Today in Supreme Court History: February 12, 1965

2/12/1965: Justice Brett Kavanaugh's birthday.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh

Comments

[Dan Schiavetta]

There’s been a lot of sucking up by Josh but this is the worst. Eugene, talk to him!

[Life of Brian]

I'm not sure if you just have a partisan drum to beat, or if it just escaped you that he's been routinely posting birthdays of justices.

[TwelveInchPianist]

Yeesh. What's up with the left? First the war on Christmas, now the war on birthdays?

[Lollius]

May this Renate Alumnius enjoy a hearty Devil's Triangle and many boofs.

[Naaman Brown]

The word boof has had many definitions, not necessarily what Democrats found in Urban Dictionary in 2018.
Earliest def I found was an extreme white water kayak maneuver (1970s).
What it meant in Maryland high schools in the early 1980s is probably not the usage that became current on usenet alt music starting 1999 (sex, anal sex, etc).

[Dilan Esper]

FWIW, I didn't think either boofing or devil's triangle was that incriminating, other than that he was a kind of obnoxious teenager. (Which we already knew from all the drinking references.)

But "Renate Alumnius" was very bad. It was very bad if he didn't have sex with her and also very bad if he did. And I honestly thought it was pretty awful that he couldn't just own up to the fact that it was a bad thing to put in his yearbook thinking that she would never see it.

[TwelveInchPianist]

But “Renate Alumnius” was very bad.

1. "Bad" is a relative term. How does it rate on the scale of questionable yearbook entries by sitting political figures?

2. It's a fucking high school yearbook. All teenagers are obnoxious. If people were making a big deal about something in Obama's yearbook, you would rightly be going nuts.

[Dilan Esper]

I am not judging him for being a teenage idiot.

I am judging him for not recognizing, when the mistake was brought to him and he was a grown adult, that he owed Renate an apology and had been caught making a hurtful sexual boast.

If someone said something like that about one of Kavanaugh's daughters, he would surely expect as much.

[Lollius]

Jokes aside, the history of "boof" is interesting, and seems sexual at least as far back as the 1980s. For example, if you search for a StackExchange question on "boof" titled "Origin, meaning, and derivation of 'boof' as a verb in U.S. slang," you would find several citations of "boof" from sources in the 1980s that mean roughly "screw." My favorite was this one:

"Someone call a proctologist, we've just been boofed." ("Two More Softballers Protest Stroh's Ruling," Rice Thresher (May 18, 1984).)

That's the kind of source research I value, not Urban Dictionary.

[Dilan Esper]

It's entirely possible both boof and Devil's Triangle were sexual in origin. Which would make Kavanaugh guilty of being a horny teenager, not a big sin.

As I said, Renate Alumnius was a lot worse- he was talking behind a real person's back and should have acknowledged that it was hurtful. Instead, he claimed it was a compliment.

[regexp]

Stewart Baker or Josh Blackman? Who is the bigger waste of space on this blog? Really hard to determine. At least Blackman doesn't appear to be working that hard.

[Á àß äẞç ãþÇđ âÞ¢Đæ ǎB€Ðëf ảhf]

Probably the commenters who don't know how to ignore space wasters.

[bernard11]

Well, he did have to set up a database of Justices' birthdays and so on. Now every day he just throws one up there with a link to the book.

[Life of Brian]

Now every day he just throws one up there with a link to the book.

Sorry, where's the link to the book in this very post, much less in a single one of the others about justices' birthdays?

I know facts are of limited value when there's bitter emoting to be done, but come on.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Ask someone who isn't a half-educated bigot to explain the link (at Justice Kavanaugh's name) to you.

[bernard11]

Did you click on the link?

Other posts have been even more blatant.

[TwelveInchPianist]

"Probably the commenters who don’t know how to ignore space wasters."

Yup. If people don't want to read about Supreme Court History, they can just skip the posts. No need to whine about them.

[Life of Brian]

They certainly can, but increasingly find themselves unable to. Welcome to cancel culture.

[bernard11]

If people don’t want to read about Supreme Court History, they can just skip the posts.

Yeah.

If Kavanaugh had been born on Feb. 11, or 13, things would have turned out completely differently.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Let's just be happy that this blog appears to be the best right-wing law professors can manage.

No wonder strong law schools seem to be disinclined to hire more movement conservatives for faculty positions.

[Kazinski]

It's not an very pretty employment picture for conservative academics, maybe 5% of faculty positions i would guess.

Oh well, it's a good thing then that for 8 years all the federal court vacancies are set aside for them as a consolation prize.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

The percentage depends on whether you include conservative professors who focus on teaching (they vote and think conservative but are not ardent culture warriors whose careers are based on loud partisan advocacy) in addition to crusading conservative professors.

You already have Trump winning again? Do you have the plans for the machine with which conservatives are to mass-produce cranky, old, white, superstitious, bigoted, easily frightened, poorly educated, rural, disaffected, southern white males for this election? Are you sure the Conspirators and other right-wing lawyers have devised a way to register newly minted clingers to vote?