Brett Kavanaugh had home field advantage this evening when he appeared on pro-Trump propaganda outlet Fox News for an interview about the mounting sexual assault accusations against him. All he had to do was answer the straightforward questions he knew were coming. Instead he found himself stumbling, sputtering, invoking the same obviously rehearsed talking points and phrases over and over again, and coming off like an idiot.

For instance, when Brett Kavanaugh was asked about the accusations made against him last night by Deborah Ramirez, he insisted that if it had happened, it would have been the “talk of the campus.” This rang false, as Yale University is a large school, and by all accounts, drunken debauchery was going on left and right. Kavanaugh belonged to a fraternity whose treatment of women was so outrageous, Yale ended up suspending it years later.

So “the talk of the campus” was a bad answer to begin with, the kind that would only make sense to you if you didn’t think about it at all. But then Kavanaugh made it worse by using the exact same “talk of the campus” talking point in response to a different question. It became painfully clear that Kavanaugh had been fed these kinds of phrases by his preppers before the interview, and that he didn’t have enough of them to work with. He also kept saying “I just want a fair process where I can be heard” so many times, in those exact words, we lost count. The whole thing was just bizarre.

Somewhat surprisingly, Fox News went ahead and asked Brett Kavanaugh about the still-developing accusation that he participated in several gang rapes in his youth. Kavanaugh forcefully denied it in generic terms, but became visibly nervous in the process, suggesting that his handlers hadn’t prepped him for the late-breaking allegation. But Kavanaugh’s weakest moment was when he suggested that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford may have merely been sexually assaulted by someone else at some point in her life. It was equal parts insulting and pathetic, and it will not play well with the general public.



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