Kavanaugh's anger is genuine. So is his lying.
I can believe that it is possible Brett Kavanaugh is a man who made some efforts to pull his personal life together as he matured out of youth. Specifically, it seems plausible that he may have learned that he needed to back away from heavy alcohol use. Most if not all of the negative and/or criminal behavior (leaving aside "privileged" for a moment) that I've heard associated with him, when he was a teen and young man, seemed to coincide with significant alcohol use. I have never been an alcoholic and seldom consume any alcohol today (less than weekly) but when I was 18 or so, on some weekend nights, I drank way too much. Back then, in those instances, I welcomed the experience of getting drunk. I had some partial black out experiences as a result, a loss of memory abut specific events although I never lost all memory of what I had been up to. It felt to me at the time almost like something to be proud of - some masculine rite of passage. I pretty quickly stopped believing that, before I turned twenty in fact) and it's been decades since I've had much more than a mild alcohol "buzz".
I am not commenting on the underlying values a young man must have to allow him to engage in some of the fowl activities ascribed to Kavanaugh in his youth. I am talking about an aspect of "maturing" in which one may come to realize that walking a down a bad path in life leads one to a bad destination - a place where you don't want to be. Kavanaugh may have come to that realization. He may have looked at where drinking led him compared to where he wanted to go. Maybe he subsequently backed off. Maybe that wasn't the easiest thing to do. Maybe he takes pride in having reigned in a demon that threatened to derail his life potential. He is a married man in a seemingly stable and positive relationship (I'll give him the advantage of the doubt here - I know of no reports to the contrary.) He has two daughters who he no doubt loves deeply. A mature sober Brett Kavanaugh, I again am willing to believe, would never engage in some of the acts that accusers describe the younger intoxicated Brett Kavanaugh as having done. Let's speculate for a moment that Brett Kavanaguh (with the help of sobriety) turned over a new behavioral leaf and sincerely sought to leave that past behind as he built his adult life....
If so he must be furious at those who seemingly wound back the clock to now fix his moral character at a point in his life which he had seemingly long since "left behind." Yes his life has been thrown into turmoil causing great pain to his family I am sure. Certainly his reputation has been tarred, possibly irrevocably. Quite often actors tap into real emotions when they play a dramatic scene. I have no doubt Kavanaugh's emotions were legitimate yesterday at the hearing. No doubt he believes, at some primal level, that what is happening to him is not fair. It is easy to slip into believing that chickens that did not come home to roost after 35 years have ceased to exist, if ever they once did so. He angrily blames Democrats for politically ambushing him but even were that true it does nothing to negate the reality that Dr. Ford painfully bore witness to yesterday at the Senate hearing. He wants that period of his life to slip below the waves, to sink back into obscurity never to be examined again. Part of his anger is from knowing that he can not now make it so.
A man like that, against whom credible charges of perjury have previously been made completely unrelated to his actions as a youth, would lie to cover up inconsistencies in his youthful story, if he felt his entire life, not just his Supreme Court nomination, was now on the line. No doubt he would feel justified in doing so. To the extent he could change his past he most likely feels like he already has done so. He is proud of the man he considers himself to be today. Now it is is present life, his present family, his present relationship with female friends, that he feels he must fight at all costs to defend. I think we say him doing that on national TV yesterday.
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