The Other McCain

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

As Though I Never Have Anything Nice To Say About #OccupyResoluteDesk

Posted on | July 26, 2013 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

Category: Barack Obama, humor

21 Books, Part I

Posted on | July 26, 2013 | 34 Comments

— by Wombat-socho
I’ve been somewhat pressed for time this week, and mostly reading The Last Lion, so this is what you get for a book post. Originally published in various parts at my LiveJournal and in somewhat different form at Everything2.


If you’re looking for the Great Books, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. Most of these books would probably make the average American Lit professor turn up his nose in scorn, but that’s okay; I’m not trying to impress anyone. These are the books that for one reason or another left their mark on me, changed my life in some subtle (or maybe not so subtle) way, and made me who I am.


The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
But now that State Security has seized the book anyway, I have no alternative but to publish it immediately.
People who think they’re living in a repressive police state here in America need to STFU and read this book, because they obviously have no idea what a real police state looks like or how it functions. Solzhenitsyn’s classic work of history, assembled painstakingly under the noses of the KGB, recounts the history of the massive prison camp system, the secret police organizations that built, staffed, and often died in it, the perverted legal system that fed it, and the twisted political system that gave birth to it in the midst of the Revolution. Solzhenitsyn dispels the myth that the GULAG was born from Stalin’s madness; rather, he makes clear that a system of this sort was what Lenin had in mind all along. I first read this book in junior high school, and if I had ever had any doubts about Communism, Solzhenitsyn killed those doubts forever. Coming on the heels of One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, it also determined my military career: I chose Russian over Chinese or Korean when I enlisted in the Army, because someday I wanted to read Arkhipelag’ GULag in the original Russian. It’s a tribute to the quality of instruction at the Defense Language Institute that I could do so without having to refer to my Smirnitsky Russian-English dictionary more than once every dozen pages.


Once An Eagle, Anton Myrer
So in the Libyan fable it is told- That once an eagle, stricken with a dart- Said, when he saw the fashion of the shaft: ‘With our own feathers, not by others’ hands- Are we now smitten’.
I don’t think there’s another book out there quite like Myrer’s classic novel about Sad Sam Damon and his nemesis, Courtney Massengale, who rise through the ranks of the Army’s officer corps from quite disparate origins. Sam Damon leaves Nebraska to enlist in the Army during the Mexican Expedition, wins the Medal of Honor, a battlefield commission, and a wife in World War I, while Massengale comes from a down-at-heels upper-class New York family, goes to West Point, and spends World War One as a staff officer far behind the lines. Damon takes care of his troops and leads from the front, while Massengale exemplifies the overly political staff officer, ultimately maneuvering his way into a corps command under MacArthur in World War II despite never previously commanding troops at all. The book has become a cult classic for Army and Marine officers alike for its stark, often brutal portrayal of the horror of war, the men who fight in them, and the women those men love.

I came across Once An Eagle in high school and have since read several paperback copies to death. There are a lot of lessons to be drawn from the book, but it wouldn’t be half as popular as it is if it weren’t such a damn good story in its own right. There are dozens of memorable characters, all of them fully-rounded people with their own stories…”Paprika Ben” Krisler, “Porky” Bannerman, Reb Raebyrne, Joe Brand, Emily Massengale, Tommy Damon, and most of all the protagonists themselves. Sam Damon is no stainless hero, and Courtney Massengale isn’t totally evil; Myrer shows them to us at their best and their worst. I have a weakness for well-written soap operas, and this globe-spanning masterpiece depicting the agonies and ecstasies of an Army officer’s career that spans the World Wars is one of the best. I really ought to get a hardback or Kindle copy one of these days.


