Internet Sports Detectives Failed and Brett Kavanaugh was Confirmed
It’s done. Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed. Credible allegations of sexual assault brought by Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez didn’t matter. Less credible claims made by Julie Swetnick and camera-hunting attorney, Michael Avenatti seemed to backfire.
Even before the Blasey Ford allegation went public, there were lots of reasons to oppose Kavanaugh as not exactly Supreme Court material. I mean sure, all judges stray from the politically impartial ideal at times, but partiality was where Brett Kavanaugh lived. Check out his resumé: Whitewater, Bush 2000, Team Bush on Bush v. Gore, and then on to the Bush Administration where he met Bush’s personal secretary, Julie Estes, and became an Estes alumnus—relax, it’s a term used to show affection—and eventually did marriage-and-kids post-graduate work.
Kavanagh may have even been involved in conjuring up some legal mumbo-jumbo to justify torture,[1] but we can’t say for sure, since the Trump White House wouldn’t release reams of documents about Kavanaugh’s time there. And then there’s all the lies Kavanaugh told. So many lies.
It looked like a really weird lie was thrown on the pile when Kavanaugh got to bat last and testified after Blasey Ford on September 27th. He was questioned about comments he had made in a 2014 speech, in which he bragged about stumbling onto the steps of the Yale Law School at 4:45 in the morning, after a night of carousing during and after a Red Sox game. When asked about it, Brett got all baseball-nerdy. Trying to change the subject of how wasted he got, he just kept droning on about baseball. He said it was a glorious a night at Fenway with Roger Clemens on the mound for the Sox and George Brett out in left field for the Royals.
Wait, what? You just testified under oath that George Brett was playing left field?
Check and possibly mate. Because George Brett was one of the greatest third basemen of all time and is synonymous with the position. I mean, sure when it came time to cast the episode of The Simpson’s where Mr. Burns stacked the company softball team, Wade Boggs got the nod.[2] But George Brett is almost as synonymous with third base as he was with pine tar and hemorrhoids.
We had him!
We didn’t have him.
My Internet investigation took about fifteen minutes. With the info Kavanaugh gave in his speech, I figured out that the game he was talking about was played in 1990. And it was right there, in a May 24, 1990, box score.[3] George Brett really did play left field. According to the box score, he even threw a guy out at third!
George Brett played in the outfield 22 times in his career. In a New York Daily News article, George explains “What they would do with me sometimes is, if we had an outfielder that maybe crashed into a wall or had a sore hamstring, or sore knee and it wasn’t going to be enough time [out] to be on the disabled list, a lot of times they put me in left or right field and let a utility infielder play third base,”
George also said he wishes the he and Kavanaugh could have gone for beers after the game.
Which may have gone something like this:
George Brett: You’re going to be on the Supreme Court!
Brett Kavanaugh: I can’t feel my face.
But even if Brett Kavanaugh was too busy throwing up to see George Brett throwing out, he does love baseball. A lot. He even reported that he may have run up somewhere between $60,000 and as $200,000 in debt—from buying Washington Nationals baseball tickets.
Something felt off. No one likes going to baseball games that much. Did he not know the games were on TV?
We had him!
We didn’t have him.
This baseball tickets never came up at the confirmation hearings. Even though Kavanaugh’s debt magically disappeared seemingly overnight. And the Internet Detectives and actual journalists could never quite piece it together.
Brett Kavanaugh is big basketball fan too. Sure, he and Mark Judge got too hammered to know who won the Louisville-Georgetown 1982 Final Four game , [4] but he’s a big believer in bring-your-daughter’s-basketball-team to-work- day. And stop me if you’ve heard this one, but in 1985, Kavanaugh even (allegedly) started a bar fight with a townie name Dom Cozzolino after a UB40 concert, and future serviceable NBA big man (and Republican Gubernatorial candidate) Chris Dudley leaped—probably not that high—to his defense. Dudley “allegedly” smashed a pint glass on Cozzolino’s head. Supposedly, the fight started because Kavanaugh was staring at Cozzolino. Because he thought he looked like the lead singer of UB40.
We had him! All the Senate Judiciary Committee had to do was ask 2018 Dom to bring some old pictures so we could compare them to Ali Campbell, see no resemblance, and prove to the world how much of an blind-drunk alcoholic Brett Kavanaugh must have been.[5] But for some reason, this never happened. And for some reason, the Twitter version of this never happened either.[6]
So all we’re left with from this whole debacle is one nearly perfect story: a frat bro, a guy named Dom, and UB40 inspired violence. The only thing I’d is I’d change is I’d have Bill Laimbeer or Christian Laettner be the 3rd guy in. So I’ll probably will change that part when I tell people about this at parties. And at least that’s something. Even if we can’t change the fact that a radically pro-corporation, anti-environment, anti-labor, probable sexual-assaulter just got a lifetime appointment to be the kind of bench warmer that actually makes a difference.
[1] Karl Rove says all policy decisions went through Kavanaugh.
[2] Probably because he could drink more beer than Brett Kavanaugh and George Brett combined!
[3] Lots of other people figured this out too. It was all over Twitter. And we’re all very proud/embarrassed.
[4] Hopefully it’ll be on ESPN Classic someday.
[5] Under Senate Rules, Kavanaugh would still have been allowed to perform “Red Red Wine” as a challenge song.
[6] That I know of.