Originally published at Frontpage Magazine
___________

“My name is Anthony Weiner and I stand for women!”

That’s not just a tailor-made caption for the indiscreet photo sent from the New York congressman’s Twitter account. Weiner proudly delivered that line twice during a rah-rah sisterhood speech to adoring fans at Planned Parenthood’s Stand Up for Women’s Health Rally in February. The only thing missing from his feminist cheerleading was a set of speculum-handled pom-poms.

But Weiner’s feminist rhetoric is far more tumid than the underwear-clad package he “can’t say with certitude” isn’t his — and just as susceptible to shrinkage. So here’s the cold water:

While the intended recipient of the lewd photo, 21-year-old Gennette Cordova, drowns in a raging media maelstrom, Anthony Weiner is using the only life preserver in sight as a hula hoop. Instead of ending the speculation about their relationship by asking law enforcement to investigate the alleged hacking of his Twitter account, Weiner spent the week tossing cagey Clintonian statements and erection puns to an increasingly suspicious press.

This is how Anthony Weiner stands for women.

Cordova and her family have been subjected to the kind of scrutiny, mockery, and even harassment normally reserved for public figures (and private citizens who vote Republican). Her candid party photos and off-the-cuff tweets are now front page news as bloggers and reporters rifle through cached social media accounts, hoping to shake out the single breadcrumb that might lead to a scoop on the young woman who denies “any inappropriate exchanges” with Weiner.

Continue reading at Frontpage Magazine.

_____________

Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Ben Stein. Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu.

Like the distinguished public servant Dominique Strauss-Kahn, I am a friend to all women, even the ones who didn’t fully appreciate my American Spectator column on the scurrilous charges filed against the former IMF chief. I’d like to extend an olive branch to those misguided members of the fairer sex by sharing some advice on the proper way to go about getting raped if you expect public intellectuals to take your charges seriously.

Ladies, my humble thoughts:

1.) Ensure that your rapist has a criminal history.

Should you find yourself being raped by a man with a long history of sexual abuse, take a moment to perform a criminal background check. This can be done with most modern smartphones as long as your hands are free.

No criminal record? In all likelihood, his sexually violent past is mere gossip and he is not a threat. You are engaged in a consensual sex act. Carry on.

2.) Find out your rapist’s profession.

Is your rapist an economist? If so, you are not being raped. As I asked in my last column, “Can anyone tell me any economists who have been convicted of violent sex crimes? Can anyone tell me of any heads of nonprofit international economic entities who have ever been charged and convicted of violent sexual crimes?”

As an economist, I can personally attest to the fact that economists do not rape. In fact, if I were to slip on a ski mask and surprise you in the dark alley by my house that I happen to know is rarely patrolled by police, rest assured, you’d be completely safe in my gloved hands.

3.) Choose a tall, muscular rapist with a weapon.

An unarmed fat man over the age of 50 cannot rape. Sure, some will try, but it beggars belief to suggest a gentleman like Dominique Strauss-Kahn could succeed at orally raping a feisty young chambermaid.

If you intend to report a rape, ensure that the perpetrator is armed with a knife or gun. He should also be fairly young and strikingly tall with lean, powerful muscles and rock hard abs. If he is short and pudgy, it is likely that you have consented to sex.

4.) Your rapist must not have travel plans.

Do not bother reporting your “rapist” unless his intention is to remain within the general vicinity of your encounter. If he has booked a flight scheduled to take off just a few hours after your tryst, his alibi is nearly unimpeachable. It is doubtful that you have been raped.

5.) Ensure that your rapist is no one noteworthy.

Accomplished men with recognizable faces–men like me–do not deserve to be treated like common criminals when a mere pleb makes allegations of sexual misconduct. Generally speaking, the allegations should not be made at all when men of great import are involved. Take a moment to consider whether you’re misinterpreting a consensual rendezvous as something more unsavory.

6.) Be an economist.

If you intend to be raped, make certain you are a professional working in a field populated exclusively by people of unassailable character and credibility. Housekeeping is not such a field. As I explained earlier this week, “I have had hotel maids that were complete lunatics, stealing airline tickets from me, stealing money from me, throwing away important papers, stealing medications from me.”

Play it safe and study to become an economist.

________

Editor’s note: GFY, Ben Stein. And yes, this is obviously satire.

Originally published at NewsReal

____________

The size of her breasts, the shape of her backside, and of course, her name. These are some of the details Le Monde, the French “journal de référence,” and its subsidiary Le Post published about the woman who says IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn groped her genitals and forced her to perform oral sex on him in a room at the Sofitel near Times Square.

France-Soir described the cut of her hotel maid uniform and how good she looks for a woman in her thirties, while France’s RMC radio reported that Strauss-Kahn’s attorneys were surprised by how “unattractive” she is.

And a bevy of friends and supporters rallied to the defense of Strauss-Kahn, a leading figure in the French Socialist Party, hoping to discredit his accuser lest she derail their plans for him to oust Sarkozy in the 2012 presidential elections.

A photo of the alleged victim is all over Twitter, and a Facebook profile in her supposed name was deleted shortly after links to it began to appear on blogs and social media sites. It’s unclear whether the Facebook profile was hers or a hoax account set up to smear her name. Today, another name and photo are circulating in the French media. It doesn’t matter if they get it right–the effect is the same. Just as they did to the accusers in the Julian Assange rape case, the “pro-woman” Left has launched a vicious campaign to terrorize and shame this woman into silence.

The despicable Bernard-Henri Lévy, author of the “Free Roman Polanski” petition, called Strauss-Kahn “a friend to women” who “bears no resemblance to this monster, this caveman, this insatiable and malevolent beast.” Henri-Levy tapped into his own inner monster by assailing the accuser on his blog and at the Daily Beast:

I do not know—but, on the other hand, it would be nice to know, and without delay—how a chambermaid could have walked in alone, contrary to the habitual practice of most of New York’s grand hotels of sending a “cleaning brigade” of two people, into the room of one of the most closely watched figures on the planet.

“Bernard-Henri is scandalized that a mere chambermaid can get a ‘great’ man like Strauss-Kahn in trouble with the law merely by credibly accusing him of sexual assault,” writes Jonah Goldberg. Decades of carefully constructed class narratives are tossed out the window in the service of the Left’s political goals. The downtrodden worker is exalted only so long as it’s convenient, only so long as she remembers her place in the power structure.

Commenters at the American “feminist” blog Jezebel smell a “honey trap.”

Why would someone throw away a decades long career and reputation for something they had no chance of getting away with.

Well, if the Sarko campaign offered the maid $100k, she might lie about it at the station and then disappear to live someplace else.

This almost NEVER happens. You almost NEVER hear tales of high level politicians sexually assaulting and raping random women like maids, waitresses .

An accusation does not a conviction make, and I’d argue it’s important to see every angle before making some snap judgment about anyone here. Especially when political powers are involved. There’s nothing wrong with saying, “This smells fishy.” Especially when, well, it does.

Meanwhile, French politicos are in full damage control mode:

Socialist Party MP Jean-Marie Le Guen:

Seduction, yes, but no way would he use constraint or violence. A certain number of facts, and certain aspects of the story we are hearing from the press, make this not credible.

Michelle Sabban, Strauss-Kahn supporter and senior councilor for the greater Paris region:

I am convinced it is an international conspiracy … It’s not like him. Everyone knows that his weakness is seduction, women. That’s how they got him.

Socialist MEP Gilles Savary:

“Everyone knows it’s true to say that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a hedonist (libertin), who is distinguished from others in that he doesn’t try to hide it.” The problem, wrote Savary, is American prudery. “In puritanical America, where everything is shaped by unforgiving Protestantism, they tolerate white-collar crime more than they do pleasures of the flesh.” Mind you, this is DSK’s flesh, not that of the chambermaid whom he allegedly assaulted. Maybe she was just too Protestant to enjoy M. Savary’s idea of pleasure.

Even Christine Boutin, head of France’s Christian Democratic party weighed in (perhaps fearing similar scandals in her own party):

I really believe that somebody set a trap for Dominique Strauss-Kahn to fall into… That he could be taken in like that seems astounding, so he must have been trapped.

