As one commenter put it elsewhere “He has been the anointed one for years.”

In essence Dr. Ford is speaking out at the end of a long process and I suspect for many of them, especially the people at the Federalist Society, this does feel like the 11th hour, but only because they’ve been preening Kavanaugh for decades.

Looking into Brett Kavanaugh’s career is like raking a heavy pile of leaves in November:  wet, overlapping, stuck and stuck together, almost impossible to shift, apparently the same, like snowflakes, but with a rancid smell that smothers new growth.

The path that career takes makes clear that Kavanaugh has always been a political animal.  The law was only a battleground and a means to a fundamentalist political end.

His grades were not in the stratosphere, like Kozinski’s, Whelan’s, and Roberts’s.  He spent more time getting drunk and getting laid, and currying relationships with would be patrons.

One was his basketball partner and Yale Law FedSoc rep, George Priest.  He is the John M. Olin professor of law and economics at Yale, an appointment that distills the essence of the neoliberal thought collective: the arch-conservative and obesely well-funded Olin Foundation, the neoliberal reconstitution of the law through handcuffing it to Chicago School economics, and FedSoc rep.

Kavanaugh took multiple, low-paid clerkships to work his way up the FedSoc ladder.  And he made partner the old-fashioned way – through patronage – rather than through expertise, client development, and billable hours.

Much of his work at K&E was politically charged, such as his pro bono representation of Elian Gonzalez in 2000.  He was a seven year-old Cuban refugee turned into flotsam as US relatives and a Cuban father waged an international custody battle.

Kavanaugh jumped ship shortly after making partner to join the BushCheney regime.  He started as a member of Alberto Gonzales’s WH Counsel’s office, where his relationship with Ed Whelan at the OLC paid off.

Remember the torture team?  Cheney and his eminence grise, David Addington, had offices in the West Wing and the Senate.  John Ashcroft was AG, Gonzales was WH Counsel, John Yoo and Ed Whelan were at the OLC.  They cooked up the torture scheme and Yoo issued the political fig leaf memos.

Kavanaugh then became staff secretary to Bush, reading whatever crossed his desk.  For the functionally illiterate Bush, that necessarily meant working closely with Bush whisperer Dick Cheney, while his appointment to the DC Circuit was being pushed through, which took from 2003 to 2006.

Brett Kavanaugh was at the heart of the BushCheney administration for most of its first six years, along with other, arch-conservative religious zealots, many of them funded by wingnut welfare.  No wonder the GOP wants to rush through his appointment and pretend that Kavanaugh’s voluminously documented record is not relevant to his public service or to his lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

Brett Kavanaugh would be the first person to throw away a woman’s control over her own body, or a couple’s right to privacy for their consensual adult sex, or for same sex couples to marry or routinely buy goods and services in the marketplace.

He will happily allow his favorite religions to use tax dollars to promote parochial interests at the expense of public ones.  And corporations, like the president, in his mind, should be bound to no restriction on their profitability or power.  So let it be written, so let it be done.

But it is a tad rich for the guy who wanted all of Congress and the voting public to know the precise geography of every dribble passed from Clinton to Lewinsky to refuse to answer questions about his money, gambling, and drinking because they impinged on his privacy.

Personal finances and behavior, for example, are essential to gauging the reliability and judgment of anyone nominated to high office.  Honey traps being what they are, and the keeping of promises being essential to good government, sexual conduct – notably adultery and affairs – is routinely assessed for security clearances.  Finances disclose judgment, prudence, risk tolerance, and potential for conflicts of interest.

Therapists and medical doctors also know that there are three things patients frequently lie to them about: how much they eat; how much they drink; and how often, with whom, and how they have sex.

Nominees are prone to do the same.  Investigating inconsistencies is an essential look at a nominee’s honesty and self-knowledge, and willingness to lie to protect themselves over doing their jobs.  The behavior is not often publicly relevant, but lying about it is.

i haven’t thought it thru, but the literature that first comes to mind from reading this is “lord of the flies”.

in my view of family, what the brats at georgetown prep and landon school needed was some serious fatherly, especially, and motherly parenting. these children-becoming-adults were allowed way too much license, had way too little parental supervision, yet really needed a great deal of affectionate but demanding parenting.

how many other unguided, pampered brats-turned-adults, like trump and kavanaugh, are there in our ruling class today?