The Other McCain

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

WE BACK MACK!

Posted on | January 22, 2013 | 12 Comments

Just when you were feeling down in the dumps — still 1,460 days remaining in Obama’s second term — Amanda Read brings you reason to hope: Say hello to Stanley Mack, a U.S. Navy veteran who is running for Congress in Alabama’s 7th District in 2014.

It’s a 3-to-1 Democrat district, but there is reason to hope: Alabama has a strong statewide Republican Party. The GOP finally captured the state legislature after the 2010 mid-terms, and the incumbent Democrat is a no-name you never heard of — a perfect target for one of those grassroots-backed underdog challengers we love.

Most incumbent Republicans in Alabama will coast to victory by 2-to-1 margins in 2014, so the statewide party apparatus could help lend support to promising challengers like Stanley Mack, potentially knocking off an incumbent even in a strong Democrat district. If the online grassroots can help drive fundraising and publicity for a good candidate like Stanley Mack, he could really change some hearts and minds.

STANLEY MACK for U.S. CONGRESS
Let’s Back the Mack Attack!

Category: Alabama, Election

The Next 1,460 Days: I Still Hope He Fails

Posted on | January 22, 2013 | 28 Comments

If only more people had listened to Rush Limbaugh . . .

My post this morning about how to hate Democrats reminded Andrew J. Patrick of the bitter debate between Jeff Goldstein and Patterico, and Andrew makes a good point:

The Democrats did not respond to getting their teeth kicked in by George Bush in 2004 by embracing civility, by congratulating the President on his re-election. They doubled down on outrage. They fought the President on his second-term agenda tooth-and-nail.
That worked out rather well for them, all things considered.

This is exactly right. You must know your antagonist. You must study his successes, and you must also study your own failures.

One of the great blunders of the Republican Party is that as soon as the 2004 election was over, they began looking ahead to 2008 when they were sure that they would be running against Hillary Clinton. How many anti-Hillary books were published in 2005-2007? So many Republicans bought into the Hillary-as-Antichrist message that in March 2008, when Rush Limbaugh launched “Operation Chaos” — aiming to turn the Democrat nomination fight into an absolute deadlock — his phone lines lit up with dimwit callers who had let themselves be convinced that Barack Obama was actually the lesser of two evils.

Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!

I remember it well: I saw exactly what Rush was doing. It was pure genius, and if enough Republican voters had listened to him — especially in Indiana and North Carolina — “Operation Chaos” may have resulted in such a vicious bloodletting within the Democrat Party that they never would have recovered from it. For want of a nail . . .

Well, there’s no point recounting the history of everything that went wrong the past five years. But it exposed a fundamental problem of the conservative blogosphere: It developed during the Bush years, amid the Global War on Terror, and its accustomed task was to defend the president and the war effort against the Left. As far as fighting elections, conservative bloggers had 2004 as their basic model — the patriotic Republican incumbent vs. the treacherous Democrat challenger — and this proved a poor template for future conflicts.

In general, by 2009, too many Republicans didn’t have any useful memory of how to be the Opposition Party. The experiences of 1964 and 1974 were remembered only by a graying generation of Elder Statesmen types who, unfortunately, were neither tech-savvy nor culturally attuned to the 21st century. The long 12-year Reagan-Bush ascendancy had been followed by a brief two-year loss of power after the 1992 election, but then the latent vigor of the Party Reagan Built came bouncing back with the 1994 “Republican Revolution.” Dole predictably lost in 1996, and the Lewinsky-inspired impeachment drama of 1998 threw the GOP off its game, but by 2003, they were back on top, controlling the White House and both houses of Congress.

Accustomed to success, to acting in defense of power, Republicans (and by extension, many conservative spokemen, including bloggers) were unaccustomed to the task that faced them after Democrats won Congress in 2006 and captured the White House in 2008.