And on it goes as Strauss-Kahn’s allies in the media and political world scramble to paint him as a ladies man snared by an international conspiracy, the “Great Seducer” rather than a sexual predator. They will chip away at his accuser’s credibility and dignity, doing whatever it takes to rescue their anointed Socialist savior from what the New York Times called “tawdry allegations.” She is nothing to them when her accusations mean everything to the their political future. Strauss-Kahn’s abusive sexual history and forensic evidence be damned.

Socialists: for the women, for the underdog, for the worker … until one of them gets in the way.

Cross-posted at NewsReal.

Originally published at NewsReal’s That’s What She Said

______

Four Afghan women have achieved something that would have been unimaginable a decade ago: they are training alongside male recruits to become pilots in the Afghan Air Force. Amidst headlines about poverty, illiteracy, and breathtaking levels of violence against women, their accomplishments are beyond heartening.

Second Lt. Sourya Saleh hopes to serve as a role model for other Afghan women after completing her aviation training in the United States.

“We are very happy to be going to open these doors for the other women to come and join the military, to show them you can do this and make our country proud,” she said. “We want for all Afghan girls to know they can do anything.”

Another newly minted officer, Second Lt. Mary Sharifzada, told the Air Force Times that becoming a pilot has been her dream since she was a little girl:

“I want to show the people of Afghanistan that women are strong,” Sharifzada said. “We want to show the people of the world that the women of Afghanistan are strong and they can do anything they want.”

“They said I’m as brave as a man,” said Second Lt. Masooma Hussaini.

As brave as men, and according to Lt. Col. John Howard of the Thunder Lab training program, as capable as their male counterparts. But these women and future recruits may not get the chance to prove “they can do anything they want” if the United States selects Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer to supply turboprop planes for the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan.

In the April 2011 issue of Smart Girl Nation, my friend Ashley Sewell explains how the Brazilian plane would bar skilled female pilots from flying Light Air Support (LAS) and light attack and armed reconnaissance (LAAR) missions:

The front-runners are the American-made Hawker Beechcraft AT-6 (a plane like the T-6 training aircraft that would accommodate 95% of women pilots) and the Brazilian-made Embraer EMB-314 (a plane that sticks to older standards thus eliminating the possibility of being flown by a woman).

Those older standards exclude more than 80 percent of women (and small men) from safely flying the planes that will be used to train and equip the Afghan Air Force.

There’s no question that operational performance and pilot safety should be the primary criteria in choosing between the Embraer and Hawker Beechcraft planes. But if the two aircraft perform comparably, can we afford to indulge the Commander-in-Chief‘s childish love affair with Brazil, forcing the struggling Afghan Air Force to sideline much needed talent?

That’s not the only reason the Hawker Beechcraft proposal is superior. The assembly of the Hawker Beechcraft AT-6 planes would result in an estimated 1,400 American jobs, while the Embraer proposal will create a comparatively paltry 50 assembly line positions in the U.S.

And even more compelling are the risks of contracting with a company controlled by Brazil, a country that doesn’t have especially warm and fuzzy feelings about American foreign policy. Embraer’s corporate by-laws give Brazil a controlling interest known as the “Golden Share.”

The Golden Share allows the Brazilian government to maintain direct control and veto rights over the “creation and/or alteration of military programs, whether or not involving the Federative Republic of Brazil” as well as the “interruption of the supply of maintenance and replacement parts for military aircraft.”

Next month, the Department of Defense will make its decision. Will we put the Afghan Air Force at the mercy of a foreign government that has, at times, been hostile to the War on Terror? Will President Obama exchange friendship bracelets with Brazil as he promises them even more American jobs? And will the ambitious and capable women of the Afghan Air Force be relegated to second-class status before they’re given a chance to shine?

These are the women whose dreams of flying could be crushed by the “most feminist administration ever” before they even leave the ground:

by Jenn Q. Public & Lori Ziganto

———

It came as quite a shock to the leader of one women’s organization when Joy Behar, ostensibly a comedian, called Sharron Angle a “bitch” on the “The View” last month. Sonja Eddings Brown, president of The Kitchen Cabinet, told The Daily Caller, “We thought Joy Behar was a classier act than this.”

To which we responded, “Ha ha ha ha ha!” followed by, “HA HA HA HA HA!” When our laughter-induced wheezing subsided — and we’re not gonna lie, there may have been some giggle-snorting — the idea for this post was born.

Before the obligatory lefty panty bunching begins in response to this post’s title, you should know that it’s not the first time we’ve been called mean girls and name-callers, and it won’t be the last. But we have refrained from calling Ms. Behar the b-word, and that gives us exclusive claim to the high road here.

Also, we’re bloggers, not holier-than-thou television “personalities” who get off on squawking about how we’re better than you because we vote Democrat. And we may have had a couple of beers while writing this post. Our readers are important to us and we’re willing to go the extra mile. For you.

So, with all of the fanfare a class act like Joy Behar deserves, we bring you her 9 most inane statements, the ones that should have even the Left shuddering in embarrassment. (Yeah, we’re not holding our breath either.) 

9. Behar Says White Men Were “Traumatized” By Obama’s Election

According to Joy Behar, white men had a traumatic year due to President Obama‘s election. Perhaps Joy Behar was projecting once again. Because we are pretty sure that lots of men have been traumatized by her and the nails on the chalkboard sound that is emitted every time she flaps her pie hole.

On an episode of her show on HLN back in January, Joy Behar and her fellow harpy Whoopi Goldberg were discussing Chris Matthews‘ offensive, and moronic, remark that during President Obama’s first State of the Union address, he “forgot for an hour that he was black.” Behar and Goldberg made the following inane statements:

BEHAR: Maybe he needs a new TV. (Behar and Goldberg laugh) What do you think he was driving at there? Because he’s a lefty- you know, he’s liberal.

GOLDBERG: Yeah.

BEHAR: And he likes Obama.

GOLDBERG: Yeah.

BEHAR: And yet, he says something stupid like that- you know, I forgot he was black. He would never say I forgot he was white if he was looking at Bush.

GOLDBERG: No. Well, white people (laughs)- you know, this is- this has been quite a year for the white man. (off-camera laughs from unidentified person/people)

BEHAR: (laughs) Traumatic.

GOLDBERG: Traumatic in many ways because the things that people say now, you have to think before you speak. It sounded great in his head, I’m sure, because I know Chris and-

BEHAR: Yeah.

Of course, desperately trying to spin because Chrissy is a lefty, thus they totally heart him. And he likes Obama, so that makes him even more super awesome. It’s funny how the oh-so-enlightened lefties are the ones who only see color and race, always, isn’t it? And if you merely disagree with someone of a different race, you must be traumatized. Because they are so scary and stuff!

Well, Joy, we are not traumatized by having to think before we speak. See, we aren’t idiots, so we always try to think before we speak. We don’t allow others to think for us and then merely parrot their talking points, no matter how inane, like you do.

We also don’t focus on the density of a person’s melanin count. Therefore, we don’t couch our thoughts and opinions worrying about racial implications. We say what we believe, to whomever we believe deserves it, whenever it is deserved. It’s a thing called equality. We treat everyone the same way.

Post-racial; y’all should try it sometime. Perhaps that would be too “traumatic” for you, though.

8. “Isn’t it a little racist to call it Black Friday?”

After a long day of celebrating the racist discovery of America by genocidal maniacs — because nothing says slaughtering the natives like can-shaped cranberry sauce and football — Americans like to switch gears a bit and target another racial group. Enter that quaint tradition of racial hatred known as Black Friday.

This from the woman who said of Sarah Palin’s supporters, “a lot of her base doesn’t even read.” But clearly she has a vastly superior intellect — how else could she offer such keen analysis of the racial animus embedded in the phrase “Black Friday”? And don’t forget, Joy identifies as a liberal, and we know where she gets her “liberal” streak:

It comes from umm, from being smart.

So smart that she thinks Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, is a bad thing? We’d better not let this bobblehead know we’re dreaming of a white Christmas.

7. Behar, Obama and A Moronic Room With A View

In July, President Obama decided that appearing on “The View” was preferable to attending the 100th Anniversary of the Boy Scouts. Which makes sense, I suppose. I mean, the Boy Scouts are just a bunch of kids that other people were “punished by.” Plus, it’s all American like apple pie and stuff, which we know he thinks is super icky.

