The Other McCain

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

‘The Prom Was Postponed’

Posted on | April 26, 2014 | 28 Comments

Horrible news in Connecticut:

MILFORD, Conn. — A 16-year-old student was stabbed to death in the hallway of a high school here on Friday morning, the day of the school’s junior prom.
The authorities arrested a 16-year-old male student and charged him as a juvenile with murder, and the police said they were looking into reports that a dispute about the prom might have prompted the attack.
The killing occurred around 7:15 a.m., just as the school day was about to begin. Students crammed the halls of Jonathan Law High School, some giddily anticipating donning gowns and tuxedos later that day.
A scream cut the air, and there was momentary confusion as students were hustled into classrooms and told to stay. In one of the halls beneath a stairwell, Maren Sanchez, a well-liked member of the drama club known for her singing voice, lay dying.
Chief Keith Mello of the Milford Police Department said that officials had not made any rulings on possible motives, but that investigators were looking into reports that the victim had declined an invitation to the prom from the suspect, whose name the authorities did not release because he is a minor. The prom was postponed.

We have a tendency as adults to look back at high school with amusement and forget how serious some things seemed at the time. Being unhappy at 16 is a very common experience, and it’s important for kids to be reminded, “This may seem like the end of the world, but it’s not. It’s just high school. You’ll survive this disappointment and probably not even remember it 10 years from now.”

 

Category: Crime

Guess Which Clip Is The U.S. State Dept.

Posted on | April 25, 2014 | 9 Comments

by Smitty

I know that it was Stacy’s understanding there would be no quiz tonight, but unfortunate social media exigencies dictate that this blog ask the following:

Which one of these clips features the U.S. State Department?
A:

B:

C:

You can be forgiven for choosing the most professional option, A. After that, junk gets real: which of B. and C. is most likely to give a lap dance to a high school student in a classroom?

This blog will fearlessly follow the facts wherever they lead, and report back with a resolution Real Soon Now.

More at HotAir.

Update: there may be a need for a hint.

Category: Politics, Russia

‘Lynn Beisner’ Is a Pseudonym

Posted on | April 25, 2014 | 81 Comments

The first thing you need to know about Lynn Beisner — it’s right there on her profile at The Guardian — is that her name is not Lynn Beisner and thus, whenever she offers personal anecdotes as arguments (as is her habit), the skeptical reader must reply, “Oh, really?”

Why this matters, as I’ve explained before, is that feminists frequently make personal anecdotes the basis of their arguments and, as is the case with “Lynn Beisner,” these anecdotes are often offered by persons writing under pseudonyms, thus making it impossible to verify the accuracy of their stories. Grant that there are legitimate reasons why authors may wish to conceal their identities. Grant that “whistleblowers” may need to hide their identities in order to be able to tell the hidden truth. Grant all of this, and one must nevertheless maintain skepticism toward the anonymous authors who rely upon personal anecdote to justify extraordinary arguments. After Texas Democrat Wendy Davis was caught fudging her biography in January, I explained how this related to a pattern I’d first noticed when reading feminist memoirs in the 1990s:

After reading about a half-dozen of these books, I noticed . . . that many elements of their narratives were “just so” stories, i.e., unverifiable anecdotes that — coincidentally! magically! — just happened to prove whatever political point they were trying to make.

As Daphne Patai pointed out in her 1998 book Heterophobia, feminists arguments rely heavily upon “the authority of experience.” Only women can say what it feels like to suffer sexist discrimination and harassment, etc., and so first-person narratives of experience — and women’s subjective feelings about those experiences — enjoy a privileged position within feminist culture.

The problem with this tendency is that it denies the possibility of objective truth. Facts are made less important than feelings and, indeed, feelings become “facts” in their own right: So-called “hostile environment” harassment cases depend on the claim that women suffered discrimination because of how the workplace climate made them feel. How can any defendant disprove such a claim?

Feminism’s reliance on storytelling and subjective emotion reflects what Thomas Sowell has called “The Irrelevance of Evidence,” a notable phenomenon of contemporary liberal discourse.  Facts, statistics and logic never seem to make a dent in liberals’ policy preferences. Abundant evidence exists, for example, that “homelessness” is a problem directly resulting from decades of liberal policies (inter alia, deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill), and yet liberals from the 1980s onward have blamed the problem on Republican “greed” and offered only more liberal policies to “solve” the problem that previous liberal policies clearly caused!

Every public policy argument becomes warped by this preference for emotional anecdotes (“Look at this family thrown into the street after the father lost his job at the steel plant”) over objective fact — in this case, the fact that a majority of the homeless have problems of mental illness, substance abuse and, quite often, criminality.

Nowhere is the irrelevance of evidence more obvious than when encountering feminists in debate. We saw this, for example, in the way the “War on Women” narrative was built around Sandra Fluke’s claim that she and other women at Georgetown Law were horribly disadvantaged by the university’s failure to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives. It didn’t take much research to discover that contraceptives were both readily available and cheap ($33 per month at a CVS two blocks from the Georgetown campus) even without insurance, but the facts had no impact on Fluke’s appeal to “women’s rights.”

