October 1, 2018

Slate — at the behest of my son John — corrects a false accusation that Kavanaugh lied.



Here's a link to the tweet.

Here's the follow-up correction tweet:
On 9/12 I criticized @thinkprogress for a headline claiming that Kavanaugh "said" he'd overturn Roe. On Friday I made the same mistake, writing that Kavanaugh "claimed" he was legal to drink in HS. Thanks to @jaltcoh for catching my error.
That thanks @jaltcoh (my son) and links to the correction at Slate, where the article is still called "Kavanaugh Lied to the Judiciary Committee—Repeatedly."
Update, Sept. 30, 2018: This article originally said that Kavanaugh “claimed that his beer consumption in high school was legal because the drinking age in Maryland was 18.” Kavanaugh’s exact words were: “The drinking age, as I noted, was 18, so the seniors were legal, senior year in high school, people were legal to drink, and we—yeah, we drank beer.” These words could imply that his beer drinking at age 18 was legal, which would be false, since the drinking age in Maryland was raised to 21 before he turned 18. Alternatively, they could imply that his drinking at age 17 was understandable, if he was with 18-year-old seniors who were legal at the time. In keeping with the standard applied to others, it’s incorrect to report that Kavanaugh “claimed” his beer consumption that summer was legal. Therefore, the sentences have been removed.

75 comments:

tim in vermont said...

In keeping with the standard applied to others,

But just this one time, mind you!

DeepRunner said...

Bravo to your son. Doubt that it matters to libs and their illiberalism, but...good all the same.

Don't suppose he could do the same for the cartoon of shame, could he?

Bay Area Guy said...

Addressing and correcting the small stuff -- great! But nobody cares that high school kids sometimes drink alcohol, regardless of the legal drinking age.

Why not address and correct the big stuff?

1. Dems love Roe v Wade
2. Dems think BK is the 5th vote to overturn Roe v. Wade
3. Because of 2, Dems want to sink BK's nomination through any means necessary.

jg said...

I wasn't sure how anyone could non-maliciously misconstrue K's statement, which has exactly the obvious reading your son points out. This is the level of thought we're dealing with, folks.

Big Mike said...

Good catch by John. Shame on Saletan he didn't catch it himself.

President-Mom-Jeans said...

Apparently your son is a far better person than you are. He must have gotten more of the decent human being genetics from his father.

Big Mike said...

@Bay Area Guy (4:02), I always felt that Kavanaugh would not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, but after what he's been through ... Can you say "self-fulfilling prophecy"?

Professional lady said...

Good for your son. Alan Dershowitz has an opinion piece in the WSJ today. Once again, to my surprise, I find that he and I are in agreement.

rcocean said...

And smoking MJ and taking cocaine was illegal in the 1970s and 1980s everywhere.

So why did Slate support Obama for President?

LilyBart said...

Alright John!

rcocean said...

Misstating 39 year old drinking laws isn't " a lie" unless its intentional

DC drinking age was 18. Could be Kavanaugh bought his beer in DC.

Bay Area Guy said...

@Big Mike,

"I always felt that Kavanaugh would not vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, but after what he's been through ... Can you say "self-fulfilling prophecy"?"

Right! But it's more a question of what the Left believes he will do, than what he will actually do.

Spiros Pappas said...

Kavanaugh is an alpha male! He'll strut his stuff and let the chips fall where they may (i.e., the Republicans getting slaughtered in the midterms by disgusted female voters).

rcocean said...

Its humorous the way the Left strains at these gnats like they matter.

Would Slate support Kavanaugh if he had been 100 percent accurate in every word? No. Would slate support kavanaugh if Ford had been shown to be a fraud? No.

Like the D's - who were going to vote 46-0 against him - the day he announced.

tim in vermont said...

I see that America’s Politico is back, but he’s no Mick.

Sebastian said...

Progs lying about lies! Who would have thought.

rcocean said...

Trump was brilliant in his press conference and has the Media whining about "Picking on Lady Reporters" and "Trying to blackmail" Democrat Senators.

Curiously, his attacks on Blumenthal were only mentioned in passing, since CNN/MSNBC don't want to discuss Da Nang Dick.

rehajm said...

This seems quite relevant today as the rapey stuff seems to be fading and the no boozebag supremes camp is ramping up.

Virgil Hilts said...

Yancey Ward and probably others posting on Atlhouse here have pointed to the work Margot Cleveland has done. https://twitter.com/ProfMJCleveland/with_replies
Really excellent and believable analysis of how and why Ford story evolved and kept changing in the way it did. Ford apparently used the Safeway reference in Mark Judge's book to rebuild the entire narrative.

