So the anti-Limbaugh forces are failing and in disarray, while the man they sought to destroy is more relevant than ever:
Even before I heard about Prism, I am hearing from the intelligentsia in Washington that there’s nothing to be really concerned about here with what we had learned, the NSA demanding and getting every phone record from Verizon. And, by the way, we now know T-Mobile and AT&T have been added to it.
But the intelligent people were saying, “Nothing to see here. The reaction is way overblown.” Those of us who think there’s something worrisome here are overreacting and we’re too oriented in politics. . . .
I’m saying, “Do these people not realize what we just learned in the last three weeks?” We got the IRS starting in 2010 taking action to suppress the political involvement and ultimately votes of Tea Party people and conservative Republicans. This regime, this government, on the orders of the highest level. In fact, that investigation is ongoing. We have Fast and Furious. We have Obamacare. The evidence of the totalitarian nature or the authoritarian nature of this administration is on display undeniably every day and yet in the midst of this, “Well, don’t go off half cocked on this, Rush. Be very levelheaded. Nothing really to see,” as though there’s no context here.
Interestingly, the more attractive the woman, the fewer sexual partners.
You didn’t really need a scientific study to know this, if you’ve been studying feminism as long as I have. Just ask yourself: Why are feminists so angry at men? It’s not merely because they are ugly — not all ugly women are feminists — but rather because they are bitter after discovering that their promiscuity doesn’t actually make them more attractive (which popular culture had convinced them would be the case).
That’s what all the rhetoric about “sexual empowerment” is really aimed at, and it’s also why feminists get so riled up about “slut shaming.”
Of course, no one could deny that Paula Broadwell was a two-timing homewrecker, and no one ventured to argue that what Paula Broadwell did was actually a good thing, but my blunt contradiction of the sexual empowerment narrative clearly enraged the soi-disant intellectuals who can’t think outside the Conventional Wisdom, which nowadays insists that no woman should ever be called a “slut,” no matter how demonstrably slutty she may be. This is identity politics as a self-esteem exercise: “Yea for our team!” — in this case, women, but in other cases ethnic groups or homosexuals — and anyone who doesn’t unskeptically cheer for the team must be denounced as a hater.
Once the collectivist groupthink takes hold, it doesn’t matter whether the policy that flows from this self-esteem politics is actually good for the group or not. So long as the policy is justified by the Official Group Ideology and approved by the Official Group Leaders, skepticism about the efficacy of the group-endorsed policy will be condemned as betrayal of the group. (News flash: Republicans are often guilty of the same thing, cf. “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and the Bush administration in general.)
Ah . . . yes, sluts. Excuse the digression.
Having convinced themselves that promiscuity is “sexual empowerment,” feminists must expunge from our language such fine Anglo-Saxon words as slut and whore, as part of an ideological campaign to exterminate whatever vestigal remnants of Judeo-Christian morality may have survived the Sexual Revolution. And because this is justified by the Official Group Ideology and approved by the Official Group Leaders, no man may criticize it without being denounced as a misogynistic patriarchal oppressor. Any woman who questions the “sexual empowerment” rhetoric — “Hey, why is it so ’empowering’ to risk getting your ladyparts all gunked up with herpes, genital warts and chlamydia?” — is ostracized as a Traitor to the Revolutionary Cause.
Unfortunately for the feminist commissars, human nature refuses to yield to their dogma, and the strident fury of their denunciations amounts to an attempt to suppress facts through the exercise of political power. As I mentioned last night, political correctness is hostile to common sense, because if the utopian visions of the progressive ideologues were compatible with common sense, there would be no need for all the legislation, litigation and indoctrination by which they attempt to remake the world to fit their intellectual abstractions.
Very physically attractive women are more likely to form exclusive relationships than to form purely sexual relationships; they are also less likely to have sexual intercourse within the first week of meeting a partner. Presumably, this difference arises because more physically attractive women use their greater power in the partner market to control outcomes within their relationships.
For women, the number of sexual partners decreases with increasing physical attractiveness, whereas for men, the number of sexual partners increases with increasing physical attractiveness.