Ah, but Rush Limbaugh knew what he was doing! Rush had risen to talk-radio superstar status during the low ebb of Republican fortunes in the wake of Bill Clinton’s 1992 defeat of George H. W. Bush. In fact, it is now often forgotten that Limbaugh supported Pat Buchanan’s challenge to Bush in the 1992 primaries. Limbaugh knew that Bush was doomed to defeat in 1992, and that the key was to give conservatives a cause worth fighting for. After Bush lost, Limbaugh’s show became the focal point for the Republican opposition that triumphed in 1994.

It should be pointed out, by the way, that Limbaugh is old enough to remember the true Wilderness Years of the GOP, the post-Watergate era of 1974-78, when such eminent figures as William Rusher, publisher of National Review, thought the Republican Party was done for and were ready for Ronald Reagan to lead a third-party movement.

Too many have forgotten that history — if they ever bothered to learn it in the first place — and no one under 40 has any real direct memory of it, so that there is a sort of “Generation Gap” within the conservative movement. If you don’t remember where you were when Saigon fell (I was a sophomore at Lithia Springs High School) or the Berlin Wall came down (I was a 30-year-old sports editor for the Calhoun [Ga.] Times), it’s impossible for you to understand the Cold War mentality, the petri dish within which the post-WWII conservative movement was incubated.

Conservatism was originally and fundamentally about foreign policy: Are we going to stand up to these godless Commies, or not?

Trying to get Americans to listen to conservative ideas on domestic policy has always been much more difficult, and we are really now back to an era that precedes my own birth, which I know only from history books and from tales of old-timers like M. Stanton Evans. We’re back to the Truman era, when the godless Commies who threatened America were clandestine subversives who called themselves “liberals.”

Really, it’s in some ways much worse now. Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss were traitorous stooges of Moscow, but today’s “liberals” pursue a Bolshevik agenda of strictly domestic origin. The disciples of Howard Zinn, Saul Alinksy, Bill Ayers and Frank Marshall Davis are most certainly Marxists, and we should not be afraid to call them what they are. Hell, “neo-Marxism” is the fashionable style for young hipsters.

The Sovietization of America is an agenda every patriot should oppose, and when Rush Limbaugh famously said, “I hope he fails,” he was right. That’s why I sided with Jeff Goldstein in his fight with Patterico four years ago. Jeff’s essay “How I learned to stop worrying and love the f-bomb” is worth re-reading today, as we begin the final 1,460 days of this catastrophic Reign of Error.

Are we going to stand up to these godless Commies, or not?

 

 

 

UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein reacts to Andrew J. Patrick, describing Obama’s agenda as “a malicious attack on our individual sovereignty and an intentional plan to undermine our constitutional republic and replace it with an beneficent police state peopled by industrious worker bees, helpfully directed and nudged toward happiness by a permanent ruling elite.” Basically, Sweden, with better weather and uglier people.

 


Category: Barack Obama, Conservatism 101, Rush Limbaugh

Ask Michele Bachmann About CBS News Political Director John Dickerson

Posted on | January 22, 2013 | 10 Comments

There was a great uproar over John Dickerson’s column advising Barack Obama to “go for the throat” and “declare war” on Republicans, but it wasn’t as if there were no prior evidence of Dickerson’s biases. Remember the November 2011 debate in Spartanburg, S.C.?

In an e-mail exchange, a network staffer informed CBS political analyst John Dickerson that Bachmann was interested in appearing on Dickerson’s post-debate webcast. The staffer CC’ed the message to Bachmann’s communications director Alice Stewart and when Dickerson answered, he evidently clicked “reply to all” without realizing that what he wrote would go directly to the Republican aide. Dickerson wrote:“Okay let’s keep it loose though since she’s not going to get many questions and she’s nearly off the charts in the hopes that we can get someone else.”
What Dickerson appeared to be mean by his “keep it loose”remark was that he wanted to avoid a firm commitment to have Bachmann on the webcast, as he was hoping to “get someone else” as a guest. But the part of the 29-word Dickerson e-mail that infuriated Bachmann’s team most was what looked very much like proof of a preordained decision by CBS that the candidate would not“get many questions” during the debate because she was “off the charts” — out of contention for the GOP nomination, based on her declining poll numbers. Posting the e-mail to Bachmann’s Facebook page, campaign director Keith Nahigan fumed that Dickerson’s comments were “concrete evidence confirming what every conservative already knows — the liberal mainstream media elites are manipulating the Republican debates by purposely suppressing our conservative message and limiting Michele’s questions.”

