The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Victims Proliferate’ at Occidental: The Unfortunate Truth About Campus Rape

Posted on | June 19, 2014 | 60 Comments

“The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties with our female party guests — we did.”
— Eric “Otter” Stratton, Animal House

“Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (‘micro-aggressions,’ often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.”
— George Will, June 6

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which was once an important and reputable newspaper, has announced it is dropping George Will’s column because of his comments about the alleged “epidemic” of rape on college campuses. Provocative language in opinion columns is apparently something that newspapers can do without in the 21st century. Losing readers and losing money, now they have decided to lose truth, too.

George Will’s provocation — his assertion that colleges have made “victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges” — may have been unnecessarily offensive to some readers, but the truth is not always pleasant, and the question remains to be answered: Is this true? Have the attitudes prevalent within academia incentivized false accusations of rape? Perhaps more importantly, we must ask, have college administrators deprived the accused of their due process rights? This was what George Will suggested in his letter to four senators who objected to his June 6 column when he said “sexual assault is a felony that should be dealt with by the criminal justice system, and not be adjudicated by improvised campus processes.” Hear! Hear!

This problem of sexual assault accusations being treated as school disciplinary matters, rather than being investigated as criminal charges, is central to the discussion of the alleged “rape epidemic” on college campuses. And it is also central to a pending lawsuit in California:

Los Angeles County Superior Court judge refused to seal portions of a lawsuit against Occidental College on Wednesday, denying such a request from attorneys for the liberal arts school.
Lawyers for Occidental had asked Judge Luis A. Lavin to make confidential an investigative report included in a case filed by a former student who was expelled after an internal school panel found that he had sexually assaulted a classmate while both were drunk.
Attorneys for the Eagle Rock college argued that documents contained “sensitive, confidential and personal information.”

(In other words, “information” that makes Occidental College look bad.)

Attorneys for The Times and the man opposed Occidental’s request, saying that the lawsuit had been filed earlier this year and that the college had made no previous effort to seal any documents.
The judge agreed, saying: “I don’t understand why [it] is so pressing in June when it wasn’t so pressing in February.”
The Times published a story earlier this month based partially on allegations contained in the documents.

(What a novel idea: Publishing the facts!)

The nearly 180-page investigative report, conducted by an outside firm, contained interviews about the incident with witnesses and the victim. In it, the students said: Both had been drinking, she went to his room, took off her shirt while dancing, kissed him and returned to his room later for sex, asking in a text message if he had a condom. When friends stopped by the room to ask if she was OK, she told them yes.
The crux of the case was whether she was too drunk to understand what she was doing — and whether he knew or should have known of her impaired condition.

(Friends don’t let friends get that drunk.)

The suit alleges that Occidental failed to provide the male student with a fair hearing, that it didn’t follow its own sexual misconduct policy and that it did not provide sufficient evidence for the finding. The [accused] student, who was a freshman, was expelled last year after the panel found that the woman, who was also a freshman, was too incapacitated to provide consent.

So, two freshmen — both of them teenagers, too young to legally buy alcohol — get drunk. According to witnesses, whose testimony is corroborated by evidence (e.g., the girl’s text message about a condom), the girl manifested enthusiastic consent to sex with the boy. Subsequently, however, the girl claimed that the boy had taken advantage of her “incapacitated” condition and, rather than treating this as a criminal accusation, Occidental College instituted a disciplinary “sexual misconduct” proceeding against the boy, violated its own stated policy in the process, and unfairly expelled him.

Of such flimsy stuff is the campus “rape” epidemic built.

The Dead Kennedys could not be reached for comment.

Perhaps this controversy — not just the situation at Occidental College, but also the situation with feminists shrieking at George Will’s alleged insensitivity to rape victims — could be mitigated by pointing to the “is”/”ought” distinction involved.

If we look at the “ought” side of the campus sex scene, if we ask what ideally should be happening, certainly conservatives do not advocate that students should get drunk and have sex.