Rocket Ship Galileo, Robert Heinlein
We have a tradition of freedom, personal freedom, scientific freedom. That freedom isn’t kept alive by caution and unwillingness to take risks.
This is actually the proxy for the half-dozen Heinlein juveniles that somehow had wound up in the collection of my elementary school in Maryland, which the librarian wished she could give me when I left the 6th grade for junior high since nobody else ever read them. This book, along with Time for the Stars, Between Planets, Farmer in the Sky and Space Cadet, really got me into the habit of reading science fiction, which I hadn’t really developed yet in spite of reading Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time back in second grade and Ray Bradbury|Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles in third. Heinlein’s first juvenile novel recounts the adventures of the “Galileo Rocketry, Marching & Chowder Society”, four young high-school friends who get involved in a retired atomic scientist’s plan to convert a surplus UN suborbital mail rocket into a fission-powered craft capable of reaching the Moon. This they then do, but they find on arrival that they’re not the first humans to reach the moon, and that’s when the real fun starts. The first of a dozen or so juvenile novels written by Heinlein for Scribners; the last, Starship Troopers is probably the most famous.


This Time Let’s Not Eat the Bones, Bill James
The minor leagues as they exist today are an abomination in the sight of the Lord.
Like Rocket Ship Galileo, this is a stand-in for all the Baseball Abstracts and Baseball Books I dug into when I was falling back into love with baseball in the winter of 1989-1990. I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that Bill James changed the way a lot of fans looked at baseball; he coined the word “sabermetrics” and over the course of his twenty-plus years of writing has begun to have an effect on the way some front offices work. The thing is, most people assume that he’s a “figger filbert”, some kind of mad statistician who thinks everything can be explained by the numbers, when in fact he’s gone to a great deal of trouble explaining why that attitude is pure bullshit. What Bill James is, really, is a scientist who has turned the scientific method on baseball. What are the facts, and what do they mean? This is the question he constantly asks in all his books, and when you get right down to it, it’s the reason he’s working for the Red Sox now, because John Henry don’t want to hear no jockstrap bullshit, he wants to know what the facts are and what they mean, and between Bill James and his disciple Eddie Epstein, I don’t think there’s two better guys for coming up with the answers to those questions.
Bill James is responsible, along with the fellow who wrote the article in Smithsonian magazine on the League of Nations rotisserie baseball league, for restoring my love for baseball after Bob Short killed it in 1972. I got interested in Rotisserie baseball, then involved in a Pursue the Pennant league, began scoring for STATS, Inc. during the horrible summer that was the 1990 Minnesota Twins|Twins season, and wound up reading (and buying) a metric buttload of baseball books. Not too surprisingly, a lot of them (The Politics of Glory, to name but one of many) were written by Bill James, but I would recommend this one as a good starting point. It’s out of print, but there are plenty of used copies out there; maybe one of these days some savvy publisher will get James to polish it up so they can offer a second edition.


Sharpe’s Rifles, Bernard Cornwell
” What the hell is this bloody army coming to? He’s a jumped-up sergeant, Johnny! He isn’t even a real officer! And in the Rifles, too!”
This is one of several books I went looking for after seeing the TV or movie adaptations, although since I hadn’t seen the credits to the show I thought I was looking for Rifleman Dodd by C.S. Forester. Fortunately, the folks at the now-defunct Baxter’s Books were able to get me pointed in the right direction, and so I began a long hunt through the libraries and bookstores for more books about the scarred, ill-starred officer of the 95th Rifles. Unlike Forester’s books, these are not stories suitable for children: there’s enough gory death and violent sex (to say nothing of rape) to earn these books an R rating at the very least, if they were ever faithfully brought to the big screen. They do have the virtue of being accurate, though; Bernard Cornwell|Cornwell has unquestionably done his homework – which is more than one can say for the idiot who cast Daragh O’Malley as the hulking Sergeant Harper in the TV series. On the other hand, casting Sean Bean as Sharpe was pure genius, so I guess overall it’s a wash.
The Sharpe novels are historical novels at their best: they give you an unflinching look at life in the period when they take place, and England during the Napoleonic Wars was a damned interesting place. One sees both the extreme poverty of the London rookeries and the often-corrupt but quite stylish Court society, sometimes all in the same novel (Sharpe’s Regiment) while other novels delve into the shadowy world of espionage and counter-espionage in which even strong men like Richard Sharpe are just pawns in the hands of the game masters. (Sharpe’s Sword). Some people draw parallels between Cornwell’s Sharpe and Fleming’s Bond; this isn’t fair to Sharpe, who isn’t the sociopath that Bond rather obviously is. Sharpe loves his men and his wives in a way that Bond never could, and I would argue that leading men from the front in the Napoleonic Wars takes a sight more courage than facing off against SPECTRE or SMERSH, if only because Sharpe knew he couldn’t rely on H.M. Government to take care of him if things went sideways. Excellent, excellent fiction and a worthy complement to our next book…


