THREAD: Not the most important lie in Kavanaugh's testimony, but certainly the most obvious one. He claims that it was legal for him to drink in Maryland when he was in high school. But the state raised the drinking age from 18 to 21 when he was still 17, so he JUST missed out...
If he had turned 18 he would have been grandfathered in for legal drinking for the next three years. For someone who enjoyed beer and drinking culture, to be on the wrong side of the random legislative benchmark would be a distinct memory. Shit, missed it by THAT much...
...I was 21 at the University of Maryland at the time and I remember the venting of a couple young freshman who were screwed. Everybody near the breakpoint did the calculation. So now, under duress, what does Kavanaugh do? Does he acknowledge that he was close to legal...
...and tell the committee that he had friends and classmates who could legally purchase beer and who as a 17 year old hasn't had beers with 18 year old classmates? Does he incorporate the truth in the narrative? No, even here, he baldly lies and moves his birthday...
...on the arrogant assumption that no one will check, that the details won't matter, that facts can be massaged. It's a simple, stupid cheat. But it's a deliberate one. What does the man do on a larger, less verifiable matter -- that, say, a young woman was sexually targeted?
To be clear, even the matter in which he tells the lie is equivocal -- noting that he was a "senior," and that "seniors" had the ability to buy beer at the time. By equivocation, he tries to assert that he was of age, though only some seniors were old enough to drinking legally..
...but his dishonesty is made manifest even in the oblique use of phrasing. He knows he was 17. He knows the law was 18 and going up to 19 at enactment and another year for two years thereafter. He was underage. Why not say, I was close and I drank with classmates? No, he lies.