In terms of moral ideals, conservatives favor sobriety and chastity. However, when we consider the “is” side of the equation — the reality of student life — conservatives must acknowledge as a matter of fact that college kids do get drunk and do have sex. As an ex-Democrat, I speak with the authority of experience on this subject, and this is what I wrote in an American Spectator column last year:

The rhetoric of SlutWalk activists — “No means no!” — is obviously not directed at the lurking sociopath, the knife-wielding career criminal who pounces from ambush in darkened alleys. Rather, feminist harangues about the meaning and importance of consent are directed at otherwise law-abiding men who don’t cope appropriately with sexual rejection.
Nowhere is this problem more widely decried than at America’s colleges and universities. Date rape is an apparently common campus crime that usually involves two drunk young people, one of whom has an erect penis, and the other of whom is unable to avert what the erect penis typically does.

This is simply the fact of the matter and, however unfortunate the facts may be, if we are going to yell “rape” every time two college kids get drunk and have sex, we’re going to be yelling constantly. But the feminist Thought Police are deliberately confusing the issue, claiming that opinion columnists who use provocative language to discuss this phony “epidemic” are complicit in rape.

Absurd accusations of word-rape (“Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, But George Will’s Column Raped Me”) are not going to subtract even a single rape victim from the tragic total. But the important question is this: Are we doing a disservice to rape victims when we describe as a “victim” the college freshman who gets drunk and has sex that she regrets after she sobers up the next day?

What about guys and their own regrets of drunken sex? Can’t we discuss the fact that teenage boys do things when they’re drunk that they probably wouldn’t do if they were sober? Isn’t this why we have laws against selling alcohol to teenagers? Couldn’t college administrators do a lot to reduce the frequency of these incidents by getting serious about punishing underage drinking on campus?

Where is Dean Vernon Wormer now that we really need him?

“You’re finished! No more Delta! . . . I’m going to
revoke your charter! And if you wise guys
try one more thing — one more — I’m going
to kick you out this college!
No more fun of any kind!”

It’s a sad thing when we become nostalgic for the Bad Old Days.

 

Category: Crime, Education, Feminism, Journalism, Sex

LIVE AT FIVE: 06.19.14

Posted on | June 19, 2014 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Iraq Asks US For Air Strikes On Jihadis Holding Northern Cities

Baiji refinery could fall to ISIS

Administration mulling a response

Israel Clamps Down On Hamas
Radio stations shut down, cash confiscated

Patent Office Strips Redskins Of Trademark Protection
Team appealing decision, will seek to overturn ruling



POLITICS
Illegal Kids Swamp Detention Centers

A Border Patrol officer talks about how illegals’ belongings are stored

Obama’s childrens’ crusade flooding the zone


Hundreds Of Armed Mexican Police, Soldiers Cross US Border While Sgt. Tahmooressi Remains In Mexican Jail


Lying Scumweasel Jay Carney Bids Farewell To Press Corps

Businesses Launch Legal Challenge To Seattle’s $15 Minimum Wage

Florida Man Executed, Press Loses Its Shit

Second Suspect Faces Charges In Agent Terry’s Death

Military Recovers, Identifies 17 Bodies From 1952 Alaska Crash

Sticker Shock Could Inhibit Passage Of VA Reform Bill



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Brent Spikes Over $114 As Iraq Crisis Continues: NYMEX $106.32, Brent $114.35
American Apparel Fires Controversial CEO
Fed Sees Slower Growth, Continues To Trim Stimulus
M&T Bank Forfeits $560K In Drug Proceeds
Rolls Royce Plans $1.7 Billion Share Buyback
Markit Prices IPO At $24/Share
Amazon Debuts Fire Smartphone
As iPhone Thefts Drop, Google & Microsoft Plan Kill Switches For Smartphones
Blackberry To Offer Android Apps For BB10 Via Amazon App Store
Most ISPs Deliver Promised Speeds; DSL Lags
MakerBot Replicator MiniReview: 3D Printing Comes Home



