Brett Kavanaugh's Calendar Is Just the Latest and Dumbest Non-Defense He's Cooked Up

Apparently, the next step in the ongoing sham of Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation process is to formally introduce The Calendar. Both the judge and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who has alleged he attempted to rape her when she was 15 and he was 17, have submitted pieces of evidence to the Senate Judiciary Committee ahead of a hearing Thursday. Here is what Kavanaugh submitted in his defense:

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From the jump, the calendar has stood out as particularly dumb amid an avalanche of braindead Kavanaugh strategies. (His primary M.O. seems to be to lie extravagantly, and in easily disproven fashion, about pretty much everything.) He produced the documents on the pretense that they did not feature any event titled Underage Drinking Party, or Kegger Where I Assaulted Someone, and that this somehow exonerated him. It's like John Dillinger producing a movie ticket stub to prove he wasn't robbing a bank that day.

Some Internet sleuths have already fixated on July 1—"go to Timmy's for ski's w/ Judge"—as a reference to the 1980s-chic term "brewskis," but does that really tell us much? At this point, anyone with a brain knows Kavanaugh was drinking, hardly out of the ordinary for a 17-year-old. The calendar proves little beyond that, except that Kavanaugh spent an awful lot of time with Mark Judge, the classmate who went on to write multiple weighty tomes about his drunken escapades with high school friends—including a "Bart O'Kavanaugh"—and who has some interesting views on women and their relationship to men.

Judge was recently found hiding out in a beach town in Delaware, apparently on the advice of his lawyer. He refuses to speak to reporters or testify before the Senate, though he could easily be subpoenaed, which Republicans in the majority have flatly refused to do. Ford says Judge was in the room during her assault, laughing with Kavanaugh as the latter tried to tear her clothes off and covered her mouth when she tried to scream.

That's a reminder that Ford included a witness who'd naturally be lined up against her when recounting her story—an unusual tactic for someone fabricating an allegation. If the story is false, Judge would be ideally placed to refute it. It's almost like Republicans aren't interested in actually finding out what happened—which may be why they won't get the White House to ask the FBI to reopen its background check investigation into Kavanaugh in order to look into the allegations. They have, however, hired a female questioner, Arizona prosecutor Rachel Mitchell, to question Ford—a clear strategy to avoid creating footage of 11 old, white Republican men badgering a sexual assault victim. It's worth remembering they had to find a woman from outside because they appointed no Republican women to serve on the committee.

On the flip side, Ford has produced sworn declarations from four people—one of whom is her husband—to corroborate her allegations, according to USA Today. Here's an example:

In her declaration, Adela Gildo-Mazzon said Ford told her about the alleged assault during a June 2013 meal at a restaurant in Mountain View, California, and contacted Ford’s attorneys on Sept. 16 to tell them Ford had confided in her five years ago.

“During our meal, Christine was visibly upset, so I asked her what was going on,” Gildo-Mazzon said in her declaration. “Christine told me she had been having a hard day because she was thinking about an assault she experienced when she was much younger. She said she had been almost raped by someone who was now a federal judge. She told me she had been trapped in a room with two drunken guys, and that she had escaped, ran away and hid.”

So from Ford, we get evidence she has told a consistent story for years, well before Kavanaugh was a nominee for the highest court in the land. From Kavanaugh, we get a calendar and that ridiculous Fox News interview, where he pretended to have been the squeakiest of squeaky-clean Boy Scouts whose activities were largely limited to studying and church and community service.

It turns out that self-caricature was a bridge too far for the judge's classmates at Yale, who stormed into the public record via The Washington Post to call this charade what it is:

“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 [Liz] 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.”

Lynne Brookes, who like Swisher was a college roommate of one of the two women now accusing Kavanaugh of misconduct, said the nominee’s comments on Fox did not match the classmate she remembered. “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.”

Like the president who nominated him, Kavanaugh seems not just to lie, but to revel in the act of extravagant lying. If Trump seeks to exercise power over the truth itself, Kavanaugh at the very least likes to feel the rush. (Elsewhere, there's reason to believe Kavanaugh lied under oath while testifying before Congress. Meanwhile, his shady financial history has gone almost completely unexplored, but his explanations don't add up.) Kavanaugh could easily have conceded he made mistakes when he was younger—but no. He insists he was a saint. It's a nod to the fact that he only needs The Base to support him, and make it politically palatable for Republican senators to vote for him, to make it through.

There's some proof already that he's right:

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29 percent of Americans want this guy on the Supreme Court even if he sexually assaulted someone. Presumably, the fact he's an obvious Republican operative who will accomplish goals for the conservative movement outweighs any of that.

It's worth summarizing, however, where we stand—even if it won't make a difference to nearly a third of the country. Dr. Ford has a consistent story she's told friends for years. She's produced four sources to corroborate that story specifically. She has called for an FBI investigation from the beginning to get to the bottom of this. Kavanaugh and his allies have shifted their defenses constantly. His friend, whom Ford named as a witness to the event, is hiding out in the middle of nowhere. They have steadfastly opposed the FBI looking into the event. But they do have a calendar.

Jack Holmes

Senior Staff Writer

Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a show about solutions to the climate crisis.