This is who John Dickerson is, and this is what John Dickerson does. And there isn’t anyone with any influence at CBS News who doesn’t share Dickerson’s biases. CBS News is a partisan political organization completely devoted to the success of the Democratic Party.

Strange as if may seem, however, CBS — traditionally the most liberal of the Big Three networks — is now rather moderate compared to the strident leftism that prevails at NBC News under the influence of NBC’s fanatically partisan political director Chuck Todd.

The Federal Election Commission should count the “news” budgets of the major networks as contributions to the Democratic Party.

 

Category: CBS, Michele Bachmann

‘Patriotic Progressivism’, The Moron’s Oxymoron

Posted on | January 22, 2013 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

Begins beta-male Brooks:

The best Inaugural Addresses make an argument for something. President Obama’s second one, which surely has to rank among the best of the past half-century, makes an argument for a pragmatic and patriotic progressivism.

This country remains founded upon individual liberty. That a pack of liars over the last century have sold an unsustainable falsehood is neither deniable nor right. ‘Progress’ remains the most expensive and destructive scam in history, and Brooks is truly a false prophet for peddling it.

Modern problems like globalization, technological change, widening inequality and wage stagnation compel us to take new collective measures if we’re to pursue the old goals of equality and opportunity.
Obama wasn’t explicit about why we have failed to meet these challenges. But his critique was implicit. There has been too much “me” — too much individualism and narcissism, too much retreating into the private sphere. There hasn’t been enough “us,” not enough communal action for the common good.

Oh, you Devil. And I mean that in the theological sense of a deceiver selling the very causes of the problem as solutions. Human nature remains constant, technology, the variable. It’s a fine sales pitch that the variable can be used to tweak the constant. If your audience is totally fools. Peaking out at the current 51% is not likely to cut it. The implicit critique of ‘too much “me”‘. Has any President ever been so immodest as to deploy the personal pronoun like #OccupyResoluteDesk?
Emphasis mine here:

I am not a liberal like Obama, so I was struck by what he left out in his tour through American history. I, too, would celebrate Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall, but I’d also mention Wall Street, State Street, Menlo Park and Silicon Valley. I’d emphasize that America has prospered because we have a decentralizing genius.
When Europeans nationalized their religions, we decentralized and produced a great flowering of entrepreneurial denominations. When Europe organized state universities, our diverse communities organized private universities. When Europeans invested in national welfare states, American localities invested in human capital.
America’s greatest innovations and commercial blessings were unforeseen by those at the national headquarters. They emerged, bottom up, from tinkerers and business outsiders who could never have attracted the attention of a president or some public-private investment commission.
I would have been more respectful of this decentralizing genius than Obama was, more nervous about dismissing it for the sake of collective action, more concerned that centralization will lead to stultification, as it has in every other historic instance.

What in the world are ‘entrepreneurial denominations’, you clown? Do you really think sincere sacred business is secular? Sure, people sell books, and yes, one might argue at length and in detail about the contents, but that’s peripheral to the question of faith. Come visit my Sunday School class, Brooks, for some desperately needed insight.

And what is the point of being ‘respectful of this decentralizing genius’ in a speech? Obama is more honest in his contempt for the fundamentals of American greatness than you, Mr. Brooks. He tosses our seed corn under the bus with a personal pronoun on top. You’re making some wistful nod to what, were you actually a conservative, you’d be snarling a ????? ???? and defending.

Reinvigorating a mature nation means using government to give people the tools to compete, but then opening up a wide field so they do so raucously and creatively. It means spending more here but deregulating more there. It means facing the fact that we do have to choose between the current benefits to seniors and investments in our future, and that to pretend we don’t face that choice, as Obama did, is effectively to sacrifice the future to the past.