Even granted license by media sympathizers to make tendentious arguments short on facts and long on emotion, however, sometimes feminists still feel a need to tell outright lies. This was the case, for example, with University of Wyoming student Meg Lanker-Simons, who fabricated Facebook rape threats against herself, then staged a campus rally to call attention to her alleged victimhood.

This documented background of feminist dishonesty, therefore, caused me to raise a skeptical eyebrow when I encountered Lynn Beisner — or, I should say, “Lynn Beisner” — making a bizarre argument at the progressive blog AlterNet: “How Christian Purity Culture Enabled My Step Dad to Sexually Abuse Me.”

Perhaps every Christian who saw that headline had the same instantaneous reaction as I did: “How can she possibly claim that Christianity enables what it quite clearly condemns?”

We shall examine this weird argument in a moment, but first things first: It is my habit, whenever encountering a weird argument by an author unknown to me, to find out all I can about the person making the argument. Often, the biographical background yields some clue as to why they hold such unusual opinions. And what I found when I researched “Lynn Beisner,” starting with the fact that her byline is a pseudonym, only intensified my skepticism.

You may remember the character Joe Btfsplk from the old Li’l Abner comic strip: Joe was cursed with bad luck, so that a dark cloud followed him wherever he went. Lynn Beinsner is a female Joe Btfsplk, so perpetually victimized that the headline of her August 2012 Guardian column was, “I wish my mother had aborted me”:

If we want to keep our reproductive rights, we must be willing to tell our stories, to be willing and able to say, “I love my life, but I wish my mother had aborted me.”
An abortion would have absolutely been better for my mother. An abortion would have made it more likely that she would finish high school and get a college education. At college in the late 1960s, it seems likely she would have found feminism or psychology or something that would have helped her overcome her childhood trauma and pick better partners. She would have been better prepared when she had children. If nothing else, getting an abortion would have saved her from plunging into poverty. She likely would have stayed in the same socioeconomic strata as her parents and grandparents who were professors. . . .
Abortion would have been a better option for me. . . . I would chose the brief pain or fear of an abortion over the decades of suffering I endured. . . .
[My mother] was in no position to raise a child. She had suffered a traumatic brain injury, witnessed and experienced severe domestic violence, and while she was in grade school she was raped by a stranger and her mother committed suicide. She was severely depressed and suicidal, had an extremely poor support system, was experiencing an unplanned pregnancy that resulted from coercive sex, and she was so young that her brain was still undeveloped. . . .
She abused me, beating me viciously and often. We lived in bone-crushing poverty, and our little family became a magnet for predatory men and organisations. My mother found minimal support in a small church, and became involved with the pastor who was undeniably schizophrenic, narcissistic and sadistic. The abuse I endured was compounded by deprivation. Before the age of 14, I had never been to a sleepover, been allowed to talk to a friend on the phone, eaten in a restaurant, watched a television show, listened to the radio, read a non-Christian book, or even worn a pair of jeans.

Wow. Three generations of disaster: Her grandmother committed suicide, her mother’s life sucked and her life sucked, too. With such a background, what could she expect from life but pain and disappointment? Next, read her December 2013 column:

“This has never been a real marriage because I never really loved you. I married you because I thought that was what I was supposed to do.”
Those were the words that Todd, my first husband, used to end our marriage. They hit me like a physical blow, shattered me into a million little pieces of jagged pain. After the first raw wave of grief passed, I was hit by shame so intense that it felt like burning ink in my veins. How horrible must I be if my own husband, the father of my children had never been able to love me?
I begged Todd to stay with me. I tried to convince him — and myself — that I could become a person he would love. He responded as if I were crazy to have believed our marriage and his love were ever genuine, and he made it clear that me thinking so was simply an indicator of how out of touch I was with reality. He insisted that any sane person would have recognized our marriage as a sham from the start.

She doesn’t go further into the details of her divorce in that column, but she described it in a column last month at another site:

I know how much self-loathing most welfare mothers endure because, on a dark fall day in 1995, I became a single mother on welfare. . . .
Two days before, I had woken up in overwhelming pain, stuck in the rubble of what had once been my car, but was now a scene thick with chaos and emergency responders. Sparks flew from cutting equipment, the rainy night air was filled with the sound of splashing feet, metal groaning, sirens blaring, and someone screaming in sustained agony. I had no idea where or who I was.
Over the next two days, I remembered who I was and then learned that woman was now gone. In her place was a woman who had broken nearly every bone on the right side of her body, had sustained a serious head injury, and was still in grave danger of having one of her legs amputated. She was also newly single. Next to my bed in the Intensive Care Unit was a sheaf of divorce papers that a process server had delivered during one of my brief periods of wakefulness.
The papers hadn’t been a complete shock, but they were a blow. My husband and I had been having some serious differences. I believed that our marriage should continue as it had started — an agreement between two individuals. I was open to polyamory, under the right circumstances. But my husband had fallen in love with a woman named Caroline, and he wanted her to be his primary partner for life.
My husband had plunged deeply into the alternative and poly community, coming out to our families with aplomb. We would have a new family, one of choice. It might have worked out, but Caroline felt compelled to destroy every woman that she saw as competition. . . .
By the time of my accident, my reputation was ruined. My family had me pegged as a godless sexual reprobate. I lost all support from family and friends when they heard that my first husband and I were trying a polyamorous relationship.

