I think I'm glad I missed this part of the hearing

At his hearing, Judge Kavanaugh sat in front of a carefully arranged line of teenage girls he used to coach as Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana asked him what he was like in high school.

“Did you ever get in trouble?” asked Mr. Kennedy, as a red-faced Judge Kavanaugh smirked. “Were you more of a John-Boy Walton type? Or a Ferris Bueller type?”

Mr. Kennedy gestured at the row of pubescent girls. “These ladies are old enough to understand …” he trailed off, and Judge Kavanaugh laughed again.

  Sarah Kendzior

I believe they were 15-year-old girls. At least I've read that Kavanaugh emphasized their age, which happens to be the age of the woman accusing him of attempted rape at the time of the incident. Coincidental? Okay. But why is Kennedy asking him what he was like in high school - or, which type of teenager he was?

“[High school] was very formative,” Judge Kavanaugh told Mr. Kennedy. And indeed it was: It set the stage for a lifetime of allegedly irresponsible conduct for which Judge Kavanaugh faced minimal consequences, thanks in part to his social circle of power brokers who repeatedly bailed him out. He is not only a reflexive protector of Mr. Trump, but Trumpian in his own behaviour, transferring the President’s “When you’re a star, … you can do anything” maxim into the rarified world of law.

[...]

At the time of the alleged attack, Judge Kavanaugh was 17; Prof. Ford, like some of the girls Judge Kavanaugh paraded at his hearing, was 15.

Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination has been cloaked in controversy since it began, but the revelations marked a new low – not only for the sheer horror of the allegation, but in the response to it, which both reveals knee-jerk misogyny and illuminates what seems to have been a pre-emptive public relations blitz aimed at neutralizing the allegation.

On July 10, a bizarre op-ed by Judge Kavanaugh’s friend Julie O’Brien appeared in The Washington Post extolling him as a “carpool dad” beloved by teenage girls. Dismissed at the time as flighty – what relevance could being a carpool dad have to the Supreme Court? – it’s now of a piece with other anticipatory moves, such as being able to rapidly produce a list of 65 women from his high-school days who would vouch for his character.

[...]

If he were applying for any other job, his list of alleged offences – which includes not only sexual assault but compulsive gambling, accruing massive debt that was paid off in unexplained ways and multiple instances of perjury – would halt the application process. But this is not any job, it is the Supreme Court in the Donald Trump era.

Which makes it all scary. Because the only thing between us and an authoritarian regime is our courts.

Mr. Trump’s solution to the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election has long been to fire judges or investigators he finds problematic while packing the courts with loyalists. In Judge Kavanaugh, Mr. Trump found an ideal lackey: an extreme right-wing judge prepared to exonerate the President of any crime, no matter how heinous.

[...]

This does not mean, of course, that Republicans will stop defending him or refrain from attacking Prof. Ford. Some deny the attack even occurred while others categorize it as a youthful indiscretion, as if Judge Kavanaugh had received a speeding ticket or shoplifted – instead of allegedly covering a girl’s mouth as she screamed. They fret that just a few minutes will change Judge Kavanaugh’s life without caring that those alleged few minutes forever altered Prof. Ford’s.