LIVE AT FIVE: 10.22.14

The troll @MMashItMatt popped up in my Twitter timeline Tuesday to call me a “piece of sh*t doxxer.” Now, there are two kinds of trolls: The worthless pests I block, and the potentially dangerous creeps I don’t block because I want to keep an eye on them.

See, I figured out that not every Twitter troll is just a random kook. Some of them are dangerous criminals and some of them are Neal Rauhauser who, if he is not a proven criminal, is arguably the most evil online operative I’ve ever encountered. Rauhauser once boasted that he had created more than 100 different accounts. And nobody has deleted more online content than Rauhauser, whose habits of secrecy and deception I’ve described at some length. And if you have read the dossier on Rauhauser, you can understand my suspicion that he must be operating somewhere in the shadows around the #GamerGate controversy. But I digress . . .

“Don’t feed the trolls” is good advice, but there are times when I deliberately call attention to a troll, so that my thousands of Twitter followers can see what kind of creepy evil is out there. And when I did this to @MMashItMatt, he said:

“You silenced a Palin critic by telling them you would
release their info. You are scum of the highest order.”

Oh, you mean “Audrey,” eh?

A small group of trusted people know the whole story of “Audrey” who, far from being merely “a Palin critic,” was in fact one of the most hateful and dishonest of the notorious “Trig Truthers.” The very last time “Audrey” posted to her blog in August 2009, she directly accused Sarah Palin of faking her fifth pregnancy — stated this as a fact in a post with the headline “Who’s not your mama?”

“Audrey” was one of several bloggers who latched onto the “Trig Truther” bandwagon that the vile Andrew Sullivan got rolling, and you can see how she squealed with pleasure the first time Sully linked her in November 2008. When “Audrey” stopped updating her blog in August 2009, some of her readers were mystified by her silence. And then on Sept. 12, 2009, this appeared in the comments:

**A NOTE FROM THE MODERATOR**
Hi faithful readers and friends, Morgan here.
Many of you have written expressing concern over Audrey’s absence from her blog. Several of you have heard rumors that she was threatened.
Those rumors are, unfortunately, true. Audrey has been threatened. She and her husband took the threats seriously enough to seek legal advice and have decided after consulting with their attorney to suspend posting for the time being.
She has asked me to convey her deep appreciation for the good wishes and support she has and continues to receive from all of you.
Thanks,
Morgan
[email protected]

Well, I knew that to be a complete lie, although perhaps a necessary lie, because the crazy readers of that once popular anti-Palin blog needed some explanation, and when Dan Riehl brought that note by “Morgan” to my attention, I wrote on Sept. 14, 2009:

Hey, “Morgan”: How about you grab yourself a nice hot cup of STFU, sweetheart? You’re not doing “Audrey” or her family any favors with inflammatory rhetoric like that.
A wise concern for mercy ought not be taken for granted because, in case you haven’t noticed, some of our regular readers were intensely curious about the mysterious end of this investigation. And the content of certain comments (some of which I’ve had to reject as hinting too obviously) indicates to me that these commenters are also capable of research.
Some other research-savvy bloggers might not be as scrupulous as Dan and I have been, “Morgan.” Your insulting comments could make those other bloggers angry, and who knows what might happen then?
Mmmm. The delicious flavor of fresh STFU . . .

It would be unnecessary and unwise for me to explain too much more than I explained at the time. But let me tell you, I was this close to hitting the “publish” button on an article, and decided against it:

Her carelessness confronted me with a very difficult dilemma, and I hesitate to think what might have transpired had some unscrupulous, selfish, vindictive person been in my position. . . .
As Dan Riehl and I discussed between ourselves, there is no reason to believe “Audrey” has been guilty of any legal wrongdoing, merely careless in her online choices.
As our research advanced, and sources provided further information, however, matters reached a point where I had to ask myself, “Do I really want to publish this?” This same research indicates that “Morgan” knows exactly what I’m talking about . . .
It would have been unnecessary cruelty on my part to have published without having first contacted “Audrey,” which I did by means of a courteous and quite friendly e-mail message to her husband (whom she had referenced at Palin’s Deceptions as a sort of in-house “expert”).

Everyone remembers how Dan Riehl and I exposed the perverted anti-Palin blogger Jesse Griffin, but that was different: Given the sick stuff Griffin had written about pornography, children and masturbation, there seemed to be a matter of public safety involved.

In the case of “Audrey,” however, it was different. Before I finally decided against publishing a thoroughly documented article full of screencaps, etc., I had already dropped a few hints on the blog, just to gauge the reaction. What would “Audrey” do if she realized that her separate online personas had been connected, and that I knew everything about the real person behind both personas?

Silence. She must have been scared shitless, as well she should have been. Let me see if I can explain what I mean:

X — Hateful and dishonest anti-Palin blogger “Audrey.”
Y — Reputable human being with a real life in a small town.
Z — Other embarrassing online behavior.

Now, imagine you are Reputable Human Being Y. For many years previously, you engaged in Embarrassing Online Behavior Z under a pseudonym that had never been penetrated. Y thinks to herself, “If nobody has figured out that I’m secretly Z, then Internet anonymity is very simple.” However, no one had very much of a motive to try to connect Z to Y; it’s a different matter when Y decides in 2008 that she is now also going to become X, telling lies about the Republican vice-presidential candidate who, as of August 2009, looked like a potential contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012.

There might be all kinds of people who decide to take an interest in discovering the identity of X, and one of those people might drop me an anonymous e-mail saying, “Hey, look at this.”

Ask yourself this obvious question: Why didn’t “Audrey” (X) use her real name (Y) to do her anti-Palin blogging? There is no law against being a “Palin critic,” after all. But she wasn’t a “Palin critic,” she was promoting the hateful insane lies of Trig Trutherism.

Do you want to know what the GOP vote margin was in the county where “Audrey” and her family live? I could look it up. Trust me, if her neighbors had discovered she was behind that wicked blog, she would not have been the most popular mom in the PTA.

Oh, but what about Embarrassing Online Behavior Z? If connecting X (“Audrey” the anti-Palin hate monger) to Y (the real person in the GOP-leaning small town) would have been hurtful, connecting Z to Y would have been thermonuclear destruction. Trust me.

And I was this close to hitting the “publish” button on that blog post, OK?

That unpublished post is still sitting there, five years later, in draft.

Some people criticized my decision not to publish that. “She’s a vile and despicable subhuman monster! What’s wrong with you?”

Trust me, I made the right decision. I’d seen the sudden silence at her blog after I started dropping hints, and I could imagine the panic. In fact, once I’d dropped a few hints, some readers searched around and figured it out for themselves. “Audrey” had been careless, and if I could connect X + Y + Z, her anonymity was not secure. But still, that question: “Do I really want to publish this?”

Hit “publish” and you destroy somebody. For what? For politics?

No, it’s not worth it. And I would not want to be known for that.

