Congratulations, New York Times! You have gone full Avenatti in your desperation to derail the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.
Despite the fact that even Senate Democrats remain quite wary of embracing Michael Avenatti's wild charges against Kavanaugh based on bizarre extrapolations of seemingly innocent comments in his high school yearbook, the New York Times is now following his lead in debased speculation.
First let us look in the September 25 Vox at how Avenatti interprets Kavanaugh's yearbook to make his charges based on basically nothing which seemed to inspire the Times in a very similar effort:
Avenatti said the committee should also ask Kavanaugh about an entry in his yearbook that reads “FFFFFFFourth of July,” which he believes stands for “Find them, French them, Feel them, Finger them, F*ck them, Forget them.” He also mentioned the term “Devil’s Triangle,” a phrase that refers to sex between two men and one woman. The Daily Kos published a picture of references to both in Kavanaugh’s yearbook.
The Times picked up what Avenatti missed by conjuring up an interpretation of several other yearbook references that writers Kate Kelly and David Enrich are hyping as something "horrible" and "hateful."
Brett Kavanaugh’s page in his high school yearbook offers a glimpse of the teenage years of the man who is now President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee: lots of football, plenty of drinking, parties at the beach. Among the reminiscences about sports and booze is a mysterious entry: “Renate Alumnius.”
The word “Renate” appears at least 14 times in Georgetown Preparatory School’s 1983 yearbook, on individuals’ pages and in a group photo of nine football players, including Judge Kavanaugh, who were described as the “Renate Alumni.” It is a reference to Renate Schroeder, then a student at a nearby Catholic girls’ school.
Two of Judge Kavanaugh’s classmates say the mentions of Renate were part of the football players’ unsubstantiated boasting about their conquests.
“They were very disrespectful, at least verbally, with Renate,” said Sean Hagan, a Georgetown Prep student at the time, referring to Judge Kavanaugh and his teammates. “I can’t express how disgusted I am with them, then and now.”
You have to read down many paragraphs to the simplest and most likely of explanations for the reference that the Avenatti-inspired Times is using to jump in the sewer with the publicity hound porn lawyer:
Four of the men who were pictured with Judge Kavanaugh in a photo captioned “Renate Alumni” said it was simply a reference to their dating or going to dances with Ms. Dolphin.
After that explanation buried deep in the article, the Times quickly relapsed to Avenatti mode:
The 1983 yearbook, for example, includes multiple apparent references to the Ku Klux Klan (but not on Judge Kavanaugh’s page). His page, in addition to the “Alumnius” entry, mentions his role as “treasurer” of the “Keg City Club.”