Beat to Quarters, C. S. Forester
During this first hour of the day the captain was not to be spoken to, nor his train of thought interrupted.
Unlike the previous two books, I discovered the shy, solitary captain of the Lydia one winter when I was a child, sick abed and plowing through a set of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books for Children. I’m a sucker for a complex, sympathetic character, and Horatio Hornblower certainly is one; also, I was a sucker for a heroic fight against long odds, and Hornblower’s cruise was definitely one of those after another, even without the romantic subplot involving Lady Barbara Wellesley. (Oh, my! #^_^#) Like Sharpe’s Rifles, this book sent me off on a hunt for the other books in the (quite extensive) Hornblower saga, which I someday hope to sit down and read IN ORDER for the first time.
What can I really say about the Hornblower novels that hasn’t already been said a million times? C.S. Forester’s lonely captain has been the inspiration for dozens of others, including one starship captain from Riverside, Iowa and another whose career was less spectacular but arguably more colorful. Oh, yes, there’s the Salamander as well. Still, Forester’s novels deserve to be read for their own sake and not as some literary archetype. They’re great sea tales and wonderful stories. Read them, and read them to your kids.


365 Days, Ronald Glasser
And so it goes, and the gooks know it. They will drop the point, trying not to kill him but to wound him, to get him screaming so they can get the medic too. He’ll come. They know he will.
Ronald J. Glasser was a pediatrician assigned to the Army station hospital in Camp Zama, Japan, during the Vietnam War. Times being what they were, he found himself working on a lot of the wounded who had been medevac’d from the war zone, and eventually writing about the experience. 365 Days isn’t Glasser’s story; it isn’t even a coherent narrative. What it is, is a collection of vignettes about Americans in Vietnam, pretty much as Glasser says in the foreword that I quoted at the beginning of this. Some of them are gripping. Some are sad. Some are extremely creepy (“Gentlemen, It Works” in particular) while others are grimly amusing (“No Fucken Cornflakes”) – and some will leave scars. You’ll know them when you find them.
There have been a lot of books written about Vietnam, and I probably read far too many of them when I was in high school. I’m pretty sure it affected how I viewed the Army, and not for the better; all the more so since the Army of the 1980s in Europe was not what it had been during Vietnam. So much the worse for me. This book, though, I couldn’t stay away from. I must have checked out every copy from the county library and the local base libraries at least half a dozen times, reading and re-reading it from cover to cover. I’ve long since worn out my first copy, and the second one’s spine is starting to go. I don’t know if I can really call it one of my favorite books, but it’s a part of who I am, and it would bother me not to have a copy on hand.


Category: Books

Armageddon, U.S.A.: Because Nobody Cares About ‘Social Issues’ Anymore

Posted on | July 26, 2013 | 61 Comments

First, the headlines:

Amanda Bynes — Doctors Win Bid
to Keep Her in Psych Ward
— TMZ

Sydney Leathers Details Being At Center
Of Anthony Weiner Sexting Scandal
— Inside Edition

Weiner Had at Least 13 Sexting Partners
— 3 After He Left Congress
— American Power

Four More Women Accuse Filner
— KPBS-TV, San Diego

San Diego mayor to seek therapy
for ‘inexcusable’ behavior
— The Hill

Democratic Party officials ask
San Diego Mayor Bob Filner to quit 
— Los Angeles Times

Obama Says Vietnamese Dictator
Inspired by Founding Fathers
— Fox News

Miley Cyrus … POSES NUDE
— TMZ

Now, the serious commentary: These are not the disease, these are merely symptoms of the disease, and the pattern is not coincidental.