SPORTS
Dodgers’ Kershaw Almost Perfect Against Rockies

Kershaw in the sixth

15 K’s, Rockies’ only baserunner reaches on error en route to 8-0 rout

Napoli, Ortiz Homer In 10th To Lift Red Sox Past Twins 2-1

Padres Rally To Beat Mariners 2-1

Snider Mops Up As Pirates Fall To Reds, 11-4

Lucroy Homers Twice As Brewers Beat Snakes

Arrieta Pitches Cubs Past Marlins, 6-1

McCann’s Big Night Carries Yanks Past Blue Jays

Nationals Welcome Gio Back, Top Astros 6-5



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Aaliyah’s Family Vows To Torpedo Biopic

No slack for Lifetime

Family not contacted by network

Film Musicians Vs. Their Union

Idina Menzel: Hugh Jackman On My Lap Was A “Welcomed” Moment


Inside Bieber’s Weed Bunker On Wheels

“True Blood” Headed For Musical Afterlife

“Real Housewives” Dad Suddenly Drops Dead In Backyard

J-Lo, Marc Anthony Agree To Anti-Paparazzi Clause

Sondheim Reveals Plot Changes For Disney “Into The Woods” Film

Lindsey Lohan Cheerleads For Jeremy Scott



FOREIGNERS
Pro-Russian Separatists Reject Ukraine Offer
Spain’s Felipe VI To Be Sworn In With Muted Ceremony
No Easing Of Tensions Between Red China, Vietnam
Deadlock Continues At Iran Nuke Talks
India Making All-Out Effort For Release Of Workers Kidnapped In Iraq
Arrests Made In Kenyan Coastal Attacks
Taliban Attack NATO Supply Line In East Afghanistan
Alleged Auschwitz Guard, 89, Arrested In US
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister/DMK Head Flays Home Ministry’s Directive To Use Hindu On Social Media
Polish Leader Says Early Elections A Possibility
British Jihadi Says Terrorists Heading Home To UK From Iraq, Syria
Red China Jails Anti-Graft Activists Linked To New Citizens’ Group
Manga Evades Japanese Ban On Child Porn



BLOGS & STUFF
Doug Powers: As Iraq Burns, John Kerry Draws Red Line In The Ocean With Help From Leo DiCaprio
Twitchy: Vox Throws Hanging Curveball On IRS Funding, Iowahawk Hits It Out Of The Park
American Power: General Petraeus Says Iraq Must Defeat ISIS
American Thinker: Hillary’s Jugger-Not?
Conservatives4Palin: The Price Of Electricity Is “Necessarily Skyrocketing”
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, June 18
Jammie Wearing Fools: Massively Popular Hillary Down To 44% Approval In NBC Poll
Joe For America: Cheneys Announce Alliance For A Strong America
JustOneMinute: Per Hillary, We Need A Trigger Warning On The Phrase “Trigger Warning”
Pat Dollard: Watch Ted Cruz Destroy Totalitarian Democrats For Their Free-Speech-Killing Bill
Protein Wisdom: Intentionalism, Redux – Redskins And Textualism
Shot In The Dark: The Inevitable Green Line Post Titled “Train In Vain”
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Post In Order To Annoy Banned Anti-Semite Commenter John Ryan
The Lonely Conservative: On Obamacare, Sebelius Spreads The Blame Around
This Ain’t Hell: Veteran Told Not To Say Pledge Lest He Offend Fellow Students
Weasel Zippers: Wendy Davis Campaign Pretends Her Filibuster Wasn’t About Abortion
Megan McArdle: Supreme Court 1, Argentina 0


Shop Amazon – Prep for Summer Savings on Select Outdoor Clothing

Category: Live at Five

IRS Obstruction of Justice

Posted on | June 18, 2014 | 16 Comments

Could it possibly be more obvious?

