FRANK BRUNI: Brett Kavanaugh loves His beer

At one point during Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony, desperate for some comic relief, I messaged a friend to ask if this were a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing or an Anheuser-Busch commercial.

There was that much talk about beer.

Most of it came from him: He used to drink a lot of beer. He used to like beer a lot. He still liked beer. Didn’t the committee? Didn’t everyone? B eer, beer, beer, beer, beer.

Christine Blasey Ford had swigged cola during her turn earlier that day. I half expected Kavanaugh to pop open a Bud Light. Or to wheel in a keg! Then there’d be plenty to go around, and he could tactlessly offer an ice-cold brewski to Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

His outrage, his strategy, his fate: All of it was about beer. Beer as a symbol of his normalcy. Beer as an emblem of his all-American maleness.

He was painting himself as a martyr for that maleness, and he was using beer — along with weight lifting, football, flatulence jokes and what he mendaciously insisted were inoffensive yearbook high jinks — to do it. Beer was his brand, and he was proud of it.

Beer was his bid, and he was bald with it. He was telling the Bud, Coors, Corona and Heineken drinkers of male America and Middle America that, yes, the coastal chardonnay types and pinot noir liberals were coming for them and were not fond of such hallowed traditions as tailgate parties, fraternities and drinking games.

It was happy-hour identity politics, a sad hour for the country and probably inevitable, given the trajectory that Kavanaugh’s nomination had taken. Like so many other battles in an age of turbocharged partisanship, it was about more than the events in dispute and the individuals in conflict.

If Democrats were going to turn this into a referendum on whether women were adequately heard, Republicans were going to turn it into a referendum on whether men were automatically hanged. If some of Kavanaugh’s opponents were going to damn him for the company he kept and the rituals he embraced, then he was going to seek salvation along those same lines. He made this about guilt by association with being a bro. About guilt by association with loving a beer.

“There is a bright line between drinking beer, which I gladly do, and which I fully embrace, and sexually assaulting someone, which is a violent crime,” he said. The “fully embrace” was gratuitous. It was also the clue that more than just a simple declaration of beverage preferences was at work.

About his years at Georgetown Prep, he told the committee that he spent much of his time “working out, lifting weights, playing basketball, or hanging out and having some beers with friends as we talked about life and football and school and girls.”

He quickly returned to that theme, referring to a good friend by his last name only: “Many nights, I worked out with other guys at Tobin’s house — he was the great quarterback on our football team and his dad ran workouts — or lifted weights at Georgetown Prep in preparation for the football season. I attended and watched many sporting events, as is my habit to this day.”

Hence all the beer:

“I drank beer with my friends. Almost everyone did. Sometimes I had too many beers. Sometimes others did. I liked beer.  I still like beer.”

“Yes, we drank beer. I liked beer. Still like beer.”

Again, “We drank beer. We liked beer.”

To Whitehouse, Kavanaugh simply said: “Do you like beer, Senator, or not?”

“Um, next,” Whitehouse stammered, trying to move the conversation along.

“What do you like to drink?” Kavanaugh pressed, and when he didn’t get an answer, he asked again.

Kavanaugh hasn’t asked me, but I’ll volunteer: I like beer. I also like wine. I like gin and bourbon, too, though not together. And in contrast to him, I’m willing to be honest and admit that in the past, I occasionally drank so much that I later didn’t remember all that I’d said and done.

What I don’t like is his selective frankness and the red-faced righteousness with which he, the supposedly sober-minded jurist, rushed to the fault lines of gender, culture and class. He made camp there and stoked the fire as high as it would go and as hot as it would burn. He brought a cooler of beer.