In case you didn’t know, “polyamory” means she and her first husband were what are commonly called “swingers.”

Predictably, this lifestyle led to divorce — the same divorce where her husband told her their marriage had been a sham from the start — and just before her husband was ready to file the papers, “Lynn Beisner” nearly died in a serious automobile accident.

OK, let’s stipulate that everything “Lynn Beisner” has told us about her life in these three columns is true. Not only has her life been a constant series of disasters, beginning with the misfortune of her birth, but each of these disasters has been extraordinarily dramatic. She was not merely a poor child, but grew up in “bone-crushing poverty.” The pastor with whom her mother became involved wasn’t just a bad man, he “was undeniably schizophrenic, narcissistic and sadistic.” Her first marriage ended because her swinger husband brought into their “polyamorous relationship” a rival who “felt compelled to destroy every woman that she saw as competition.” Her heartless husband told her he never loved her at all, and served her with divorce papers in the intensive care unit.

All of this, as I say, we will stipulate as true, if only to make the point that “Lynn Beisner” has lived a life so extraordinarily catastrophic, it is impossible to generalize from her experience and find any life lessons that would be useful to most people.

Except maybe, “Don’t be Joe Btfsplk.”

This dispiriting tale of woe and doom, however, is the biography of “Lynn Beisner,” so far as we know. There’s no way to verify it, of course, but let’s just assume all this misery actually happened to her. Now, after reading that lengthy preamble, maybe you’re ready for Lynn Beisner to tell you why “Christian purity culture” is bad:

My step-father began having problems getting erections when I was a senior in high school. How did I find out about this? He told me that he was using me to get an erection so that he could have sex with my mother.
We were very religious people. We attended a Fundamentalist Baptist Church so sexually conservative I was not even allowed to wear jeans. But still, he would sit me down and discuss what he had been thinking on those nights when he pressed my body against his and stroked my hair, the curve of my hip and the area between my collar bone and breasts until his penis was hard against my thigh. . . .

“Dear Penthouse Forum . . .”

Excuse my entirely inappropriate sarcasm, but the way “Lynn Beisner” tells this story invites ridicule. Taking her previous biographical revelations at face-value — the endless bad luck of Joe Btfsplk — now we encounter this weird story of her being molested by her step-father. Well, guess what? Elsewhere, on her own blog, she tells us a lot more about her mother and step-father:

She had married a man when I was a junior in high school who was the head of the deacon board, leader of a bus ministry and generally considered “on fire for God.” . . .
Part of my step-father being the spiritual leader of their marriage, and of me when I was a part of their family, was enforcing church attendance for no fewer than six two hour services per week and at least eight hours of additional volunteer work.

WHOA! First as Lynn Beisner previously told us, her mother “became involved with the pastor who was undeniably schizophrenic, narcissistic and sadistic.” Next — when Lynn was a junior in high school — her mother married “the head of the deacon board,” who subsequently molested her, using her “to get an erection so that he could have sex with my mother.” And her mother is still married to that same creepy stepfather, who is still active in church.

All kinds of alarm bells are going off here. Based on her lifelong experience of disaster, however, “Lynn Beisner” doesn’t come up with a story about the danger of creepy stepfathers who maybe should be in prison. Instead, she decides to turn this into a story about the harms she attributes to “Christian purity culture.”

Complete Rebuttal in 26 Words: Next time I see a story about a public school teacher molesting a student, I’ll turn that into an argument for the abolition of public education.

From any bad experience, we can learn lessons. But when disaster follows disaster and someone gets that Joe Btfsplk attitude of hopeless doom, their embrace of resentful victimhood can make it impossible for them to learn anything useful from their experience.

Lynn Beisner wrote a blog post, “How God’s Opinion of My Pussy Unravelled Me,” which tells us more about her than it tells us about God.

Also, she says, “I too suffer from clinical depression.” No surprise.

Finally, “Lynn Beisner’s husband . . . helps her daughter shop for prom dresses.” Maybe Joe Btfsplk would see that as an ominous cloud, but Lynn Beisner seems to perceive no possibility the pattern of disaster could extend to a fourth generation.

ADDENDUM: Lynn Beisner tells us about “The Moment I Became a Feminist.” It involves an extraordinarily dramatic story.

You’re surprised, right?

