BridgeGate or … VaginaGate?

Posted on | March 28, 2014 | 49 Comments

Ace of Spades points out a disturbing fact:

The law firm’s report exonerating (supposedly) Christie says that key Bridgegate player Bridgie Kelly had a “personal relationship” with Christie’s then-campaign-manager, Bill Stepien, a relationship which had cooled — or soured — just before Kelly sent her infamous email, “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee.”
The report claims the affair resulted in Kelly and Stepien barely communicating… and that this might have caused communication breakdowns regarding the Fort Lee lane closings.

“Indeed, that fact may have affected how Kelly and Stepien conducted themselves and whether they communicated about the lane realignment.”

[F]eminists are going to freak out at the (claimed) implication that a woman’s hormones caused all of this. The report doesn’t say that, and doesn’t really imply that, but, you know. You can get there if you really want to.
And MSNBC is going to really want to get there. “CHRIS CHRISTIE’S OLD BOYS CLUB BLAMES BRIDGEGATE ON WOMAN’S LIBIDO.” You heard it here first.

To digress — because I don’t give a damn about Chris Christie and consider speculation about his 2016 prospects absurd — this sheds a helpful light on the “unit cohesion” arguments against gays in the military, or having women in combat roles. Contrary to all the radical egalitarian politically correct bullshit on the subject, this is not an intellectual argument about “equality” or “rights”; it’s an argument about basic common sense and keeping troops alive.

Military success requires troops who are mission-focused and capable of effective teamwork. Introducing sexual tension or romantic feelings to this situation is a guaranteed formula for all kinds of bad outcomes, predictably including many outcomes — e.g., sexual harassment and rape — that the Left abhors. You should read Stephanie Gutmann’s The Kinder, Gentler Military, and you might also try talking to soldiers and their families. The success of the all-volunteer force and reductions in the size of the military mean that fewer and fewer Americans have any idea of what the lives of combat troops are like. And yes, I’m gonna tell a story about my Army son now.

The back of this T-shirt asks, ‘What do you do?’

They were set for one of their periodic training jumps at Fort Bragg, and my son was in the second flight. “Sleep discipline” means a soldier must be able to fall asleep at under any conditions, because sleep is a precious commodity in warfare. My son is naturally excellent in this regard, so while the troops in the second flight were waiting on the tarmac, he put on his Oakleys and nodded off.

He awoke to the sound of shouting: “YOUR RESERVE! PULL YOUR RESERVE! HIT YOUR RESERVE!” Bolting awake, my son looked up to see a troop high overhead falling from the sky. The main chute had failed and, although the falling troop obviously couldn’t hear the men on the tarmac, they reflexively shouted what was almost a prayer, knowing that the impending disaster overhead was something that might just as easily have happened to them.

Thank God, the reserve was deployed in time.

And then, moments later, two troops got their parachutes entangled with each other, and everybody on the tarmac went silent for the second or two it took for them to get untangled from what could have been another deadly situation. The instructors decided to cancel the second flight, and my son didn’t get to jump that day.

Military combat is a lethal business, and even in peacetime training exercises, death is not a possibility that can be ruled out. If you’ve read Scott McEwen and Richard Miniter’s new book about the Navy SEALs, Eyes on Target, you know that the biggest loss of life in SEAL history didn’t happen during a firefight. Fifteen members of SEAL Team Six, Gold Squad, were killed — along with 23 other service members — on Aug. 6, 2011, when a CH-47 helicopter (code named “Extortion 17”) was shot down in Afghanistan by an RPG.

You want to whine about fairness and equality?

Being on the tip of the spear is not the kind of “career opportunity” where complaints about discrimination and “social justice” belong. A liberal democracy cannot vote out of existence the decidedly undemocratic and non-liberal realities of warfare. Attempting to manipulate the armed forces to fit politically correct preconceptions will have a predictable result: Dead troops.

But I digress . . .

