Everett Edward Kavanaugh Jr. was born in New Haven, Connecticut on June 9, 1941. It’s not too hard to figure out why he was born in New Haven. His father, Everett Edward Kavanaugh Sr., was not only born there but he also attended the city’s most famous institute of higher learning– Yale University.
Now, Brett Michael Kavanaugh, was not born in New Haven, Connecticut. He was born in Washington DC on February 12, 1965. It’s not too hard to figure out why Brett wasn’t born in New Haven, Connecticut like his daddy and granddaddy. That’s because his father Everett Jr. did not go to Yale. He went to Georgetown University. And then he got a job locally as a sales representative for the Northwestern Mutual Insurance Company where he worked for five years beginning in 1963.
Naturally, since Brett was not born in New Haven, Connecticut and his father did not actually attend that city’s most famous institute of higher learning, that means that Brett did not have any connection to Yale University.
Of course that’s nonsense, so when he testified under oath on Thursday that “I got into Yale Law School. That’s the number one law school in the country. I had no connections there. I got there by busting my tail in college,” he must have been making the rather pedantic point that while he was a legacy student as an applicant to the Yale undergraduate program, he was actually accepted to the Law School strictly on merit.
The thing is, Kavanaugh probably got accepted as a Yale undergrad without needing his granddaddy as a notch. It’s just that he likes to talk about his merit as a student at the strangest times:
SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (Yale University, Class of ’78): So the vomiting that you reference in the Ralph Club reference, related to the consumption of alcohol?
BRETT KAVANAUGH (Yale University, Class of ’87): Senator, I was at the top of my class academically, busted my butt in school. Captain of the varsity basketball team. Got in Yale College. When I got into Yale College, got into Yale Law School. Worked my tail off.
SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: And did the world “ralph” you used in your yearbook…
Several things were kind of great about this exchange, like the fact that Sen. Whitehouse’s grandfather, Edwin Sheldon Whitehouse, was a Class of ’05 graduate of Yale University which made Kavanaugh’s Class of ’28 grandfather a bit of a newb. And yet there Brett was demonstrating, one legacy to another, just how hard it is to explain away membership in the high school Ralph Club.
The problem, obviously, is that Sheldon is basically just a Protestant version of Brett. He knows it’s possible to crush your courses at an Ivy League school when you really only used to get juiced in it. He knows this because he witnessed it firsthand. And he also knows the look of a guy who did so many keg stands at Yale that his face is permanently blood-flushed.
BRETT KAVANAUGH (Yale University, Class of ’87): I like beer. I like beer. I don’t know if you do…
SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (Yale University, Class of ’78): OK.
BRETT KAVANAUGH: … do you like beer, Senator, or not?
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: Um, next…
BRETT KAVANAUGH: What do you like to drink?
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: Next one is…
BRETT KAVANAUGH: Senator, what do you like to drink?
SHELDON WHITEHOUSE: … Judge, have you — I don’t know if it’s “boufed” or “boofed” — how do you pronounce that?
BRETT KAVANAUGH: That refers to flatulence. We were 16.
Watching these Elis pretend not to know the meaning of boof and ralph made for some excellent theater for people like me who spent half my senior year at Princeton High School at parties with Princeton University seniors. It reminded me of the time I witnessed Brooke Shields (Princeton University, Class of ’87) hurl into a heavyweight Hefty trash bag on the front lawn of the Colonial Club after losing one too many points in Beer Pong.
Has anyone called her up to get the correct pronunciation of boof?
The sad fact is that Kavanaugh could have grabbed a woman during the proceedings and raped her in front of sll of the Republicans and they still would vote to confirm him.
THEY DO NOT CARE IF HE LIES, COMMITTED ASSAULT or IS AN ALCOHOLIC!
It should be obvious that the Republicans will not surrender on this. Barring a flip by Trump, this piece of lying trash will be voted onto the Supreme Court. The FBI is doing an investigation with its hands tied behind its back. The committee is not required to share the results once they’ve been reported. Key witnesses will not be interviewed.
This is Their Pick and they’ll die on this hill. Giving him up means they lose a big Trump promise, they lose a Judge who would vote to overturn Roe v Wade among other laws, and who would provide legal outs for Trump in upcoming possible prosecution. This is where McConnell, Grassley, Graham, and the rest wanted to seal the fate of the Supreme Court for generations.