 

Category: Feminism

Totalitarian Terror: Anti-Israel Campus Extremists Target Jewish Students

Posted on | April 25, 2014 | 39 Comments

Jewish students at New York University were the targets of a sick stunt by members of an anti-Israel group called Students for Justice in Palestine, and this hateful deed should be a teachable moment, an occasion to reflect on recent history.

The anti-Israel sentiments of the academic Left are no secret to those who have paid attention to the climate on university campuses for the past decade. In a sense, this situation is a leftover from the Cold War, when the Left supported Soviet-backed Third World “liberation” movements from Cambodia to Angola to Nicaragua. When Israel fought two wars for its survival in 1967 and 1973, it fought against enemies armed with Soviet weapons, and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization was also a Soviet client. (For a useful synopsis of this history, see David Meir-Levi’s 2007 article, “The Communist Roots of Palestinian Terror.”) Left-wing activists at American universities shared the Soviet view of the Mideast as a Cold War battlefield that pitted the oppressed Arabs against the Jews, who were demonized as proxies of Western capitalist imperialism.

The Kremlin’s cynical opportunism — its willingness to aid any potential enemy of the United States — extended so far as to include support for radical Islamic extremism, despite the dogmatic atheism of the Soviet Union’s Marxist ideology, and this attitude explains the American Left’s willful blindness toward the anti-democratic tendencies of Islam: The Left has never abandoned its Soviet-influenced Cold War belief that “world peace” obligates progressives to embrace any anti-American movement anywhere in the world.

This pre-existing leftist attitude only intensified after the 9/11 attacks. With a Republican president in the White House, students at American universities — where Democrats on the faculty outnumber Republicans by a ratio of 5-to-1 or more — were encouraged to join protests against the ensuing war in Iraq. Left-wing faculty promoted (and administrators did nothing to discourage) the view that the United States deserved the hatred of the Islamic world because of U.S. support of Israel.

Anyone who paid attention to the anti-war movement during the Bush era knows the conspiracy-theory worldview that prevailed on the Left. “No war for a oil!” — this mindless slogan became popular, as did the paranoid and unsubstantiated claim that the Iraq war was just a scheme to enrich Halliburton, a company where Vice President Dick Cheney had formerly been an executive. Claims that the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job,” a latter-day “Reichstag fire,” gained widespread currency within the anti-war Left. And cheap talk about Republican “neocons” fostered the similarly paranoid belief that the Bush administration was controlled by a secretive cabal of Zionist warmongers. Self-described “progressives” embraced these anti-Jewish views, which acquired additional political authority from rhetoric that portrayed Bush’s foreign policy as “racist,” so that Islamic terrorists were analogous to 1960s black civil-rights activists. This rhetoric of the anti-war Left was entirely consistent with Palestinian claims that Israel is a racist “apartheid state.”

Evidence of the effects of this rhetoric is not hard to find. Rachel Corrie’s fatal involvement with the International Solidarity Movement is the most obvious example. The 2003 death of that deluded young American student was just the tip of a vast iceberg of anti-Israel attitudes promoted by the anti-war Left during the Bush era, and the situation on campuses now — where pro-Palestinian activists do not hesitate to target Jewish students in their agitprop campaigns — is a logical consequence of this long-term trend.

Nobody on the Left wants to discuss this history. None of the NYU idiots with “Students for Justice in Palestine” knows anything about how the Soviet Union cynically supported the bloodthirsty killer Arafat, and no one in the academic Left has stepped back to take an objective look at how blatant anti-Jewish paranoia was promoted by campus anti-war protesters during the Bush years.

Because the truth of history is being actively suppressed by the Left, we see that the “Best and Brightest” at our universities are willing to re-enact the very worst chapters in human history.

There is a horrible noise coming from NYU, and from many other campuses across the country, and if you listen closely you can almost hear the sound of hobnailed boots marching over broken glass.

 

 

UPDATE: Donald Douglas has more, and Pamela Geller describes Students for Justice in Palestine as a “vicious pro-Hamas Muslim group,” pointing out that the organization was recently banned from campus at Northeastern University because of its notorious brownshirt tactics. Meanwhile, Laura Adkins, the New York University student who reported on SJP’s “activism,” finds herself harassed on Twitter by anti-Israel activists:

The anti-Israel hatemongering of young radicals like Rania Khalek and Max Blumenthal flourishes because no grown-up on the Left has the will or the courage to stand up to their extremism.

 

Category: Education, Israel, Terrorism

Hollywood Pedophile Scandal: Gay Director Calls Accusations ‘Fictitious’

Posted on | April 24, 2014 | 25 Comments

Gay movie director Bryan Singer wants the world to know that he did not have butt-rape with that underage boy, Mr. Egan:

“The allegations against me are outrageous, vicious and completely false. I do not want these fictitious claims to divert ANY attention from X-Men: Days of Future Past. This fantastic film is a labor of love and one of the greatest experiences of my career. So, out of respect to all of the extraordinary contributions from the incredibly talented actors and crew involved, I’ve decided not to participate in the upcoming media events for the film. However, I promise when this situation is over, the facts will show this to be the sick twisted shake down it is. I want to thank fans, friends and family for all their amazing and overwhelming support.”