The BridgeGate report’s finding that a romantic relationship may have contributed to the mess doesn’t mean that the woman is to blame. It takes two to tango, and workplace romances predictably undermine staff morale without regard to who we blame. Suspicions of favoritism are one common consequence, along with resentments and hostilities and emotional turmoil, all of which are unnecessary distractions from a mission-focused attitude. Are we paying people to do their jobs,

or are we paying them to play hide-the-sausage? When people treat the workplace like a singles bar or a dating website, bad things happen, as the potential destruction of Chris Christie’s political future quite clearly illustrates.

Since we’re doing military-themed digressions, let me close by asking you to read Craig Henry’s excellent post about the dangers of poll-driven optimism leading to Republican overconfidence in the November mid-term election. He references the intelligence screw-up that made the Battle of the Bulge such a brutal surprise to the Allied high command in December 1944.

In The Mailbox, 03.28.14

Posted on | March 28, 2014 | 5 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER

THE TRANSOM
Proof Positive: Clubs Not His Strong Suit
First Street Journal: But, But, But They’re Blue States! How Can This Be?
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Things I Learned About Politics By Playing Tropico
Michelle Malkin: A Whole Lotta Democrat Corruption Going On
Twitchy: Racist “Joke” Has People Calling For Comedy Central To #CancelColbert; Update – Tweet Deleted

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Add Iowa To The GOP’s Senate Pickup List
American Thinker: The October Surprise That Could Cripple The Practice Of Medicine
Conservatives4Palin: Governor Palin Endorses The Mama Grizzly Over The Clown – Julianne Ortman For #MNSen
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, May 27
Jammie Wearing Fools: State Department Gets Tough On Putin By Posting Selfies
Joe For America: Noah’s Sinking Ark
JustOneMinute: No Honor Among, Well, Progs
Pat Dollard: Cantor, McCarthy To Headline Anti-Tea Party Event
Protein Wisdom: Former Liberal Democrat Governor Richard Lamm’s Speech On How To Destroy America
Shot In The Dark: One Of The “Meta” Tribe
The Jawa Report: Can You Do Kindergarten Math?
The Lonely Conservative: Obama Got Reprimanded During His Visit With The Pope; Networks Ignore It
This Ain’t Hell: I Am An Army Nurse Now
Megan McArdle: Finding A House That Won’t Destroy You

Deadline to submit links for the FMJRA is noon tomorrow.
DO IT.
Deadline to submit links for Rule 5 Sunday is midnight tomorrow.
DO THAT TOO.

You Can’t Spell ‘Liberal’ Without L-I-E

Posted on | March 28, 2014 | 43 Comments

Patterico catches Matthew Yglesias in a big fat stinking lie and the liar Yglesias reacts by lying about his lie. Yglesias actually blocked Patterico on Twitter, and Ezra Klein defended Yglesias’s lie.

Meanwhile, “Harry Reid Lied About Americans Being Liars, and

Now That He’s Busted, He’s Lying Again” — this is not unusual. Harry Reid is one of the most dishonest men ever to serve in the Senate, perhaps rivaling even the notoriously mendacious Ted Kennedy.

Maniac Feminist @LauraLevites Unleashes Anti-Christian Hatred

Posted on | March 28, 2014 | 97 Comments

The problem with trying to keep up with feminist insanity is, while you’re distracted by one deranged nutjob — say, Amanda Marcotte, or that fat chick with paranoid rape fears — another one is likely to go off her meds and completely melt down while you’re not looking.

Believe it or not, when she is not busy wishing violence upon people she’s never met, Laura Levites is a professional comedian.

Probably observational humor: “Did you ever notice those Republican women on TV? Wouldn’t you like to rip out their uterus?“

You’ll notice I’m screen-capping her tweets rather than just embedding them, because I figure Laura Levites will eventually go completely schizo like Amanda Bynes and get committed for psychiatric evaluation. Then her therapist will make her delete this crazy stuff, so I want to preserve the part where she death-wished a teenage girl.