We know the denouement. I sent a polite email to Y‘s husband, explaining that the secret (“X + Y + Z“) was no longer secret. I suppose “Audrey” decided that continuing to write wicked lies about Sarah Palin was probably not a good idea. (Smart decision, ma’am.) And, of course, Sarah Palin did not run for president in 2012; the wicked lies of Trig Trutherism were just a waste of time, anyway.

Did I “threaten” anybody? No. I don’t threaten people. I made a choice not to publish, and “Audrey” made her own choice. To see my choice criticized by @MMashItMatt, however, makes me wonder if mercy was the wrong choice. What are we to do with these insane, hateful and ignorant people who confuse mercy with weakness?

@MMashItMatt had better contemplate the consequences of attempting to impugn my honor with his dishonest accusations.

Mercy has its limits, and I am not always merciful. Selah.

HATE TROLL > @MashItMatt < w 86 followers calls ME "piece of sh*t doxxer"? @AdamBaldwin #GamerGate pic.twitter.com/D29CAWLWcB

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

.@MashItMatt Hey, Troll: I could publish it NOW, if that would make you happy. @AdamBaldwin

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

Hate-filled perverted scum like @MashItMatt get mercy and don't appreciate it. Be careful. I'm CRAZY, you know. @AdamBaldwin

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

@rsmccain ignore the bots & socks & trolls, please.

— Adam Baldwin (@AdamBaldwin) October 21, 2014

.@MelissaTweets She's got a point, Adam. I'm a crazy troll magnet. Ask Barrett Brown, who is in federal custody. @AdamBaldwin

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

Somewhere out there online, Neal Rauhauser must be lurking in the shadows of #GamerGate. If you find him, let me know.

Category: Sarah Palin

In The Mailbox: 10.21.14

Posted on | October 21, 2014 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Doug Powers: Crowd So Shocked Democrat Candidate Allowed Obama To Campaign For Him, Some Had To Walk Out
Twitchy: “Your Tax Dollars Not At Work” $775 Million For Federal Bureaucrats On Administrative Leave

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Hispanics Sour On Obama, May Sit Out Elections
American Thinker: Math Is On Life Support. Can We Save It?
BLACKFIVE: For Vets – The Most Important Post You’ll Read Today
Conservatives4Palin: P.J. O’Rourke – What We Really Need Is A Nobel War Prize
Don Surber: HGTV Election
Jammie Wearing Fools: Polls Indicate Dems Will Lose Control Of The Senate
Joe For America: Top Scientist – “This Version Of Ebola Looks Like A Very Different Bug”
JustOneMinute: Two Americas
Pamela Geller: American Soldier Receives Death Threats At Home From Suspected ISIS Sympathizer
Protein Wisdom: “Even When A British Muslim Beheads A British Christian, There Will Still Be Those Who Blame The Jews”
Shot In The Dark: Parkas In The Third Circle
STUMP: More On The Illinois Governor’s Race
The Gateway Pundit: 71 Illegals From Ebola-Affected Countries Captured At US Border This Year
The Jawa Report: Killing Jews For Allah Has Been Quite Profitable For Hamas
(Pat Condell content!)
The Lonely Conservative: US Aid Going To Fund And Feed ISIS
This Ain’t Hell: Younger Veterans Bypassing Legion, VFW For Service, Fitness Groups
Weasel Zippers: America’s “Most Influential Muslim Leader” Endorses Sharia Law In Letter Condemning ISIS
Megan McArdle: Why New York City Hates Airbnb

Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow

Category: Linkagery

The Externalization of Responsibility: Monica Lewinsky’s Personal Shame

Posted on | October 21, 2014 | 135 Comments

Today’s headlines via Drudge:

Monica Lewinsky: I was ‘in love’
with President Clinton
— New York Post

Monica Lewinsky: Drudge Ruined My Life
— Truth Revolt

This raises a subject long overdue for discussion. The Internet is merely a tool — a very powerful tool, but still just a tool. For Monica Lewinsky to depict herself as “Patient Zero” in an epidemic of “cyberbullying,” as she has done, inspires several questions: Was she genuinely a victim? What does the phrase “cyberbullying” mean? How innocent must a victim be, in order for their victimhood to be genuine? In the context of online disputes like #GamerGate, how do we determine who is the victim and who is the bully? Is it possible that our prejudices, including the set of prejudices we call “political correctness,” may prevent us from accurately assessing responsibility for these conflicts?

Here’s the thing: Monica Lewinsky committed perjury.

Perjury is a crime and a very harmful crime. President Clinton’s personal attorney, Vernon Jordan, prepared a perjurious affidavit, which Clinton certainly knew to be false, and Monica Lewinsky signed that affidavit knowing it to be false. The purpose of that perjured affidavit was to deny justice to Paula Jones, who had filed a lawsuit accusing Clinton of sexually harassing her. Clinton’s harassment was a violation of Jones’s rights under the Civil Rights Act of 1991 and Jones, as the plaintiff, was entitled to true testimony from Lewinsky, who had been subpoenaed to testify in order to establish (as courts have determined harassment plaintiffs may do) that Clinton’s behavior toward Jones was part of a pattern of behavior by the defendant.

Instead of providing truthful testimony, Monica Lewinsky lied.

She perjured herself by signing that false affidavit and, in doing so, became part of a conspiracy to obstruct justice, to deny Paula Jones the remedy prescribed by law. Whatever we think about the concept of “sexual harassment” and the 1991 law that enabled Jones’s lawsuit, the law is the law. And both plaintiffs and defendants in lawsuits have a right to truthful testimony. Your sympathy for one of the parties in the suit cannot justify your lying under oath as a witness in an attempt to “help” them. Perjury is a crime, and conspiracy to obstruct justice is also a crime. It is possible that Monica Lewinsky did not understand the full legal consequences of her crimes, but (a) she damned sure knew she was lying, and (b) Bill Clinton is a graduate of Yale Law School, who was subsequently disbarred as a result of his own admitted perjury in the Jones v. Clinton case.

Because this is a very important story, it’s important to get it right.

We cannot allow the media to propagate myths about history, and Monica Lewinsky’s attempt to re-write her own part in recent history — to depict herself as a victim of cyberbullying, rather than as a criminal perjurer who attempted to deny justice to Paula Jones — should not be shrugged off or treated as one-day humorous punch line.

Because readers will want to comment on this story, I’m going to go ahead and hit “publish” and then come back to extend this little essay and aggregate reaction from other commentators.

<br />

UPDATE: How quickly we have forgotten the truth! Does anyone else remember that Clinton tried to claim that, once he became president, he could not be the defendant in a lawsuit for torts he had allegedly committed prior to taking that office? The Supreme Court ruled unanimously — 9-to-0 — in the landmark 1997 Clinton v. Jones decision that the president enjoyed no such immunity.

Also, have we forgotten how the Democrat-Media Complex, including Clinton henchman James Carville, viciously defamed Kenneth Starr, depicting that honorable man as the Torquemada of a 20th-century Inquisition simply for carrying out the duties of his office?