Why has Amanda Bynes gone crazy? Why is Sydney Leathers being treated like a celebrity? Why can’t Anthony Weiner remember how many women he “sexted”? Why is Miley Cyrus naked? Why does Bob Filner think “therapy,” and not resignation, is the answer?

Don’t tell me we don’t know the answer to why President Ho Chi Minh is in the White House and Amanda Bynes is in the nuthouse. This kind of escalating madness doesn’t “just happen,” does it?

Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat.

Finally, the random sarcasm:


 

Category: Fear. Loathing., Scandal, Sex

Mediocrity Celebrated, Greatness Ignored

Posted on | July 26, 2013 | 30 Comments

And douchebags insufficiently denounced:

Liberal bias is not a matter of unfairness, but rather a matter of dishonesty — deliberately ignoring some facts, and misrepresenting other facts, in order to misinform the public by portraying to them a politically falsified view of events and personalities. If there were ever any honest person employed by the  New York Times (we stipulate the hypothetical), that person would have been obligated to quit Thursday morning, when the banner headline on the front page of the paper should have been: “ANDREW BREITBART WAS RIGHT.” (An appropriate subhead might be, “Anthony Weiner Is a Typically Dishonest Democrat Dirtbag.”) Cheating a great man out of his posthumous vindication is, however, just small change in the vast franchise of journalistic dishonesty of which the New York Times is the flagship enterprise. The fundamental falsehood of the whole Big Lie business is that Democrats are virtuous simply because they are Democrats, which is the only reason any fool ever could have thought a wretched human stain like Anthony Weiner worthy of admiration. . . . .

You can read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

 


Category: American Spectator, Anthony Weiner, Media Bias, New York Times

LIVE AT FIVE: 07.26.13

Posted on | July 26, 2013 | 14 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Weiner Faces Growing Calls To Pull Out

Huma not healing the wounds

Polls show support softening


Rioting In Tunisia After Opposition Leader Brahmi Assassinated
Moderate Islamic ruling party blamed; general strike called


Third Woman In Filner Harassment Case Comes Forward
Founder of America’s Angel campaign interviewed about mayor’s creepy behavior



POLITICS
Texas Republicans Push Back Against Holder’s Voting Rights Challenge

Don’t mess with Texas

Senator Ted Cruz: Suit continues DOJ’s tradition of refusal to follow the law

NC Legislature Approves $10 Million For Forced Sterilization Victims

“No Bailout”: Senators Move To Pre-Empt Federal Aid For Detroit

Lonegan Criticizes Booker’s Record On Job Creation

Prosecution Portrays Wikileaker As Traitor In Closing Arguments

New Hampshire Legalizes Medical Marijuana

Speaker Boehner Clashes With Rep. King Over Immigration Remarks

“Serious Deficiencies” In $50 Million Afghanistan Justice Project



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Weaker Dollar Boosts Oil Prices: NYMEX $105.54, Brent $107.77
SAC Case Threatens Wall Street Cash Cow
Activision Goes Solo, Buys Out Vivendi For $8.2 Billion
Samsung Reports Record Profit, Still Falls Short Of Expectations
Big Three Automakers Thrive Even As Detroit Fails
Starbucks Earnings Jump as Same-Store Sales Increase
Chipotle Faked Its Twitter Hack
Apple Smartphone Market Share Drops To Three-Year Low
Google Reveals It Spent $966 Million On Waze Buy
US Government Demanding Passwords From Web Firms
Sony Backing “Gran Turismo” Film
Google’s New Nexus 7 Forces The iPad Mini Into A Corner
Lomography Strikes Kickstarter Gold Again With Petzval Lens
Activision Backs Wii U With Six Games – Call of Duty: Ghosts Confirmed



SPORTS
Mack Brown: College Players Need To Be Paid

“The players are killing themselves, and last year we made $163 million.”

