UPDATE III: I was unsuccessful in persuading Kate Obenshain to don the famous fedora, alas:
UPDATE IV: Wow, what a coincidence that I should run into a fellow Atlanta native here at the YAF conference:
Sarah Perkins, an alumna of Fulton County’s Westlake High, with Alyssa Cordova of the Claire Boothe Luce Policy Institute. Sarah is now attending Smith College (an elite “Seven Sisters” school), and told me that her dad went to school with Herman Cain. How cool is that, huh?
Phyllis Schlafly is one of conservatism’s great heroines. Both Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter acknowledge Schlafly’s influence as a role model. Forty-six years after her rallying cry for Goldwater, A Choice Not an Echo, and three decades after she led the crusade to stop ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, she’s still driving liberals nuts:
“One of the things Obama’s been doing is deliberately trying to increase the percentage of our population that is dependent on government for their living. For example, do you know what was the second-biggest demographic group that voted for Obama? . . . Unmarried women. Seventy percent of unmarried women voted for Obama. And this is because, when you kick your husband out, you’ve got to have Big Brother government to be your provider. . . .”
This is what we in the journalism business call a “fact”:
Take a recent report entitled “Advancing the Economic Security of Unmarried Women” by the Center for American Progress, the “progressive” nonprofit run by Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta. The report reviews the problems of a growing segment of our society: unmarried women. They are poorer, more likely than other women to be unemployed, have less access to health care, and often struggle to care for children without support from fathers. What’s CAP’s solution? More government at every turn. Among the recommended proposals are more generous unemployment benefits, more job-training and job-placement programs, greater subsidies for child care, more generous child-nutrition programs, direct welfare payments for those with children, government intervention to prevent foreclosures, expanded low-income-housing programs, an increased minimum wage, government intervention to increase the pay of occupations dominated by women, mandatory paid family and sick leave, and, of course, government-provided health care. In other words, complete cradle-to-grave, taxpayer-provided government support.
It’s tempting to call this paper sexist: Women — especially unmarried women — are portrayed as barely able to subsist without extra protection. One could also ruminate on CAP’s view of family formation, which seems willing to substitute a dependent relationship on the government for marriage. A woman without a man is encouraged to depend on Uncle Sam.
One might disagree with that analysis, but it is hardly “extreme,” and yet the Schlafly speech making the same basic point is being seized as a campaign issue by Democrats:
Democrats aim to exploit the comments to pressure the more than 60 Republican candidates who have earned Schlafly’s endorsement. . . .
Democrats plan to jump on the 75 Republican candidates for federal office that Schlafly’s Eagle Forum has endorsed and donated to — a list that includes Todd Tiahrt in the Kansas Republican primary for Senate, Ken Buck in the Colorado Republican primary for Senate, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and his Senate Conservatives Fund and Sen. David Vitter. Already, reporters in Vitter’s home state of Louisiana are getting releases from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee pressing them to ask Vitter if he agrees with Schlafly. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is doing the same thing to Eagle Forum-endorsed House candidates, painting Republicans on dozens of ballots — including Rep. Michele Bachmann and Scott Rigell in the competitive VA-02 race — as “extreme” and saying the candidate should refuse Schlafly’s endorsement.
I plan to renounce any Republican who renounces Phyllis Schlafly.
For the benefit of any Republican confused by all this uproar, let me explain the basic problem: The way to tackle feminism is head-on.
Feminism is a left-wing phenomenon. It is a radical egalitarian ideology based upon a fallacy, and should never be endorsed or appeased in the erroneous belief that, by kowtowing to ideologues, Republicans can win “The Women’s Vote” (capital-T, capital-W, capital-V, denoting a dubious category that is reified by feminist ideology). A brief explanation:
Insofar as men and women are different, they are not equal.
Equality implies fungibility — that two things are perfectly interchangeable, so that one thing may be substituted for the other without any difference in value. Only a fool could believe that men and women are equal in that way, and yet this is what feminists would require us to believe. And any man who dares contradict this egalitarian dogma is a sexist, an oppressor, a reactionary representative of the patriarchy.
All the other errors of feminism flow from this one fundamental error, a counterfactual insistence on the equality of the sexes. Men and women are not the same, and therefore are not equal.
Do not think that you, a Republican, can benefit by attempting some sort of “me-too” feminism, nor should you fall into the error of thinking that there is some sort of “conservative feminism” which can be mobilized to elect you. Such foolish behaviors and atttitudes only betray your lack of judgment and courage.
Most of all, do not think that you can benefit by throwing Phyllis Schlafly under the bus. Do you know how Phyllis Schlafly earned her way through college? Working in a munitions plant during World War II, when her job was test-firing .50-caliber machine-gun ammunition.