So that settles that, doesn’t it? Except that now Gawker claims to have inside sources on the gay Hollywood boy-toy scene:

X-Men director Bryan Singer is not the only powerful gay man in Hollywood who likes to surround himself with handsome twinks. But according to a handful of sources who spoke with Gawker over the course of the last week, he was known as the most generous and active benefactor of a scene that allowed the young and impressionable to rub up against Hollywood elite — including prominent writers, directors and actors — leaving behind bitter memories and a sheaf of newly filed lawsuits.
That litigation comes from a man named Michael Egan, who says that he was sexually assaulted by four men—Bryan Singer, Garth Ancier, Gary Goddard and David Neumann—when he was 17. All four have strenuously denied the accusations, but Egan’s lawsuits have exposed a culture that was previously visible only to insiders in and around L.A., especially within the gay enclave of West Hollywood.

(Ooh! There’s a “gay enclave”? Tell us more!)

It’s a scene, our sources said, in which a good-looking young person can easily ingratiate himself with the legitimately powerful. Executives like Ancier and Neumann hosted the same crowd as Singer at their own homes a decade ago, according to a gossip blogger named Lucas John who often attended the gatherings. One might run into actor Kevin Spacey—who was spotted years ago partying with Singer and a group of boys by one source, a security guard who worked at the Chateau Marmont — or screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who is notorious in L.A. for having the same taste in men as Singer and who frequented his parties years ago. The director Roland Emmerich threw a well-documented pride pool party, photos of which penetrated even the non-Hollywood gossip blogs a few years ago.
And why wouldn’t an ambitious young actor want to attend?

(Well, there’s that alleged butt-rape problem . . .)

A twink might hear whisperings of boys who fucked their way to the top — Taylor Lautner, two sources told us, carries an unconfirmed reputation amongst the West Hollywood chatterati of having used Singer as a launching pad (and has been spotted at a Singer party).

Enough with the innuendos, Gawker. We want hard evidence! And by “hard evidence,” we mean, a cleverly worded hint:

Though nearly everyone we talked to affirmed that Singer is careful about the ages of boys he sleeps with, it’s not hard for, say, a 17-year-old to get his attention.

Oh, “nearly everyone” says Singer is “careful” not to sodomize 17-year-olds? This would seem to suggest Gawker has a source or two who aren’t entirely sure if Singer is “careful” about avoiding jailbait boys. There is also this obvious clue:

Singer has a history of professional and personal relationships with convicted sex offenders.

So if Bryan Singer can’t prove that he is innocent . . .

GUILTY! GUILTY! GUILTY!

Because otherwise, it’s slut-shaming and rape culture. That’s how the campus feminists roll, so it can’t be defamation, can it?

PREVIOUSLY:

 

Category: Gays, Hollywood, Scandal, Sex

Hillary 2016 Campaign: Should Cliven Bundy Take GOP POTUS Nomination?

Posted on | April 24, 2014 | 6 Comments

by Sissypuss the Blog Kitty

Upon infiltrating Global Clinton HQ, I overheard some interesting fallout from the recent Cliven Bundy revelations, which revealed some very Robert Byrd-esque sentiments:

“Where is our colored brother? Where is our Mexican brother? Where is our Chinese — where are they?” Bundy said. “They’re just as much American as we are, and they’re not with us. If they’re not with us, they’re going to be against us.”

Never one to let a good crisis go to waste, it seems that David Plouffe, recently in a funk over the rebuff given Jeb Bush over Jeb’s candidacy air biscuit, is now ecstatic.

This is because in Cliven Bundy, there exists a candidate whose primal American stick-it-to-the-manhood is completely irresistible to the anti-establishment conservative base. At the same time, his views are so smolderingly unpalatable to anyone born after the Apollo moonshot as to burn through the wet blanket that as ObamaCare, and excite the Democrat base.

In picking a GOP candidate to give a concession speech in 2008, Democrats just ran McCain’s war record around the country in a bus, against the will of the Tea Party. In 2012, they let RomneyCare run himself around the country, letting it be known that the most Mitt would do is re-brand ObamaCare. How could anyone turn down the spectacle of Cliven Bundy? The only thing that could make it more beautiful is if the man proved a direct descendant of Jefferson Davis. He’s like Donald Trump without all the pesky money and occasional outbursts of showmanship. Todd Akin without any political experience or abortions, but with plenty of bull, on the hoof and off.

Stand by, Conservatives: Hillary is going to deliver a doozy.

Category: Sissypuss the Blog Kitty

Let’s Condemn All the Sexist, Racist, Homophobic Heroes of American History

Posted on | April 24, 2014 | 78 Comments

One of the joys of being an independent blogger is that you don’t have to pay attention to anything that doesn’t interest you, or about which you have nothing helpful to say. At least 90% of what Fox News and talk radio spend their time blabbering about falls into that category for me. It’s not that those stories aren’t important. Rather the question is, what’s the point in me becoming the 143rd blogger to add my two cents on a particular story, unless I have something to say that hasn’t already been said better by someone else?