For women, the number of reported sexual partners is tied to weight: Thinner women report fewer partners. Thinness is a dimension of attractiveness for women, so is consistent with the finding that more attractive women report fewer sexual partners.
There are many cruel blows to the feminist worldview here. To start with, their “sexual empowerment” rhetoric seems mainly to have been embraced by ugly fat women, which may explain why Sandra Fluke was so adamant about getting free contraceptives.
Secondly, decades of feminist indoctrination and pop-culture propaganda have failed to make promiscuity the desired lifestyle of women who are best able to choose their options. Really good-looking women don’t put out because they don’t have to put out, and instead prefer fewer partners and exclusive relationships.
The Democrats did not respond to getting their teeth kicked in by George Bush in 2004 by embracing civility, by congratulating the President on his re-election. They doubled down on outrage. They fought the President on his second-term agenda tooth-and-nail.
That worked out rather well for them, all things considered.
This is exactly right. You must know your antagonist. You must study his successes, and you must also study your own failures.
One of the great blunders of the Republican Party is that as soon as the 2004 election was over, they began looking ahead to 2008 when they were sure that they would be running against Hillary Clinton. How many anti-Hillary books were published in 2005-2007? So many Republicans bought into the Hillary-as-Antichrist message that in March 2008, when Rush Limbaugh launched “Operation Chaos” — aiming to turn the Democrat nomination fight into an absolute deadlock — his phone lines lit up with dimwit callers who had let themselves be convinced that Barack Obama was actually the lesser of two evils.
Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!
I remember it well: I saw exactly what Rush was doing. It was pure genius, and if enough Republican voters had listened to him — especially in Indiana and North Carolina — “Operation Chaos” may have resulted in such a vicious bloodletting within the Democrat Party that they never would have recovered from it. For want of a nail . . .
Well, there’s no point recounting the history of everything that went wrong the past five years. But it exposed a fundamental problem of the conservative blogosphere: It developed during the Bush years, amid the Global War on Terror, and its accustomed task was to defend the president and the war effort against the Left. As far as fighting elections, conservative bloggers had 2004 as their basic model — the patriotic Republican incumbent vs. the treacherous Democrat challenger — and this proved a poor template for future conflicts.
In general, by 2009, too many Republicans didn’t have any useful memory of how to be the Opposition Party. The experiences of 1964 and 1974 were remembered only by a graying generation of Elder Statesmen types who, unfortunately, were neither tech-savvy nor culturally attuned to the 21st century. The long 12-year Reagan-Bush ascendancy had been followed by a brief two-year loss of power after the 1992 election, but then the latent vigor of the Party Reagan Built came bouncing back with the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” Dole predictably lost in 1996, and the Lewinsky-inspired impeachment drama of 1998 threw the GOP off its game, but by 2003, they were back on top, controlling the White House and both houses of Congress.
Accustomed to success, to acting in defense of power, Republicans (and by extension, many conservative spokemen, including bloggers) were unaccustomed to the task that faced them after Democrats won Congress in 2006 and captured the White House in 2008.
Ah, but Rush Limbaugh knew what he was doing! Rush had risen to talk-radio superstar status during the low ebb of Republican fortunes in the wake of Bill Clinton’s 1992 defeat of George H. W. Bush. In fact, it is now often forgotten that Limbaugh supported Pat Buchanan’s challenge to Bush in the 1992 primaries. Limbaugh knew that Bush was doomed to defeat in 1992, and that the key was to give conservatives a cause worth fighting for. After Bush lost, Limbaugh’s show became the focal point for the Republican opposition that triumphed in 1994.
It should be pointed out, by the way, that Limbaugh is old enough to remember the true Wilderness Years of the GOP, the post-Watergate era of 1974-78, when such eminent figures as William Rusher, publisher of National Review, thought the Republican Party was done for and were ready for Ronald Reagan to lead a third-party movement.