“[Ken Starr is] a sex-obsessed person who’s out to get the president. . . . He’s concerned about three things: sex, sex, and more sex. . . . It’s about sex. . . . [Starr] plants a story, he goes down by the Potomac and listens to hymns, as the cleansing waters of the Potomac go by, and we are going to wash all the sodomites and fornicators out of town.”
— James Carville, quoted in The Death of Outrage by Bill Bennett (1998)

Well, yes, Mr. Carville: A sexual harassment suit is necessarily “about sex,” and it was a Democrat-controlled Congress that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, under which Paula Jones brought her federal lawsuit against the man who harassed her. Your attempt to change the subject, to portray Ken Starr as “sex-obsessed” and make him the scapegoated villain in the story, was dishonest in the extreme, sir.

You are a liar, Mr. Carville, and Bill Clinton is a liar, and if you think honest people cannot see what a reprehensibly dishonest creep you are, you have another think coming.

Everyone who assisted Clinton in the Lewinsky scandal — everyone who tried to exculpate that guilty liar — covered themselves in immortal shame. After all was said and done, and Bill Clinton settled out of court with Paula Jones, paying her $850,000, that worthless son of a bitch’s hired liars kept lying on his behalf:

Robert S. Bennett, Clinton’s chief attorney in the case, said the president still insists Jones’s allegations of a crude proposition in a Little Rock hotel suite seven years ago “are baseless” but agreed to make the payment in the interest of finally putting the matter behind him.
“The president has decided he is not prepared to spend one more hour on this matter,” Bennett said. “It is clear that the American people want their president and Congress to focus on the problems that they were elected to solve. This is a step in that direction.”

All decent and honest people must recoil in horror at the way in which Democrats and their media allies, in their politically motivated project of covering up Clinton’s guilt, relentlessly smeared Paula Jones, Ken Starr and everyone else who told the truth about Clinton.

Let me tell you something, Mr. Carville and the rest of you hired liars on Team Hillary: Do you think honest people will believe that Monica Lewinsky’s timely emergence, with this carefully scripted tale of her “victimhood,” was merely a coincidence?

Like I said, you have another think coming.

You want to try and re-write history? OK, I’m going to invite readers to study the true history of the Lewinsky scandal. OK, I’m going to direct them to Bill Bennett’s book The Death of Outrage and to the official “Starr Report” of the investigation.

What part of “fuck you” don’t you understand, Mr. Carville?

<br />

UPDATE II: Have we forgotten how “that woman, Ms. Lewinsky,” has become a very wealthy woman as a result of her victimhood?

Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern whose affair with then-President Bill Clinton paralyzed the nation, has been shopping a memoir for several weeks, and according to the New York Post, she has apparently sold it for $12 million to an unnamed publisher. . . . Lewinsky . . . already cooperated with celebrity gossipmonger Andrew Morton for a 1999 book called Monica’s Story . . .

Yeah, here’s another book you should read:

<br />

No One Left to Lie To, by the late Christopher Hitchens. Welcome to the Internet, which is the enemy of lying cocksuckers.

The phrase “lying cocksucker” applies literally to Monica Lewinsky, and also to many in the media, literally or metaphorically.

@starless941 @rsmccain Everyone now *wants* to be a victim. An INNOCENT victim, no matter what damn fool things they did. This will doom us.

— Undine (@HorribleSanity) October 21, 2014

UPDATE III: Readers will please forgive my use of Anglo-Saxon words to describe these lying cocksuckers, but “mendacious fellatio performers” doesn’t have quite the same rhetorical force. There is something admirably powerful about plain English words when we are speaking the truth about a lying cocksucker like Monica Lewinsky:

Sixteen years ago, fresh out of college, a 22-year-old intern in the White House — and more than averagely romantic — I fell in love with my boss in a 22-year-old sort of a way.

(The “22-year-old sort of way” that people fall in love, she wants us to know, involves [a] fellatio, and [b] mendacity.)

It happens. But my boss was the President of the United States. That probably happens less often.
Now, I deeply regret it for many reasons.

(Including the many millions of dollars in my bank account.)

Not the least of which is that people were hurt. And that’s never okay.
But back then, in 1995, we started an affair that lasted, on and off, for two years. And, at that time, it was my everything. That, I guess you could say, was the golden bubble part for me; the nice part.

(Lying and sucking cock? “The nice part”! She’s still a Democrat, you see.)

The nasty part was that it became public. Public with a vengeance.

(Because she perjured herself.)

Thanks to the internet and a website that at the time, was scarcely known outside of Washington DC but a website most of us know today called the Drudge Report.

(Reminder: Drudge got the story because Newsweek magazine spiked the story by investigative reporter Michael Isikoff. As a result of this — the Newsweek spike and then Drudge learning about the spiked story — there were days of media speculation until, on Jan. 21, 1998, the Washington Post finally broke the story on their front page. But yeah, Monica, you just keep on blaming it all on Drudge, you lying cocksucker. Don’t even mention Paula Jones or your own perjury.)

Within 24 hours I became a public figure, not just in the United States but around the entire globe. As far as major news stories were concerned, this was the very first time that the traditional media was usurped by the Internet.

(“Usurped” is a word that has a definition, an actual meaning. To “usurp” is to acquire authority wrongfully. What actually happened, as opposed to what the lying cocksucker Monica Lewinsky wants you to think happened, is that “the traditional media” had for many years been abusing their authority, so that as soon as the Internet permitted others to challenge that authority, the authority of “the traditional media” was exposed as illegitimate. There was a revolution against “the traditional media,” which forfeited its authority by using its authority in wrongful and dishonest ways. We now return you to the self-serving victimhood mythology of the lying cocksucker Monica Lewinsky.)

In 1998, as you can imagine, there was a media frenzy. Even though it was pre-Google, (that’s right, pre-Google). The World Wide Web (as we called it back then) was already a big part of life.
Overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one. I was Patient Zero.
The first person to have their reputation completely destroyed worldwide via the Internet. . . .
This is what my world looked like: I was threatened in various ways. First, with an FBI sting in a shopping mall. It was just like you see in the movies. Imagine, one minute I was waiting to meet a friend in the food court and the next I realized she had set me up, as two FBI agents flashed their badges at me.
Immediately following, in a nearby hotel room, I was threatened with up to 27 years in jail for denying the affair in an affidavit and other alleged crimes. Twenty-seven years. When you’re only 24 yourself, that’s a long time.

Dispensing with the italic fisking format — you can go read the entire dishonest transcript — let me note how Monica Lewinsky has transposed events and, in the process, shifted responsibility.