Today, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Charles Boustany Jr., M.D. (R-LA) revealed that the Committee’s early work into “lost” IRS emails show the problem is much bigger than the IRS initially admitted to.
In addition to Lois Lerner’s emails, the IRS cannot produce records from six other IRS employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups. One of those figures is Nikole Flax, who served as Chief of Staff to Steve Miller, who at the time of the targeting was Deputy Commissioner and would later serve as Acting Commissioner of the IRS – a position from which he was fired for his role in the targeting of conservative groups. The timeframe for which Ms. Flax’s communications are purportedly unrecoverable covers when the Washington, DC office wrote and directed the Cincinnati field office to send abusive questionnaires, including inappropriate demands for donor information, to conservative groups.
Camp and Boustany also uncovered that the IRS has been keeping secret for months the fact that the Agency lost these critical records. Ways and Means investigators have confirmed that the Agency first knew of the destroyed emails as early as February 2014 – nearly three months prior to newly installed Commissioner John Koskinen telling the Committee the IRS would produce all of Lois Lerner’s emails. . . .
“Even when the IRS does admit something, they are not fully honest with us. Despite their attempt to bury the missing Lerner emails on page 15 of a 27 page letter that arrived late Friday, we now know documents from other central figures, like Nikole Flax, are missing. The fact that Ms. Flax was a frequent visitor to the White House and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building only raises more questions. Who was she visiting at the White House and what were they talking about? Was she updating the White House on the targeting or was she getting orders? . . .”

(Via Memeorandum.)

 

Category: Scandal, Taxes

Is Hillary Brain-Damaged?

Posted on | June 18, 2014 | 34 Comments

During the past several months, there have been questions about Hillary Clinton’s health and some speculation she might have had a mild stroke. This speculation comes to mind as I read Jonathan V. Last’s account of Hillary’s bad week:

By just about every account, her book is uninteresting and unreflective, a carefully contrived piece of positioning. Yet instead of owning that, she insisted at an event that she was “done with being really careful about what to say.” And that was before uttering inanities about how “the American political system is the most difficult, even brutal, in the world .” . . .
Then there was her Romney-esque statement about being “dead broke” after leaving the White House and her being so out of touch as to suggest that she and her husband “struggled” to “piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea’s education.” “You know,” she said, looking for sympathy, “it was not easy.” It’s hard to think of a more let-them-eat-cake moment from any Democratic politician in the last 40 years. But what made the line even worse is that it was made in defense of taking exorbitant speaking fees from companies such as Goldman Sachs. You half expected her to explain, hedge funds are people, my friends!
And then there was her encounter with Terry Gross, in which Clinton couldn’t handle the tough questions … from NPR.

Of course, one hates to cite simple gaffes or inept interview performances as evidence of brain damage, because if Hillary’s slip-ups are symptomatic of a stroke, then Joe Biden should be in the ICU.

But the really big blunder was what Hillary said about Second Amendment advocates in a CNN Town Hall event:

“We cannot let a minority of people — and that’s what it is, it is a minority of people — hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people.”

Ann Althouse dismantles that in fine fashion.

My gut hunch is that Hillary will not run for president in 2016, and if she does run, she will lose the Democrat nomination again. Whether or not she has a serious health problem, Hillary will face serious challengers for the nomination — I keep hearing Martin O’Malle mentioned — and I don’t think she can stand the heat from the Left.

 

Category: Hillary Clinton

Young Feminist Has Problems

Posted on | June 18, 2014 | 112 Comments

Erin McKelle Fischer (@ErinMcKelle) is a Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies major at Ohio University whose name I recognized because in February I quoted her denunciation of “heteronormative” virginity:

“The idea of your first penis-in-vagina sexual encounter being something significant and life altering (well, for women anyway) has origins in women being considered property.
“That is to say, virginity is a social construction that came about because of the commodification of women. . . .
“Virginity is heteronormative.
“Virginity assumes that penis-in-vagina sex is somehow a special type of sex that is different from all others.
“This means that there is an assumption that engaging in heterosexual vaginal sex is the standard (and should be) for your sexual activities.
“Heterosexuality is the norm, and virginity just works as reinforcement to this.”