Too many have forgotten that history — if they ever bothered to learn it in the first place — and no one under 40 has any real direct memory of it, so that there is a sort of “Generation Gap” within the conservative movement. If you don’t remember where you were when Saigon fell (I was a sophomore at Lithia Springs High School) or the Berlin Wall came down (I was a 30-year-old sports editor for the Calhoun [Ga.] Times), it’s impossible for you to understand the Cold War mentality, the petri dish within which the post-WWII conservative movement was incubated.
Conservatism was originally and fundamentally about foreign policy: Are we going to stand up to these godless Commies, or not?
Trying to get Americans to listen to conservative ideas on domestic policy has always been much more difficult, and we are really now back to an era that precedes my own birth, which I know only from history books and from tales of old-timers like M. Stanton Evans. We’re back to the Truman era, when the godless Commies who threatened America were clandestine subversives who called themselves “liberals.”
Really, it’s in some ways much worse now. Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss were traitorous stooges of Moscow, but today’s “liberals” pursue a Bolshevik agenda of strictly domestic origin. The disciples of Howard Zinn, Saul Alinksy, Bill Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis are most certainly Marxists, and we should not be afraid to call them what they are. Hell, “neo-Marxism” is the fashionable style for young hipsters.
Are we going to stand up to these godless Commies, or not?
UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein reacts to Andrew J. Patrick, describing Obama’s agenda as “a malicious attack on our individual sovereignty and an intentional plan to undermine our constitutional republic and replace it with an beneficent police state peopled by industrious worker bees, helpfully directed and nudged toward happiness by a permanent ruling elite.” Basically, Sweden, with better weather and uglier people.
Krystal Ball will co-host MSNBC’s new show ‘The Cycle’ starting Monday.
FROM AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
MSNBC host Krystal Ball was in close communication with leaders of an online boycott aimed at advertisers on Rush Limbaugh’s popular radio show, e-mails between the boycott leaders indicate.
Attempting to discover the identity of an infiltrator in their group, the #StopRush leader @Shoq (aka “Shoq Value,” who is believed to be an activist named Matt Edelstein) indicated that Ball had warned another member about the suspected “right wing disrupter.” The other member had “already inquired with Krystal last week, and Krystal said ‘we don’t like or trust this guy,’” Shoq wrote in an e-mail published Thursday by Brooks Bayne at The Trenches.
Bayne said the e-mail was obtained from a Google group, “Social Action Steering,” which was apparently deleted after The Trenches published the correspondence between the #StopRush leaders. The group was attempting to discover the true identity and political leanings of a Texas man, known as “Randy Hahn,” who had joined their anti-Limbaugh effort and caused dissension among the boycotters.
Ball, a Democrat who ran for Congress in Virginia two years ago, is a paid MSNBC contributor who was recently announced as one of four co-hosts of a new daily program, The Cycle, on the left-leaning cable news network. It is unclear whether MSNBC executives were aware of the extent of Ball’s involvement in #StopRush, which used the social network in a campaign to drive Limbaugh off the airwaves by threatening boycotts against advertisers on his conservative talk show, the nation’s most popular syndicated radio program.
UPDATE: In attempting to discover the identity of “Randy Hahn,” the #StopRush boycott leader Shoq sought the services of Democrat consultant Neal Rauhauser, the e-mails obtained by The Trenches show. Rauhauser provided the group with extensive documentation about a Houston man named Jason, whose surname was redacted in the version posted by Bayne. Rauhauser then mused about exposing the man to harassment by sending his personal information to online groups.
“I have been sorely tempted to point him out to various actors — a guy like this, he could really produce some high quality entertainment for 4chan, Something Awful, Encyclopedia Dramatica, etc.,” Rauhauser wrote in his e-mail reply to Shoq.
Rauhauser, who was banned from the progressive blog Daily Kos last year, became notorious in 2010 when he was accused of organizing “a group of E-Thugs meant to harass, threaten, provoke, disparage, intimidate, verbally assault, berate & employ hate-speech against those not in agreement with his brand of politics,” as conservative blogger Patrick Read said at the time.
