1. Isn’t an itsy-bitsy lie still a lie?

Judge Kavanaugh, I don’t know what happened in 1982. But I’m deeply troubled by what I perceive as your lack of integrity last week. You told the Senate Judiciary Committee under oath that your “have you boofed” yearbook question referred to farting, that “devil’s triangle” was a drinking game, that a “Renate alumnius” was simply a friend of Renate with no sexual insinuations, that the drinking age was 18.

Really? As James Comey tweeted: “small lies matter, even about yearbooks.” No one sensible is going to hold teenage drinking against you, but we are bothered when you mislead senators and the public today and deny what is obvious: As you put it in 1983, “we’re loud, obnoxious drunks.”

I appreciate that it’s embarrassing to be pressed to explain juvenile humor, but it takes only a moment online for anyone to see that “boofing” refers to anal sex or rectal infusions of alcohol or drugs, that a “devil’s triangle” is sex involving two men and a woman, that the drinking age in Maryland was raised to 21 when you were still 17. And the boast about being a “Renate alumnius”? Come on. We were all teenagers once.

[Nicholas Kristof answered your questions about his column on Twitter.]

What can we call these but lies? And they come on top of deeply misleading testimony about your knowledge of stolen documents when you were in the Bush White House and your involvement in judicial nominations then.