The False Binary of the ‘Choir Boy’ Defense of Brett Kavanaugh

“He’s trying to paint himself as some kind of choir boy,” Lynne Brookes, a former pharmaceutical executive who attended Yale, told The Washington Post on Tuesday of her onetime classmate Brett Kavanaugh. “You can’t lie your way onto the Supreme Court, and with that statement out, he’s gone too far.”

Senator Dianne Feinstein cited Brookes’s quotation at Thursday’s hearing about sexual-assault allegations against Kavanaugh, making for yet another use of the term after the Supreme Court nominee gave a Fox News interview on Monday he denied ever blacking out from drinking and mentioned being columnist Paul Krugman . The liberal judicial advocate Nan Aron that some of the judge’s peers “certainly don’t remember … Brett Kavanaugh as being a choir boy.” In response, Charles C. W. Cooke that Kavanaugh’s supposed “choir boy” image is actually a fabulation by the left: that the nominee himself has not used the term and has, in fact, acknowledged rowdiness in his past.