Our first task for recovery is to ignore false prophets like yourself. Our political Winter, while cold and bitter, can be followed by a Spring of reform. But that involves understanding that the centralization of policy is the garrote about the neck. Your ‘patriotic progressivism’ piffle is absolutely not the answer, Brooks.

via Byron York

Category: New York Times

Democrats: You Can Never Hate Them Nearly as Much as They Hate You

Posted on | January 22, 2013 | 77 Comments

Last night, I saw a post at an anti-Palin blog that had more than 200 vitriolic comments about the woman they called “the Creature from Lake Lucille.” More than four years after Sarah Palin was the Republican vice-presidential candidate, she still inspires frothing rage from the Left.

What prompted that particular outburst of hatred? Palin put up a Facebook post commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Think about that for just a minute. And then think about something Erick Erickson wrote on Inauguration Day:

Congratulations Mr. President on your second inaugural.
Saying that makes some of you really enraged. I said the same on twitter shortly after his official swearing in. Several of the replies were embarrassing and atrocious. Some accused the man elected by a majority of Americans of treason. Some accused him of willfully destroying the nation.
I believe the President’s policies are destructive and will harm our economy, our nation, and our sense of national self long term. I believe his policies have the effect of turning us into subjects of the government, not citizens in charge of it. Because of his expansion of the social safety net funded through class warfare, Mr. Obama’s policies will cause too many Americans’ fortunes to rise and fall with those of the government, unable to chart a course for themselves apart from government.
But I do not think the President means to do this maliciously. I do not think he is treasonous. I do not hate him. I am not outraged by it.

As soon as I saw that, my attention focused on one sentence: “Some accused him of willfully destroying the nation.”

Yes, of course: David Limbaugh, author of The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama’s War on the Republic, a book I heartily recommend.

Erick Erickson didn’t title his post “David Limbaugh Is Wrong,” or “Don’t Listen to That Idiot David Limbaugh.” He merely dismissed as “embarrassing and atrocious” anyone who agrees with Limbaugh’s argument that Obama’s “War on the Republic” is deliberate.

As to how one should deal with Monday decorously, I took a vow of silence: I simply wouldn’t say a damned thing about Re-Coronation Day.

Didn’t watch it on TV. Didn’t blog about it until it was over. The last time I checked, I still had the right to remain silent. “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all,” and what conservative could possibly say anything nice about America’s public humiliation?

That’s what we’re dealing with here: A stain on our national honor, the negation and antithesis of everything that makes our country great.

Americans should be outraged by it, and we should not be dismissing their expressions of outrage as “embarrassing and atrocious.”

Ordinary Americans don’t always express themselves in such eloquent and measured phrases as meet with the approval of the elite, but why is it that no one on the Left ever bothers to chastise the commenters frothing with rage at Sarah Palin, whereas Erick Erickson feels the need to scold Republicans who don’t like Barack Obama? Why is Erickson embarrassed to be associated with these Republicans, when no one on the Left ever bothers to notice the non-stop messages of hate emitted by the immoral monsters who constitute the Democrat Party’s grassroots? My answer:

The problem, really, is that Republicans just don’t hate Democrats the way Democrats hate Republicans.
Most Republicans are born and raised Republicans, and are spiritually attuned to the sentiments of bourgeois respectability that are core values to the decent, honest people the GOP represents. By contrast, Democrats owe their power to the vilest dregs of humanity — corrupt union goons, Marxist academics, criminals, drug addicts, sexual perverts and race hustlers — who have no respect for the values of decent, honest people.

We do not have to lower ourselves to their level. We merely have to tell the truth about who the Democrats are. People who voted for Obama (or any other Democrat) should be ashamed of themselves.

The GOP’s ridiculous defensive flinch reflex — “Oh, no! Somebody said rude things about Democrats!” — is symptomatic of a larger problem: Republicans let liberals dictate the terms of debate.

If liberals say the problem is that Republicans lack “civility,” then the GOP is beset by hall-monitor types telling us to watch our language. If liberals say the problem is Republicans need to appeal to Latinos, we’ll hear a lot of sermonettes from the open-borders crowd. If liberals say Republicans are losing because of gay-rights issues, we’ll be told to drop our pants and bend over to demonstrate our support for sodomy.