A lot of crazy things are happening inside the conservative world today. . . . This is a movement in moral and intellectual crisis. Yet it’s very difficult and even dangerous for a committed conservative to acknowledge that crisis or to write about the crisis without excuse or apologetics. Weigel did just that, and very successfully. He is no Max Blumenthal, a self-identified ideological counter-warrior bent on harassing and humiliating those who disagree with him. He is a sympathetic and skeptical outsider, as the best reporters almost always are.
“He is no Max Blumenthal” = damning with faint praise . . .
What I’m trying to say in this American Spectator piece is that some people now seem to be demanding that conservative journalists like myself — Philip Klein, Matt Vadum, J.P. Freire, et al. — must choose between being conservatives or being journalists.
To surrender to that demand would be to give credence to Matthew Yglesias’ oft-iterated and counterfactual assertion that conservatives are incapable of doing “real journalism.” And it is especially infuriating when these demands are delivered as part of a More Right-Wing Than Thou message, as if failure to join the Dave Weigel high-tech lynching indicates that I am ideologically unsound and must therefore be shunned.
Acceding to that mentality is to turn the conservative movement into a clique, a gaggle of schoolgirls on the third-grade playground: “I hate Suzy because she’s nasty. You can’t be my friend if you’re friends with Nasty Suzy.”
Frum’s great sin was his attempt t0 purge paleoconservatives — among them some of my friends — from the movement. In that purge, Frum was sufficiently successful that by 2002 there were no dissidents in the Bush White House to say, “Hey, chief, how about we slow down and double-check this Weapons of Mass Destruction angle before we start ginning up the jingos for the conquest of Mesopotamia?”
As I have often remarked, I’d love to write a history of the neocon/paleocon feud titled, First, They Came for Mel Bradford. The ascendancy of what might be called “Claremont conservatism” can be traced to that one episode nearly 30 years ago. Combine that with Ronald Reagan’s ill-advised choice of GHW Bush as his running mate (rather than Paul Laxalt) and you have the two basic ingredients of nearly all that has gone wrong for the conservative cause ever since.
Frum is therefore accountable for what I deem harmful mischief, which he has stubbornly refused to recant. Yet I suspect there may some day come a moment of crisis — and perhaps some day soon — when an important conservative gets hit with the “anti-Semite” smear, and Frum will stand up to defend our guy, bringing to bear the credibility on that subject he garnered by calling it like he saw it back in the day.
Even though I think he called it wrong.
Again I remind readers of the moral of Androcles and the Lion: Gratitude is the sign of noble souls.
I can’t wait to tell my Baptist mother that her daughter is in Playboy.
This month’s issue of Playboy features an interesting article on the tea party movement and in particular, focuses on a particular group of activists, myself included.
We’ve quietly acquired Service Employees International Union shirts to wear at Tea Party rallies.
Yeah, I figured that out. I know some of the people in this guy’s network, and I don’t believe he was authorized to disclose that operational detail. There will be repercussions.
UPDATE: “I know him very well,” my source says of the consultant who wrote the article. The SEIU T-shirt detail was “old news,” says my source, but the shot at Eric Odom still requires explanation, at least in my mind. Odom’s a good guy, and didn’t deserve that.
UPDATE II: What kind of man reads Playboy? Moe Lane. But only for the Tea Party articles. Aaron Gardner highlights the problem that arose when Deb Medina in Texas refused to disavow 9/11 Truther conspiracy theories.
Lewis in Douglas County offers a solo on the last verse of the Star Spangled Banner.
O! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
To all you sad little Leftist haters who just don’t get this country: listen to these words, ponder the exceptional creation that is the United States, and be healed of your abject, nihilistic foolishness.
Willy-nilly lumping together of libertarians, conservatives and kooks like Alex Jones? Check. Obligatory inclusion of high-profile Fox News personalities? Check. Time for somebody to do some actual reporting:
Catherine Bleish is a 26-year-old libertarian who was a Ron Paul delegate to the 2008 Republican National Convention. She is a leader of the Liberty Restoration Project which, among other things, opposes the federal “War on Drugs” and denounces the Patriot Act as “an assault against the civil liberties of Americans.”
Perhaps you disagree with those views, but is Bleish dangerous?
The Southern Poverty Law Center seems to think so. In a special report called “Meet the ‘Patriots’” issued last week, the SPLC named Bleish as one of 35 people “at the heart of the resurgent movement.” The report — which also names WorldNetDaily publisher Joseph Farah and Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media — describes the movement thus:
“In the last year and a half, militias and the larger antigovernment ‘Patriot’ movement have exploded, accompanied by the rapid expansion of other sectors of the radical right. … [T]he so-called Patriots [are] people who generally believe that the federal government is an evil entity that is engaged in a secret conspiracy to impose martial law, herd those who resist into concentration camps, and force the United States into a socialistic ‘New World Order.’”
