On the dangers of boofing, and lying about it

Do you know Bart O’Kavanaugh?

boofing
WASHINGTON, DC – SEPTEMBER 27: Senate Judiciary Committee member Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) (L) questions Judge Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing with Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) (C) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill September 27, 2018 in Washington, DC. Kavanaugh was called back to testify about claims by Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused him of sexually assaulting her during a party in 1982 when they were high school students in suburban Maryland. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
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Have You Boofed Yet? – the question America is asking after Brett Kavanaugh appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The term appeared in the entry he wrote for his high school year book and he was asked to define it. His answer – ‘It refers to flatulence. We were 16’ – may be disingenuous. ‘Boofed,’ as the Urban Dictionary helpfully explains, commonly refers to ‘consuming drugs or alcohol through one’s anus’. As in: ‘Bro, I totally boofed 3 beers in my asshole last night!’ Or: ‘Boofing is rad. My girlfriend boofed an entire gram of…

Have You Boofed Yet? – the question America is asking after Brett Kavanaugh appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The term appeared in the entry he wrote for his high school year book and he was asked to define it. His answer – ‘It refers to flatulence. We were 16’ – may be disingenuous. ‘Boofed,’ as the Urban Dictionary helpfully explains, commonly refers to ‘consuming drugs or alcohol through one’s anus’. As in: ‘Bro, I totally boofed 3 beers in my asshole last night!’ Or: ‘Boofing is rad. My girlfriend boofed an entire gram of MDMA and she was lit.’ The principle is that anything taken as an enema will be absorbed directly into the bloodstream. The alcohol hits the body before it gets to the liver. You get more slammed, more quickly. Party on!

But – a public service announcement from Cockburn – boofing, or butt chugging, is dangerous. Extremely dangerous. And not just to a Supreme Court nomination. A Texas man died following an alcohol enema of three litres of sherry, administered by his wife. A student at the University of Tennessee was taken to hospital with five times the legal blood alcohol limit after an alleged butt-chugging incident. In Arizona, there was a panic over reports that high school kids were making enemas out of tampons soaked in vodka. It’s not recorded whether the students at Georgetown Prep circa 1980 did this or if they preferred the more usual method of inserting a beer bong while naked and upside down in the bath.

Cockburn is a trusting fellow, but he has doubts that Kavanaugh was talking about flatulence. Who imagines that a 16-year-old boy would have to ask other 16-year-old boys if they’d farted? But to be fair to the judge, boofing might be exactly the kind of thing that high school sophomores would talk about (a lot) without actually having done it. The same goes for Kavanaugh’s mention of a ‘Devil’s Triangle,’ which according again to the Urban Dictionary is a threesome with two men and one woman. Also his apparently crude boast that he was a ‘Renate alumni’ – a reference, it seems, to one of the girls in his class.

The references to drinking may be more literal. It was ‘100 Kegs or Bust’ for young Kavanaugh, who called himself ‘treasurer of the Keg City Club’ in the yearbook. His friend, Mark Judge – the ‘witness/accomplice’ from Christine Blasey Ford’s account of sexual assault – wrote a roman-à-clef called Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk. One ‘Bart O’Kavanaugh’ makes an appearance. The Mark Judge character is asked by a girl:

‘Do you know Bart O’Kavanaugh?’

‘Yeah. He’s around here somewhere.’

‘I heard he puked in someone’s car the other night.’

‘Yeah. He passed out on his way back from a party.’

Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee couldn’t believe their luck. Judge’s book was quoted: ‘Are you Bart?’ And the year book entry was blown up six feet wide and put on the senators’ dais. Of course, the Democrats’ strategy was to link the alleged sexual assault to the drinking: Did you ever black out? But the aim was also to humiliate Kavanaugh. This was the ‘hit job’ that he complained about in his testimony.

But Kavanaugh already knew how devastating ‘the details’ can be. He used the same tactics when he worked for Ken Starr, who investigated Bill Clinton. It was Kavanaugh who prepared ‘The Grounds,’ the section of the Starr report meant to provide legal grounds for impeachment. He cited details from Monica Lewinsky’s ‘sex deposition’ in 34 consecutive footnotes. Jeffrey Toobin writes in his book about Clinton’s impeachment that these included material ‘judged too viciously unnecessary’ to mention anywhere else in Starr’s report. ‘For example, Kavanaugh’s team dropped the following deadpan footnote: ‘After [one] sexual encounter, she [Lewinsky] saw the President masturbate in the bathroom near the sink.’

So you might say Kavanaugh’s ordeal is ‘poetic justice’. Or – as one Washington observer put it – you might describe what’s happening as ‘basically the Dreyfus affair with vagina hats.’ At this point, the only people who can be happy about anything are the lucky few who happen to own Mark Judge’s book, Wasted. It’s changing hands on eBay at a thousand dollars a time, if you can find it. Cockburn now has one, well-thumbed copy. We offer it as a prize to the reader who sends the best butt-chugging cocktail recipe in time for the Autumn formal at the Chevy Chase country club. Email cockburn@spectator.co.uk. Have You Boofed Yet?