Oscar Wilde once observed, “The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past while every sinner has a future.”
These wise words are utterly lost on Senate Democrats, Left-wing agitators, and their maids and butlers in the liberal media. As they degrade Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation into Hell on Earth, they ignore his 12 years on the federal bench and 306 judicial opinions. Instead, they obsess over his high school yearbook entries, adolescent alcohol intake, and the ice cubes he threw at a fellow bar patron in 1985.
Kavanaugh’s long-forgotten letter to seven Georgetown Prep schoolmates surfaced Tuesday. While organizing their 1983 visit to Ocean City, Maryland, Kavanaugh jokingly offered “a good idea…warn the neighbors that we’re loud, obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us. Advise them to go about 30 miles.”
This set critics’ tongues flapping.
“If you’re going to set yourself up to be a choir boy, there had damn well better be evidence that you are a choir boy,” CNN host Don Lemon scolded. Anchor Chris Cuomo added, “You better be able to sing.”
But Kavanaugh never claimed to be a choir boy. In fact, as the Senate Judiciary Committee dissected him on September 27, Kavanaugh mentioned “beer” or “beers” 46 times.
“Yes, we drank beer,” Kavanaugh testified. “My friends and I, the boys and girls. Yes, we drank beer. I liked beer. Still like beer. We drank beer.”
He and his pals, Kavanaugh admitted, “sometimes probably had too many beers, and sometimes other people had too many beers.”
Kavanaugh began keeping calendars “in ninth grade, in 1980.” They included, he said, “about what you would expect from a kid; some goofy parts, some embarrassing parts.”
But this sinner had a future.
Kavanaugh grew up, worked in President G.W. Bush’s White House, and served on the D.C. Circuit Court, arguably SCOTUS’ J.V. team.
Where would we all be if we were judged for life based on our 18-year-old selves?
Consider the man who penned these words.
“I spent the last two years of high school in a daze,” Obama wrote in "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance." “I kept playing basketball, attended classes sparingly, drank beer heavily, and tried drugs enthusiastically.”
And don’t forget Obama’s use of “blow” — a.k.a. cocaine. As he wrote about high school, “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it.”
But Obama got focused, turbocharged his ambitions, and served two terms as president of the United States.
Asked if he ever smoked pot, Dana Rohrabacher laughed on "Politically Incorrect," “I did everything but drink the bong water.” He became one of President Reagan’s speechwriters. He currently is running in Orange County, California, for his 16th term as a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
New York magazine wondered if Michael Bloomberg had smoked marijuana. “You bet I did,” he said. “And I enjoyed it.” Bloomberg served 12 years as mayor of America’s largest city. He has flourished in business, before and since. His estimated net worth: $49.8 billion.
Democrats must stop submitting Kavanaugh’s youth to a post-facto breathalyzer test. If he had a drinking problem, so did millions of American boys and girls who attended college in the early to mid-1980s — an era that took its behavioral cues less from St. Thomas Aquinas’ "Summa Theologiae" and more from "Caddyshack," "Animal House," and "Blazing Saddles." Many of us, to one degree or another, now run this country. These likely include once-wasted collegians who became adults and now write newspaper stories and TV scripts that condemn Kavanaugh for doing exactly what they did at the same age.
Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed for the Supreme Court, not crucified upon a cross of golden ale. Senator Hatch said it best: “Like Dr. Ford, Judge Kavanaugh deserves fair treatment. He was an immature high schooler. So were we all.”
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a contributing editor with National Review Online. He has been a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. Read more opinions from Deroy Murdock — Click Here Now.
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