Too bad they chose such a rotten guy. I’m still hopeful that the FBI, who was insulted and accused of bad dfaith by Trump, will somehow do so much due diligence that the Republicans cannot put Kavanaugh through, but I won’t bet on it.
Terrible man, terrible choice.
That is true but they will have succeeded in making the Supreme court corrupt for all time. After each ruling by him the Dems should just play the video of his melt down and Clinton conspiracy theories . It won’t change anything but it will make a point.
The “conservative” movement is willing to so politicize the Court that progressive areas of the country will ultimately have no choice but to refuse to respect its rulings. Especially when 4 of the sitting justices will have been nominated by popular-vote-losing (i.e. Repub) prezes, with 3 of them being confirmed by bare partisan majorities made up of states that represent less than 45% of the population. The Constitution has failed the nation; we do not remotely possess a democratic regime.
So the National Trumpalists (fka Repubs) are willfully and recklessly steering the nation towards the reef, gambling that they can impose their will nationwide without the consent of the governed, based entirely on respect for tradition and the “mystic chords of memory”.
As has been recently discussed here, it’s very unclear what the result will be. But “conservatives” obviously see the American left as meek pathetic sheep, who ultimately will accept anything, albeit with a little grousing. Since we don’t play hardball on anything, one can see why they are running this strategy.
The Intercept article Boo links to is a compelling and clear recitation of Kavanaugh’s many lies during Thursday’s out-of-control performance. As well as his aggressive, hostile, incoherent and emotional behavior.
The man could be squeaky clean in his life and that unhinged display at the hearing would be enough to disqualify him for a judgeship on any court, all the way down to traffic court.
If the definition of “boofed” fits, you must acquit…
Does have that OJ feeling, right down to the contempt for women
I like how you snuck in that Bob Dylan reference.
I believe I messed up my attempt to award you four stars.
I think it worked fine. Thank you. I haven’t had that many stars since third grade.
Flatulence jokes generally take hold among young boys aged 4-8.
Hey! Unfair! Lil’ Bart was a little socially delayed because he was working his tail off in Kindergarten!
Sure, but that was an outright lie. Boofing is not farting. It’s upchucking.
According to teh Google, boofing is inserting drugs into the rectum because blood vessels are close to the surface so the drugs get into the bloodstream fast.
Who, other than pathological liars, lies about anything as easy to check as the meaning of slang terms?
. . . in Princeton when booman was in h.s., nor what does it mean in the current vernacular per google or urban dictionary, but what did it mean to Bart’s cohort at Georgetown Perp in ’83?
But no, “flatulence” doesn’t pass the . . . er . . . smell test.
Full disclosure, I attended the Yale School of Music at the very tail end of the 60s and early 70s, well before the glorious restoration of true American manhood in the Reagan era. My educational background had been in the public schools and colleges of New York City and I got my masters at another municipal university. What I mostly saw in New Haven was … the SIXTIES. All that Frat and Skull & Bones stuff existed but it was very unhip and me and my friends had no connection with it. We did have parties, but the main refreshments at those events were not of an alcoholic nature. And I never heard the word boof until a few days ago.
So sick of the nation being in thrall to the products of Yale Law School. It certainly seems to shit out dozens of Federalist Society extremists. Too many legacies?
An analogy might be the tendency/strategy of the Habsburgs to keep marrying their first cousins. Ultimately you start getting quite a few mental defectives. Also, too, the various genetic difficulties arising in narrower and narrower strains of pure-bred doggies.
Enough with the pure-bred Yalies. The Court needs a few more mutts. The nation, too.
We could start by looking father west than the Hudson River for nominations to the court. There are alums from many highly respected law schools to chose from: Michigan, Chicago, Northwestern, Stanford, Minnesota, Berkeley, and others.
Even though Gorsuch was born in and ended up in Colorado, his education was strictly Ivy League (Columbia and Harvard), preceded by attendance at the now infamous Georgetown Prep.
The wonderful justice John Paul Stevens (a moderate Repub in 1975) was a grad of Univ of Chicago (BA) and Northwestern (JD).