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

Good catch, indeed!

In their defense, Slate knew it They just didn't expect their lie to get called out.

The Crack Emcee said...

Thumbs up to John, and now there's this:

Mitch McConnell says there WILL be a Kavanaugh vote this week

This week's going to get intense.

bagoh20 said...

Wait, wait, I haven't got my pants on yet. ~ The truth

Anonymous said...

Good for John. He is showing a lot more "cruel neutrality" than his mother in this instance.

Char Char Binks, Esq. said...

I lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is still putting on shorts like a little boy.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Crack I was about to post the same. I can see Flake running away scared from this - it's what he does . I think (hope?) Collins and Murkowski are stronger and have more common sense.

bagoh20 said...

I suspect the headline was written far before any justification was found or created. The left has a whole bunch of incriminating headlines that are passed out to writers to build a story on. Kind of a creative writing assignment for the whole class. If you put 1000 chimps at word processors, you can build a narrative.

Bay Area Guy said...

Okay, I confess. I admit it. I feel so low.

In high school, I, I, er, I drank beer. And slept with a female. It was awkward, but fun. I'm so sorry

In college? Well, I drank beer, too. Much more beer. Also, sometimes I drank enough to blow chunks. And, sometimes I drank with girls who also drank. The horror. It was like Footloose. We drank. And then we danced. We danced the night away. Kenny Loggins sang, so we danced, and drank. With girls. And the girls drank. Not so much beer, but wine coolers. And they sometimes wanted to make out. And, well, sometimes they wanted to "do it." I feel so bad. We did it.

So, it was a blurry haze of drinking, and dancing and fornication. The memories. Or was it fornication, then dancing, then drinking? I can't remember. The girls wanted to dance and drink. We were young. It was summer. Teenagers. Able to vote, but not able to drink. And so we danced.

Sloanasaurus said...

I always thought perjury required that one does “harm to the truth” in addition to being a false statement. Thus making a false statement about what a statute says doesnt do harm to the truth because you dont need the testimony to determine the truth.

So it was a stupid argument to begin with. Now on to the meaning of “boofing...”

tim in vermont said...

We have all had a thousand "good catches" like this. They are routinely ignored, the "errors," like "math errors" on a tax form, all seem to break in a single direction. So it's great that Slate did this this one time, but what they care about is spin.

The Crack Emcee said...

Khesanh 0802 said...

"Thanks Crack I was about to post the same."

You're welcome - I want to be first nowadays for obvious reasons - but I have a hard time understanding the attention Kavanaugh's high school exploits can hold over us when, just today, I featured 5 sisters who were all molested by the same Catholic priest, Africa Bambaataa - the man who started Hip-Hop - busted as a child molesting cult leader, and now the leader of NXIVM has been caught on audio tape saying something really revealing.

I just don't get it.

mccullough said...

Saying "the seniors were legal" should have been the first clue to Slate.

Not "we were legal." And he wasn't a "senior" until after Ford's (according to her most recent version) alleged assault.

The "seniors" were grandfathered in (as were the 19 year olds and 20 year olds). Kavanaugh and his friends who were born in 1965 (and after) were the first ones subject to the 21 drinking age. But the beer was flowing as it had in states like Wisconsin that had an 18 year old drinking age for a long time. Anyone's older brother or sister could get them beer easily.

tim in vermont said...

BTW, did he claim anywhere that he was uniformly a sweetheart when he was drunk?

DeepRunner said...

Flake will vote present or will oppose if there is a vote

Jim at said...

The fact the left continues to split hairs over such trivial bullshit reveals they've got nothing.

Zip. Nada.

tim in vermont said...

What they are trying to do is create the "truth" that he MUST have blacked out when drunk. I have been awfully drunk, passed out in the bathroom of the dorm drunk, passed out on a lawn on the way back to the quads drunk, so drunk I couldn't drink so much as a cup of coffee for a month for what it did to my stomach drunk, and I never blacked out, not even once. I wouldn't have minded to have blacked out some of those head spins.

They don't want him on the court, therefore he is a liar, seems to be the standard.

iowan2 said...

In college? Well, I drank beer, too. Much more beer. Also, sometimes I drank enough to blow chunks.

Yipee, you gave me the opening for a joke!

Sam enters the bar after work, takes his usual seat. The bartender spots him, "Hey Sam, let me bring you your Bud." No" Sam says " No bud." The bartender's confused " Sam, whats up? You're my number one Bud drinker, you come in here drink your Buds, never a problem, Why no Buds?"
"Gee, last night I left here and blew chunks." The bartender commiserates, "Don't take it so hard Sam, it happens, not uncommon to cross that line and blow chunks, happens to the best of us". Sam says "you don't understand, Chunks is my dog"

DeepRunner said...