This “value-added” approach to blogging explains why I haven’t had anything to say about the Cliven Bundy BLM confrontation. There were a couple of times in recent days when I almost blogged about it, but then something else would catch my eye  — who can resist a LESBIAN POLYGAMY headline? — and I’d forget about it. But so what? Everybody was blogging about the Bundy story, and the value of my two cents would have been negligible anyway.

That stance changed this morning when I noticed Dana Loesch discussing how a Politico reporter asked her to comment on some controversial racial remarks made by Cliven Bundy:

I’ve only ever focused on the BLM. In fact, I repeatedly said on my radio program that this isn’t about Cliven Bundy, it’s always been about the abuse of the BLM. The left is unhappy with this because they want to use Bundy’s remark to invalidate the entirety of the claims against the BLM. Forget Tommy Henderson, Kenni Patton, or other ranchers who have weighty claims against the BLM, it’s all moot now because of Cliven Bundy. Bundy’s a racist, therefore anyone who agreed with his criticism of the BLM’s heavy-handed tactics is also a racist. Bundy’s a racist, thus the politicians who spoke against the BLM sending 200 armed agents to deal with a local issue must also be racists. Now it’s the left who wants to make this about Bundy and his remark so they can silence all criticism of the BLM. In their minds, you can’t condemn Bundy’s remark and criticize the BLM. . . .
Bundy’s horrible remark doesn’t change that the BLM is overreaching.

Exactly so, Dana. This calls to mind, by the way, Andrew Breitbart’s insistence on “vetting” people before associating himself with them. Andrew understood that, in order to be in the white-hot heat of the national spotlight, he had to be “clean” of any unsavory associations, and he was careful to make sure he checked people out, sometimes in ways that offended them. But I digress . . .

The top of Memeorandum is now covered with reactions to Bundy’s “Negro” remarks, including condemnation by the eminent Nevada civil rights leader Harry Reid (eye-roll) and predictable celebratory jeering from the usual suspects, e.g., Slate.

Yet Dana’s point still holds: Bundy’s unfortunate remarks do not in the least justify the abusive conduct of the BLM. Do we have to conduct tests of people’s opinions on every controversial issue before we recognize their fundamental rights? And who will be the arbiter of which opinions are and are not acceptable? Will NARAL be the judge of what is acceptable to think about abortion? Will we authorize GLAAD to investigate people’s views on homosexuality? And will such judgments then be made the basis of whether a citizen is entitled to keep his life, liberty and property? Good God! Would liberals have tolerated this attitude toward suspected Communist subversives?

It should suffice to say that Bundy’s comments reflect opinions that are probably not uncommon among elderly white Nevada ranchers, who don’t waste much time wondering if their opinions (on race or anything else) are acceptably progressive. But the terroristic fury of an online lynch mob has had its intended effect: Republican politicians are predictably scuttling for cover, and very few of Bundy’s erstwhile supporters have been able to withstand the onslaught with anything like courage or dignity.

Among the dignified few is Kevin Williamson of National Review:

National Review correspondent Kevin Williamson, who recently compared Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy to Mahatma Gandhi, told TPM in an email on Thursday that he thought Bundy’s racially charged comments were “lamentable” but they were “separate” from Bundy’s standoff with the Bureau of Land Management. “Mr. Bundy’s racial rhetoric is lamentable and backward,” Williamson said in an email. “It is also separate from the fundamental question here, which is the federal government’s acting as an absentee landlord for nine-tenths of the state of Nevada.” “I very strongly suspect that most of the men who died at the Alamo held a great many views that I would find repugnant; we remember them for other reasons.”

Hear! Hear! And it’s not just the Alamo.

Has anyone ever bothered to investigate, for example, the racial opinions of those American heroes of the 101st Airborne Division who, surrounded by Hitler’s army at Bastogne, held firm to that crucial crossroads at peril of their lives? An awful lot of brave young G.I.’s probably died in the snow there — just like American boys died on the beach at Normandy, at Okinawa, at Iwo Jima — whose private opinions would today categorize them among the racists, sexists and homophobes that everyone with a WiFi connection now hastens to condemn.

Indeed, the careful student of history may be startled to learn the degree to which the Union troops whose victory in the Civil War secured the freedom of millions of slaves, were themselves quite frankly racist. For that matter, many of Abraham Lincoln’s statements about race were nearly as “lamentable and backward” as what Cliven Bundy said.

So I never said a word about Cliven Bundy until the Left decided to turn the old rancher into a symbol of “right-wing racism,” and now I’ve only got three more words to say: “Fuck you. War.”

 

Category: Racism

‘Who the F Are U?’