The so-called “TwitterGate” scandal was largely ignored by major news organizations, but Rauhauser has in the past month gained increasing notoriety as an associate of convicted felon Brett Kimberlin.
Rauhauser was one of three people — along with Kimberlin and former Raw Story editor Ron Brynaert — whom blogger Patrick “Patterico” Frey named last month as suspected of complicity in a July 2011 “SWATting” incident at his Los Angeles home. Sen. Saxby Chambliss and 85 Republican members of Congress have called on Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the reported harassment of conservative commentators.
UPDATE III: Thursday’s revelation of e-mails between #StopRush leaders was the second consecutive scoop by The Trenches on the anti-Limbaugh group’s infiltration by “Randy Hahn.” Bayne previously posted recorded excerpts of a conference call in which the leader Shoq berated the suspected interloper by boasting of his connections to Organizing for America (OFA), President Obama’s re-election campaign: “Randy, I can pick up the phone and call the director of OFA, can you? I can pick up the phone and call the … battleground state director of OFA. Can you?”
If Shoq’s claims are accurate, the latest reports may suggest multiple connections between the Limbaugh boycott, MSNBC, the Obama campaign, Democrat operatives like Rauhauser, and tax-exempt groups like Media Matters and Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution.
There are many developments in the Brett Kimberlin story today, which I hope to aggregate in a new post later. But here’s your headline: “Kimberlin vs. Walker: Walker Fights Back.”
Stay tuned. One source told me today that there may be “something big” coming, but I’m not sure what the source meant by that.
The head of a boycott effort aimed at radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh boasted in a conference call of his ties to Organizing for American (OFA), President Obama’s re-election campaign.
“Randy, I can pick up the phone and call the director of OFA, can you?” Matt Edelstein said during the phone call, berating a Texas activist. “I can pick up the phone and call the … battleground state director of OFA. Can you? Can they? Okay, so I don’t care what somebody at OFA — some flunky level in Texas told you about OFA. I have extremely good relations with OFA.”
A recording of the conference call was obtained by Brooks Bayne, who reports that “Randy Hahn” is a Texas Democrat who joined Edelstein’s “Stop Rush” campaign as an “infiltrator.” The recording shows that Edelstein also said he has “extremely good relations with Van Jones,” a radical environmentalist who resigned as Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar” in September 2009 after he was exposed as having signed a petition that claimed the 9/11 terror attacks were “deliberately allowed” by the Bush administration.
The New York Timesreported in March that the “Stop Rush” boycott effort was started by Angelo Carusone, who in 2009 organized a similar campaign against advertisers on Glenn Beck’s Fox News program. Beck played a key role in exposing Van Jones’s radical past.
During the conference call with other “Stop Rush” activists, Edelstein says “it’s making me crazy [that] Michelle Malkin is launching a new counterattack” against his group’s boycott effort. Edelstein also expressed concern about Dana Loesch and James O’Keefe, defended MSNBC contributor Krystal Ball, and worried that someone had discovered “one of my plant names that I use on the web to confuse the Right.”
Ann Romney stepped into the White House’s line of fire by handling the situation … with absolute perfection.
And as she did, let me assure you, Obama’s Media Palace Guards completely freaked out.
Welcome to what will surely become “Palin II: The Nuclear Option.”
We all remember how John McCain so shook up the 2008 race with the VP choice of Governor Sarah Palin, that awful, terrible, no good college-educated, self-made mayor and governor who raised herself a lovely family. And we all remember, how for these sins, a full-court media rampage immediately began that was determined to destroy her. The media lied about Sarah Palin’s record, lied about the massive crowds that came out to see her, and worst of all, they attacked her children.
What we learned from this is that when it comes to protecting the Left and most especially Barack Obama, any virtue the other side holds that might hurt Their Precious One, must be annihilated. Furthermore, Ann Romney isn’t just an asset to her husband’s campaign, she’s also a direct threat to the very heart of Obama’s cynical reelection plans.