At what point will Republicans figure out they’re being scammed? Liberals lie constantly, routinely and habitually, but never do they lie so predictably as when they’re giving advice to Republicans.

Mitt Romney lost the presidential election. His defeat cannot be blamed on “outrage pimps” (Erickson doesn’t name names, so we don’t know if he meant that term to apply to David Limbaugh or Mark Levin or Michelle Malkin). Nor can the GOP’s problems be excused by scolding people who say rude things about Obama on Twitter.

Why did Erickson feel the need to tee off on “humorless, angry opponents of the President” who “scream ‘Benghazi’ and ‘Fast & Furious'”? Was that aimed at Katie Pavlich, author of Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up?

Katie wasn’t offering any “congratulations, Mr. President” sentiments there, so maybe she’s one of those “humorless, angry opponents,” eh?

Here’s the point: All Sarah Palin had to do is put up an MLK Day post on Facebook, and the haters swarmed all over her without anyone in the Democrat Party noticing or complaining. Democrats don’t get any “civility” lectures from their liberal spokesmen. They just win elections.

Democrats hate Republicans with the heat of ten thousand suns. When are Republicans going to give themselves permission to hate back?

 

 


Category: Barack Obama, Democrats, Republicans, Sarah Palin

LIVE AT FIVE: 01.22.13

Posted on | January 22, 2013 | 8 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Algerian PM: Gas Plant Worker, Two Canadians Helped Jihadis In Siege

Algerian firemen carry a coffin from the gas plant retaken Saturday

Final death toll lower than 81 previously reported

Hollande, Merkel Fete 50 Years Of Franco-German Ties
Joint celebration of the Elysee Treaty originally signed by De Gaulle, Adenauer

Inauguration Too Special To Pass Up
Smaller crowds, a more subdued tone, and fewer A-list celebrities



POLITICS
Biden: Revved Up And Ready For 2016?

President Obama and VP Biden

Is the nomination his for the taking?

Obamacare Impact About To Become Clearer

Thirty-Two Yeats After Leaving Office, Jimmy Carter Gets Big Cheer

Farm Workers Travel To DC To Keep Spotlight On Immigration

Montana Family Caught Bilking Phone Customers For $70 Million In Charges

Rapper Lupe Fiasco Escorted Offstage At Obama Pre-Inauguration Party After Criticizing President’s Foreign Policy

Files Show Cardinal Mahony Worked To Conceal Abuse In LA Diocese

Nation Honors Martin Luther King Jr. As First Black President Sworn In For Second Term

Pension Reform Act Hits California State Employees



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Crude Oil Futures Hover Above $95 In Asia: NYMEX $95.05, Brent $111.53
Bank Of Japan Adopts Abe’s 2% Target In Commitment To End Deflation
Groupon Nixes All Gun-Related Deals
Atari’s US Unit Files For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy
$40 Lets You Board Early On Southwest
GE Profit Lifted By Jet Engines, Energy Equipment
RIM Surges Again As CEO Talks Of Partnerships
McDonald’s Settles Michigan Suit Over Halal Food
Dish To Close 300 Blockbuster Stores
A Cheap, Rugged Tablet Is Your Kid’s Next Fixation
Former Microsoft Exec’s Book Lambastes CEO Steve Ballmer
Is Cuba Finally Allowing Its Citizens Fiber Access To The Internet?
Was That Sergei Brin Wearing Google Glasses In The NYC Subway?