Longhorns coach comes out for paying college football players; rival Stoops at Oklahoma disagrees

Plans For New Red Wings Arena Spark Criticism


Nightengale: A-Rod Finished With The Yankees

LeBron James Reportedly Done Playing For Team USA

AT&T Gets Naming Rights For Cowboys Stadium

Matt Ryan Signs Fice Year, $103.75 Million Deal With Falcons

George Brett Steps Down As Royals Hitting Coach

Guthrie Goes Six, Butler Homers As Royals Own O’s 7-1

Here He Comes To Save The Day: Harper’s Sayonara Swat Wins It For Nats After Soriano Melts Down



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Demi Lovato Doesn’t Care If You Like Her Blonde Hair…

Demi in the sun

…or not.

Amanda Bynes In The Looney Bin: One Hour Of Sanity, Ten Hours Of Crazy

Beyonce Scraps 50 Songs Amidst Endless Album Delay

Taylor Swift “Biggest Fan” Contest Cancelled After 39-Year-Old man Uses Bots To Rig Voting

Disney Channel’s “Shake It Up” Ending

Merritt Wever Returning For Third Season Of “New Girl”

Solange Knowles Cancels Tour Dates Citing Mental, Physical Health

Rosamund Pike To Star In “Gone Girl”

Ten Black “American Idol” Contests Sue Claiming Racism

Kristen Wiig, Fabrizio Moretti Split

Shakira In Bikini Shape Six Months After Baby Birth



FOREIGNERS
Spain Train Crash: “It Came Apart Like A Zipper Being Pulled”
Syrian Rebel Leader Tells Kerry Situation Is Desperate
Bar Rafaeli Gets Cold Shoulder In Ramallah
Defense Review Paper Says Japan Needs Marines, Drones
Assange Running For Australian Senate
Zardari’s Party Boycotting Pakistani Presidential Vote
Irish Veterans Of Korean War Recall Conflict
eleven Dead In PRC Nursing Home Arson
Morsi Detained For Contacts With Hamas
Canadian Suspect Named In Bulgarian Bus Bombing
C Of E Admits Investing In Backer Of Payday Lender



BLOGS & STUFF
BLackmailers Don’t Shoot: Mary Carey – The Sensible Choice For NYC Mayor?
R. Emmett Tyrell: President Barack Obama’s Six Months Of Blunders
Twitchy: Actress Who Once Threatened To Kick Michelle Malkin “In The Nuts” Tells Conservatives To Be Civil
Jammie Wearing Fools: Pathetic Weiner Now Admits To Sexting At Least Three Women Since Resignation, Craters In Polls
NRO Corner: Weiner Rival Demands apology for “Carlos Danger” Alias
Bryan Preston: Pelosi – What, You Expect Me To Know Things?
Power Line: Will Texas Be “Bailed In”?
Protein Wisdom: Holder To Sue Yet Another State. For The Post-Partisanship And The Post-Racialism.
Bobby Jindal And Scott Walker: Unworkable ObamaCare
Jihad Watch: Al Qaeda Host A Family Fun Fair In Syria, Complete With Ice Cream, Jihad, And The Koran
Rush Limbaugh: Drive By media Echoes This Program In Analysis Of Weiner Story And Obama Speech
Gateway Pundit: Has Missouri Senator Roy Blunt Gone Wobbly On Obamacare?
College Fix: College Republicans Deemed Security Threat, Denied Admission To Obama Speech
Weasel Zippers: Obama Admits Liberal Media Fawns Over Him – Reporters Tell Me My Economic Proposals Are “Great”


Deadline to submit links for this weekend’s FMJRA is midnight tonight. DO IT.