We thought that perhaps Joy Behar might revisit her scintillating and insightful commentary wherein she accused white men of being “traumatized” by a black president. But, alas, she didn’t. We, as gluttons for punishment apparently, watched “The View” episode. Eyes glazing over and minds wandering off, we heard only hard-hitting questions like this:

“Do you know CPR? Because, you take my breath away”

“Would you say that you are The MOST Awesome, or THE Most Awesome?”

“So, about your ‘laser like focus’ on jobs … your eyes are *gorgeous*, by the way”

“It’s so awful that the “f**king NASCAR retards” don’t get all the nuance-y nuane of your nuance-iness, isn’t it?”

Additionally, Joy Behar tweeted the following on the day of President Obama’s taping:

Classy! Only, you know, with a “k.” And the Nazi reference with the Herr comment: so original, Joy! And by original, I mean totally tired and lame.

Another sign of the Apocalypse? That the president of the United States considers Joy Behar and her cohorts on “The View” to be an important source of information and news. Although, to be fair, they may be slightly more credible than most of the members of JournoList.

6. George W. Bush “has no business talking to Jewish people”

You know, the Left doesn’t really spend quite enough time connecting the Bush/Cheney cabal to Nazis. If only they’d thought of that a few years ago, maybe a George W. Bush impeachment would be reality instead of just the source of countless nocturnal emissions among Media Matters “fellows.”

Or not.

Joy Behar is among the worst violators of Godwin’s law. Her comparisons of Donald Rumsfeld to Hitler and the Arizona immigration law to Nazism are nothing short of obscene.

You can always tell when Joy is throwing down the Hitler card because her standard “blah, blah, blah” morphs into “blah, blah, Nazi, blah.” Of course, that means someone has to actually listen to what this door-stopper has to say, and for that, we say, “Thank you, Newsbusters.” From the May 19, 2008 edition of “The View”:

It’s very interesting and ironic that George Bush Sr’s, George Bush, this one, his grandfather, this one, the late, I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, but in this case it’s fun. [laughter] He was a United States senator, Prescott Bush, okay, he was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany, okay? This is his grandfather. He has no business talking to Jewish people when he’s got this right in his back yard, this guy.

The president of the United States should refrain from addressing 1.7 percent of the United States population because of charges that his grandfather profited from dealings with Nazis? The way Joy goes on, you’d think W. and his dad sit around at family reunions oohing and ahing over candids of Grandpappy Prescott and Uncle Adolf. Not to mention the way they gush over scrapbooked records of the family’s Nazi money laundering business.

Is there anyone on daytime television who consistently produces sound bites that make the viewing public stupider? This sapheaded ninnyhammer gets paid to give her opinion. By two networks.

5. Joy Behar Odiously Equates Arizona’s Immigration Law With Nazi Germany

Joy Behar likely doesn’t know what epistemic closure means (you know, because she’s a dum-dum) but she sure does take part in it. In one of her standard fits of hysterical and inane shrieking, she broke out the Hitler card. While I usually can’t in good conscience force one to be subjected to her, this video clip pretty much sums up her up in all her delusional and bitter old harpy glory:

On her April 26 broadcast, HLN’s Joy Behar suggested the new Arizona immigration law that would allow local law enforcement to arrest immigrants unable to produce documents showing they are allowed to be in the U.S. is comparable to “World War II Germany.”

“Do you think it’s kind of – doesn’t it feel like sort of Nazism a little bit?” Behar asked. “I don’t want to overstate it, but ‘may I see your papers,’ you know?”

It’s not surprising that Behar is hyperbolic and clueless, as always. It is however, hilarious. Or it would be, if it wasn’t so vile. Why don’t you talk to people who somehow managed to survive Nazi Germany, Joy? See if they think having to enter the United States legally is the same as being rounded up, dragged out of your home, and thrown into concentration camps under constant threat of death. Of course, you can’t ask the 6,000,000 people who were killed during the Holocaust.

Silly us. Thinking of such things would require a brain, wouldn’t it? And a soul.

4. Having Multiple Children is Immoral and Irresponsible

As Justin McCarthy points out, when even Rosie O’Donnell mocks your eco-fanaticism, you’ve gone too far to the Left. On the March 24, 2008 edition of “The View,” Joy Behar, mother of one, criticized the morally unacceptable, socially irresponsible act of choosing to give birth to multiple children. We’d put the relevant parts in bold, but the whole thing is breathtakingly cretinous:

HASSELBECK: I love a lot of kids. I think it’s great.

JOY BEHAR: Don’t you think that, that’s a little bit- how shall I put this- inconsiderate of the fact that you’re using more energy, you’re using up more gasoline.

HASSELBECK: No, you use one pot for 17 kids as opposed to 17 pots of water –

BEHAR: Oh one pot– Joint you mean.

O’DONNELL: Joy was saying is it irresponsible socially or ecologically to have that many children?

BEHAR: I think it is. I think that you’re using more of the resources of the world. You can adopt 17, that would be morally acceptable, but to give birth to 17 children?

HASSELBECK: I think it’s fantastic.

ROSIE O’DONNELL: I do too. But this is Joy who was an only child and who has an only child. So this is her world view.

HASSELBECK: So, do you think Marie is socially irresponsible?

BEHAR: No because Marie adopted.

[...]

BEHAR: It is very hard and very expensive to raise children.

O’DONNELL: But if they can afford it why shouldn’t they?

BEHAR: Because, I told you why, they’re snorting up the oxygen.

O’DONNELL: All right. We’ll be right back after this break and Joy is moving to China where you’re only allowed to have one child.

Kids, you’re gonna have to do a better job of hiding your oxygen-sniffing habits, ’cause Joy Behar is so onto you. Do you even realize how much carbon dioxide you’re spewing into the air? Um, well, Joy isn’t exactly sure, but it’s obviously too much. Why do you hate Mother Earth?

According to misanthropic environmentalist Joy Behar, the world doesn’t have enough energy and oxygen to sustain large families, but hunting and drilling for oil ought to be off limits and that awful Sarah Palin is “very mean to animals.”

Hey, you know how we can save the polar bears and bolster Joy’s “pro-choice” street cred without taking a single extra gulp of sweet, sweet oxygen? Why not classify those filthy, oxygen snorting babies as pollutants?! Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide will throw a parade in her honor.

Joy’s thoughts on the human plague illustrate the Left‘s utter disregard for human life and demonstrate the bizarre suspension of disbelief required to swallow this anti-human flavor of environmentalism. Maybe instead of going after eco-criminals (aka, moms and dads), Joy Behar should aim for a little firsthand experience with the whole “oxygen snorting” thing.

3. To Joy Behar, Abortion is Hunky Dory. It’s Profits That Are Super Bad. Plus, The Baby Could End Up a Pedophile!

Last year, a Planned Parenthood director, Abby Johnson, resigned after seeing an abortion on ultrasound. “The View” included the story in one of their “Hot Topics” segments, inexplicably calling it a “controversial” story. Although, we suppose in their collective minds someone not toeing the Planned Parenthood line is controversial. Joy Behar jumped into the mix to preach to all about morality and immorality. We know, we couldn’t stop giggling at the thought either.

Behar quickly denounced Planned Parenthood for making money off abortions. She called it “gross” and “obnoxious” before she stated, “I don’t see abortions as a profit-making industry. I think that that is the real immorality of it.”

The real immorality of abortion is the fact that the clinics profit. In Behar’s sad excuse for a mind, profiting is way, way worse than the killing of an unborn child. Of course, this cognitive dissonance, especially regarding abortion, isn’t new for Behar. When Focus on the Family ran an ad during the Super Bowl, featuring Tim Tebow and his mother, Behar and her fellow travelers were all up in Stepford Feminist arms. You see, Tebow’s mom did not abort him, even though there was medical risk involved. The ads didn’t even mention that at all; the ads merely showed the great love between a mother and her son. But that, of course, still didn’t stop the idiotic screeching by the feminist Left.

Behar, grasping at straws – and strawmen – in a desperate bid to say something nasty about the ads, could only come up with the following:

The only argument against any of it is, that, you know, he could just as easily become some kind of a rapist pedophile. I mean, you don’t know what someone’s going to be

Wow. A beautiful ad about the pride a mother has for her son, and all it conjures up for Behar is “But… but…. he could have been a pedophile.” Well, Joy, it’s true that you don’t know what someone is going to be sometimes. In your case, however, we do know. You will always be an irrelevant, bitter bint.

