Category: Barack Obama

Garance Franke-Ruta is a serious lefty writer, and also a friend of mine, and she gets all critical theory in analyzing President Obama’s declaration that Kamala Harris is the “best-looking attorney general,” saying that the president’s error was “in introducing an observation from the system of beauty into a forum that was about the system of power.”

As a journalist, I must note that Obama’s remark was factually inaccurate: Pam Bondi is much better-looking than Harris.

Permit me also to observe that the widespread outrage over the president’s compliment could be interpreted as further proof of Rush Limbaugh’s Undeniable Truth of Life #24: “Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.”

This great truth has been misunderstood as “sexist” or “misogynistic,” an accusation that is only true under the definition of those terms as describing any man who disagrees with a feminist.

Is life unfair to unattractive women? Yes. No one can argue with that. But life is also unfair to short guys — studies show that taller men have higher incomes, so that their competitive advantage in the Darwinian mating pool yields compound interest: Women prefer taller men and richer men, and the fact that taller men are also generally richer . . . well, unfair, eh?

Alas, the Marxoid practitioners of critical theory have shown little interest in the grievances of runts, even as the patriarchal oppression of women has spawned an entire industry: Women’s Studies departments at universities, a vast library of feminist literature, and terroristic militants who enforce a de facto policy of excluding from public life anyone who questions the basic premises of feminism.

Compelling critics into fearful silence is, after all, why the coven of witches at Harvard insisted on destroying Larry Summers — to make of him a scarecrow example, to warn others that any speculation about “innate differences” between men and women will not be tolerated in the corridors of elite academia, where young geniuses are indoctrinated to accept without question the egalitarian dogma of the One True Faith.

In this environment — one in which the slightest skepticism toward the One True Faith is viewed as heresy — even the President of the United States can be compelled to apologize for what was intended as a jocular compliment.

Well, I could write thousands of words about this and not finish, but it’s not yet National Offend a Feminist Week (which this year will be May 6-12). However, I would like to tell a brief story to help explain Garance Franke-Ruta’s grievance.

Last Monday, I covered a candidate forum in Hilton Head, S.C., featuring Mark Sanford and Curtis Bostic. The forum was held at a restaurant, Aunt Chilada’s. When it was over,  I decided to have lunch at the bar. There were three blue-collar workers, employees of an industrial air-conditioning contractor, also having lunch at the bar.

These guys were flirting with the young barmaid — “chatting her up,” as the Brits would say — and the barmaid didn’t seem to mind in the least. She bantered with the guys, volunteering the fact that she was a college student who also worked nights at another bar, and suggesting they stop by to see her there, too. The barmaid didn’t impress me as particularly beautiful. She was, however, young and slender and, for a bunch of guys who spend their days with a bunch of other guys sweating on construction sites to install HVAC systems, the chance to talk to this college-age girl who, working for tips, had an obvious incentive to be friendly, was not a chance to be missed.

Were those guys “sexist”? Were they engaged in harassment? Was this what lawyers would call a hostile work environment?

Bullshit.

It was just guys being guys — authentic, normal, natural — and if the barmaid wasn’t offended by their attentions, why should anyone else be offended on her behalf?

Feminists don’t generally inhabit the milieu of barmaids and blue-collar guys. Feminism flourishes in the white-collar world of office life, and especially in the world of intellectuals, the only place such a War Against Human Nature can avoid contact with the stubborn realities of life.

Garance Franke-Ruta is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, not a would-be school teacher working as a barmaid to pay her way through state university. Like all intellectuals — and certainly, any political journalist qualifies as an intellectual to some degree, under Friedrich Hayek’s definition of that term — Garance expects to be judged by the quality of her work, and is offended by the idea that “the system of beauty” might intrude itself into her sphere of activity.

But it inevitably does, doesn’t it?

Even in the world of progressive journalism — yea, verily, even among feminists themselves — a certain career premium is afforded to the pretty “lipstick feminist,” the telegenic “It Girl” who can manage to be sexy even while she’s denouncing the Damned Misogynistic Patriarchy.

Can you say “Naomi Wolf,” boys and girls? It certainly did not hinder her career as a feminist intellectual to be green-eyed and dimpled, and there are many other progressive females who have learned that good looks can be advantageous to their advancement as feminist spokespersons. And I suppose there are scores of highly qualified left-wing women intellectuals who watch MSNBC every day and see Krystal Ball making an idiot of herself and wonder, “What’s she got that I ain’t got?”

Well, a six-figure salary at MSNBC, for starters.

And if you don’t understand why feminism can never rid the world of that kind of blatant unfairness, ladies, you obviously haven’t been paying enough attention to what Rush Limbaugh has been trying to explain to you all these years.

Feminist are so cute when they’re angry. And they’re always angry.