So I was already familiar with Ms. Fischer’s name before I encountered her column today at Everyday Feminism about “the very real struggles that young feminists face,” e.g.:

A lot of it comes down to there not being a whole lot of opportunities for young people to get paid for their work. If more paid internships and fellowships, programming, and feminist-based work designed for young people existed . . . this could help bridge the age gap.

In other words, Feminism, Inc., doesn’t have enough job openings for all the Women’s Studies majors who would like to become full-time professional Marxist lesbian man-haters, but Ms. Fischer declares our belief that feminists hate men to be a “stereotype”:

Unfortunately, because of common stereotypes about feminism, many people think feminists are all just angry people, man-haters, or “killjoys.”

Excuse me, Ms. Fischer, for logically inferring that a woman who expresses hostility toward “penis-in-vagina sex” and the “norm” of heterosexuality might be hostile toward men in general. Also, Ms. Fischer, have your Ohio University professors taught you that your historical analysis — “women being considered property . . . the commodification of women” — is derived from Marx and Engels? If you haven’t yet read Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, you should, so that you understand that those who teach you this stuff are just repeating the errors of 19th-century radicalism. The idea of “traditional sexual relations” as “oppressive and humiliating” to women, of “the woman . . . being humiliated by the domination of the man,” and monogamy as a male imposition required by “economic development” — it’s all right there in Engels. The fact that tens of millions of people were killed on behalf of the insane Marxist vision . . . Well, I don’t suppose they teach that history at Ohio University, do they?

In her column, Ms. Fischer describes her own feminist journey:

I discovered feminism first when I was 15 and read Jessica Valenti’s book Full Frontal Feminism. . . .
My stepmom found out about a program taking place through my local rape crisis center that was geared towards developing youth activists and educators. We would be learning about sexual violence, as well as doing projects out in our communities that we would be compensated for. . . .
This changed my life.
This was what brought me back to feminism, as I would check out hooks, Lorde, and MacKinnon out from their resource library, not to mention learning about gender-based violence, oppression, and privilege. It inspired me and my mentors encouraged me to take action and do more.

Permit me to say that any high-school kid who reads radical feminists like bell hooks, Audre Lorde and Catharine MacKinnon is likely to suffer permanent brain-warp. It’s like Nietzsche. I have long been of the opinion that no one should read Nietzsche until they’re old enough to realize that the syphilitic weirdo was a dangerous madman. Maybe by the time you’re 35, and have a full-time job, kids and a mortgage, you can read Nietzsche without suffering permanent brain-warp. Still, his books should come with a warning label: THIS NOTORIOUS GERMAN LUNATIC DIED OF BRAIN SYPHILIS.

But I digress . . .

In February, Ohio University’s Women, Gender and Sexuality program hosted a conference at which were presented such papers as “Using the Lesbian Gothic to Combat the Male Gaze in Film and Literature” (Alane Presswood), “Is Your Vampire Boyfriend Abusing You?: The Twilight Saga and Perceptions of Intimate Partner Abuse” (Kelly Choyke) and “Bridging the Paradox: SlutWalk, Culture, and the Quest for Identity” (Jennifer Seifert). Erin McKelle Fischer also contributed a conference paper entitled, “‘Am I Pretty Or Ugly?’: Why Online Harassment is the New Sexism.” While I can’t find Ms. Fischer’s paper onlline, the title refers to a much-discussed YouTube video genre in which teenage girls invite criticism of their looks. Ms. Fischer is very much an activist against “lookism”:

Why are “Fatphobia” and “Fat-Shaming” feminist issues? Maybe for the same reason the federal government spent $2.2 million for research on why lesbians are obese. And now, Erin McKelle Fischer presents, “5 Ways to Have a Body Positive Summer”:

 

Category: Feminism

A Failed Slut, A Successful Farmer, And A Pair of Soldiers

Posted on | June 18, 2014 | 16 Comments

— Wombat-socho


I’m going to lead off this week’s book post with a short review of a book which is itself all too short: Kathy Shaidle’s Confessions of A Failed Slut. Ms. Shaidle, proprietress of the Five Feet of Fury blog and columnist at Takimag, has a lot of uncomplimentary things to say about the state of the sexual revolution in America and Canada since the unfortunate 1970s, and she says them in a very entertaining manner. As has been said about Florence King’s Reflections In A Jaundiced Eye and Mencken’s Chrestomathy, the main problem with this book is that the covers are too close together.