What started out as an unverifiable assault has turned into get K on perjury for drinking too much.

Salem would be proud.

tim in vermont said...

Here is the Wikipedia entry for "Devil's Triangle" from before this controversy broke:

Devil's Triangle can mean one of the following six places:

Highway 62, 116 and 330. A curvy, dangerous route in the mountains of East Tennessee.
Bermuda Triangle: a location from the Bermuda islands to Miami, Florida to Puerto Rico and back to the Bermuda islands;
Devil's Sea: a triangular area south of Japan;
Another triangular area around Spain.
A mountainous area over Barrington Tops National Park, New South Wales, Australia that has taken at least 8 aircraft in the past, including VH-MDX.
UFO hotspot in California from L.A. to Long Beach to Catalina Island
It can also be in reference to a 1974 movie made by Richard Winer and narrated by Vincent Price called The Devil's Triangle and was used as a reference for the 1976 NOVA/Horizon episode called "The Case of the Bermuda Triangle'"


Of course now it's full of references to a MWM threesome. Roe v Wade is just not this important, People say there will be a play about this, but we already have The Crucible.

Henry said...

In regards to Leland Keyser, Kavanaugh made the same confusion between lack of corroboration and refutation that many of the right continue to make. It seems to me to be an exaggeration to call this a lie. In oral testimony lasting hours and covering a range of topics, Kavanaugh's summing up of Keyser's testimony is technically incorrect, but a reasonable approximation.

By Saletan's standard of lying -- the occasionally lumping of facts into a simpler, favorable, conclusion -- Saletan's column is full of lies.

For example, Saletan writes, "...Judge has admitted to drunken blackouts, which raises the possibility that Judge and Kavanaugh don’t remember what they did to Ford." As an argument, this is nonsensical. Judge's alchohol addiction has no bearing on Kavanaugh's memory. You could call this a lie. But I wouldn't. It's just a clumsy non-sequitur.

Saletan raises a valid issue when he questions Kavanaugh's refusal to countenance additional FBI investigation, but in that case, Kavanaugh wasn't lying. He was stating his own opinion.

wholelottasplainin said...

@tim in vermont:

See, the left doesn't want to use the phrase "passed out", because that would mean that BK wasn't in a condition to grope anyone. My own experience when I was a college kid was, you drank so much that you went somewhere to sit or lie down, and then you went into a deep sleep.

Yes, when you woke up you wanted to die, and your mouth felt like the Chinese Army had marched through it wearing sweatsocks, but while passed out you didn't do anything at all---except maybe pee your pants when your friends put your limp hand into luke-warm water. (what jokesters, eh?)

So the proglodytes prefer the term "blacked out", which allows them to claim that even if he didn't remember anything involving groping or "assault", he still "might" have done so.

Then they can demand investigations into the "might" part.

But they can't prove the "might" unless they have witnesses to BK actually being "blacked out" AND doing bad things. Being "belligerent" when drunk won't cut it, UNLESS they can also prove through witnesses that he had "blacked out" when he was being belligerent.

Let'em try to find those witnesses.

But if BK says he can't remember being belligerent when badly drunk, that will "prove" that he was "blacked out" and "could" have done other bad things.

Pretzel Logic: it's what the Left uses to destroy people.

Yancey Ward said...

He said repeatedly that he drank socially, and sometimes too much. Pretty much every young adult who drinks socially does exactly that. The questions he was asked over and over was whether he ever blacked out while drinking- doing things he doesn't remember, and he said that it hadn't ever happened. I eagerly await the mind-reading experts that prove those were lies. Go right ahead and die on that hill- I dare you.

Bay Area Guy said...

@Iowan2,

Funny!!

Is there a distinction between "blacking out" from alcohol and "going to bed"? The first seems sinister. The latter happens every night, even if you are drunk.

Yancey Ward said...

"Shame on Saletan he didn't catch it himself."

Saletan stuck it out there knowing it was incorrect, is my considered opinion, but was forced to call it back when he got called out on it. Lots of people do this- deliberately misunderstand what someone said and hope that no one notices, but instead runs with the misunderstanding themselves, thus spreading the meme.

rehajm said...

I have been awfully drunk, passed out in the bathroom of the dorm drunk, passed out on a lawn on the way back to the quads drunk, so drunk I couldn't drink so much as a cup of coffee for a month for what it did to my stomach drunk, and I never blacked out, not even once. I wouldn't have minded to have blacked out some of those head spins.