2. America Sucks Because We Can’t Fix Our Health Care System Like France, Denmark, & England

A few weeks before the 2008 presidential election, celebrated health care policy wonk Joy Behar channeled Michael Moore to outline her ingenious one-point plan for reforming the American health care system:

What they haven’t discussed in any of these debates is how other countries have solved this. France has solved it, Denmark has solved it, England has solved it. Why can’t we solve it? [applause] It’s ridiculous.

Omigosh, why didn’t Joy run for president? Better yet, why didn’t she just draft Hollywood’s favorite multi-millionaire neo-communist documentarian to run for the highest office in the land? With all those public policy lessons learned while filming “Sicko,” Michael Moore could’ve overhauled the health care system and still had plenty of time left over to topple capitalism.

But gee, maybe Joy does have a point. They’re awful sophisticated across that there pond. (Cue the banjo music.) Take the French, for example. They have wine. And stinky cheese. And berets!

Oh, and don’t tell anyone, but they’re looking to the filthy American swine for ideas on health care reform. Last year the Wall Street Journal reported:

As Congress fights over whether America should be more like France, the French government is trying to borrow U.S. tactics.

In recent months, France imposed American-style “co-pays” on patients to try to throttle back prescription-drug costs and forced state hospitals to crack down on expenses.

That brilliant French model of universal health care has been operating in the red since 1989. Their solution was to kick the can as far down the road as possible. And now, their fragile health care system is buckling under the weight of unsustainable entitlement programs and social welfare benefits are being slashed. Hence, the enthusiastic protests (read: violent street riots) taking place across the country.

In ever so ideal Denmark, lucky citizens pay the highest tax rates in the world and enjoy below-average life expectancy compared with the rest of Europe. Health care solved!

And do we really need to recount the horror stories coming out of Joy’s beloved United Kingdom? Like the practice of “patient-stacking“:

Seriously ill patients are being kept in ambulances outside hospitals for hours so NHS trusts do not miss Government targets.

Or the clever way the NHS deals with a shortage of anesthetists when pregnant women seek epidurals to ease the pain of labor:

Hundreds of British women are being denied epidurals to numb the pain of childbirth because there aren’t enough anesthetists to go around, and this has been going on for at least three years.

And why wouldn’t the British solution to dental care be the envy of every American?

Some English people have resorted to pulling out their own teeth because they cannot find — or cannot afford — a dentist, a major study has revealed.

Six percent of those questioned in a survey of 5,000 patients admitted they had resorted to self-treatment using pliers and glue, the UK’s Press Association reported.

Breast cancer mortality rates are 88 percent higher in the UK than they are in the United States, and British patients wait twice as long to see a specialist. So why wouldn’t Joy “The Brain” Behar want a heaping serving of what they’re having?

1. Joy Behar: For The Children ™ – Unless, Of Course, They Are Those “Demented” Homeschooled Kids

Joy Behar doesn’t just loathe people with minds of their own, she also hates their children. Excuse me, their “demented” children:

“A lot of them are demented when they’re homeschooled.”

Nice.

And wrong, as always. As Michelle Malkin notes, these “demented” kids have an excellent record of achievement. Of actual academic achievement and not made up stuff like “best recycler award” or, you know, community organizing. She goes onto say that homeschooled children are scared of other children. Nothing could be further from the truth. But, to be fair, Behar isn’t much familiar with truth.

I homeschool, Joy. My “demented” kid is two grades ahead. My “demented” kid is not afraid of other children; far from it. She plays with children of all ages, since she has not been indoctrinated to believe that she should only play with children her exact same age. Where, besides public schools, is anyone boxed into socializing with people of only their exact same age? That’s cuckoo pants. It would be similar to only working with, or caring about, people that share your lockstep mindset. Oh, wait.

Diversity of thought, freedom of individuality – those are concepts lost on Joy Behar. They are above her pay-grade, apparently.

If you want to see “demented,” Joy, take a look in a mirror. And stand back a bit, just in case it cracks. You’re welcome.

******************************

Joy Behar has said a lot of vomit-inducing things — Ralph Nader is “sexy” springs to mind — and spends plenty of time parroting the standard leftist talking points about everything from Christianity to the stolen election of 2000. But it’s her unrestrained asininity that makes us wonder why she’s on the air at all.

The answer, of course, can be summed up in two words: train wreck.

People tune in to Joy’s shows to see her make a fool of herself and to gawk at the drool and bile falling from the lips of this mouth-breathing numskull of a woman. And she rarely disappoints.

———

Last week The American Prospect revealed an unsettling workplace trend. This discovery is completely unanticipated, so prepare to be shocked.

When female coworkers are out of earshot, men sometimes talk about them. Just awful, right? And guys aren’t just discussing the work habits of their female colleagues — occasionally they mention their looks!

This is the new “sexual harassment”: not the groping, fondling, and obscene comments of yesteryear, but “what’s said about [women] when their backs are turned.” According to the Prospect‘s Ann Friedman, “behind-their-back comments are also intimidation and bullying of a sexual nature.” And this indirect harassment is even worse than dealing with run-of-the-mill lewdness from male coworkers.

[G]iven that networking and reputation are keys to success in many professions, what people say about you is arguably more important than what they say to your face. If your professional contacts are talking about your legs rather than your résumé, you’re at a disadvantage. I know how to handle direct sexist comments. It’s much harder to think about how to shut down a conversation about me that I may not even be aware of.

Watch out, guys: if you’re hanging out at the bar after work, be sure to limit the leg talk to women who aren’t coworkers. Unless, of course, the owners of said legs are around to “handle” the comments. Got it?

Friedman describes some of the other conversations that would be off limits in her Utopian vision of a world in which men no longer talk about attractive women:

Some of the guys you talk to about women are our friends — and they tell us what you’re saying. That’s how I found out that a female editor I know had garnered a totally unwarranted reputation as a flirt. How I know that a certain male editor likes to make side comments about the bodies of female interns. How I heard about an older male co-worker who wistfully expressed that he wishes he were 20 years younger so he could hit on the young women at the office.

So, let me get this straight. It’s intimidation and bullying for a man to pine for his youth when he would have had a better chance with young women at the office. It’s harassment for a guy to talk to his office buddies about the way interns look. And gossiping about the flirty personality of a coworker is completely out of bounds (when men do it).

Where exactly is the chauvinism here?

There’s nothing sexist about guys digging chicks and vice versa. In fact, I’ll let Ann Friedman in on a little secret: it’s kind of how we keep the human species going. Simply talking about who’s hot (or not) is a common and harmless pastime, even when it involves one’s colleagues. And if Friedman was honest, she’d admit that talking about how coworkers look is something both sexes engage in. Equally.

But this isn’t about honesty, it’s about grievance mongering. Club Victimhood is open for business and Friedman is on hand to distribute all access passes. Dreaming up new classes of oppression and new categories of victimhood is how the so-called feminists on the Left build support for their movement. As with all flavors of Marxism, leftist feminism can’t exist without ginned up resentment among the “oppressed.” The social revolution will never come if the Left allows people to be content with their lives and secure in their equality as human beings.

And so we have the latest complaint for the perpetually aggrieved to latch onto: indirect sexual harassment. Have fun at work on Monday, fellas!

—–

Follow Jenn on Twitter.

———

Imagine: you’re paying $30,000 a year to send your kid to college and she calls to tell you her class schedule. “Monday and Wednesday mornings I’m taking ‘The Phallus’ and Tuesday and Thursday I have ‘Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music.’”

“You’re taking the what?”

These course titles aren’t a joke.

Women’s studies has long been a field in which scholarship takes a backseat to leftist activism and radical feminist politics. Although the discipline has “evolved” to encompass gender and sexuality studies, campus programs remain ideologically sterile laboratories designed to indoctrinate students into the ins and outs of the live-action role playing game they call feminism.

Typically gender studies departments are nothing more than vocational training programs for progressive activists. The political litmus tests and radical feminist indoctrination administered by these programs are well documented in One-Party Classroom by David Horowitz and Jacob Laskin. When students sign up for classes like “Introduction to Women’s Studies” at Penn State, they may not realize they’re getting a “course in (rather than about) the ideology of radical feminism.”

But not all gender studies classes have such innocuous titles. Here are 10 hit-you-over-the-head ridiculous gender and women’s studies courses offered by American colleges and universities, starting with The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie. 

