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"Worst case scenario . Drunk kids at a party make a clumsy pass at some girl who was probably drunk too and 30 years later she imaged it was attempted rape?"

Assume this is true. Drunken testosterone ridden teenage boy athletes. Who knows what their intent was? The idea this was "attempted rape" cannot be concluded, because we have no way of knowing intent. Maybe Kavanaugh just wanted to expose Blasey Ford's breasts to Judge, who knows?

That said, such action still falls under today's definition of sexual assault. Today such behavior would get one tagged a sex offender for life. In 1983, it would have resulted in a firm dressing down by teachers and parents, and a forced apology.

I am not making excuses, but teenage boys do stupid things. The behavior claimed of Brett Kavanaugh and Mike Judge as 17 year olds is less than claimed of Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd when they were in their 50s.

I remember Alan Simpson saying when asked if he would ever run for President: "Are you crazy? When I was a lieutenant in the Army I thought beer was food." No doubt the then LT Simpson engaged in some debauchery in the mid-1950s. Perhaps someone 25 years old like Simpson was could be held to an adult standard.

But I would not be surprised if such behavior is far more common than many of the puritans on both the left and the right would like to admit.

There are a lot of strange things in this story. Why was she wearing a swimsuit? Was it a pool party?

The last thing which is hard for me to get my head around is the idea this brief event caused such trauma as to threaten a marriage 30 years later. There is a fragility here that suggests there has to be more to the accuser's story.

However, this "New Puritanism" is the new normal. Like I said, incidents like this are probably more frequent than many would like to admit. There are Republican men right now who know bad behavior either was done by them, or happened with their knowledge while they were in high-school or college. They don't even need to be the perps if they knew about it but said nothing.

They know it will be dug up if they run for office or are appointed to positions. As a result, we will only get squeaky clean candidates. That also means fewer former team sports athletes, fewer fraternity members, etc. In other words, fewer male Republicans who have early life experiences which develop teamwork and interpersonal skills.

Of course it also means Republicans will appoint more women. This is the simplest avoidance technique. However, we see from Feinstein's abuse of Amy Barrett, which can only be described as religious bigotry, there is no limit for the Democrats. If a Republican made comments like Feinstein's to a Muslim nominee, they would be annihilated by the Democrats and the press. The double standard is palpable.