Dartmouth grad?

iowan2 said...

Black outs

I've posted this several times, but I still see people getting wrong. Blacking out, and passing out, are not the same thing. Black outs have nothing to do with the quantity of alcohol consumed. Some people could drink four oz of liquor (86 proof) in an hour and suffer from blackouts. Black outs are a total loss of memory of your words and actions, while seemingly coherent, A different person could drink until they literally pass out, and remember everything up until that moment.

Drago said...

Deep Runner: "Flake will vote present or will oppose if there is a vote"

To get his lefty/Soros payoff, Flake HAS to vote "no" and drag either Collins or Murkowski with him while simultaneously providing enough cover for red state dems to also vote "no".

Its a tall order but that LLR is up to it I'm sure.

Henry said...

Saletan is also guilty of this bit of wild exaggeration:

In fact, Judge has fled to a hideout in Delaware to avoid being called to testify.

If you follow the Saletan's link, you find this:

Barbara “Biz” VanGelder, Judge’s lawyer, said she instructed him to leave the D.C. area last week because of an onslaught of criticism and media questions.... VanGelder said Judge waited to leave town until after the hearing date and witnesses were announced.

Judge is hiding from the media, not a non-existent summons. Oy, Saletan, where's that "standard applied to others" that you be keeping?

Yancey Ward said...

And people routinely misconstrue the drinking laws- it is illegal to sell it to people under the age of 21, it is illegal to give it to people under the age of 21- and at age 18 when I was a teenager still.

I have seen alcohol being confiscated by the police from people below the age limit, and I know of them being arrested for all the same drinking crimes people over the age limit are- for example drinking and driving, public intoxication, etc. I have never heard of anyone being arrested for the simple act of drinking while under the age limit- not once. Is there even a statute on the books for that, and if so, is it ever used in prosecution?

Matt Sablan said...

And yet for months I'll hear how he should go to jail for perjury over this.

Francisco D said...

Professional writers who want to opine about what was said in the hearings ought to have actually watched the hearings.

Didn't that used to be an ethical standard in the media?

Yancey Ward said...

You just wait- the new meme will be-"Can Kavanaugh prove he didn't sleepwalk and try to rape people?"

What is particularly interesting to me is that by my memory, Althouse was the first to propose that perhaps Kavanaugh's denials might be explained by alcoholic blackouts. And now the entire Democratic Propaganda Apparatus is all-in with this idea 2 weeks later. Take a bow!

Bay Area Guy said...

In the 80's, we had a board game called, "Pass-Out" that we'd play in the dorms (of course, with the girls). I forgot how it went, I forgot who brought it, but we drank plenty of beer, eventually would pair off, make-out, and then "do it."

And we were only 18 or 19! OhMYGod!

Yancey Ward said...

You don't have to watch the hearings to get the statements right- all you gotta do is read the transcript- they have been available since early Thursday evening.

William said...

All this is skirting the real issue. He lied to the Senate. He tried to pass off a joke in his HS yearbook about butt fucking as a joke about farting. Do we really want on the Supreme Court of our land a man who practices such deceit?.......Why are Prof. Ford's inconsistencies called inconsistencies and Judge Kavanaugh's insights into HS yearbook humor called lies?

William said...

I just hope his little girl prays for his immortal soul. He made crude jokes in his high school yearbook.

Yancey Ward said...

On the assumption it wasn't snark, go boof yourself, William.

Jason said...

Why do Saletan and Think Progress put the correction at the very bottom of the article instead of at the top, below the headline, where it belongs?

(Note: Of course we know why. But I just tweeted that question to Saletan and would like very much for them to answer it.)

Seeing Red said...

All this is skirting the real issue. He lied to the Senate. He tried to pass off a joke in his HS yearbook about butt fucking as a joke about farting. Do we really want on the Supreme Court of our land a man who practices such deceit?.......Why are Prof. Ford's inconsistencies called inconsistencies and Judge Kavanaugh's insights into HS yearbook humor called lies?


You forgot sarcasm tags because I lmao at your post.

Language mutates. Book could have meant fart in the 80s.

I don’t 5hink you have teenagers. I my house we actually needed to talk face to face about word meanings, dating to this group means something different than my age group.

Boof is a new one on me.

How old was the person who who wrote the boof article?

What we have here is a generation gap.

Seeing Red said...

Boof could have meant.....

See kids today aren’t taught context. That started in the 80s. I was amazed how differently my cousin was taught HS history vs me in the 8 years between us.

William said...

