Consider where we are

Brews Wayne, I believe, via DrunkenDorkPodcasts.

Consider where we are: It is now considered an outrage that there isn’t an FBI investigation into a Supreme Court nominee’s college drinking https://t.co/8Uf3AaLed0

— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) September 29, 2018

Maybe that's as good a place to start as any. Judge Kavanaugh is accused by various women described as "credible" (including by the president of the United States) as having perpetrated various revolting assaults on them when he was in a state of extreme drunkenness and by a range of witnesses of both sexes as frequently drinking to excess and getting notably aggressive and nasty when he does, including his own apology to a bunch of buddies—

pic.twitter.com/eIQXsOBA8F

— DavKat (@DavKat43) September 29, 2018

—and then denies under oath that he ever drinks to excess, while consistently evading more specific questions on the subject, even to the extent of turning them around on his questioners—"Have you ever had an alcoholic blackout, Senator Klobuchar?" "What do you like to drink, Senator Whitehouse?" I think the question is relevant on its face, I don't see how there can even be any question.

This is the man, by the way, who advised his boss, Kenneth Starr, to ply the president of the United States in his Special Counsel interview with questions such as,

6. If Monica Lewinksy says that on several occasions in the Oval Office area, you used your fingers to stimulate her vagina and bring her to orgasm, would she be lying?

7. If Monica Lewinksy says that she gave you oral sex on nine occasions in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?

8. If Monica Lewinsky says that you ejaculated into her mouth on two occasions in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?

9. If Monica Lewinksy says that on several occasions you had her give oral sex, made her stop, and then ejaculated into the sink in the bathroom off the Oval Office, would she be lying?

10. If Monica Lewinsky says that you masturbated into a trashcan in your secretary’s office, would she be lying?

What receptacles do you generally jerk off into, Judge Kavanaugh?

To be fair, he later said that that was "over the top", or rather allowed his then-colleague, Robert Bittman, to say it for him, for a story placed in The New York Times (Michael Shear and Adam Liptak) in early August, as part of the nomination rollout, where it was explained that he was actually against it, at least when it came to making the results of the interrogations public:

“Brett was an advocate against explicit detail,” said Paul Rosenzweig, who took the opposite position during the heated strategy sessions on the issue. Mr. Rosenzweig and others, including Mr. Starr, thought they needed to include the details to prove their case that Mr. Clinton had lied.

Mr. Kavanaugh thought the sexual narrative would undermine the credibility of the office, and he predicted that it would be immediately leaked to the press by members of Congress. He urged Mr. Starr to at least write a blunt letter urging them not to make that part of the report public.

Indeed, he didn't even want to be a part of the Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky phase of the investigation, having had his fill after spending two years and two million dollars trying to prove that Hillary Clinton had murdered Vincent Foster, or something like that, only all his friends on Starr's staff just wouldn't let him:

“We begged and begged and begged,” said Robert Bittman, the deputy counsel who led the Lewinsky prosecution for Mr. Starr. “He really liked big legal issues. That was my pitch to him. Eventually, he succumbed and came back.”

They were especially hot on how calm and judgelike he was, which may surprise anybody who saw video from Thursday afternoon:

“He’s always been a guy who is judicious in his comments,” said Sol Wisenberg, one of Mr. Kavanaugh’s colleagues at the time. “He’s not a shouter.”

But that's not even the point at all. For the FBI mini-investigation, the point is to resolve contradictions in the Judiciary Committee hearings, in which his drinking, not in the present but in his student days, and his weaseling out of questions on it at any price, are a key element in all the crimes he's alleged to have committed. The Committee really needs to know. Lowry's part in this, suggesting that there's no relation between the drinking and the crimes, is intended to deceive, and it's despicable.

There's an odd passage in that Times story on how Kavanaugh's changed his mind about interrogating presidents, suggesting he's learned exactly the wrong lesson:

“Like many Americans at that time, I believed that the president should be required to shoulder the same obligations that we all carry,” he wrote in a 2009 law review article, about 10 years after the Starr investigations ended.

“But in retrospect,” he said, “that seems a mistake.”

No, that wasn't a mistake at all. Presidents, and Supreme Court nominees, have the same obligations as everybody else. But no ordinary citizen would ever have been asked a question by federal investigators on a consensual affair with an adult over which no complaints, civil or criminal, had been raised, as Clinton was. Kavanaugh seems to have given himself the message that he didn't have to tell the truth about felony assault.