Since everyone is litigating Kavanaugh's lies or lack thereof today, I owe @NateSilver538 a response to this list, per our disagreement as to whether Kav was mostly being "lawyerly" about drinking or lying:https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1046931604831113217 …
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I'm going to work backward on his list, apologies if this is awkward. Start with Kav's claim that "ralphing" reflects the fact that "I got a weak stomach, whether it’s with beer or with spicy food or anything."
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As I read that he's not saying he threw up from spicy food at Beach Week, just that his weak stomach meant that he could throw up from drinking without having drunk more than others, bc he throw up easily from other things as well.
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If he doesn't have a weak stomach, this would be a lie. But I've talked to mere acquaintances of Kavanaugh who attest to his weak stomach, his difficulty w/spicy food. So I'm going to go with lawyerly defensiveness, not lying.
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Next, his claims about the drinking age in MD. This doesn't seem like lying at all. In his prepared statement he says: "The drinking age was 18 in Maryland for most of my time in high school, and was 18 in D.C. for all of my time in high school." This is entirely accurate.
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Later in passing he says "the drinking age, as I noted, was 18," without making the MD/DC distinction. But he already made it. And he lived next door to DC. No lie here, and only lawyering if you think he's implying that he only drank once he turned 18. But I don't think he is.
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Next on Silver's list is "claiming to Mitchell to have never have passed out is extremely implausible." I don't think BK claimed to have never passed out; he seemed to make a distinction between passing out and blacking out: "I’ve gone to sleep ... but I’ve never blacked out."
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Since many people pass out without blacking out, that distinction isn't obviously a lie or even lawyering. But Silver thinks the black-out claim is highly unlikely, especially "given his repeated apparent references to drinking-related memory losses in e.g. his yearbook."
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meta-claims about, not merely events that happened while drinking, but the *qualitative state* of drinking are intrinsically inexact it’s a little silly even to humor the leftists by having this discussion
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