10. Occidental College – The Unbearable Whiteness of Barbie: Race and Popular Culture in the United States

Readin’, writin’, and RACIST!!! A smattering of white guilt, a dash of anti-capitalism, and fresh from the oven at President Obama’s alma mater comes this Marxist inquiry into Barbie’s unbearable whiteness. From the Spring 2010 catalog:

Have you ever said or thought “I don’t look like a Barbie!”? Join the crowd. However, the problem that Barbie presents is infinitely more complex than her supposed life-sized measurements. As the embodiment of complex discourses on race, sex and gender Barbie provides a central figure for this course in exploring broader themes, particularly those of race and social justice. Thus, we will cover a wide territory that ranges from an exploration of the ways in which scientific racism has been put to use in the making of Barbie to an interpretation of the film The Matrix as a Marxist critique of capitalism. You’ll never play with your toys the same way again.

Oxy doesn’t have a separate gender studies major, so this one falls under the Critical Theory and Social Justice Department.

9. Berkeley – Pornographies On/Scene

Linda Williams, author of Porn Studies, offers this course through the Rhetoric Department at Berkeley. She cautions prospective students, “Please realize that curiosity about this course does not mean that you are actually prepared to look closely at a wide variety of explicit sexual representations for an entire semester.” Watching porn with your teacher? Ick. (Or bow chicka wow wow, if you prefer.)

This seminar will bring together debates about the nature of pornography with debates about the nature of the visual. Both will be considered in relation to the (mostly unwritten) history of American visual pornographies and with an eye towards imagining, and even contributing to this history. What, for example, is the canon of hard core pornography? We will concentrate on two moments in the history of moving image pornography: an earlier era of “obscenity,” in which explicit sexual images were kept off-scene for the consumption of private elites in the era of the stag film, and a more contemporary, and increasingly electronic era of “on/scenity” in which pornographies of all sorts become available to wide varieties of consumers, including those to whom it was once forbidden. Although moving-image pornographies will be our primary objects of study, this seminar will also consider the different rhetorics of still and image moving images which aim to arouse, techniques of arousal, and related popular images which also aim to “move” the bodies of spectator/users. Approximately one third of the class will be devoted to general readings in the growing “field” of pornography studies, another third to the question of what constitutes the canon of the stag era (here I will invite those interested to imagine a two disk DVD with notes arguing for what constitutes this canon) and another third to the burning question of electronic, interactive pornographies on small screens.

From the department of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: the course requires active participation and an oral presentation.

8. Brown University – Che Guevara, the Man and the Myths

What gender studies curriculum would be complete without a course on murderous Communist thug Che Guevara? This class is cross-listed in the Gender and Sexuality Studies and Comparative Literature sections of the Brown University catalog.

Reads Guevara’s political and philosophical writings alongside the literary, visual and filmic representations that have made him one of the twentieth century’s most iconic figures and a symbol for vastly diverging interests. From a cultural studies perspective, compares the development of Guevara’s theories to posthumous uses of his work and image, particularly in and in relation to present-day Cuba.

I wonder if they condemn Che’s persecution of gays. Or maybe they spend some time discussing how he tear-gassed the grieving widows of the prisoners he slaughtered when they came to claim the bodies. Nah. That might intrude on their Motorcycle Diaries viewings and daily group chants of Viva Che!

7. University of Washington – Feminist Understanding of Victims

Surprisingly, this course lasts just one semester. I’m betting it’s a shallow survey, because it would take at least a year to really make a dent in the canon of feminist victimhood literature. Even if full embrace of one’s status as a victim is a prerequisite, that doesn’t leave much time for instructing students on the art of wallowing in victimhood, the science of reveling in victimhood, and of course, the socio-economic impact of rejecting victimhood. From the University of Washington Women’s Studies catalog:

Explores the meanings of the term “victim” within popular, religious, psycho-social, and feminist discourses and the implications these have for victims, people and institutions that serve victims, and scholars who are concerned with these questions. Examines the tensions between activist and academic understandings of the impact of “backlash”.

Is this a scholarly look at victimhood or yet another seminar designed to remind women of their perpetual status as victims of patriarchal oppression? After looking at a syllabus from an earlier version of the course, my money’s on the latter.

6. University of Michigan – How to be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation

Ah, the finest public education taxpayer money can buy now comes complete with lessons on how to be gay.

Before someone cries, “Homophobe!” let me make clear that I’m not interested in stoking the culture war over gay rights, and I’m not suggesting the professor, David Halperin, is evangelizing gayness to otherwise straight-as-an-arrow kids. My guess is that he’s simply a provocateur looking to rile up social conservatives. But really? Is a crash course in how to conform to existing gay stereotypes a legitimate academic pursuit?

Just because you happen to be a gay man doesn’t mean that you don’t have to learn how to become one. Gay men do some of that learning on their own, but often we learn how to be gay from others, either because we look to them for instruction or because they simply tell us what they think we need to know, whether we ask for their advice or not.

This course will examine the general topic of the role that initiation plays in the formation of gay male identity. We will approach it from three angles: (1) as a sub-cultural practice — subtle, complex, and difficult to theorize — which a small but significant body of work in queer studies has begun to explore; (2) as a theme in gay male writing; and (3) as a class project, since the course itself will constitute an experiment in the very process of initiation that it hopes to understand.

Even Perez Hilton was taken aback by this one. His site classified the course as “wacky, tacky & true.”

5. Smith College – Feminisms and the Fate of the Planet

Mother Earth is on the brink and only one thing can bring her back: Ecofeminism! (Or should that be “ecofeminisms“?

We begin this course by sifting the earth between our fingers as part of a community learning partnership with area farms in Holyoke, Hadley, and other neighboring towns. Using women’s movements and feminisms across the globe as our lens, this course develops an understanding of current trends in globalization. This lens also allows us to map the history of transnational connections between people, ideas and movements from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Through films, memoirs, fiction, ethnography, witty diatribes and graphic novels, this course explores women’s activism on the land of laborers, and in their lives. Students will develop research projects in consultation with area farms, link their local research with global agricultural movements, write papers and give one oral presentation.

“We begin this course by sifting the earth between our fingers”? Is “sifting” some sort of scientific measurement now? That this Smith College professor wasn’t embarrassed to write that tells you everything you need to know about this course.

And in case you’re wondering what feminism and environmentalism have to do with each another anyway, here it is in a nutshell: The earth is oppressed and chicks are oppressed (by the patriarchy, of course). So naturally, the subjugation of women can’t end until we free the planet from her patriarchal bonds. It’s likely Cap and Trade is integral to the process.

4. University of Michigan – Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music

As bizarre as some of these courses are, the overt prejudice in this women’s studies class at the University of Michigan is particularly offensive. The notion that one’s sexual identity somehow dictates musical preferences is an absurd stereotype, not a valid basis for a semester of academic work. Note the elitist condescension in the course description:

What kinds of LGBT people listen, dance, and socialize to country music? And what kinds of country music appeal to LGBT people? The notion of queer country fandom clashes with popular images of both “queer” and “country.” Queer identity is often associated with gay men, and urban, bourgeois, coastal lifestyles. Country music is linked to heterosexual white, rural, working-class, Southern, and Midwestern cultures and has often been invoked as a symbol of “redneck” bigotry. This seminar therefore asks how music that to many people sounds homophobic and racist serves as a medium for multicultural queer social and sexual exchange. Assignments include country listening and readings in country music studies, social science and humanities literature on U.S. rural queers, and social theory on class.

In a way, this course description makes sense. Country music artists really do throw the N word around far too often, and the anti-gay lyrics are a little much. Oh, wait, that’s rap music, not country. If you’re going to go after a musical genre for homophobia and racism, is it really country music that’s the pinnacle of bigotry?

3. Hampshire College – Women’s Fabrication Skills

Technically this is an applied design course, but it was screaming to be included. What does a course in “women’s fabrication skills” cover? Maybe it’s a survey of women’s contributions to design? Or a look at the ways fabrication skills have impacted women’s lives?

No. It’s shop class … for chicks.

“Women’s Fab”, as it is commonly called, is an introductory shop course that is designed to provide female students with a shop environment that addresses their unique needs and concerns about learning new skills.

I mean, c’mon, how are women supposed to get their learning on when men are breathing the same air? If we ladies are going to work metal, we need to do it away from the watchful eye of the patriarchy.

Also, gender segregation in art classes is hawt!