Category: Live at Five

Huma Abedin Is So Hot, Her Creepy Husband Can’t Resist Other Women

Posted on | July 25, 2013 | 48 Comments

There is an old joke that whenever you see a really hot woman, you know that somewhere there’s a guy who’s sick and tired of her bullshit.

Which is to say, we can’t really blame Huma Abedin for her husband’s sleazy sexual compulsions. It’s wrong to derogate her looks or imply that somehow her Castrating Democrat Power Bitch personality might be the real explanation for why Anthony Weiner was looking for love phone sex in all the wrong places 22-year-olds.

Anyway, David Weigel has a piece at Slate about how the media never do anything else except praise Huma, and then there’s this:

Nobody forced the Weiner-Abedin clan to re-enter electoral politics. Nobody forced Abedin to go along with the stories that Weiner had fallen from grace in 2011 and gone on to be a devoted, chastened husband. Twice now, Weiner has used his personal life to sell himself as a more trustworthy politician. He did this after 2008, when he married Abedin, and he did it in 2012, after the birth of their kid. His 2013 campaign launch video began with a shot of the couple and the baby playing at home in the morning. “Every day starts right here,” said Weiner—who’s now insisting that his private life isn’t relevant to politics.
But back to Abedin. It’s very nice that her friends are feeling for her in this time of self-inflicted hardship. What, though, is missing from our politics if Abedin’s not in it? Before this week, she had a sterling reputation (based in part on how she didn’t appear at Weiner’s press conferences, but oh well) based on … what, exactly?

Read the rest because it’s amazing how Huma Abedin got a reputation for being amazing, simply because Democrats kept telling the media how dadgum amazing Huma is all the time.

Notice there are no conservative women who have this kind of amazing reputation? Michelle Malkin is arguably one of the most innovative New Media entrepreneurs on the planet, but you’ll never read any glowing profile features about her in Vanity Fair, will you? Nor could you imagine any prominent Republican getting caught “sexting” young hotties — say, maybe three young hotties, as a ballpark estimate — and then have feminists write of their undying admiration for the wife that this Republican creep betrayed.

Let’s be charitable: As loveless sham marriages go, certainly the Weiner-Abedin marriage is no less plausible than Bill and Hillary.

 

Category: Anthony Weiner, Scandal, Sex

Project #Groundswell Memo, Number 17: What Conspiracy? Oh, That Conspiracy!

Posted on | July 25, 2013 | 122 Comments

It’s important, when prominent conservatives coordinate messaging, that your project inspire raging paranoid fear on the Left. Everyone whose involvement is not already a matter of public record should be careful neither to confirm nor deny their participation:

“Believing they are losing the messaging war with progressives, a group of prominent conservatives in Washington — including the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and journalists from Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner — has been meeting privately since early this year to concoct talking points, coordinate messaging, and hatch plans for “a 30 front war seeking to fundamentally transform the nation,” according to documents obtained by Mother Jones.
Dubbed Groundswell, this coalition convenes weekly in the offices of Judicial Watch, the conservative legal watchdog group. During these hush-hush sessions and through a Google group, the members of Groundswell — including aides to congressional Republicans — cook up battle plans for their ongoing fights against the Obama administration, congressional Democrats, progressive outfits, and the Republican establishment and “clueless” GOP congressional leaders.

Certainly these “prominent conservatives in Washington” will disavow any claim that I ever attended their “hush-hush sessions” and, with no proof of such attendance, there can be no way to dispel the paranoid fantasies of deranged leftists that we’re all in on the plot.

Of course, we’re all in on it. Am I right?

No prominent conservative should ever deny that they’re part of this shadowy clandestine conspiracy, you see, because if you deny it, then obviously you aren’t really “prominent,” are you?

But a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse, IYKWIMAITYD.