See, this is what happens to women who take Amanda Marcotte seriously: They actually

believe that Hobby Lobby wants to take away their “reproductive choice” and, because they are soulless bloodthirsty baby-hating fanatics, this leads them to an existential crisis which can only be resolved by death-wishing innocent teenagers.

“Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. . . . He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don’t listen to him. Remember that — do not listen.”
— The Exorcist (1973)

Some people — including Chris Loesch — are actually praying for Laura Levites’s salvation, but this is almost certainly a waste of prayer. Someone who openly delights in wickedness and curses Christians in such a foul manner is most likely possessed by demons.

Unless you’re prepared to conduct an exorcism, there is no hope at all for satanic monsters like Laura Levites.

Hey, Stop Raping Fat Chicks!

Posted on | March 27, 2014 | 122 Comments

Peter Paul Rubens, Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1618)

This public service announcement should not be necessary, but unfortunately there seems to be some confusion on the subject:

Rape culture is prevalent, insidious, and normalized in our culture. . . Fat women face an extra special facet of rape culture though — the fact that they should be grateful for it. You read that right — grateful for being raped. The logic goes that, of course, no one would want to touch a fat woman. We’re so gross, you know? So if someone was actually willing to have sex with us we should be on our knees with gratitude thanking that person for sharing their special snowflake of a dick with us. Some people even deny that it’s possible for fat women to be raped because, ew, who would want to have sex with a fattie? . . . Let’s be clear, while the reasons for rape are complicated and include a whole lot of things, dehumanization and objectification of women is at least one pretty large factor. And who doesn’t love to dehumanize and objectify fat women? Fat woman are simultaneously desexualized and oversexualized in our culture. Myths of fat women being always ready for sex, promiscuous, and never turning down sex abound. . . . Rape culture is where this desexualization and oversexualization intersect. No one could possibly want to have sex with you which is why you’re such a slut and sleep around and why you would be lucky if you get raped.

She’s arguing with the voices inside her head, projecting her own imaginary fears onto “our culture,” over-interpreting negative feedback, and seeking moral authority by striking a pose of outraged victimhood.

Which is to say, she’s a feminist.

Irrational screeds are impossible to refute, because logic cannot address a wild collection of anecdotes, subjective emotional responses and tendentious assertions, but let’s begin by acknowledging that (a) negative perceptions of fat people are widespread, however, (b) fat men are no less stigmatized than fat women, and (c) it is by no means evident that anti-fat bias is particularly implicated in “rape culture,” besides which (d) exactly what the hell does “rape culture” mean, anyway?

We were told that the Steubenville case was the pluperfect example of “rape culture” in action, but when all was said and done, the most obvious lesson of that saga was, drunk teenagers make very bad decisions, which is not exactly a startling revelation.

No responsible adult is in favor of teenage girls getting passed-out drunk at parties, nor are responsible adults in favor of drunk teenage boys taking advantage of passed-out teenage girls, but it seems that the teenagers in Steubenville weren’t under the supervision of responsible adults, and so something very bad happened. Except for the fact that evidence was captured in digital photos, videos and social-media messages produced by the perpetrators and their friends, there was nothing particularly significant about this crime.

Why, then, was Steubenville seized on as a drama about “rape culture”? Perhaps for the same reason that the death of Trayvon Martin became a drama about racism, or some people tried to turn the Kaitlyn Hunt case into a drama about homophobia.

There are activists and organizations with political agendas and, insofar as influential members of the media are sympathetic to those agendas, any conflict that dramatizes (or, at least, seems to dramatize) the activist agenda is ripe for exploitation. What is the result of this kind of journalistic activism? One result, predictable to any student of mass psychology, is that agenda-driven journalism spawns something akin to a copycat syndrome. Just as a highly publicized murder may be imitated by a “copycat killer,” likewise media publicity for victimhood dramas can inspire some people to say, “Me, too! I’m a victim! Help me!”

It is from this media-influenced copycat syndrome that fake “hate” hoaxes originate. Alec Torres at National Review provides a listing of recent hate hoaxes, including the infamous case of University of Wyoming feminist Meg Lanker-Simons, who fabricated Facebook threats to “hate-f**k” herself.