2. Occidental College – The Phallus

This course offered by Obama’s alma mater topped a 2007 list of the most bizarre and politically correct courses.

A survey of psychoanalytic theories of gender and sexuality. Topics include the signification of the phallus, the relation of the phallus to masculinity, femininity, genital organs and the fetish, the whiteness of the phallus, and the lesbian phallus. The authors we read include Freud, Riviere, Lacan, Irigaray, Kristeva, Grosz, Gallop, Silverman, de Laurentis, and Butler.

In prior years, the syllabus also included sections on “the Jewish phallus, the Latino phallus, and the relation of the phallus and fetishism.”

1. Occidental College – Gender, Race and Gay Rights in the Obama Era

Yes, it’s one more course from Oxy, where they’re so proud to have Obama as an alum, they created a course on the Obama Era that has nothing to do with Obama.

This course is an introduction to the concept that gender, race, sex and sexuality (among other aspects of one’s identity) are social constructions. We shall examine the fight for equal citizenship for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered Americans, commonly known as the “gay rights movement.” Using the period beginning with the birth of Barack Obama in August 1961 we will focus specifically on how notions of who can marry as well as the cultural, religious, legal and societal significance of marriage have changed as the country enters the era of President Obama. Our texts will be academic articles, court cases, popular media pieces and moving images. All students in this class will be using Web 2.0 tools such as blogging, twitter and web publishing to facilitate their development as both consumers and producers of intellectual content. No previous knowledge is required and technological support will be provided.

They really can’t get away with studying President Obama’s actual views on race, gender, and gay rights, considering how embarrassing his record is to the academic Left. They’d have to stay away from gay rights since Obama opposes gay marriage. Gender? Well, the Hyde Amendment still exists, so Obama hasn’t fulfilled the Left’s deepest wish. And on race? I think we can all agree we’re not living in post-racial America. Beer summit, anyone?

As far as I can tell, the use of Obama’s name in the course title is simply a marketing ploy to suck in 18-year-old Obamaphiles who want to be Part of History™. They’re probably the only ones who still believe this:

—–

Follow Jenn on Twitter.

by Jenn Q. Public & Lori Ziganto

———

1. Jessica Valenti’s Femisogynist Spirit: Rooting for and Rejoicing at Abortion for Convenience

While leftist “feminists” sneer condescendingly at the idea of post-abortion syndrome, it does exist. And if they actually cared about women, they’d admit that fact. But, see, they can’t. If they did, it would mean that they’d have to stop encouraging women to have abortions without disclosing the trauma that can occur to the woman. Many women who abort their babies suffer intense pain and immense guilt. Their entire lives.

It’s clear that they don’t care about the dead babies, but they also need to stop insisting that they are For Women ™ , when they are anything but. Jessica Valenti’s response to an ad campaign from AbortionChangesYou.com proved once again that leftist feminists, or Femisogynists, care only about an agenda and not one whit about actual women. The Abortion Changes You ads served to aid women. Femisogynists sought only to diminish that aid. Truth doesn’t fit with their meme. So, they defaced the ad, as pictured above. Jessica Valenti called the original abortionchangesyou.com ad “heinous.” But what did she say about the defaced one, promoting abortion for convenience? She called the vandal a “pro-choice hero” who “wasn’t having it” and then said:

Love. It.

Loves encouraging abortion for convenience. Loves encouraging abortion because a baby, a human life, doesn’t fit in with one’s super fun college plans. Loves denying the harm and the trauma that abortion causes to women. And rejoices at the thought of killing a baby who isn’t timely.

That, Jessica, is heinous.

In a follow-up response to my post, Valenti also said the following:

So yeah, I guess I would “rejoice” over women obtaining abortions when it’s convenient. (The inaccessibility of abortion for too many women makes actual rejoicing impossible.) Whether it’s for health, financial, and educational reasons – or simply not wanting to have a child yet – it would absolutely thrill me if women’s life decisions were respected, accepted and supported. But instead, we live in a world where a woman’s desire for something as basic as education is mocked as selfish. And we’re the ones who are “anti-woman”? I think not.

Or simply not wanting to have a child yet. Silly me. I thought that if you didn’t want to have a child, one would use birth control or, you know, not have sex. When does that choice come into play, Jessica? It seems to me that you are the “anti-choicer” because you don’t believe that a woman can possibly be smart enough to act responsibly and make choices all on her very own. By the way, I write while also home schooling my child. You see, not only can a Mother obtain an education herself, but she can educate others. That’s a concept lost on Femisogynists like Jessica Valenti.

2. Helen Benedict Terrorizes Women and Diminishes the Seriousness of Rape By Lying About Military Sexual Assault Statistics

In 1994, Christina Hoff Sommers told an interviewer about an interaction with a young woman at the University of Pennsylvania Women’s Center:

I think she thought I was one of the sisterhood. And she said, “Oh, I just suffered a mini-rape.” And I said, “What happened?” And she said, “A boy walked by me and said, `Nice legs’.” You know? And that — and this young woman considers this a form of rape!

This is the sort of fabricated and exaggerated victimhood that nourishes the feminist Left. Without frightening statistics and horrifying sob stories of oppression, their movement would cease to exist. After all, how could the Left justify further government intrusion into our lives without fantastic stories of poverty-stricken women who can’t access health care to treat the mental anguish of mini-rapes they suffer when they walk uphill both ways to escape the racist food deserts they call home?

Lefty whining about our embellishment to begin in 3 … 2 … 1 …

Some supposed feminists have based their entire careers on seeding academia and the mainstream media with ginned up scare-tistics that pave the way for new laws and policies that are harmful to women. Helen Benedict is among the worst. Her statistics on military sexual assault have been repeated hundreds, perhaps thousands of times in books, articles, and blog posts. Only problem is, she lied:

Consider these statistics published by Benedict in a recent Huffington Post piece:

Nearly a third of military women are raped, some 71 percent are sexually assaulted, and 90 percent are sexually harassed.

Benedict’s piece is entitled, “The Pentagon’s Annual Report on Sexual Assualt [sic] in the Military, or, How to Lie with Statistics,” and how to lie with statistics is exactly what she demonstrates.

The sexual assault figure is the most preposterous, and spelling assault wrong doesn’t get her off the hook. It is an outright lie that some 71 percent of military women are sexually assaulted.

The statistic comes from a study of PTSD sufferers published in Military Medicine in May 2004. The research sample was not, as Benedict would have you believe, culled from a general pool of female veterans or current servicewomen. Instead, participants were selected from “an eligible pool of 4,918 representatively sampled veterans seeking VA disability benefits for PTSD.”

Benedict shows a reckless disregard for the truth with her inflated data on military rape and sexual harassment. Over and over, she cherry-picks figures, misquotes sources, and tortures the numbers until they confess to her anti-war, anti-military agenda:

Do the reasons soldiers rape have anything to do with the nature of the wars we are waging today, particularly in Iraq?

Robert Jay Lifton, a professor of psychiatry who studies war crimes, theorizes that soldiers are particularly prone to commit atrocities in a war of brutal occupation, where the enemy is civilian resistance, the command sanctions torture, and the war is justified by distorted reasoning and obvious lies.

Thus, many American troops in Iraq have deliberately shot children, raped civilian women and teenagers, tortured prisoners of war, and abused their own comrades because they see no moral justification for the war, and are reduced to nothing but self-loathing, anger, fear and hatred.

Benedict’s dishonesty isn’t just harmless chicanery in the service of a feminist cause. Her lies are destructive to women and America. In addition to trivializing actual experiences of rape, smearing our troops, and undermining our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Benedict is dissuading women and girls from pursuing military service and terrorizing those who are currently serving. In the process, she isn’t just harming women, she’s damaging our country.

But, yeah, grrl power! Woo hoo! It’s a good thing the compassionate “feminist” Left is looking out for women.

3. Chappaquidick a “Fortunate Fall” for Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne Just A “Footnote” Who Would Have Felt Her Death “Worth It”

Leftists, despite all their sanctimonious, holier than thou grousing at the Right for its perceived “insensitivity,” have an odious disregard for any human life, besides their own, natch. Few things prove this more than the vile comments made about Mary Jo Kopechne upon the death of the “man” they so lionized: Ted Kennedy. Eleanor Clift weighed in, ideologically insane, as always. She said that she was “willing to measure the benefits that Kennedy brought to countless people through his politics, and give them proper weight on the scales of the man’s record.” Leaving a woman to drown? No big whoop, since it resulted in sweet, sweet lefty policy. Author Joyce Carol Oates called Chappaquiddick a “fortunate fall.” It was just a little “notorious behavior,” you see. No biggie, because Ted Kennedy then totally refashioned himself into a super cool Uber-Liberal. Isn’t that all that matters?