She was the one who (a) sucked the cock of the President and (b) lied about her cocksucking in a false affidavit, which was intended (c) to deny justice to Paula Jones, a previous victim of Clinton’s predatory sexual habits, and (d) secure for Monica Lewinsky the assistance of Vernon Jordan and others in providing her, the lying cocksucker, with employment in New York City. As I recall, there was both a quid (“sign this false affidavit”) and a quo (“we’ll get a job with Revlon, whose CEO is a Friend of Bill”), but as always in such situations, it was difficult to prove the “pro” part of this quid pro quo arrangement.

Without checking the timeline of the scandal, I distinctly remember (because I was involved in editing daily news coverage at that time) how the revelation of the Revlon job in New York and Vernon Jordan’s role as Clinton’s personal “fixer” brought into stark relief exactly how the Clinton Scandal-Control Machine operated.

The object of the game, in Ms. Lewinsky’s case, was (a) to get her out of Washington, D.C., (b) to put her in a respectable job where she didn’t feel disgruntled and could tell friends it was a step up from her White House gig, and (c) thereby to provide her with a plausible pretext for claiming, in her perjurious affidavit, that her duties at her new job in New York made it impossible for her to appear and be deposed as a witness in the federal lawsuit Jones v. Clinton.

This was the game. Everyone following the story at the time could see why it had been crucial for the Clinton Scandal-Control Machine to get Monica out of D.C., because if Paula Jones’s lawyers had gotten the opportunity to depose her in person, they were prepared to confront her with sufficient evidence to force her to admit the truth about her relationship with Clinton. Remember, testimony about Clinton’s predatory sexual habits was being sought by Jones’s lawyers as evidence that what happened to her was part of his pattern of behavior, and one key element of this pattern — i.e., Clinton’s preferring to have women perform fellatio, as opposed to normal intercourse — clearly could have been confirmed by Monica, if she had been willing to tell the truth under oath. Instead, she signed that perjurious affidavit and took that cushy job at Revlon headquarters in New York. Quid pro quo.

And also quod erat demonstrandum, you lying cocksucker.

UPDATE IV: In the comments:

Sworn to secrecy, she only told 11 people (including an erstwhile squeeze, one of her high school teachers who was 33 years old and had been married right along).

People forget so much so quickly, don’t they? Bill Clinton wasn’t the first married man Monica Lewinsky had sex with and, indeed, her own narcissistic compulsion to tell people about her sexual exploits was the proximate cause of her becoming a public figure:

Monica Lewinsky’s former high school drama instructor said yesterday that he had a long-running affair with her that began in 1992 during her college years in Portland, Ore., and continued until last year, throughout much of the time she reportedly has alleged she had an intimate relationship with President Clinton.
In an account questioning Lewinsky’s credibility, Andy J. Bleiler, 32, said through an attorney that Lewinsky had called him as often as four or five times a day after coming to Washington in 1995 as a White House intern, and that she talked obsessively about sex, including boasts that she was involved in a sexual relationship with a “high ranking White House official.”
Standing beside Bleiler and his wife at a news conference outside their home in Portland, attorney Terry Giles said the Bleilers “would both describe Monica as having a pattern of twisting facts, especially to enhance her version of her own self-image.”

So, Lewinsky’s former teacher (and former adulterous lover) says she has “a pattern of twisting facts, especially to enhance her version of her own self-image.” Did I mention she’s a Democrat?

Hmm. Nothing yet from @AceofSpadesHQ on this Lewinsky thing? Either (a) he's working on a killer post or (b) he's in a Valu-Rite vodka coma.

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

Hey, @AceofSpadesHQ, you see this from @/bitingtea? A story CNN is running EVERY HOUR TODAY is "stuck in 1998." pic.twitter.com/mJuNy8IbGY

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

UPDATE V: Let’s talk more about this quote:

“I fell in love with my boss in a 22-year-old sort of a way.
It happens.”

Does anyone else notice the helpless passivity — “It happens” — with which Monica Lewinsky attempts to deny her own agency?

If you study psychology, you know that good mental health is characterized by a sense of personal agency, that is to say, a psychologically healthy person thinks of himself as the agent, the active force in his own life. He is in charge, he is “the subject of the sentence,” as it were. Even though unpleasant or unfortunate things may happen to anyone, people with healthy minds do not think of themselves as helpless, passive objects to whom things merely “happen.”

A healthy-minded person, finding himself in a predicament for which he is not responsible, immediately thinks: “What can I do? What are my options? How can I exercise agency and regain control over my own destiny, rather than to allow the continuation of this circumstance in which others are exercising control over me?”

This sense of agency requires an ability to look at your situation objectively and, if you are unable to obtain that objectivity, it impairs your ability to learn from your mistakes. Here is the thing: It is very common for people to find themselves in a situation where, in some sense, things seem to “happen” to them through no fault of their own. However, in such a case, it becomes necessary to ask yourself, “What did I do, or fail to do, which has made me vulnerable this way?”

Problem: Your job is a stress-inducing nightmare. You are underpaid and treated poorly. Your boss is a jerk, and your good work is repeatedly sabotaged by a handful of selfish, lazy and dishonest co-workers who are envious of your superior ability. No matter how hard you work, or how clearly you explain the problem to your boss, the mistreatment does not end. As a matter of fact, your assessment of the problem and attempts to rectify the situation are counted again you. You’re labeled a “troublemaker,” and the people who are actually causing the problem (who for reasons of seniority or favoritism or company policy are in some sense protected) escape the consequences of their sabotage. Never mind the harm their sabotage does to you, personally, but by impairing your ability to do your job, these selfish and dishonest co-workers are doing harm to the company’s productive efficiency.
Solution: Quit.

It’s really that simple. The only reason those sons of bitches are able to make your working life a Hell on Earth is because you let them do it.

If you’re not willing to quit — just tender your resignation and walk out the door — then you are choosing to continue the problem. There are few situations in life where we are truly helpless, except where we have put ourselves into a bad situation by our own unwise choices.

Considering the lifelong series of bad choices that preceded Monica Lewinsky’s alleged “victimhood,” she has no legitimate cause to complain. Jeff Dunetz at Truth Revolt:

Ms. Lewinsky wasn’t a victim of cyber-bullying; she was a victim of having sexual relations with a person at or near the peak of power. She became news just as Donna Rice, Elizabeth Ray, Fanne Foxe and many others had before her.
Matt Drudge didn’t ruin her life just the same way that the Miami Herald did not ruin Donna Rice’s life. Drudge simply reported a huge news story.
If she wants to place the blame for the personal attacks she received, Ms. Lewinsky would be better served to look toward the “Clinton Machine,” whose history of destroying reputations is well-documented.

You hit the nail squarely on the head, Jeff: Monica Lewinsky deliberately chose to associate herself with people who were (and still are) dangerously dishonest and cruelly unscrupulous. If you lie down with Democrats, you’ll wake up with corruption.