“I want to hatef–k Meg Lanker Simons so hard. That chick that runs her liberal mouth all the time and doesn’t care who knows it. I think its hot and it makes me angry. One night with me and shes gonna be a good Republican b–ch.”

Totally fake, and why? Well, the liberal media spent many months in 2012 promoting the phony “War on Women” meme, and the same media turned the Steubenville story into a “rape culture” drama, and if a lonely feminist in Laramie, Wyoming, was desperate for attention, what better way to get attention than to manufacture a Republican rape threat?

So here we are, in the spring of 2014, when some feminists are staging “Fat Justice” seminars on college campuses, while other feminists are declaring that all heterosexual intercourse is rape. Nobody therefore should be surprised that a plus-sized feminist would claim fat women are victims of “an extra special facet of rape culture” in the allegedly widespread belief that fat women should be “grateful for being raped.”

Do some people, in mocking feminist rhetoric about rape, express such an attitude? Certainly they do, but sarcastic mockery is one thing, and actual rape is another thing. And this is an important distinction the hysteria over “rape culture” is intended to obscure. Everybody agrees that rape is a crime that should be prosecuted; feminist rhetoric about “rape culture,” on the other hand, is a sort of consciousness-raising project that aims to change the way we talk about sex.

The “rape culture” campaign is about punishing speech — including innocuous jokes — and ultimately about silencing criticism of feminist ideology: “Shut up, because rape!”

If the media are “uncritically fascinated” with rape culture, why? “Nothing catches an editor’s eye like a good rape,” as Hunter S. Thompson observed in Hell’s Angels. If a feminist crusade gives BuzzFeed a sneaky way to appeal to prurient interests, why not?

“Rape culture,” like slideshows of adorable kittens, is good for web traffic. But we ought not confuse BuzzFeed’s search-engine optimization strategies with reality, and if feminists and their liberal media friends are making fat women paranoid about rape, this is a problem entirely separate from actual rape. Mocking feminists and mocking the media are not the same thing as mocking rape or mocking fat women.

Besides, mockery is pretty much my full-time job.

Welcome to the Internet, fatso.

(Hat-tip: @UnknownNameDoe on Twitter.)

UPDATE: At least one commenter has noticed that I illustrated this post with a painting by the 17th-century master Rubens, from whose plump female figures we derive the term “Rubenesque” to describe a woman who is pleasantly plump.

So, you might ask, is the author of the feminist “fat rape” screed a Rubenesque figure? You can go see for yourself.

By the way, she has already been the subject of a Reddit thread.

In The Mailbox, 03.27.14

Posted on | March 27, 2014 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
First Street Journal: The American Left Is Pro-Choice On Exactly One Thing
Proof Positive: Alas! We Knew Him!
Zero Hedge: What Happens When A U.S. President Stops Speaking And Nobody Claps?
Doug Powers: Contradict-A-Palooza – “Not My Boss’s Business” Goal To Make It Every Boss’s Business
Twitchy: Oops! Toure Accidentally Makes Conservative Argument Against Obamacare
Erick Erickson: Matthew Yglesias Is Juice Vox Media’s Village Idiot And Liar-In-Chief

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Professor Tyler Cowen Attacked While Teaching Class At George Mason U.
American Thinker: Smearing

Climate Skeptics
Blackfive: The Real Michael Bisping (Koala Boy)
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: CA Gun Grabber Arrested For Firearms Trafficking
Conservatives4Palin: Governor Palin Endorses Joni Ernst For Senate In Iowa, Lisbeth Benacquisto For House In Florida
Don Surber: Daily Scoreboard, March 26
Jammie Wearing Fools: FBI Dumps Hate Group Southern Poverty Law Center
Joe For America: Solar Industry Headed For Disaster
JustOneMinute: Failing To Man Up In The Other Blue Heaven
Pat Dollard: Us, European Security Agencies See Massive Russian Buildup On Ukraine Border
Protein Wisdom: Reid Defends Obamacare Delay – “People Are Not Educated About How To Use The Internet”
Shot In The Dark: Carrying On
STUMP: Obamacare Watch – Do Mandates (And Prohibitions) Work?
The Jawa Report: Hump Day War Pr0n
The Lonely Conservative: Harry Reid Doesn’t Like Reporters Poking Into His Family Affairs
This Ain’t Hell: The Economics Of Veteran Unemployment
Megan McArdle: College Football Players Get A Union. Will They Get Paid?