Seen through that lens, the Progressive War on Women comes partly into focus. Like the over-the-top assault on Rush Limbaugh over the Sarah Fluke disparagement, which had apparently been on the shelf for a while before instantiation, this seemingly random attack on Ann makes more sense as a leftover attack on Sarah Palin that was dusted off and launched.
Propaganda, too, begs for recycling. The Left invested so much effort into demonizing Sarah Palin that they probably couldn’t help themselves even with a 12-step program.
Given the Limbaugh-limbo and the Romney-o-rama, the Bush whacking this summer promises to be so excruciating, you’ll think yourself in Germany and W of Semitic extraction. This is because, as I realized this afternoon and commented on another post, Progressivism is an allergy to reality, and therefore must always be on the attack.
This is not just a war of tired old feminists who are trying to justify the fact that most of them paid illegal, undereducated women, many of whom speak little or no English, to raise their children. This transcends Leftist feminist sensibilities and touches upon a core issue in statism — namely, who raises the children?
A small, but relevant, digression here: One of the most interesting books I’ve ever read is Joshua Muravchik’s Heaven On Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism. The title is self-explanatory. I highly recommend the book, simply because it’s so good, but I mention it here because of the chapter involving Israeli kibbutzim, which were intended to represent the purest form of voluntary socialism. Part of the socialist experiment was that children would be raised, not within family units, but as part of the cooperative. Only in that way could the kibbutz defeat unhealthy, selfish individualism and assure a new generation of people dedicated to the movement.
This triggers an idea for a truly bad combination Greek tragedy and Southern romance novel: Antigone with the Wind.
One nearly can empathize with the poor Lefties, seeing that the Trayvon Martin tragedy is moving from simple tragedy to propaganda farce. In the (gang)green spirit of recycling, then, we have Hillary telling Andrea Mitchell;
Today, Hillary Clinton told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell in a pre-taped interview that Rush Limbaugh’s comments about Sandra Fluke constituted a “verbal assault.” She continued:
We, as a nation, have every right — and in fact I welcome it — to engage in the kind of debate and dialogue that is at the root of who we are as Americans. But lets not turn it into personal attacks and insults. We’re beyond that. We’re better than that and people in the public eye have a particular responsibility to avoid it.
I can agree with SECSTATE’s opinion, in general. Back in 2008, I was prefixing her name with ‘Ct-‘, as a Lovecraft reference, to show my affection for the lady. It occurred to me that derogatory ‘games with names’ are childish. Repenting, I have since sought higher forms of snark.
But, really, Hillary? Has anyone on the Left, e.g. Maher, ever been taken to task for potty mouth? I guess Don Imus got a wrist slap for some hairstyle remark a couple of years back. But let’s not kid ourselves here. This is:
An attempt to control the media cycle in general, deflect attention from the ObamaCare disaster.
A retreat from the disaster the Trayvon Martin tragedy is becoming.
One is nearly, but not quite, tempted to record the actual interview and see if the good SECSTATE actually mentions anything work-related. I Reckon Anything National is more fun to discuss than that one important thing over there on the right side of the map thing on the office wall.
November cannot arrive quickly enough, so we can usher these jokers out of power. OK, for the Brietbart trifecta, Hillary is aware of Iran. Reset button.
Illegal robocalls have been hitting voters’ phones in Rep. Judy Biggert’s 13th CD, Rep. Tim Johnson’s 15th CD and Rep. Bobby Schilling’s 17th CD this week, UK’s Daily Mail reports. The robocalls tell callers to contact the U.S. Reps’ offices and ask them to stand against radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh’s controversial comments last week about contraceptives activist Sandra Fluke. . . .
The call is illegal because the responsible group identified on the calls as “Women of the 99%” is not a registered PAC or lobbying group, and no return call phone number is given.
The call targets Limbaugh as leader of a “war on women” and is apparently part of a nationwide effort aimed at Republican members of Congress. A similar robo-call — this one targeting Ohio Rep. Jim Renacci — was recorded on an answering machine:
The “war on women” calls come at the same time Democrats are using such attacks in fundraising appeals such as the e-mail sent today by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