So, @EdDriscoll, how soon will @MarkSteynOnline get an RT from @MonicaLewinsky? Today? Tomorrow? http://t.co/m8oQ4C76tB

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

.@elliottkrista Actually, the "creeps/jerks/haters" are the FUN part of Twitter. Am I right, @AmandaMarcotte ? @MonicaLewinsky

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

You stay classy, notorious "progressive" troll! #tcot #UniteBlue pic.twitter.com/hKSfDhJxfN

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

UPDATE VI: Because there is other news happening on which I wish to comment, I will wrap this up. Here’s the point: Monica Lewinsky was/is externalizing responsibility for her problems.

This is a classic symptom of the narcissistic personality. A narcissist will ruin his own life and, rather than recognize his own self-harm, will irrationally transfer blame to a scapegoat.

Pick up a psychology textbook and look up “defense mechanisms” or “rationalization.” Nobody likes to admit error. Nobody wants to recognize their own worst tendencies. However, if we cannot be objective about our problems, we can never solve our problems. It is difficult, and perhaps in some ways impossible, to be objective about yourself. But if you find yourself in a bad situation that seems to resemble the last bad situation you were in, and if you keep finding yourself in similar situations, you have to recognize that you are a major cause of your own problems. In other words, it’s not them, it’s you.

Earth to Monica Lewinsky: You have a wounded ego.

This is the key to understanding narcissism. Somehow, narcissists suffered an injury to their ego, so that they are unable to cope with negative feedback. They cannot accept that they are wrong, because they can’t handle the shame. By contrast, a healthy person understands the sense of shame as useful feedback. If you feel ashamed of your action, this is a clue you did the wrong thing. If you are merely feeling tempted to do the wrong thing, your sense of shame at your wrongful urge is also a good thing. The narcissist, however, cannot cope with shame because their ego is damaged. And so, in an attempt to defend itself against criticism, the narcissistic ego begins to engage in rationalization, including blameshifting, minimizing and scapegoating.

Irresponsibility and narcissism go hand in hand. So the narcissist will blame-shift (transferring agency for their wrongful action to others), the narcissist will minimize (diminishing the harmfulness of their wrongdoing) and the narcissist will scapegoat, magnifying the harm (perhaps wholly imaginary) done to them by someone (perhaps entirely innocent) in order to justify their own irrational anger.

The narcissist’s choice of scapegoat is always significant. Consider, for example, Hitler’s scapegoating of Jews. What happened to Hitler was that he applied to the academy of art in Vienna and was rejected. Hitler inarguably had some artistic talent. However, he applied to the Vienna academy at a time in the early 20th century when “Modern Art” was all the rage, and it happened that Jews (including some members of the Vienna academy) were very much involved in the Modern Art trend. Now, there was a pre-existing tradition of anti-Semitism in Germany, and there was also a pre-existing tradition of romantic nationalism in Germany. However, the crucial factor was Hitler’s damaged ego. He had apparently developed at an early age a grandiose concept of himself (a classic narcissistic overcompensation for the damaged ego), and had invested this grandiosity into his artistic ambition. Being thwarted in that ambition because of his rejection by the Vienna academy, he blamed Jews for his failure, and spent many years thereafter developing his paranoid conspiratorial anti-Semitic ideas into an all-encompassing worldview. At the root of the problem was not the Jews, of course.

The root of the problem was Hitler and his damaged ego, his inability to accept his failure. Hitler could not cope with this shame — the sense of unworthiness which his rejection by the Vienna academy caused him — and his grandiose messianic dreams of becoming a World-Historic Leader made him the most infamous case of narcissistic personality disorder in history. Hitler’s entire career from the 1920s onward could be seen as a classic revenge gesture of the thwarted narcissist who, failing to get what he wants, decides to vindicate himself by a grandiose act of destruction. This quest for vindication, you see, is necessary for the narcissist to prove to himself that he was wronged, cheated out of what was rightfully his, so as to exculpate himself for his own failure and thus purge the stigma of shame.

Obviously, Monica Lewinsky is not Hitler. But she is doing the same minimizing/scapegoating thing, trying to vindicate herself, to evade responsibility for her own disgrace, and to make Matt Drudge and the Internet the scapegoat in this mythical drama she’s scripting for herself.

It’s sad to see people do this, and it would be even sadder if, with such an example as Monica Lewinsky in front of us, we did not take the opportunity to learn the lesson of her sad fate.

UPDATE VII: OK, just a couple more final points:

I didn’t make clear the difference between blame-shifting and scapegoating. Blame-shifting is a defensive move, to avoid responsibility for your failure by saying others are actually at fault (or, at least, more at fault than you are). Scapegoating is an offensive move, turning someone else into a target of your vindictive rage. The scapegoat becomes, in the mind of the narcissist, a hated symbol of the wrong which (in the narcissist’s unhealthy ego-damaged mind) he has suffered. Think about a guy who cheats on his girlfriend, who then breaks up with him. The guy blame-shifts (saying that the girl he cheated with was actually at fault for his cheating), but if he then becomes obsessed with the ex-girlfriend who broke up with him, she’s the scapegoat. She hasn’t done anything wrong, except in the mind of the narcissist who scapegoats her. However, in many cases, the targeted scapegoat has little or nothing to do with the narcissist’s rage. In the throes of his irrational paranoia (which is often a side-effect of narcissism out of control) the thwarted narcissist may focus his rage on utterly innocent people. Rodger Elliott’s shooting spree in Santa Barbara was such a case. The people he shot had done him no wrong, but in his twisted mind, they were symbolically to blame.
Notice how Monica Lewinsky can’t distinguish between “falling in love” (i.e., a subjective emotion) and the wrongful acts of sucking the president’s cock and committing perjury? Unhealthy minds are impulsive in this way. Their actions are out of control and irrational because the damaged ego produces such strong emotion that the person feels they must act on these emotions. Monica’s fixation/obsession with “The Big He” (as she nicknamed Clinton) is a typically symptomatic trait of the damaged ego. Their emotions run out of control and become fixed on some object — a person, an idea, an ambition, an activity — and the obvious dangers of their irrational behavior are ignored.

Exit question: Why are crazy people usually Democrats?

Category: Bill Clinton, Crime, Culture, Feminism, Hillary Clinton, Media Bias, Scandal, Sex Trouble

Essential Feminist Quotes: ‘Access to a Sexuality Autonomous from the Male’

Posted on | October 21, 2014 | 30 Comments

Left to right: Andrea Dworkin, Teresa de Lauretis, Diane Richardson

“We want to destroy sexism, that is, polar role definitions of male and female, man and woman. We want to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family; in its most hideous form, the nation-state. We want to destroy the structure of culture as we know it, its art, its churches, its laws . . .
“We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist’s maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.”
— Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (1974)

“[T]he seductiveness of lesbianism for feminism lies in the former’s figuration of a female desiring subjectivity to which all women may accede . . [T]he erotic charge of a desire for women . . . unlike male desire, affirms and enhances the female-sexed subject and represents her possibility of access to a sexuality autonomous from the male. . . .
“Some women have ‘always’ been lesbians. Others, like myself, have ‘become’ one. As much a sociocultural construction as it is an effect of early childhood experiences, sexual identity is nether innate nor simply acquired, but dynamically (re)structured by forms of fantasy private and public, conscious and unconscious, which are culturally available and historically specific.”
— Teresa de Lauretis, Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (1994)

“[C]entral to radical feminist perspectives is the belief that if sexuality is socially constructed then it can be reconstructed in new and different ways. . . .
“[H]eterosexuality is socially instituted and maintained, creating the prescriptions and the conditions in which women experience sexual relations.”
— Diane Richardson, in Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed, edited by Diane Bell and Renate Klein (1996)

Most people speak of “sexual equality” as if that phrase can mean something other than what Andrea Dworkin said it meant, i.e., the destruction of our culture, including family and religion.

