Huffpo: Brett Kavanaugh’s Testimony Was A Spectacle Of Angry Male Bonding

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testified Thursday about allegations dating back to his days as a high schooler. And he really got into the role — in the hearing room he was that arrogant white prep school boy, grounded before Beach Week and fuming. It wasn’t hard to imagine a younger Brett, all prickly entitlement, barking to his parents about the injustice of being told he can’t go boofing on the shore with Squee.

During his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the allegations of sexual assault made against him by Christine Blasey Ford, Kavanaugh harangued the committee in a plaintive squawk. He seemed perpetually on the verge of tears ― especially, for some inscrutable reason, when he lovingly recalled how well-organized his father’s daily calendar was ― yet also incandescent with partisan fury and petulance about the injustice being done to him.

And Republican men, from pundits to the president, apparently reveled in it. Those in the room, such as Sens. Lindsey Graham, Orrin Hatch and Ben Sasse, used their questioning time to apologize fulsomely to the judge and to shout imprecations against government overreach, Democratic perfidy and the great cruelty being done to Kavanaugh by investigating credible assault allegations against him prior to confirming him to a lifetime seat on the highest court in the nation.

Kavanaugh’s testimony stemmed from accusations of a male bonding session gone too far. On Thursday, the nation saw another one, of another kind, in progress.

The torrent of allegations and recollections about Kavanaugh’s high school and college days has been a grim reminder of how cruelly girls and women suffer at the hands of boys and men who bond by laughing at their expense. During Kavanaugh’s testimony, we saw an equally ugly mirror image: men bonding through performative anger and hostility ― again, at the expense of women.

Where Blasey, soft-spoken and gracious, assiduously courted the goodwill of both Republican and Democratic senators ― laughing at their jokes, patiently allowing them to complete questions and graciously asking for clarification when she didn’t understand them, apologizing to them for any inconveniences or misunderstandings ― Kavanaugh burst into his testimony with a pout screwed to his flushed face, the look of a man who has just discovered his S-Class has been keyed. He was ready to brawl ― elementary-schoolyard style, with gratuitous sniffling and eye-rolling. He accused Democrats in his opening statement of executing “a calculated and orchestrated political hit,” perhaps as “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.”

When Democratic senators ― four of them women ― questioned Kavanaugh, his physical reactions were bizarrely juvenile; he squirmed and grimaced and made wounded eyes much like an aggrieved 8-year-old denied a long-awaited trip to Dairy Queen because he shoved his sister. He interrupted their questions to complain, in tones rising nearly to a shout, that these allegations were “sprung” on him at the last minute, or to ask them forlornly if they also liked beer.

In one particularly insolent exchange, he responded to Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s question as to whether he’d ever drunk so much that he couldn’t remember the next day what had happened by turning the question back on her ― twice. Needless to say, whether the Minnesota Democrat has ever been blackout drunk bears no relevance to Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court appointment, nor was it Kavanaugh’s place to ask her questions during the hearing. (After a brief break, having perhaps been informed that the optics on this were spectacularly poor, he reopened the hearing by apologizing to her.)

But Kavanaugh, like Blasey, was courting the goodwill of his audience ― at least of the audience that mattered to him. Where her anger would have irritated and alienated them, his braced them. Robin Lakoff, professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, characterized his behavior as “hostile, angry, bullying, uncooperative,” and noted in an email to HuffPost that “when a man, especially a powerful and entitled one, acts that way, it strengthens him in the eyes of many: he’s manly, strong, and credible.”

Trump, a summa cum laude graduate of this particular school of masculinity, reportedly disliked Kavanaugh’s restrained, anodyne interview Monday on Fox News. The judge’s little-boy-in-a-big-suit tantrum was transparently pitched toward the president, and reports indicate that it worked.