 

Category: Conspiracy Theories, Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

Nora Louise Kuzma, Sydney Leathers: Commodities in a Sexual Marketplace

Posted on | July 25, 2013 | 68 Comments

Traci Lords (a.k.a., Nora Louise Kuzma) at age 17 in 1985

“Traci Lords, who had been hailed as ‘the Meryl Streep of the porn industry,’ was in fact 17-year-old Nora Louise Kuzma. She was first molested at age 10 and later promoted as an ‘adult’ movie actress by her mother’s ex-boyfriend, a California cocaine dealer. Beginning her pornographic career as a 15-year-old high-school dropout, Lords appeared in dozens of X-rated flicks in a year and a half before it was discovered in 1986 that she was a minor.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, The American Spectator

“I thought I loved him. Pretty pathetic.”
— Sydney Leathers

As politics, the Anthony Weiner scandal seems like a silly distraction. As a glimpse into sexual culture in the 21st century, however, it’s fascinating — and by “fascinating,” of course, I mean absolutely horrifying.

Every decent and normal person reading the messages between 22-year-old Sydney Leathers and Anthony Weiner is revolted to think that a young woman would feel compelled to degrade herself in this manner, merely to attract and maintain the “romantic” interest of a married (and, by then, completely disgraced) 47-year-old politician.

Who does these things? Where do people develop such appetites, such expectations, such habits? Why would an attractive young girl engage in this kind of “sexting” with a creepy old pervert?

Just to look at Sydney Leathers — and Evil Blogger Lady has a selection of photos, if you’d care to inspect the merchandise, as it were — most people would presume that this shapely brunette with a brilliant smile would have no shortage of handsome young suitors.

Alas, most young men today are cretinous slobs or neurasthenic wimps, lacking either masculine vigor or chivalrous impulses or both. Even if the most gallant, virile specimen of old-fashioned manhood could be reincarnated, however, one suspects there would be a mutual disinterest between him and the Sydney Leathers type of girl.

“Going into it, I think we both had weird intentions.”
— Sydney Leathers

Lacking any sense of decorum, propriety or personal dignity — indeed, accustomed by early habit to the most disgraceful behaviors and coarse modes of expression — the Sydney Leathers type of girl would be bored to death by a steady, decent and responsible man. And of course, such a man would never desire her companionship.

Utterly corrupted, Sydney Leathers had a very accurate (that is to say, quite low) estimation of her self-worth: No good man could possibly want her, so she sought out a notoriously bad man, and felt herself compelled to perform for this vile pervert:

The woman who told her story to Richie said, “I was 22 and in a bad place. … I really admired him. … I thought he was misunderstood. Until I got to know him. … I was young and dumb.”

Yes, “young and dumb” — a Democrat — “22 and in a bad place.”

Could someone ask Sydney why, at age 22, she was “in a bad place”?

That is to say, could this progressive activist provide a sort of itinerary of the behaviors that led her to that place? Because it seems that far too many young women are in the same place, and America’s parents might like to know how to keep their daughters from going there.

If many of America’s daughters are in that place, why? How did we get to the point where this kind of behavior — really, you should read the sordid details of the Weiner-Leathers “romance” — is not really that surprising? The intersection of culture and politics:

What we know of Weiner’s latest shame is that, in the wake of his 2011 scandal, the married Democrat began an online correspondence with an Indiana girl, identified by BuzzFeed as Sydney Leathers, who says she worked on President Obama’s re-election campaign. To give you an idea of Ms. Leather’s partisan and ideological commitments, after a maniac’s shooting rampage in Tucson, Arizona, she created an online petition that blamed this deadly crime on Sarah Palin, whom Ms. Leathers condemned for “inciting violence.” (In fact, the Tucson gunman was a schizophrenic inspired by a leftwing conspiracy “documentary.”) Only a liberal girl could admire a creep like Weiner. And in one of his creepy sex messages to Ms. Leathers, the 48-year-old Weiner employed a vulgar term for the female genitalia to ask whether she was “smooth” down there.
Let us digress to provide a historical perspective. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

 

 


Category: Anthony Weiner, Culture, History, Scandal, Sex
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