Tom Kratman’s Big Boys Don’t Cry still on sale for $1.99!

MSNBC and Obama Tanking Together

Posted on | March 27, 2014 | 34 Comments

Two headlines:

MSNBC is in serious trouble
— Politico

Poll: Obama’s disapproval
rating hits a new high
— Washington Post

Hating Republicans is a poor substitute for sound policy, and it’s also not an adequate rationale for a news organization:

In a world where liberals wanted to be outraged by George Bush every night, or celebrate the rise of Barack Obama, MSNBC had a theory of the case. But now Obama’s presidency has turned into a slog, and MSNBC isn’t compelling. Prime time is just hours of what often seems like feigned outrage. And the daytime strategy — giving shows to kids in their 20s and 30s, in an apparent bid to reach the youths — is comically bad, and rendered absurd at every commercial break when the catheter ads come on.

Everybody’s chortling at MSNBC’s misfortune — Instapundit jokes that both of MSNBC’s viewers will “age out of the demographic next year” — but it’s important that conservatives not miss the real lesson here. Fox News has succeeded by offering an alternative to biased liberal news coverage, but despite being No. 1 in cable news, the market demand seems to have peaked:

In 2013, the cable news audience, by nearly all measures, declined. The combined median prime-time viewership of the three major news channels — CNN, Fox News and MSNBC — dropped 11% to about 3 million, the smallest it has been since 2007. The Nielsen Media Research data show that the biggest decline came at MSNBC, which lost nearly a quarter (24%) of its prime-time audience. CNN, under new management, ended its fourth year in third place, with a 13% decline in prime time. Fox, while down 6%, still drew more viewers (1.75 million) than its two competitors combined (619,500 at MSNBC and 543,000 at CNN).

By comparison, despite declining ratings, the three major broadcast evening news programs still reach much larger audiences: NBC Nightly News 8.4 million, ABC World News 7.7 million and CBS Evening News 6.5 million — a combined average nightly viewership of more than 22 million in 2013, about seven times larger than the 3 million total reached by the cable news networks.

That is to say, while Alternative Media have risen and Establishment Media have declined, Establishment Media still matters, and will continue to matter for the foreseeable future. MSNBC made a bet during the Bush years that there was a market for a cable network that was the antithesis of Fox News, and that bet helped MSNBC vault past CNN into second place among cable networks, but the momentum — which took MSNBC from about 350,000 primetime viewers in 2006 to about 750,000 in 2012 — couldn’t be sustained.

Conservatives who watch Fox News to get pro-GOP happy talk are much more numerous than people who tune into MSNBC to get anti-GOP angry talk, but that is cold comfort to Republicans when the Democrat in the White House was able to get re-elected in large measure because MSNBC actually reflects the private opinions of the people who produce mass-market news at the major networks.

Scott Walker: “It’s About Reform”

Posted on | March 27, 2014 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

I, for one, have had enough “borrowing

it forward”:

“I think what we’ve shown in Wisconsin is that it’s not about austerity — it’s about reform,” Walker said. “And what I mean by that is if we just come in our state and cut things across the board that means you cut your priorities as much as you cut things that aren’t quite as important. We reined in collective bargaining. We put more power back in the hands of the taxpayer at the state and the local level. I think nationally we need that same sort of reform no matter who is running for president. I’d slash the marginal tax rates for everyone across the board — go to a simpler, more flat tax.”

We should hasten to add that, in stark contrast to #OccupyResoluteDesk, Walker actually has a record of, you know, reforming.

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