The abolition of “role definitions of male and female, man and woman” is necessary to “destroy sexism,” Dworkin explained 40 years ago, because “sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed,” as people are “programmed by culture” according to those roles. What Dworkin advocated for, what she offered as the antonym of “sexism,” is androgyny — a social condition in which sex roles do not exist, where male and female are essentially identical and interchangeable.

Sexual equality = androgyny.

It is actually that simple, you see, and when people call themselves “feminists” — when they declare themselves advocates for “sexually equality” — the question is, do they realize what this entails? Would they want to live in the world that would result if their egalitarian principles were enacted? Ideas Have Consequences, as Richard Weaver explained, and what are the consequences of feminism’s ideas?

Well, #GamerGate, among other contemporary phenomena. Last month, Robert Mariani wrote about the Left’s “intellectual bullying”:

The tactic of dishonestly re-framing a viewpoint into something outrageous in an attempt to discredit those who hold the viewpoint is known as intellectual bullying. . . .
With enough voices dishonestly insisting that someone holds all those beliefs that everybody hates, the person in question will either be shamed into silence or suffer from character assassination. . . .
A lot of of the tactics of the anti-GamerGate intellectual bullying campaign were famously codified in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

Read the whole thing. You see how feminists have made the accusation of “sexism” one of “those beliefs that everybody hates,” so the accusation that someone is “sexist” is an attempt to discredit them — to engage in character assassination in an attempt to effectively silence them — and no one even bothers to explain what “sexism” means or why it is so bad. This is remarkable, when you think about it.

What does “sexism” mean? It means to hold the opinion that men and women are different, that “masculine” and “feminine” describe natural qualities, and that these innate differences have social significance.

“Sexism” does not mean “says rude things to women.” Many sexists are extraordinarily courteous and mild-mannered. In fact, many sexists are female because — hello! — contrary to what feminists would have you think, men do not have a monopoly on sexism.

Sexism is not a synonym for “male chauvinism,” a term popular about 40 years ago that now sounds quaintly old-fashioned. Male chauvinism is (or was) a belief in the general superiority of men, particularly in matters of intellect and temperament. There are very few educated men nowadays who are (or who will admit to being) male chauvinists, but I think sexists like me are far more common than most intellectuals realize and (to repeat) many women are also sexist, i.e., they believe in natural differences between men and women.

My wife, for example, is a sexist. She was raised in a family with three bothers and three sisters, and she is the mother of two girls and four boys and she knows from direct experience that boys and girls are different. They simply are born different, naturally.

Not all males are equally masculine and not all girls are equally feminine, but in general boys are masculine and girls are feminine.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

That boys and girls are different does not mean that one sex is superior to the other, but yet their differences actually matter. To try to wish away these differences, or to create political, legal and social incentives to impose an artificial equality on the sexes, well . . .

“Believe me, sir, those who attempt to level never equalise. In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society, by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.”
— Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

Political and legal coercion — including the use of lawsuits to punish corporations and public institutions that do not hire or promote women in sufficient numbers to satisfy feminists — can indeed bring about greater equality between men and women, but these measures “load the edifice of society,” as Burke said. This artificial equality, imposed by quotas and other coercive incentives, distorts the social structure in ways that produce results that are in many ways ironic without necessarily being unpredictable.

A sort of Newtonian principle of equal-and-opposite reactions can be observed. Under a regime of coercive equality, many men will actually become more rudely hostile to women — more “sexist” in the vulgar usage of that term — and many women will actually be much less happy than they were when women were less “equal.” And yet, because intellectuals are committed to the abstract ideal of equality, these “smart” people will not be able to figure out that it is the pursuit their cherished ideal that is causing the harms they denounce.

Instead, when men react badly and women are less happy as the result of greater equality, these harms will be blamed on “sexism,” so the answer to any new problem is always the same: More equality!

People forget where feminism began. They forget (or never bothered to learn) what feminists advocated when the Women’s Liberation movement started in the late 1960s. How many people, when confronted with an angry feminist, ever bother to ask her whether she agrees with Andrea Dworkin? Trapped in the present tense — where only the latest outrage is discussed — we let feminists get away with a lack of ideological clarity. Do you, ma’am, want to destroy the family, destroy religion, destroy culture, destroy the nation-state?

“Well, that’s not fair! Dworkin was a radical extremist!”

Yes, but this 1974 book of Dworkin’s I’ve quoted bears cover blurbs by Audre L0rde, Kate Millett and Gloria Steinem. Does our contemporary feminist — while denouncing Dworkin as an extremist — also want to repudiate these other feminists who praised Dworkin? I doubt very much that any 21st-century feminist would denounce Audre Lorde (who has been beatified by the Women’s Studies cathedral), yet Audre Lorde called Dworkin’s Woman Hating “much needed and long overdue.” So, does the 21st-century feminist wish to accuse Audre Lorde of bad judgment or does she want to attempt to defend Dworkin’s book that Audre Lorde praised?

Hint: Woman Hating is indefensible.

Feminists are never challenged that way. Why? By calling themselves “feminist,” they have declared their allegiance to a political ideology that has a canon of books outlining ideas that are taught at universities by professors of Women’s Studies, and this ideology — including its extremist expressions by radicals like Dworkin — is what feminists are enforcing when they accuse the videogame industry of “misogyny.” So why aren’t these dots connected? Why aren’t these latter-day heiresses of Dworkin’s legacy asked if they agree, inter alia, that “sexuality is socially constructed [and] can be reconstructed in new and different ways,” as Professor Diane Richardson explained?

Isn’t that relevant? After all, what does Amanda Marcotte mean when she declares that #GamerGate “is a full-blown reactionary movement aimed at preserving male dominance”?

[Deadspin’s Kyle] Wagner explained that #GamerGate is driven by angry young white men who are threatened by demands that gaming be inclusive of women, people of color, and LGBTQ people, and who are lashing out in an attempt to keep the white male dominance they enjoy. . . .
[I]t’s quickly shaping up to be a potent way for conservatives to reach out to previously apolitical young men and turn them into devoted, hardened misogynists.

Accusations of “all those beliefs that everybody hates,” you see. But what does Marcotte mean by “male dominance”? What is a “hardened misogynist”? These terms are never defined. They are merely epithets hurled at demonized enemies. Also, while we’re at it, what are these “demands that gaming be inclusive”? How are these “demands” formulated? Who is “threatened” and how?