The SPLC’s scary references to militias and conspiracies and a “resurgent movement” very much echo Bill Clinton’s recent conflation of the tea party with Timothy McVeigh and, like Clinton, the Montgomery, Ala.-based organization singled out Rep. Michelle Bachmann, calling her an “enabler” of the Patriot movement. Also labeled “enablers” by the SPLC were Glenn Beck and Andrew Napolitano of Fox News, as well as Ron Paul, the Texas congressman whose quixotic 2008 presidential campaign helped turn Bleish into a full-time political activist. . . .
Please read the whole thing. Whatever you think of Ron Paul and his supporters, the SPLC’s insinuation that they pose a threat to public safety — The Libertarian Menace! — is unwarranted. And the Paulistas certainly aren’t part of a “movement” that also includes, inter alia, Cliff Kincaid and Michelle Bachmann.
It’s amazing what you can find out about the SPLC with just a little effort. Yesterday, I spoke to a guy who decided to spend his weekend reading their financial disclosure forms and said the $190 million organization apparently has accounts in the Cayman Islands. And another guy told me that, for the first time in three decades, SPLC founder Morris Dees has donated money to a Republican.
Attention, members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy: We’ve got an unanticipated problem developing in Pennsylvania, where the long-awaited Arlen Specter meltdown appears to be beginning prematurely.
Typically, long-term incumbents with support in the low forty percent range are thought to be vulnerable, which means that Sestak still has an opportunity to pull off an upset if he is able to raise enough money to communicate a message.
A Sestak victory in the May 18 Democratic primary must be prevented. Of course, the VRWC has no love for Specter — if he got run over by a D.C. Metro bus tomorrow, we’d send flowers to the bus driver — but a Sestak primary victory would foil our carefully orchestrated Pennsylvania Plan, which has been spectacularly successful so far:
May 2009-May 2010 – Geriatric crapweasel Specter soaks up all the money and media coverage, killing the dreams of an up-and-coming Democratic challenger, and wins the May 18 primary.
June-November 2010 — Haunted by his well-deserved reputation for unprincipled opportunism, geriatric crapweasel Specter sinks steadily in polls, loses general election to conservative Republican Pat Toomey in a landslide.
A congressman and retired Navy vice admiral who is challenging Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania’s May 18 Democratic primary election is accusing the fifth-term senator of using “Swift Boat”-style attack tactics in an ad that suggests the Navy fired him.
U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak on Wednesday released a list of former Navy officers who support him while a group of veterans held a news conference in suburban Philadelphia calling on Specter to remove the ad.
In an e-mail to veterans, the Sestak campaign called the ad “baseless” and compared it to the attacks mounted in 2004 by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which sought to tarnish Sen. John Kerry in his challenge to President George W. Bush.
The ad, which first aired Tuesday, begins with a narrator saying, “Joe Sestak, relieved of duty in the Navy for creating a poor command climate” — a term for morale — then criticizes Sestak for missing votes in Congress last year.
Democratic primary voters react like Pavlov’s dog to the phrase “Swift Boat,” and this could create a sympathy backlash that helps Sestak. Therefore, the VRWC is issuing an alert to all Pennsylvania Republicans, calling on them to pull out all the stops to ensure that Specter wins the primary, so that he can get his geriatric crapweasel butt stomped by Toomey on Nov. 2. Here’s an anti-Sestak ad that all VRWC bloggers should post on their sites:
BTW, I remind readers that I live just south of the Pennsylvania border — it’s about an hour-and-a-half drive to Harrisburg from my house — and may be able to go do some Pennsylvania primary campaign coverage in the next few weeks, if you’ll contribute to the Shoe Leather Fund.
We expect over ONE MILLION protesters across the country, and I hope you’ll be among them. But if you cannot, there are still plenty of ways for you to help out and make your voice heard for freedom.
It will take a lot of pictures to back up that prediction. Even so, we can expect the liberal media (you can’t spell ‘liberal’ without ‘libel’) to convert the attendance estimate to hexadecimal, and then take the logarithm, so that the final figure fits fingers. But they could well disprove my mockery by breaking with tradition and reporting honestly.
I do wonder if Conor Friedersdorf shall have recovered from the encounter with Valley of the Shadow on Twitter in time to meet some actual Americans. Come chill with the homies, Conor: we’re generally good folk, after all.