This is definitely not a problem with Matthew Harrington’s Godspawn, which would have been a righteous doorstop of a book if I’d bought the dead tree edition, but since I borrowed it from the Amazon Prime Lending Library it was merely a nice long read. Harrington has done a good job of writing a distinctly different sort of fantasy, set in a world where magic works very differently, magicians fall out of the sky periodically, and a farmer’s boy comes back from a mushroom gathering walk in the woods to find all the adults in his village slaughtered, all the children enslaved, and the world’s best bowman searching through the wreckage to see what, if anything, can be salvaged. From that grim beginning stems a coming-of-age novel that’s also an epic tale of revenge involving dragons, an utterly corrupt (but still brutally, effectively, oppressive) Hegemony, a less corrupt matriarchy, and a number of other folks who help our hero on his way. Also, magical oranges that wind up changing the world for the better. All things considered, this is a fun book and well worth the money I’m going to drop on it when I have to give it back at the end of the month.

Equally huge, but considerably more famous, is James Jones’ From Here to Eternity, the classic novel of the prewar Army in Hawaii. This is the restored edition with more of the original obscenities and a couple of sections that were deleted from the original print edition by squeamish editors and lawyers, along with an afterword that discusses those edits, and the whole thing is definitely worth the $3.03 (see what they did there?) Amazon wants for the Kindle edition. I originally talked a lot about this book in the long-ago 21 Books post and really don’t have anything new to add; the restored parts don’t significantly change the plot in any way. I do not, on the other hand, recommend the other two-thirds of Jones’ trilogy (The Thin Red Line and Whistle); Jones was apparently obsessed with using the same characters in all three books despite killing off Prewitt at the end of the first novel, and as a result they wind up being textbook examples of the maxim that most authors have one good book in them, their first, and spend the rest of their careers trying to rediscover the spark that made that first book so special. This is not to say that the latter two books don’t have their moments, because they do, but if I had to do it over again I would have borrowed them from the library instead of buying them.


Category: Books, Kathy Shaidle

Porn, Shame and Suicide

Posted on | June 18, 2014 | 14 Comments

Last month, I wrote about the death of Alyssa Funke, a 19-year-old who committed suicide two weeks after appearing in a porn video:

If you do porn, it’s going to be on the Internet, and if it’s on the Internet, everybody’s going to see it. There is no way you can have a “secret” porn career in the Internet age, so if you’re going to do porn, just get used to the idea that your high school friends (and your high school enemies) are going to find out about it. Your parents, your teachers, your brothers and sisters, your aunts and uncles, grandma and grandpa — everybody you know is going to see what you do, got it?
If that doesn’t bother you, OK. But if you don’t think you can handle the reaction, maybe you shouldn’t be doing porn.

This is just common sense, but feminism is profoundly hostile to common sense, and so the feminist commentary on Alyssa Funke’s suicide was focused on the “slut-shaming” and Internet “bullying” she experienced after her porn career became public knowledge.

Now, Amy Otto is directly attacking the pro-porn feminist argument:

The claim that porn is a “sex positive” activity for women does not reflect reality. Denying the internal shame and trying to re-brand it will not redeem people. . . .
Was this video an act of her “self-expression” or a sign of a girl in trouble? The suicide soon after does imply that whatever theoretical “empowerment” that was gained by allowing herself to be filmed having sex with a stranger certainly wasn’t positive enough to inspire her to continue with that career path.

Read the whole thing at Pocket Full of Liberty.