Isn’t it a fact that these demands are part of a larger effort, as Dworkin said, to “destroy the structure of culture as we know it”? And aren’t these demands also an attempt to shake down a multibillion-dollar industry, to get some of that money into the hands of self-described “Social Justice Warriors,” and to change the (hugely successful market-driven) gaming culture into something acceptable to the tastes and ideology of the arbiters of political correctness?

Feminist authors whose books surround my desk declare that “male dominance,” to use Marcotte’s phrase for what others call “male supremacy” or “patriarchy,” is part of the “heterosexual matrix” of the “sex/gender binary,” as Judith Butler called it. Nearly all of these feminist theorists are lesbians, and they insist that “compulsory heterosexuality” (Adrienne Rich) is integral to women’s “oppression” under patriarchy — to which sexists like me answer, “So?”

We need not argue that radical feminists are wrong about these connections — between sex roles, male supremacy and heterosexuality — in order to say that they are wrong to attack these (necessary and natural) elements of our civilization. Normal women are heterosexual and feminine, and these heterosexual feminine women prefer masculine men. Normal women prefer also that their male mates be able to provide a sufficient income to support the women (as wives) and their children (procreation being the biological purpose of sexual dimorphism in mammals). So here we having the hugely lucrative videogame industry, where reportedly males are 78% of the employees, under attack by feminists: MISOGYNY!

Is this targeting of the allegedly misogynist videogame industry coincidental? Is there any male-dominated institution in our society which has not been attacked by feminists in this way?

The attack on “male domination” — the attempt to lower the social and economic status of men — will have the effect of making it more difficult for women to find husbands and making it more likely that marriages will end in divorce. Women’s happiness will be diminished, and when these women complain about the dissatisfactions of their lives, feminists will say . . . MORE EQUALITY!

Feminists are quite specific about what they don’t like about videogames. They complain that depictions of female characters are examples of heteronormativity and the male gaze, i.e., the female characters are conventionally feminine and sexually attractive.

Christina Hoff Sommers asked an obvious question: “If playing violent videogames doesn’t make people violent, how does playing sexist videogames make people sexist?” But wait! What feminists are saying about videogames is that cultural representations produce in real life what they depict? Doesn’t this sound like every social conservative criticism of pop culture, ever? I mean, remember when jazz music turned us all into degenerate heroin-addicted sensualists? More recently, gangsta rap turned us all into ghetto thugs.

So now, according to feminists, playing videogames are making us all misogynists? Isn’t this tantamount to an admission by feminists that Disney’s Frozen is a plot to turn our daughters into lesbians?

Two can play this Culture War game, you see.

How did boys ever learn to become violent misogynists before we had videogames to teach them? #GamerGate

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

My teenage sons were going to be meterosexual Obama voters. Then they started playing videogames. Now they're misogynists. #GamerGate

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

Someday, we'll tell our grandkids about the Golden Age of Sexual Equality that ended when the videogame industry started. #GamerGate

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) October 21, 2014

The trend in our culture and society desired by the intelligentsia is toward more “equality” and more acceptance of homosexuality, and we are not supposed to notice now closely this reflects the analysis provided by feminist gender theory, where women are oppressed because they’re heterosexual, and vice-versa. If, as feminists insist, male supremacy depends on the “heterosexual matrix,” then what is the opposite value system? The derogation of men, the deliberate stigmatization of masculinity and especially the demonization of male sexuality. Notice how, in the quote above, Teresa de Lauretis says that lesbian “desire for women . . . unlike male desire, affirms and enhances” women, by offering them “a sexuality autonomous from the male.”

In other words, lesbian supremacy — men bad, lesbians good.

Professor De Lauretis is a renowned feminist credited with coining the term “queer theory,” and I am waiting for Amanda Marcotte to denounce her — but of course, she won’t. You see my point?

The lesbian feminists are constantly derogating males and heterosexuality, while a heterosexual feminists like Marcotte is ranting about “white male dominance,” despite the fact that (a) Marcotte is white and (b) her boyfriend is a white male, so that in effect, Marcotte is denouncing herself and her own lifestyle. Yet never once is Amanda Marcotte required to address the whole argument — i.e., that male sexuality is inherently oppressive and lesbianism is therefore the key to women’s liberation — which has been the underlying message of feminist ideology for 40 years!

“Hey, Amanda, what do you think about Teresa de Lauretis? Why are you still tolerating your white male boyfriend’s oppression?”

These questions are never answered because they are never asked, just like nobody asks a feminist, “What do you mean by ‘sexist'”? Does “sexism” (or “misogyny,” as a synonym) actually mean what Andrea Dworkin said it meant? That is to say, are the basic “role divisions” of male/masculine and female/feminine your target? What is wrong with these roles? Are women oppressed by their femininity? Is male heterosexual desire for women inherently offensive and degrading? Does Amanda Marcotte want to “destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family”? And if not, why not?

Feminism is a journey to lesbianism, I keep saying, because it’s true. If “sexual equality” means androgyny (which it does), and if male sexuality is the source of women’s oppression (as all feminists say it is), then why on earth would any feminist be heterosexual? In the feminist future where “male domination” has been eliminated and sex roles have been abolished, wouldn’t all women in this androgynous future society prefer the (superior) female partner to one of those pathetic XY chromosome carriers, the males?

After five decades of activism, feminists are still losing their war on human nature (97.7% of Americans are heterosexual). What feminists have accomplished is to make more women as unhappy as feminists are. Making us all equally miserable is the real goal.

Category: Sex Trouble

#WendyDavisWontSay If She Reads TheOtherMcCain, But The Pelosi-Esque Visage Is A Probable ‘No’

Posted on | October 20, 2014 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

#WendyDavisWontSay how she got over Macho Grande, when all others are stymied.

— 'Teahadist' h/t@DMat (@smitty_one_each) October 20, 2014

#WendyDavisWontSay whether or not it's true that she went noodling, and a catfish bit her and died.

— 'Teahadist' h/t@DMat (@smitty_one_each) October 20, 2014

#WendyDavisWontSay whether or not she'd give Al Gore a massage, if that's what it took to win the election.

— 'Teahadist' h/t@DMat (@smitty_one_each) October 20, 2014

#WendyDavisWontSay whether she at first thought ebola was waving a smart phone at pins in an alley.