It’s fucking blindingly obvious a Stevens-type justice is precisely what this country-destroying situation calls for, but of course we don’t have a statesman in the WH, we have an authoritarian imbecile. And the white male Repubs on the Judiciary Committee are frankly no better.
But the Federalist Society has probably made sure that a Stevens-mold sitting judge no longer exists. That organization’s role in destroying the federal courts (and ultimately the country) has yet to be examined in detail.
Now, now. Brooke might have just had a sensitive stomach.
The accepted phrase is weak stomach! weak!
That’s the ticket!
1987 lawn parties. Cheater Jones was playing on the lawn at Tiger Inn and they did a sick In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.
In 1986, apparently, they rocked Campus Club.
Cheater Jones did Tiger Inn in 1985, too. I was not in attendance for that one.
Watching the Kavanaugh testimony and reading credible accounts of his time at Yale, I finally get why an old friend who went there hated the place. I always thought he was insane. The campus is beautiful, the buildings beautiful, but Kavanaugh’s testimony makes it impossible to not notice that something’s rotten.
For me, discovering in middle school (when all of our neighborhood elementary schools converged) that I was from the other side of the tracks was traumatizing. I’d get invited by one particular friend to a party and his wealthy parents would come by with their Cadillac and pick me up. I’d be in a car with a bunch of kids from that part of town. We’d go do something great and have tons of fun. Then I’d be the first one dropped off in front of my parents’ 1300 square foot rambler and watch the Caddy drive off with all these happy kids. And rightly or wrongly, I’d imagine them going home to the same kind of enchantment the party had been. So even though my family was middle (working) class, I felt deprived.
Later on, working in the locker room at the Country Club on an old estate where the rich folks lived while classmates golfed in their tournament deepened that sense, as did the fact that it seemed everyone else could go to any college they wanted while I had to beg for financial aid.
I look back and think of all of that as very misguided. I was privileged in tons of ways. Certainly the most important ones. But I get now why I’ve been romanticizing places like Princeton and Yale. And I’m seeing how foolish, myopic and shortsighted that is.
So while I find Kavanaugh himself disreputable and the entire Republican party pretty much beneath contempt, and I’d love to see them all drown in a pool of kharma (or vomit or whatever), I’m grateful for their exposure of the fact that all that glitters is not gold.
Telephone lineman’s daughter here, graduate of a large public high school in a blue and white collar suburb; went to a Seven Sisters Ivy on scholarship, loans and campus jobs including waiting tables in my dorm’s dining room; and lemme tell ya, it was very clear even to a naive and sheltered girl what a vast gulf yawned between me and the legacy girls. It was in its own way quite as formative an education as what I learned from the curriculum.
Similar story here. Worked super hard in high school. Was in the top 3% of my graduating class competing against kids from very privileged backgrounds. Worked my butt off to learn the game but believed the BS about how it doesn’t help to study for the SAT.
No one believes that crap anymore but in those days we didn’t know any better. So the rich kids got coached and I went in cold. Scored 1260. Had I scored another hundred points higher, probably could have gotten full scholarships to the ivies (in those days). Today it seems they don’t consider need during admissions but the standards have gotten even higher and kids with perfect scores get rejected.
Alas, was rejected by many top schools and one never knows why but I’m sure my need for aid played into it. Looked like I was going to a state school and then Johns Hopkins took me off the wait list and gave me a full scholarship.
Hopkins medical school is second to none but among undergraduate institutions it’s not quite in a class with Harvard, Yale or Princeton. In those days it was not a particularly fun place to attend. They still graded on a C-curve. But I’m so grateful to have gotten the chance.
Part of the experience, like yours, was to walk on marble floors and look out through stained glass windows. The education was probably no better than a state school. There were plenty of wealthy jerks but by no means everyone. The cool thing about Hopkins was they were far more committed to merit-based admissions than most of the ivies. The result was they took a lot of Jewish kids from New York (like me) and a lot of Asian kids.
I do not know the meaning of “boof” or “ralph” but, then, I attended public schools.
Even where I grew up in Hawaii in the 1980s (`85 high school grad) “boof” and “ralph” were both well known (and onomatopoeiac) euphemisms for puking.
onomatopoeiac
oaguabonita is gonna LOVE that word. Well done!
boran2 (SUNY at Oneonta, class of ’79): Too much ivy will make one gag.