Of course it wasn't snark. Who would ever be snarky about high school fart jokes. Some issues are just too important to joke about. I just hope that in the years since graduation, Kavanaugh has learned to treat flatulence issues with some respect. He'll be sitting in the same room with the formidable RBG, and this figures to be a sensitive subject. And if his jokes were about butt fucking, then that clearly disqualifies him from sitting.

Yancey Ward said...

Wasn't there a character named Boof in one of Michael J. Fox's early movies in the mid 80s?

pchuck1966 said...

How come Slate's errors rarely go the other way? Meaning, portrays Republicans in a favorable light.

Jupiter said...

Bay Area Guy said...
"Why not address and correct the big stuff?
1. Dems love Roe v Wade
2. Dems think BK is the 5th vote to overturn Roe v. Wade
3. Because of 2, Dems want to sink BK's nomination through any means necessary."

I don't think that's it. Roe vs. Wade is good red meat to rile up all the pussy-hatters who are too old to get pregnant anyway, but the Dems don't really give fuck-all about it. What they do care about is getting control of the Supreme Court. If they can do that, they will eliminate the first two Amendments immediately, and the remainder shortly thereafter. It is their fondest dream, and their only hope since Trump harpooned their Great White Whale. In 2016, they thought they were about to take over the country. Now they see themselves on the verge of at least another 15 years in the Outer Darkness, and they are ready to do anything to keep that door from closing. Anything.

iowan2 said...

Isn't the whole purpose of slang to give words different meanings? In my school, when a guy really messed up on the field or court, we would say a dropped a Kevin. (Kevin, our classmate went by the nickname Turd) Adult politicians in DC talking about bringing perjury charges against a Judge, sitting the second highest court in the land, for lying about the definition of slang, is an idiocy that cannot be grasped by mere mortals.

Milwaukie Guy said...

I'm having a recovered memory. Maybe not "recovered," but more like an old synapse firing.

When I was a junior in HS, 67-68, we had a samzidat, an "underground" literary magazine called The Catalyst. You see, our anti-war propaganda, poems and drawings were not acceptable to the official HS literary magazine.

One time our group put out a leaflet for an anti-war demonstration with a calligraphic scrawl up in the corner, "lick the corner. 1 in 100 will dance." The fascist administration accused us of passing out blotter acid. They really beclowned themselves with that.

Our drawings had Beardsley-style nudity and the poems reflected real-live teenage angst, from possibly getting drafted and killed in an Asian war to awkwardly fumbling with bra clasps, and worse. But, artistically.

One poem, by our editor Frank S, a senior, and his girlfriend, Sandy A, my class (in case anybody needs to know), wrote a nice poem two words by four lines, kind of haiku like. It started out "clouds faintly." The first letters spelled out cunt and fuck. Take that!

We only occasionally drank beer out with the jocks in the forest preserve (when in Rome, right?). We would nick hard stuff from the parents liquor cabinets and smoke weed. We were quite clever.

I denounce myself.

Etienne said...

English is a mongrel language. Lawyers are able to say things that you don't even know are confusing.

The jumble of noise enters your ear, goes down your Eustachian tube, follows your GI tract to your asshole, and makes a little poot-noise.

Other people on the bus say: "ahw-rite who da poot? Who da poot mofo?"

Howard said...

pootie-poot

Ken B said...

Saletan casts shade on jaltcoh's catch, coming up with a lame excuse. “Perhaps the cartoon was meant ... “

mikee said...

Etienne, Howard, may I correct you, with all due respect? The noise is a boof.

wholelottasplainin said...

Yancey Ward said...
Wasn't there a character named Boof in one of Michael J. Fox's early movies in the mid 80s?
***************

"Back to the Future"---but it was Biff

Yancey Ward said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Yancey Ward said...

Yes, in Teen Wolf- his girl was named Boof.

tim in vermont said...

Millennials have no idea of the kind of cultural silos we lived in before the internet. There was no way to even develop a common meaning for slang words unless they were on TV, which, for example “Devil’s Triangle” in the sense that they use it now, apparently, never was. It would be interesting if somebody could find an old version of Hustler that used the term, I suppose. Same with boof. I guess heterosexual anal sex was a thing back then with a small subset of the population, but I don’t remember a single person IRL talking about it ever, even in jokes. it was certainly not the culturally ubiquitous thing it seems to be now.

stlcdr said...

Too late. Not the point. To put out a lie and then retract it is like saying sorry for breaking your window by throwing a brick.

MAJMike said...

Okay. Let me understand this. Ex-President Light Bringer smoked dope and snorted coke in high school, but that's allowable.


Brett K drank beer and farted, but that's beyond the Pale.


Got it.