— 'Teahadist' h/t@DMat (@smitty_one_each) October 20, 2014

#wendydaviswontsay what she did with Joan Walsh's brain. Granted, if it were pot, the brain wouldn't trigger an arrest in most jurisdictions

— 'Teahadist' h/t@DMat (@smitty_one_each) October 20, 2014

Category: Democrats, humor

Store Clerk Shoots Robber

Posted on | October 20, 2014 | 17 Comments

Rome, Georgia:

An attempted armed robbery suspect who was shot by a Maple Street store clerk remained hospitalized at a Chattanooga hospital late Sunday, according to Rome police officials.
Micah Wood, 24, of Rome — listed as a suspect in the early morning robbery attempt at the One Stop Shop, 2107A Maple St. — was airlifted to Erlanger hospital, according to Rome police authorities. His condition remained unknown late Sunday.
Two customers who inside the store — Robert Grant Stinson, 43, and Tina Louise Davenport, 51, both of Rome — were also injured and taken to Floyd Medical Center.
Stinson was listed in satisfactory condition late Sunday, while Davenport had been treated and released from the hospital, FMC Public Relations Specialist Bill Fortenberry said.
Meanwhile, investigators said they are still looking for a second suspect.
According to multiple Rome police reports:
Officers were called to the scene shortly before 2 a.m. by store clerk Gregory Ticas, who said someone had been shot. . . .
Ticas told officers that two black men wearing masks had walked into the store. One of them held up the customers in the back at the game machines and the other pointed a gun at Ticas and demanded money.
Ticas gave him money but was unable to comply with the next order, to open the safe.
“He stated the male told him if he did not get the safe open he was going to die,” the report said.
Ticas managed to get a gun from the counter and began to fire, striking one of the men police later identified as Wood.
While one of the officers was checking the extent of Davenport’s injuries, a call came on the radio about a man with a gunshot wound on East 20th Street near the CVS and Rite Aid stores.
The officer ran over to find Wood — who appeared to be shot in the head — lying on the pavement, covered in blood and wearing only boxer shorts and a large gold watch.
Wood was incoherent and it was unclear what had happened to his clothing. The description of his watch, however, made him a suspect.
Rome police Lt. Gary Clayton said nothing was taken from the store and that the clerk was not hurt.
“The suspects had taken the money, but dropped it in the store during the shootout,” he said.
Reports described the other man as a shorter black man weighing approximately 200 to 250 pounds.

it is not clear from the report whether the two wounded customers were shot by the robbers or were wounded by stray shots fired by the clerk. What is clear is that if the clerk had not had a weapon, the robbers might have killed him and all the customers. My advice to law-abiding citizens is, arm yourselves. My advice to criminals is, stay the hell away from Rome, Georgia. People there will shoot your ass.

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Category: Crime

LIVE AT FIVE: 10.20.14

Posted on | October 20, 2014 | Comments Off on LIVE AT FIVE: 10.20.14

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Better late than never…

TOP NEWS
New Pivot In Ebola Protocol

Dr. Fauci calls for medical personnel working with Ebola patients to have no exposed skin

Also, SecDef Hagel orders formation of multiservice team to assist civilian medics
Did CDC laxity on one infection help spread another?
Ebola contacts in US may number up to 300

US Finally Airdrops Weapons, Ammo To Kurds Defending Kobani
Turks are gonna be pissed

Activists Retake Streets In Hong Kong
Clashes reported with police in the Mong Kok district

POLITICS
DNC Head Claims Dems Will Hold The Senate

Whatever she’s smoking, I don’t want any

Wasserman-Schultz claims Obama and the Democrats “have America’s back”

Suspected Nazi War Criminals Expelled From US Still Collecting Social Security

Maryland Delaying Legal Effort To Recoup $55 Million Wasted On Obamacare Website

Ted Cruz Rips Ron Klain As “Political Operator”

Fauxcahontas Campaigns For Bruce Braley In Iowa

Supremes Allow Texas To Enforce New Voter ID Law

Early Voting Totals Mirror 2010

Democrats Pull Back In Kentucky As Grimes Catches Flak From The Left

Detroit Bankruptcy Takes Center Stage In Tight Michigan Governor Race

Martha Coakley Struggles To Hold Lead In Massachusetts

Obama Makes Rare Campaign Appearance; People Leave Early

GOP Brass Stand Behind DeMaio Despite Sexual Harassment Claims

Brownback, Roberts Facing Tough Re-Election Fight In Deep Red Kansas

THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Asian Crude Stagnant On Weak Demand, Glut On Market: WTI $83.22, Brent $86.33
Japan Stocks Lead Sharp Asian Rebound
Boston Fed’s Rosengren: Don’t Expect More QE
Pay Raises Rarer Despite Strong US Hiring
Investor Group Aims To buy Adidas’ Reebok Unit
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Plan To Ease Lending
IBM Paying Globalfoundries $1.5 Billion To Take Chip Unit Off Their Hands
Snapchat Plunges Into Advertisements
Microsoft Soon To Unveil A Wearable
Apple Pulls All Bose Products From Its Online Store
Kickstarter Suspends Anonabox Campaign
“HALO: The Master Chief Collection” Is Mythic Value

SPORTS
Brad Keselowski Wins At Talladega

“I know there’s probably some people out there that aren’t really happy I won.”

Stays alive in the hunt for the NASCAR championship

Kaepernick Struggles As 49ers Get Thumped By Broncos, 49-17

Alabama Crushes Aggies 59-0 #rolltide

Andersen Gets First Shutout As Ducks Blank Blues

#9 Oregon Whips Huskies 45-20

Cowboys Beat Sagging Giants 31-21

Flames Trounce Hapless Jets 4-1

Colt McCoy Steps Up, Leads Redskins To Victory

Sens Edge Blue Jackets 3-2

Bruins Blank Sabres 4-0

Nationals Top 5 Offseason Storylines

FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Will Jena Malone Be Playing A Female Robin In “Batman Vs. Superman”?

From “The Hunger Games” to “Batman vs. Superman”?

You know, if the presence of Carrie Kelley as Robin means they’re basing this on Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, I might actually be willing to see this in a theater.

“Kingdom” Picked Up For 20 More Episodes By DirecTV

“Buffy” Star Nicholas Brendon Arrested In Boise

Amal Clooney Most Powerful Woman In London?

Shia LaBeouf Blames Method Acting For His Recent Troubles

Evan Rachel Wood Dating Katherine Moennig

No Prosecution For Child Molester Stephen Collins

Bono Not Wearing Shades Inside To Be A Douche – He Has Glaucoma

FOREIGNERS
BJP Sweeps Haryana, Maharashtra
Widodo Inaugurated As Indonesian President
Japan’s Justice, Trade Ministers Resign Amid Scandals
Hong Kong’s C.Y. Leung Claims “External Forces” Involved In Protests
Indian Diesel Prices Deregulated As Modi’s Government Fuels Reform
Swedish Military Sights Russian Sub Off Stockholm Coast
Koreas Trade Gunfire Across The DMZ Amid Continuing Tensions
Downing Street Rejects Barroso’s Criticism
Spanish Ebola Nurse Appears Clear Of Disease
Israeli Hospital Treats Daughter Of Gaza Hamas Leader
Catalans Rally In Barcelona, Call For Early Elections
Australia Sending Special Forces Troops To Iraq
Polls Show Opposition With Slight Lead In Brazilian Runoff Election