The Pernicious Double Standards Around Brett Kavanaugh’s Drinking
On Thursday, the testimony delivered by Brett Kavanaugh to the Senate Judiciary Committee took a turn that was at once unexpected and, the past week being what it has been, deeply predictable: Sheldon Whitehouse, the senator from Rhode Island, used a portion of his allotted questioning time to ask the Supreme Court nominee about the definition of the “devil’s triangle.” For most Americans who came of age in the same rough decades as Brett Kavanaugh, the term—included, along with Kavanaugh’s self-identification as a “Renate Alumnius” and references to kegs and ralphing and boofing, on Kavanaugh’s yearbook page—would seem an obvious reference to a sexual act. Kavanaugh, however, told the committee that his definition of the term was different. “Devil’s triangle,” he insisted, was merely a drinking game.
“Three glasses in a triangle,” Kavanaugh said. Like quarters.
If “devil’s triangle” is a game that, indeed, involves bouncing coins into cups, there was, as of Thursday afternoon, seemingly no evidence of this on the internet, when people watching Kavanaugh’s hearing, inevitably, checked. No evidence, that is, until shortly after Kavanaugh testified as to his personalized definition of the term. At that point, congress-edits, the Twitter bot that tracks updates made to Wikipedia pages from congressional IP addresses, recorded a change made to the Wikipedia entry for “Devil’s Triangle”: “‘Devil’s Triangle’: a popular drinking game enjoyed by friends of Judge Brett Kavanaugh.”
The edit might have been a clumsy joke; it might have been a flimsy attempt to corroborate an explanation, would seem to defy common sense. Either way, it was fitting: Thursday’s hearing, in its , was its own kind of clumsy joke, precisely because of its transparent display of reason-defying entitlements. The event—the raw but measured testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, followed by the rage-fueled indignations of Brett Kavanaugh—was a testament to the corroborative effects of power: the ease with which those who chair committees and run countries can rearrange the facts of the world until they conform to, and allegedly confirm, the tales told by the powerful.