Posted on | April 24, 2014 | 81 Comments

The quoted tweet could be lesson one in a New Media seminar: “How Not to Respond to Jeff Goldstein on Twitter.” It began when Jeff (@ProteinWisdom) asked @CaliAzona why she favorited a certain tweet, and you can read through the resulting flame war.

My apathetic inattention to everything — except whatever it is I’m obsessed with at any particular moment, e.g., radical feminism — means that I completely missed that Twitter firestorm Tuesday, and didn’t notice it until Bob Belvedere called it to my attention.

What is this about? First, it’s not about ideology.

This always happens: Whenever people involved in politics get into a conflict, they will tend to define the conflict as political. The person with whom they disagree will be accused of deviation from the True Ideals of the Cause, whatever the Cause may be. I’ve seen this happen in all kinds of contexts over the past 15-plus years.

It’s basically what happened to Charles Johnson (who?) of Little Green Footballs (what?) — he got into a conflict with Pamela Geller, became convinced that it was ideological in nature and, within two years, Charles went from being one of the most influential conservative bloggers to being an obscure asterisk in Internet history.

OK, if it’s not about ideology, is it about courtesy?

The Internet Etiquette Police could not be reached for comment.

Urgent Breaking News: People are being rude on Twitter!

Nevertheless, one could say that any inclination toward deference by any of the parties involved might have averted the conflict. Deference is really the essence of courtesy, but a society that has no generally recognized hierarchy has no basis on which deference should be expected. This was what Edmund Burke meant, after all, in his famous lament that “the age of chivalry is gone.”

If the Queen of France could be seized by a mob of rabble, Burke correctly observed, then every customary basis of respect — “The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise” — was under assault.

Ah, but never let it be said “democracy” has no hierarchies! Wealth, fame, beauty, political power — some animals are more equal than others, and the mad scramble to ascend the Ziggurat of Ambition produces a ceaseless churning: Who’s in? Who’s out? Who’s up? Who’s down? Who made the Top Ten list and who is Number One?

Status and prestige are marketable commodities, and values shift constantly in the exchange. Those who aspire to Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous discover that what qualifies one as Rich is subject to inflation, while Fame is a notoriously fickle whore. Nearly every day brings news of the death of an erstwhile VIP whose passing in old age is unlamented by youth who never knew their name.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

It has been a little more than two years since Andrew Breitbart died at the apogee of his fame. Everybody swore then that Andrew would never be forgotten, but when was the last time anybody quoted him? Andrew’s widow has been sued by Shirley Sherrod, and who has been following the process of that vexatious lawsuit?

People in a democracy are present-minded, prone to forget their heritage and ignore history, and democratic culture is hostile to tradition — even hostile, ultimately, to the tradition of democracy!

But I digress . . .

Amid the Tuesday flame war, Jeff Goldstein sarcastically remarked: “Conservatism on the internet began in 2009.” That is to say, some people who became active in online political discourse when the Tea Party first flared into existence five years ago — in particular, Twitter users — have a limited knowledge of what went on (and who did what) in the blogosphere Back in the Day.

It should not be necessary for Jeff Goldstein to remind people just how long he has been Fighting the Good Fight, but alas, it is:

It’s an interesting trip down memory lane, but it also shows a kind of site trajectory. So in that sense, the exercise was instructive — at least to me.  My Twitter stalkers won’t read them, because, you know, being challenged intellectually is not what this new brand of “conservative activism” is about. . . . I’d rather talk about substance than deal with the kinds of people whom I now have to rely on to carry “our” battle flag. Because having dealt with them — and been blocked by a few who have 10s of thousands of followers — that’s just too damn depressing. Especially when I realize that some of these were written when the current crop of “conservative influence peddlers” on Twitter were probably in the 3rd grade.

Please read the whole thing, because Jeff has every right to believe that many of us are deeply in his debt, and we are thus obligated to defend him against those who do properly not appreciate his long years of service to the conservative cause.

Hint: He includes a post from August 2002.

And now, boys and girls, it’s Story Time With Grandpa McCain: It was in Santa Barbara, California, at the West Coast Conference of the Young America’s Foundation in the fall of 2007 that I first met Jeff Goldstein. My buddy Jason Mattera had invited several bloggers to attend the conference, and I’d helped suggest names to be invited. Ace of Spades was there, and so was Rusty Shackleford of the Jawa Report. Little Miss Attila showed up, and I seem to recall Jim Hoft being there, too, but Grandpa McCain’s memory isn’t very reliable because of that unfortunate experience with psilocybin back in ’79. Anyway . . .

Several of us were lounging around the hotel lobby bar one evening when Jason Mattera approached me and said, “Hey, what’s up with this Jeff Goldstein guy?” Jason proceeded to tell me that Jeff was outside on the oceanview veranda in a heated argument with some of the college Republican kids attending the conference. Jason asked me to see if I could attempt to quell the dispute.