Melissa Lafsky’s article at the Huffington Post, entitled “The Footnote Speaks: What Would Mary Jo Kopechne Have Thought of Ted’s Career,” however, wins the prize for the most disgusting entry:

Not just a footnote, but a “controversial” footnote. There is no controversy, only facts. She was left to die. The man who left her to die did no jail time and instead lived the good life while doing great harm to this country for decades more.

We don’t know how much Kennedy was affected by her death, or what she’d have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history. What we don’t know, as always, could fill a Metrodome.

Yes, we do know. He was affected not at all. He had the audacity to serve in the senate for four decades. He stopped windmills from being built that would ruin his quality of life – his view from his luxury boat as he was flitting and sailing around the Nantucket sound. He buddied around with Chris Dodd, making “waitress sandwiches.” He enjoyed a “good laugh” over Chappaquiddick jokes. He spent his last days not making amends or in any way repenting, but rather he spent them conniving, trying to change the laws to suit his own purposes and ends.

Still, ignorance doesn’t preclude a right to wonder. So it doesn’t automatically make someone (aka, me) a Limbaugh-loving, aerial-wolf-hunting NRA troll for asking what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted’s death, and what she’d have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded.

Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.

Nice snide little Palin reference with the aerial-wolf-hunting mention. So much for your feigned Rah-Rah Empowered Woman stuff. And, no Melissa, we can’t know what Mary Jo Kopechne would have thought about the life and career of Ted Kennedy. Why? Because he left her to die. Alone. In a sinking car. In the dark. For hours. She didn’t drown, you know. She suffocated; she was gasping her last breaths as the tiny air pocket left in the car was used up.

While Senator Kennedy chatted with buddies. And slept. Likely peacefully.

So, no. We don’t think she’d think it was “worth it.” We don’t believe her family and loved ones would either. We do not think it was “worth it”; to the contrary. And the value, or rather the lack thereof, that YOU and many on the Left place on human life that is in any way inconvenient to you or to your narratives is disgusting.

4. Alice Walker Disowns Her Daughter For Embracing the Anti-Feminist Act of Motherhood

Author Alice Walker spends her days cavorting with Code Pink, demonizing Israel, and caricaturing the people of Africa. Important work, to be sure, but awfully time consuming. If she wanted to live out her dream of becoming an anti-Zionist activist, she had to cut corners somewhere, and disowning her daughter seemed like a good start.

Alice severed ties with her daughter Rebecca in 2004 after learning that her 30-something daughter had committed the most heinous of anti-feminist acts: procreation. On purpose!

I was at one of her homes, sitting, and told her my news and that I’d never been happier. She went very quiet. All she could say was that she was shocked. Then, she asked if I could check on her garden.

After a exchanging a series of emails, Alice wrote to Rebecca to say that their relationship had been “inconsequential for years” and that she was no longer interested in being a mother to her daughter. She later cut Rebecca out of her will.

As Rebecca has since revealed, Alice’s lip service to choice, opportunity, and freedom for women doesn’t allow room for her own daughter to choose motherhood. Unsurprising from a woman whose greatest act of motherly concern was arranging an abortion for Rebecca when she became pregnant at 14. Being a mom might be okay for unenlightened non-Westerners, but damn it, she raised her daughter to abhor motherhood just like she did:

“I very nearly missed out on becoming a mother – thanks to being brought up by a rabid feminist who thought motherhood was about the worst thing that could happen to a woman,” she revealed to British newspaper Daily Mail.

“My mom taught me that children enslave women,” she continued. “I grew up believing that children are millstones around your neck, and the idea that motherhood can make you blissfully happy is a complete fairytale.”

Rebecca shares the painful experience of discovering her mother’s disdain for being a parent:

“I was 16 when I found a now-famous poem she wrote comparing me to various calamities that struck and impeded the lives of other women writers,” Walker noted.

According to Rebecca, Alice spoke of how “Virginia Woolf was mentally ill and the Brontes died prematurely,” then calling her a “delightful distraction, but a calamity nevertheless.” It was something that she said was “a huge shock and very upsetting.”

Alice Walker built her career on striking blows against The Patriarchy ™ on behalf of oppressed women around the world. But even if her feminist credentials weren’t sullied by idealization of Islam, Israel hatred, and lies about the liberating powers of abortion, Alice’s shelf-life as a “feminist” expired when she rejected her own daughter’s choice to embrace motherhood.

Note: The above portion of this post about Alice Walker and her daughter was written based on publicly available articles, none of which provide reaction from Alice Walker because she has declined to comment on the issue.

5. Worshipping At The Shrine of Multi-Culturalism And Feigned Tolerance Are More Important Than Women Themselves

Actual misogyny perpetrated against Muslim women gets a pass from Femisogynists because George Bush. Also, racism. This line of alleged thought was on gross display this past year, several times in a few month span alone.

One of the most egregious was Amanda Marcotte, once head blogger for John “Two Americas and Two Broads” Edwards, and her defense of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ attempt to embrace genital mutilation. The AAP, like the UN, started referring to female genital mutilation as merely “cutting” because mutilation sounds icky and may be offensive and insensitive to other cultures. They then went one further and said a “little nick” is a nice compromise. No big whoop! Sacrifice girls and allow a misogynistic practice to occur, all in the name of appeasement. I don’t think the girls who are barbarically maimed feel very appeased, do you?

According to Marcotte, this can be explained away because American cultural practices are icky:

And it’s not like Western culture is so free of blatantly misogynist traditions, either. Part of me wishes that we had a two minute nicking at the doctor instead of the entire painfully misogynist wedding tradition that persists in the name of tradition.

Oh, just a little two minute nicking, says Marcotte. It’s not like it’s as awful as getting married and sharing your life with a loving partner! We can maybe see where Marcotte is coming from, personally. As self-loathing as she is, she must feel that marriage is a horrid punishment—for the man.

Marcotte again apologized for misogyny when excusing an Iranian cleric’s claim that earthquakes are caused by “immodestly dressed” women (you know, women who dare to actually show their face or an ankle). The ever inane Amanda Marcotte claimed that we are worse for insisting that an embryo is a life.

But we have plenty of woman-hating religious claims in our culture that are taken seriously. Take for instance, the claim that an embryo is a fully formed human being with rights, and so women’s bodies have to be routinely commandeered against their will in order to gestate them. That’s a religious claim, as much as anti-choicers pretend otherwise. It’s based in the idea that godsaidit—god said it’s a person, so sorry, women!

Yes, Amanda. Being against infanticide is exactly the same as raping and torturing women for speaking. There was one thing on which Marcotte remained silent, as did most Femisogynists. The fact that the UN gave Iran a seat on the Commission on the Status of Women. Yes. IRAN. The State Department had this to say:

“We’re not going to stand up and cheer,” the official said. “By the same token, that is less onerous than the Human Rights Council because women in Iran, relative to other countries in the region, actually have greater rights.”

Oh, well, as long as you don’t cheer. It’s not like it’s human rights and all. It’s just pesky women! All who remained silent on this, including the Obama Administration, in effect condoned the appointment of Iran to the Commission on the Status of Women. As a way of “tolerance” and appeasement. See, pointing out true evil doesn’t fit the “progressive” meme. Instead, subjugation and misogyny must be invented out of whole cloth regarding things like marriage, but the very real—and often deadly—subjugation of women under Islamic law must be tolerated and ignored. The hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance have reached epic levels.

6. The Burqa is Sexy and Other Celebrations of the Islamic Veil

Earlier this year NewsReal Blog debuted the Naomi Wolf Award, also known as The Howler, to recognize “the failure of feminist commentators to identify Muslim veils, particularly the burqa and the niqab, as powerful symbols of extremist ideology and instruments of subjugation.” Naomi Wolf, of course, is among the worst offenders when it comes to justifying the entombment of women in these dehumanizing fabric crypts.

