Take me out to the ball game

A crucial fact that’s been revealed about Brett Kavanaugh gradually over the last couple of months, and then undeniably over the course of the last week, is that he lies all the time about everything.  Scott posted about this devastating compendium, put together by Nathan Robinson, but I wanted to highlight what has turned out to be a completely characteristic example that popped up this weekend, after Robinson’s analysis appeared.

During his testimony on Thursday Kavanaugh claimed that he got into Yale the new-fashioned way: “I have no connections there,” he said. “I got there by busting my tail.”

This is just another flat-out lie.  Kavanaugh’s grandfather was a Yalie, which makes Kavanaugh a legacy admit.  What I find particularly revealing about this lie is that it’s absolutely unambiguous (it’s utterly incredible that Kavanaugh didn’t know or had somehow forgotten that his grandfather was a Yale man), and also incredibly easy to catch.  Kavanaugh isn’t just a guy who shades the truth from time to time — which needless to say would still be a huge problem for a judge testifying before the Senate. Rather, he appears to be a compulsive pathological liar.

Which brings me to this small matter, that somehow continues not to get anything like the attention it deserves. This is from a three-week old WAPO story:

Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh on Wednesday described in detail how he regularly bought Washington Nationals tickets and split the cost with friends — purchases the White House has said led Kavanaugh to accrue tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt.

The Washington Post reported in July that Kavanaugh ran up credit card debt that the White House has attributed to his purchasing pricey season tickets for himself and a group of friends. The nominee’s friends have since repaid Kavanaugh — an avid fan of the Nationals baseball team — according to the White House, and the issue did not surface during his two days of public questioning before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But the issue arose in written follow-up questions submitted by members of the committee, and Kavanaugh submitted his answers in writing late Wednesday.

In explaining the debt to members of the committee, Kavanaugh noted that he is a “huge sports fan” and said that he bought four season tickets annually from the Nationals’ arrival in Washington in 2005 until 2017. He also bought playoff packages in 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2017.

He split the tickets with a “group of old friends” through a “ticket draft” at his home, Kavanaugh said.

“Everyone in the group paid me for their tickets based on the cost of the tickets, to the dollar,” Kavanaugh said in the written responses to the Senate Judiciary Committee that were made public Wednesday. “No one overpaid or underpaid me for tickets. No loans were given in either direction.”

In 2016, Kavanaugh reported between $60,000 and $200,000 in debt, according to his financial disclosures, which was spread out over three credit cards and a loan. The debts were either paid off or dipped below the reporting requirements the following year.

But Kavanaugh signaled that his debt at the time was far lower than $200,000, saying in his written responses Wednesday that his debt was “not close to the top of the ranges” he reported on the financial disclosures.

Even if you knew nothing else about Kavanaugh, that story would smell real bad.  It’s massively implausible on its face — who carries the credit card interest rate float on between $60,000 and $200,000 worth of entertainment purchases for his friends?  Kavanaugh’s story isn’t just that he made the initial purchases of these tickets for such massive amounts, which would be questionable by itself, but that he was carrying enormous amounts of revolving credit debt for the benefit of a bunch of “friends,” who were apparently in no hurry to pay the huge amounts of money they owed to a judge on the nation’s second most important appellate court.

But now we do know a lot more about Kavanaugh.  The man is a brazen liar.  This story is bullshit, and it’s covering up something somewhere between very unseemly and extremely criminal.