 

Category: Feminism, Sex

Ace on @Milbank: ‘Biased and Giddily Ignorant … Proud to Know Nothing’

Posted on | June 18, 2014 | 13 Comments

Last night, I hit Dana Milbank’s cheap smear of a Heritage Foundation panel about the Benghazi cover-up and thought I’d done a good job. This morning, I woke up and saw Ace’s treatment of the same story and was awed by the work of the master:

Milbank’s original deception is reporting this woman’s charge — a vague claim that the panel was Muslim-bashing — without first stating if the charge was accurate or not.
He reports her charge as if the charge is, itself, a fair one.
But is it? He doesn’t say. He implies it is, without saying so.
Note, however, what this panel was about. It was not about terrorism. It was not about Islam.
It was about the American government’s response to Benghazi, including lying to the public and retaliating against internal whistleblowers.
How would Islam have even have come up, except as a brief tangent? It seems unlikely that it did — and I imagine when the full video gets released, it will demonstrate, as one panelist told this woman, that this questioner was the only person talking about Islam, while all the panelists were focused on the Obama administration.
That is, she hijacked the panel to make her own point and toss out a vague charge of Serious You Guys Racism while doing so. . . .
Milbank’s original column shows him as biased and giddily ignorant. He’s actually proud to know nothing at all about the subject he’s allegedly covering.

Read the whole thing. In one of Milbanks’ “Look at These Crazy Wingnuts” gestures, he includes this:

The accusers’ allegations grow wilder by the day. . . .
[Brigitte] Gabriel floated the notion that Stevens had been working on a weapons-swap program between Libya and Syria just before he was killed.

Does Dana Milbank really think Brigitte Gabriel just made that up? Has he not paid attention? October 25, 2012:

On the night of Sept. 11, in what would become his last known public meeting, Stevens met with the Turkish Consul General Ali Sait Akin, and escorted him out of the consulate front gate one hour before the assault began at approximately 9:35 p.m. local time.
Although what was discussed at the meeting is not public, a source told Fox News that Stevens was in Benghazi to negotiate a weapons transfer, an effort to get SA-7 missiles out of the hands of Libya-based extremists.

Stevens’ meeting with the Turkish consul in Benghazi is significant because it is believed — not confirmed, because the administration has been stonewalling congressional investigators — that what happened was this: The CIA and State Department were trying to negotiate a “buyback” of weapons they had (secretly) supplied to anti-Qaddafi forces in Libya, weapons which were then being (secretly) shipped via Turkey to anti-Assad forces in Syria. Of course, Milbank might dismiss this as a Fox News conspiracy theory, except that CNN reported the same thing in August 2013:

CNN has uncovered exclusive new information about what is allegedly happening at the CIA, in the wake of the deadly Benghazi terror attack. . . .
Sources now tell CNN dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, and that the agency is going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remains a secret.
CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency’s Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out. . . .
Among the many secrets still yet to be told about the Benghazi mission, is just how many Americans were there the night of the attack.
A source now tells CNN that number was 35, with as many as seven wounded, some seriously.
While it is still not known how many of them were CIA, a source tells CNN that 21 Americans were working in the building known as the annex, believed to be run by the agency. . . .
Speculation on Capitol Hill has included the possibility the U.S. agencies operating in Benghazi were secretly helping to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels.
It is clear that two U.S. agencies were operating in Benghazi, one was the State Department, and the other was the CIA.

The CIA was reportedly forcing employees with knowledge of the Benghazi operation to take polygraphs, asking if they had talked to journalists or congressional investigators. And this is significant . . . why? Because, if true, it shows that the administration had a covert policy which was neither authorized by Congress nor disclosed to the American people, that four Americans were killed because of this policy, and that the whole farcical charade of claiming that the Benghazi attack was a “spontaneous” protest against a YouTube video was part of a clumsy attempt to conceal the truth, a cover-up that continues to this day.

Dana Milbank is (or pretends to be) “giddily ignorant” of this. Why? Because the Washington Post is actively involved in the cover-up?

“The accusers’ allegations grow wilder by the day . . .”

 

Category: Ace of Spades, Libya, Media Bias, Terrorism
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