional character, he'd be a secret monster. What's he hiding behind his humble visage?

The WaPo article quotes, first, Liz Swisher, "who described herself as a friend of Kavanaugh in college":

“Brett was a sloppy drunk, and I know because I drank with him. I watched him drink more than a lot of people. He’d end up slurring his words, stumbling,” said Swisher, a Democrat and chief of the gynecologic oncology division at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “There’s no medical way I can say that he was blacked out. . . . But it’s not credible for him to say that he has had no memory lapses in the nights that he drank to excess.”

She's a doctor, and there's no "medical way" to say he had blackouts, but she says it anyway, in the form of saying that he can't say that he didn't. Swisher swished that around nicely, not putting her medical credibility at risk at all.

Lynne Brookes, who like Swisher was a college roommate of one of the two women now accusing Kavanaugh of misconduct...

Whoa! I'm surprised that this roommate-of-an-accuser status is revealed only after I've digested Swisher's semi-medical diagnosis.

... said... “He’s trying to paint himself as some kind of choir boy,” said Brookes, a Republican and former pharmaceutical executive who recalled an encounter with a drunken Kavanaugh at a fraternity event. “You can’t lie your way onto the Supreme Court, and with that statement out, he’s gone too far. It’s about the integrity of that institution.”

What's the lie? Kavanaugh admitted he drank. But Brookes is "a Republican," but her assertions are intemperate. The lie in question I infer, reading on, is that Kavanaugh denied ever suffering memory lapses from drinking.

I'm looking to see if there are any other classmates in the set of those rankled by the choir boy image. No. And really, only Brookes spoke in those terms.

Finally, I get back to Swisher and Brookes. Both were roommates with Deborah Ramirez (the woman who told The New Yorker that Kavanaugh exposed his genitalia near her face during a bout of drinking).

The key question, I infer from the text, is not whether the "choir boy" imagine rankled, but whether these women have any evidence of Kavanaugh suffering memory blackouts. I can see the WaPo reporters must have pressed these 2 women on the subject. How could they know? One way would be if they heard Kavanaugh say that he couldn't remember. We're told Swisher "could not recall a specific instance" like that.

But Brookes, Ramirez’s roommate for a year, said she was present one night when Kavanaugh participated in an event with his fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon. Brookes said she believes there was “no way” he remembered all of the behavior she observed that night, when fraternity brothers pushed pledges to get “ridiculously drunk” and do “ridiculous things.”

Why is there no way he remembered? It seems to be just another way to say he was really really drunk:

Brookes said she remembers seeing Kavanaugh outside the Sterling Memorial Library, wearing a superhero cape and an old leather football helmet and swaying, working to keep his balance.

He was ordered to hop on one foot, grab his crotch and approach her with a rhyme, Brookes said. He couldn’t keep balanced, she said, but belted out the rhyme she’s remembered to this day: “I’m a geek, I’m a geek, I’m a power tool. When I sing this song, I look like a fool.”

“It’s a funny, drunk college story that you remember — at least, I remember,” Brookes said. As she tracked his career over the years, and his rise in the federal court system, she said, “I thought it was so funny to think that’s the Brett who sang that song.”

Yeah, it's funny. But it doesn't mean he had a memory lapse. Or even that he was that drunk. He hopped on one foot, didn't he? All Brookes can say is that he wasn't "balanced." If you were so drunk that you'd necessarily suffer memory loss, wouldn't you fall if you tried to hop? Wouldn't you forget the lines of the rhyme? The inferences to be made from this story are not, I think, that he was blackout drunk, but that he was in thrall to some fraternal hazing.

The Post contacted Brookes and Swisher last week because they lived with Ramirez at different points during their undergraduate years. Neither returned calls or emails until Tuesday. Ramirez previously told neither of them about her allegation... but Brookes and Swisher said they believe her account.

Oh! So the real news here is that Ramirez's roommates won't corroborate her story! They say they believe her, but they were in a position to hear the story close in time to when it allegedly happened and they did not. Back before The New Yorker broke the story, they would not respond to calls and emails seeking to corroborate it. Only after The New Yorker's publication did they answer some questions, and they seem to have been led into bolstering the blackout drunk theory of why Kavanaugh is contradicting his accusers.

NOTE: This is the first post in a series of posts about Kavanaugh this morning. Comments on this post should only be about this article. Here's my post warning you that a series of posts is forthcoming. If you want to draw attention to other articles, do so in the comments section for that post, not this one.

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"The drinking was unbelievable," said Bernie Ward, who was the sex-ed teacher at Georgetown Prep in the Kavanaugh years...

... and who — according to "'100 Kegs or Bust': Kavanaugh friend, Mark Judge, has spent years writing about high school debauchery" (WaPo) —  "later spent two decades as a radio talk-show host in San Francisco and served six years in federal prison for distributing child pornography."

“It was part of the culture. A parent even bought the keg and threw one of the parties for the kids.”..,

[Mark] Judge wrote that he came to view Ward as an example of his school’s fall from Catholic orthodoxy and traditional discipline into a New Age emphasis on feelings and liberal notions about faith and politics.

Like Kavanaugh, Judge grew up in a Catholic Washington that formed its own social world, centered in the big old houses of Chevy Chase, Bethesda and Potomac.... The big houses were perfect for large Catholic families....

Judge spent two decades in Catholic education, from Our Lady of Mercy to Prep and on to Catholic University. But he came to believe that he had been “cheated out of a Catholic education,” failing to be assigned the great theological works, the rigorous texts he devoured later in life. Rather, he wrote in “God and Man” that at Prep he was “bombarded with drugs, alcohol, widespread homosexuality among the clergy.” The faculty at Prep, he said, had morphed from “tough guys” to “hippies and leftists.”...

“I was a Catholic illiterate kept that way in a Catholic school,” he wrote in “God and Man.”

Judge spent years struggling with his faith. He relished boxing with God, questioning and testing his beliefs. He read his father’s copies of books by G.K. Chesterton and Thomas Merton, works that embraced the mystery of faith, an idea that appealed to Judge’s belief that the most complete people are those who, as Chesterton wrote, have “permitted the twilight . . . with one foot in earth and the other in fairyland.”...

In 2003, a student named Eric Ruyak reported to school authorities that a Jesuit priest who was a teacher at Georgetown Prep had touched him inappropriately. Some Prep alumni, including Judge, rallied around the teacher, the Rev. Garrett Orr, according to several Prep graduates.

“Numerous alumni told me that Judge was going around saying I was emotionally unstable and a sexual deviant,” Ruyak said Thursday. “He told people that the only reason I wasn’t being expelled was my dad was a powerful lawyer and president of Prep’s board.”

An investigation by Jesuit authorities later confirmed Ruyak’s account....

Ruyak's name is familiar from this post, written earlier this morning (which expressed a desire for more articles like the one I'm blogging in here).

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