SPORTS
Brunner’s Shootout Goal Wins It For Wings, 4-3

Blue Jackets goalie Sergei Bobrovski makes a save in the first period as teammate Nikita Nikitin and Detroit’s Johan Franzen wait for the rebound

Columbus rallied but couldn’t hold on against Detroit

Nyets Grab A Win At The Garden

Leafs’ Home Opener Strikes Appropriate Tone

L.A. Kings’ Matt Greene Injures Back, Out For Season

Changes Give Stewart-Haas Team Optimism For Coming Sprint Cup Season

Agreement Reached To Sell Sacramento Kings To Seattle Group; NBA Owners Must Approve

Hoyas Beat #24 Irish, 63-47; Notre Dame’s Third Loss In Four Games

Cincinnati To Host Baseball’s 2015 All-Star Game

Paul Gasol Permanently Benched By Mike D’Antoni

Curry Leads Warriors Past Clippers, 106-99

Nationals Add Bulls-eye On Back As Part Of New Look



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Prince Harry “Thrilled” Over Royal Pregnancy

Harry, Prince of Wales

Can’t wait to become an uncle

Adrienne Maloof (51) Dating Rod Stewart’s Son Sean (32)

Selena Gomez Spotted Partying Until 2:30 AM With A New Guy

Taylor Swift Mortified By Mocking!

Chris Brown Gets SWATted

Jennie Garth “Smitten” With New BF Jeremy Salken

Brantley Gilbert, Jana Kramer Engaged

Barbara Walters Hospitalized After Weekend Fall

Rapper Chief Keef Sued For Child Support By Middle Schooler



FOREIGNERS
Israelis Head For The Polls, Set To Re-Elect Netanyahu’s Coalition
Arab League Tells Israeli Arabs Vote To Stop The Far Right
Delhi Rape: Supreme Court To Consider Moving Trial To Uttar Pradesh
Dutch Minister Tapped To Steer Eurogroup, Navigate Eurocrisis
Europe Snowed In
Malian Army Retakes Diabaly
French Foreign Minister Says Assad Must Leave “As Quickly As Possible”
Prince Harry Slams UK Press On Return From Afghanistan
Planes Sent To Evacuate Russians From Syria
Cameron To Give Postponed Speech On EU Tomorrow



BLOGS & STUFF
Professor Bainbridge: How Moderate Is Barack Obama?
Legal Insurrection: Obama’s Inaugural Speech – Collectivist We
Power Line: Long Day’s Journey
Weekly Standard Blog: NYT Says Only 40% Of Obama’s Inaugural Address Is Worth Reading
NRO Corner: “No Single Man Can…”
Jawa Report: Inauguration Funnies – TPM Whines “Virginia GOP Pulls Dirty Trick On Inauguration Day”
Breitbart.com: Mark Levin’s Inauguration Day Message – Fight!
Ramesh Ponnuru: Obama’s Bogus Journey
Patterico: Obama – Social Security And Medicare Are What Make Us Strong
Lonely Conservative: NYT Gushes Over Marxist Rag
American Power: Obama Raped Thomas Jefferson For Radical Collectivist Agenda
Pat Dollard: Obama Takes Office With Only Carter, Ford Having Lower Approval Ratings
Stephen Kruiser: Krugman – Obama Isn’t FDR-y Enough For Me

Category: Live at Five

Our Long National Nightmare Is Over

Posted on | January 22, 2013 | 28 Comments

By which, of course, I mean Monday. It’s now 12:01 a.m. ET Tuesday, and so I kept my vow not to say a word about Re-Coronation Day.

Others who chronicled the event now have stains on their pants from the orgasmic gush. Chris Matthews emitted his usual effusion of idiocy, and over on the Third-Place Cable News Network With Lower Ratings Than MSNBC (The One That People Only Watch When They’re Stuck in Airports), Jim Acosta was trying to out-gush Matthews:

“You know, I feel like I should pinch myself right now, Wolf. I can’t believe I have this vantage point of history in the making . . . It’s good to be the President. It’s almost like being a rock star on every street corner of Washington on this day.”

Further mockery from The Lonely Conservative, American Power and Poor Richard’s News. This stuff does not amuse me. It depresses me.

Our nation is being destroyed, and the press corps is reduced to the role of partisan pom-pom girls for The Great Destroyer. Meanwhile, the alleged leaders of the opposition have no clue of how to rescue themselves from their current condition of helpless impotence. The search for any reason to smile amid this catastrophe — which I blame entirely on the gross ineptitude of the overpaid dimwit fratboys running the Republican Party — turns up precious few nuggets of encouragement:

The bimbo was a guest Monday on Anderson Cooper’s show on the Third-Place Cable News Network With Lower Ratings Than MSNBC (The One That People Only Watch When They’re Stuck in Airports). Her “brand” is even more irrelevant than her failed father, assuming that such complete irrelevance is even possible.

