"Kavanaugh had been deluged with advice until the end. His Bush friends, by and large, told him ... not to show too much emotion. But he received calls from a few senators encouraging him to show his righteous indignation."

Fox News reports on what's in the forthcoming book "Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court" (by Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino). Most of what's in that link is material I knew from following the hearings. There's a bit of behind-the-scenes about Kavanaugh's preparation for the hearing.

The Daily Caller has "New Book On Kavanaugh’s Confirmation Has Incendiary Allegations About Christine Blasey Ford," which seems to offer something more revealing, but I'm so dubious about Daily Caller headlines. I'll read this, though (and it can be a test of whether The Daily Caller is as bad as I think it is). Incendiary Allegations?

In “Justice on Trial” authors Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino say unnamed peers accused Ford of drinking to excess and accosting boys with some regularity as a student at the Holton-Arms School, a contrast with press accounts that cast her as innocent and naive during that period.

Press accounts cast her as innocent and naive during that period?

“Female classmates and friends at area schools recalled a heavy drinker who was much more aggressive with boys than they were,” Hemingway and Severino write of Ford. “‘If she only had one beer’ on the night of the alleged assault, a high school friend said, ‘then it must have been early in the evening.’ Her contemporaries all reported the same nickname for Ford, a riff on her maiden name and a sexual act.”

I'm supposed to think of sex words that rhyme with "Blasey"?!

“They also debated whether her behavior in high school could be attributed to the trauma of a sexual assault,” the authors added. “If it could, one of them said, then the assault must have happened in seventh grade.”

The anonymous sources who shared those accounts were reluctant to come forward because “hostility to Kavanaugh made them fear for their livelihood if their names were attached to the stories,” the authors wrote.

Holton-Arms yearbooks the authors obtained provide a contemporaneous narrative about the school’s social scene. Like Kavanaugh’s own yearbooks from Georgetown Preparatory School, the Holton-Arms annual is replete with sexual innuendo and explicit references to underaged binge drinking, among other debauched themes.

“The pages that follow contain references to ‘Playboy Bunnies’ and things that are ‘X-rated’ as well as pictures of beer and rum,” Hemingway and Severino write of the 1982 yearbook. “The same volume boasts a cavalcade of off-color jokes about ‘furburgers vs. Cheeseballs,’ ‘6 Caucasian females, one Caucasian male,’ and ‘Halloween-whores,’ as well as a lewd riff on the ‘tube snake boogie.'”

“This depiction of Holton-Arms as Studio 54 on the Potomac may be nothing more than adolescent posturing, and only the alumnae can judge how accurately it reflects their social life in the early 1980s,” the authors write. “But it is clear that a lack of vigilance by the yearbook’s faculty adviser and bacchanalian extracurricular activities were by no means unique to Georgetown Prep.”

Kavanaugh’s Georgetown Prep yearbooks were subject to intense scrutiny in the press and before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Democratic Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy asked Kavanaugh to explain the “drinking and sexual exploits” described in his own yearbook entry during Kavanaugh’s second round of testimony. Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse followed on with more probing questions, asking Kavanaugh to explain references to “boofing” and “the devil’s triangle.”...

Interesting evidence to counterweight some of what was used against Kavanaugh — private school yearbook stupidities — but hardly "incendiary." It's evidence that could have been used but that wouldn't have proved enough to be worth the new troubles it would have opened up. The Daily Caller did a good job of showing us the actual quotes from the book. I'm irritated by the headline, but I'll give the Caller some credit. That was worth reading.

I can see why Kavanaugh and his advisers chose not to use that material, and the fact is he won. He won by defending himself strongly, not by attacking her. Whether attacking her was a losing strategy, we can't know for sure, but I think he was smart to reject that. If she were attacked, then her supporters (his antagonists) would have shown anger and outrage on her behalf — and it could have overshadowed the anger and outrage he was using in his defense. The anger and outrage on her behalf would have resonated with something that was already being used against Kavanaugh: The difficulty of reporting sexual assaults when victims find themselves turned into the accused.