Outside I went, to find Jeff confronting half a dozen of these kids. He had a glass of bourbon in his hand and, from the tone of his discourse, I gathered it was his third or fourth glass. At least.

Jeff is philosophical by nature, and he was in the process of challenging these college kids’ commitment to classic liberalism.

Of course, the kids had no idea what was happening. They didn’t know who Jeff was, and the Total Goldstein Experience was rather shocking to them. Here they were, at a fabulous event in beautiful seaside Santa Barbara, and they had not expected to find themselves baited into a Socratic dialogue challenging their conservatism.

This is where it is necessary to explain that Jeff Goldstein is a complete fitness fanatic. He was wearing a T-shirt so that his muscular arms were displayed in all their bulging glory, a flesh-and-blood billboard declaring: “Don’t Fuck With Me, Hombre.”

Being from the South, where a skinny boy’s life and health depends in large measure on knowing who not to fuck with, the dynamic of the situation on the veranda at that moment was terrifying.

Trust me, I recognize an Incipient Redneck Brawl when I see one and with a sudden adrenaline rush I realized that, in asking me to intervene, Mattera had sent me into a potential combat zone.

“Hey, Jeff, let me buy you a drink!”

How does a skinny boy survive to adulthood in Georgia? By ingratiating himself to bad-asses, of course. If a fight breaks out, you want to make sure that the bad-asses are your friends, and so my first order of business was to head inside to the bar and get Jeff another bourbon on the rocks. This also gave me an opportunity to grab another Corona (in the bottle, because a beer bottle makes a handy weapon, if worse comes to worse) and time to analyze the situation. What the hell was happening here? And how could an escalation to violence be prevented? Honestly, I was kind of hoping the fight would break out while I was still at the bar, so that by the time I returned, the ugly confrontation would all be over.

As I recall — psilocybin can wreck your brain, boys and girls, so Grandpa McCain can’t say for certain — the biggest of the young Republicans facing off with Goldstein on the veranda was 6-foot-2 and 220 pounds. Probably played offensive lineman in high school. Jeff is medium height and maybe 170, but it’s all muscle, so if a fight breaks out, he’s the most dangerous beast in the scrum. And as I returned to this weird scene outside, the tense verbal face-off had not ended.

Picture it: A pleasant evening in coastal California, the glow of sunset fading to night. Palm trees shifting in the warm ocean breeze, while the surf softly lapped the beach just a couple hundred yards from the patio where Jeff Goldstein faced down a semi-circle of college Republican kids who were angry — and I mean, fighting mad — at being aggressively interrogated about their conservative bona fides.

The incongruity of the scene struck me as I handed Jeff a fresh bourbon. Details of his Socratic colloquy have long escaped my memory, but there were three or four guys and a girl or two in the college Republican group. This was one crucial factor in the toxic atmosphere: Jeff’s intellectual challenge to the boys amounted to showing them up in front of their girlfriends. Standing behind Jeff, meanwhile, were Ace, Rusty and Attila, who had been trying to mediate or at least keep Jeff calm.

Just as it seemed that fisticuffs were inevitable, however, Ace made a clever sarcastic jab that suddenly evaporated all the tension. You could ask Ace what he said and maybe he would remember exactly, but it was sort of an inside joke about Jeff’s rhetorical tactics.

Jeff burst out laughing hysterically and the frightening stand-off with the college Republican kids ended happily, although the kids certainly must have left wondering what it was all about.

That was the fall of 2007, you see — way back in the misty dawn of Internet time, when Giants Bestrode the Blogosphere.

My point in telling that story . . . No, seriously, I’m sure that story did have an actual point, something other than (a) Jeff Goldstein enjoys arguing, and (b) Ace of Spades has always been funny as hell.

Ah — yes! My point was that the hierarchy of respect is not always apparent to us. Those college kids in 2007 probably didn’t spend a lot of time surfing around the conservative blogosphere but, even if they had read Protein Wisdom, they had no idea that the muscular guy drinking bourbon and arguing with them outside that hotel in Santa Barbara was the esteemed blogger Jeff Goldstein.

Fast-forward six-and-a-half years and, when Goldstein confronts someone on Twitter, their response is, “Who the F are u?”

Well, in point of fact, Jeff Goldstein is somebody. You don’t have to like Jeff, but if you want to go to war with him, don’t make the mistake of underestimating him. Nor should you expect that Jeff’s friends will hesitate to join him in the fight. There are good people who owe Jeff favors, and I am most certainly among them.

Back in 2008, when I quit my newspaper job and embarked on this crazy freelance career, blog hits weren’t always rolling in by the thousands. There were days when getting linked at Protein Wisdom was an answer to earnest prayer. It would be dishonorable of me to forget such favors. The passage of time cannot erode an obligation of sincere gratitude.

Jeff and I haven’t had the opportunity to hang out in many years, but if he ever makes a trip East — or if I make a trip West — I’ll be glad to buy him another bourbon on the rocks. And if anyone wants to insult Jeff to his face, they’d better be ready to rumble.

 

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