It’s going to be a long 1,460 days ahead.

Category: Barack Obama, CNN, Meghan McCain

Does Lynn Messina Grasp The Damage She’s Doing To Our Culture?

Posted on | January 21, 2013 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

Bottom line up front: “XX” != ” XY”.

Anybody who thinks that the moral fiber of the United States has been diminished since feminism and the sexual revolution disgraced our shores  can find a contemporary example of the disease here, emphasis mine:

Start to complain about your preschooler adopting gentlemanly behavior and you quickly discover how out of step you are with the rest of the world. Almost everyone I mention it to thinks it’s lovely and sweet. What’s the harm in teaching little boys to respect little girls?
The implication, of course, is that I’m overreacting, and as a parent, I’ll admit to being prone to the occasional bout of hypersensitivity. For months, I grumbled that the inappropriately breathy tone of Cinderella on Emmett’s LeapFrog Princess laptop was warping a generation of impressionable young minds.
But I don’t think it’s an overreaction to resent the fact that your son is being given an extra set of rules to follow simply because he’s a boy. His behavior, already constrained by a series of societal norms, now has additional restrictions. Worse than that, he’s actively being taught to treat girls differently, something I thought we all agreed to stop doing, like, three decades ago. That the concept of selective privilege has been introduced in preschool of all places — the inner sanctum of fair play, the high temple of taking turns — is mind-boggling to me. How can you preach the ethos of sharing at the dramatic play center and ignore it 20 feet away at the toilet?
Yet as much as this double standard offends me as a mom, it’s nothing compared with how much it infuriates me as a feminist. Forty years after the tender, sweet, young thing in “Free to Be You and Me” gets eaten by a pack of hungry tigers after asserting that ladies should go first, we are still insisting on empty courtesies that instill in women a sense of entitlement for meaningless things. Many women see gallantry as one of the benefits of their sex; I see it as one of its consolations.

As we peer into the wreckage of our culture, wondering how we went from greatness to corruption, we need to point to the Lynn Messinas as the flies in the soup. Thanks to the internet, we can underscore  just how false your ideas are Messina, and share some information about the origins of your jacked-up thinking.

This ‘notion of rules’ and sense of  ‘treating girls differently’ does not end in a ‘sense of entitlement for meaningless things’, as events in Aurora tragically underscored. Without doing a thorough survey, how many of the recent spate of atrocities were undertaken by men who’d enjoyed a stable family life? How many featured a father who, understanding traditional values as pillars of strength rather than the bars of a prison, led the family in traditional roles of worship, character development, and masculine nurturing? I’d fall well short of connecting dots on anything here. I’m not making any correlation-equals-causation argument. Rather, I’m pointing out that the fundamentally good things Messina rejects are not, themselves, apparent drivers for evil at Newtown, Aurora, VA Tech, and so on.

Furthermore, if you ever want to develop the kind of men you need when the fertilizer truly hits the air circulator, you had better read every word Messina writes and proceed to do the opposite as parents. Denouncing the sort of idiocy she seems to encourage is among the minor reasons I blog at all. We, as a culture, need to stand up and oppose people that are throwing Western Civilization under the bus.  They seem comfortable making room, not only for abortion, but for the kind of barbaric cultures that can genitally mutilate girls and then dress them in a bags when grown. If Messina was worthy of the attention, one should like to drop her somewhere in Asia for a year or so, as sort of a “homeland appreciation tour”.

As a case in point, we have the World’s Youngest Blogger.

As this blessing is on loan from the Good Lord Almighty, I can affirm that he will be raised with the utmost attention to all aspects of healthy moral, mental, and physical development. He may grow to frustrate his parents mightily, but I can guarantee it won’t be from exposure to the kind of falsehoods Messina peddles without being instructed as to their diabolical source.

via Insty

Category: Culture
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