After a delightful jaunt through a Moroccan bazaar in a headscarf she wore by choice, Wolf wrote, “I felt a novel sense of calm and serenity. I felt, yes, in certain ways, free.” Never mind the medical problems related to burqa-induced vitamin D deficiency. Disregard the fact that in parts of the world, the alternative to donning the veil is death. Naomi Wolf had a gay ol’ time obscuring her femininity from the nasty male gaze, so the veil should be celebrated!

Jamie Glasov took Wolf to task for her abandonment of persecuted Muslim women, and Phyllis Chesler skewered her for the ridiculous suggestion that “shrouds are sexy,” and the ultimate feminist choice. Wolf’s predictable response was to demand apologies from those stupid-head meany-pants anti-jihad bloggers, because naturally she’s the persecuted one.

With the French burqa ban making headlines this year, the feminist Left made far too many journeys into the land of cultural relativism and moral equivalence to recount. Among the most absurd was when Jill Filipovic twisted the burqa into a “freedom of choice” issue, treating it as a mere article of clothing equivalent to a modest “flowery dress.”

Summary: I think it’s silly, an affront to basic freedoms, and ultimately more damaging to the women it claims to protect. Now France is at it again, trying to ban the wearing in public of any item of clothing that covers your face. The law is clearly targeted at French Muslims and Muslim immigrants.

I understand that many people perceive the burqa, or any full-body covering, as a symbol of female submission. Heck, I perceive the stereotypical conservative Christian floor-length denim or flowery dress the same way, so I get it.

Other so-called feminists defended the burqa from conservative racists and painted the full veil as a delightful mobile playground for Muslim children.

Way to strike a blow against the patriarchy, ladies.

7. Maureen Dowd Excuses Sharia Law In Order to Mock Catholicism

In an April 10th op-ed piece for the New York Times, Maureen Dowd finally lost that last tenuous grip she had on her sanity. In the article, she attempted to equate the suffering of women living under radical Islamic law in Saudi Arabia with being a Catholic woman. In America. No, really:

How could such spirited women, smart and successful on every other level, acquiesce in their own subordination?

I was puzzling over that one when it hit me: As a Catholic woman, I was doing the same thing.

I, too, belonged to an inbred and wealthy men’s club cloistered behind walls and disdaining modernity.

I, too, remained part of an autocratic society that repressed women and ignored their progress in the secular world.

I, too, rationalized as men in dresses allowed our religious kingdom to decay and to cling to outdated misogynistic rituals, blind to the benefits of welcoming women’s brains, talents and hearts into their ancient fraternity.

Since thinking appears to be rather hard for you, Maureen, I will spell it out for you with bullet points for easy reference. Here is just a partial list of things that women cannot do in Saudi Arabia, under Sharia law:

They cannot drive cars

They cannot get too many jobs

They cannot wear their own selection of fashions (forced to war body covering abayas)

They aren’t allowed to speak in public

They have no right to vote

They are not welcome in government

They have no freedom of movement

They have their genitals mutilated as young girls

They are beaten by husbands routinely and have no legal recourse to stop it

They are beaten on the streets by “religion police” if they seem to be violating Sharia “laws”

They have little recourse to prosecute attackers for raping them

They cannot travel abroad without permission

They cannot join the clergy

Of course she is partially basing her alleged arguments on the oh-so-tiresome “reproductive rights” card. Under Sharia law, that isn’t a problem, Maureen! Just lop it off and get a clitoridectomy! And, in Saudi Arabia, if you get pregnant out of wedlock or by rape, you can simply be stoned to death. Problem solved! Perhaps Maureen should step out of her ivory tower and speak with a woman who knows about true oppression and subjugation. Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Ms. Ali, the author of Infidel, had to flee the Netherlands under threats of death by radical Islamists. The reason? She spoke. She spoke about the atrocities committed against women under fanatical Islamic faith. She spoke out against the physical mutilation of women by radical Muslims. She renounced the faith. For that, she lived in constant fear for her life.

You, Maureen, are always allowed to speak freely (sans burqa, no less), even if what you spout is utter nonsense. As is every other woman in this country, Catholic or otherwise.

The same can’t be said for women under Sharia law. Ever.

8. Bonnie Erbe: Michelle Malkin Invited the Playboy Rape Fantasy

Playboy writer Guy Cimbalo’s roster of women he wanted to hate f*** was online for less than a day before it was pulled. At the top of his serial rape fantasy list was Michelle Malkin, described as a “‘highly f***able Filipina’ and purveyor of ‘frothing idiocy’ Her hate f*** rating? ‘Worse than f***ing Eva Braun.’” He even imagined that Malkin was somehow asking for it:

Malkin’s “tight body and get-off-my-lawn stare just scream, ‘Do me!’”

Hoping that some among the feminist Left would condemn the article’s misogyny, Smart Girl Politics director Teri Christoph contacted syndicated columnist Bonnie Erbe:

Knowing that Bonnie Erbe, a blogger at USNews, was a passionate defender of liberal women (such as Nancy Pelosi), I wrote to her in the hope that she would use her pulpit to rally to the defense of her right-leaning sisters. Instead of refuting the noxious ruminations of Cimbalo, Ms. Erbe piled on with more of her own.

Erbe called the article disgusting, sexist, and in Malkin’s case, well-deserved:

I also want to note that at least one woman on the list is so venom-spewing, she unfortunately invites venom to be shot back at her: Michelle Malkin. Her posts and her “routine” are so venomous and predictable, in fact, I stopped paying attention to her years ago.

Michelle Malkin invites sexual degradation because of her viper-like tongue? This is feminism?

No. In fact, Bonnie Erbe is exactly the sort of woman she once contemptuously described like this:

Anti-women women have existed since time immemorial. Another way of putting it is, women have been smart enough for decades to make their living by telling other women to stay home …

Hateful harpies like Bonnie Erbe can spend all day trying to get Michelle Malkin to stay home. Not. Gonna. Happen.

9. Gloria Steinem Decides Pro-Life Women Don’t Count and Can’t Be Feminists

As if we’d want to be “feminists” anyway. Regardless, this shows the utter disregard for women that Steinem Stepford Feminists actually have. They don’t actually care about women; they care only about their pro-abortion agenda. That has always been the case, but the emergence of conservative women to the forefront recently has made them particularly unbearable, as they strive to, in every repugnant way possible, diminish said women. This is just the latest from one of them, Miss Gloria Steinem, who unfortunately resurfaced from whatever Birkenstock-clad, soy latte drinking ivory tower she was hiding in to have an interview with the equally asinine Katie Couric:

Watch CBS News Videos Online

You can’t be a feminist if you oppose abortion. Can’t be one. That’s crimethink! Sorry, Steinem Stepford Feminists, but we don’t care if you don’t consider us a part of your cultish club. You see, we have minds of our own. And, unlike you, we respect women and don’t think that they are too stupid to handle life on their own without Big Daddy Government hand holding. Nor do we think that women are perpetual victims who must be saved from things like “inconvenient” motherhood. That is what the entire modern day Faux Feminist ‘movement’ is about: those punishing babies.

Just ask Amanda Marcotte, who said:

If there’s ever a conflict between the baby-making functions and a woman’s hopes, dreams, responsibilities, or well-being, the former will always win with anti-choicers.

There’s the difference right there. We believe there is no conflict. A baby does not crush a woman’s hopes, dreams or well-being. Motherhood enhances your life in ways that can’t even fully be described. A woman can have it all, and should. As women who respect and support other women, because Pro-Life is Pro-Woman, this is what we “can’t be real feminists” women do. We unhinged nutty nuts help women, instead of urging them to abort. We help them truly have it all, education, career and motherhood via personal responsibility. We trust and have faith that they can do so, unlike Femisogynists who don’t believe women can actually do much of anything at all without constant grievance mongering.

This is a blessing in disguise, however. Leftist feminists continue to walk in Stepford Feminist lock-step, constantly extolling their delusional wonders of abortion, while the rest of the population now looks on in horror. And not just due to their hairstyles and their creepily smug faces, although that is part of it. We see through the lies.

You are already irrelevant, Feminists. But do you know who will never be irrelevant?

Moms.

10. The Hypocritical Dehumanization of Conservative Women

The Left salivates over opportunities to dehumanize conservative women. It’s easy (and completely gross) to imagine Keith Olbermann sloshing around in his beloved bathtub each night, eyes glued to Michelle Malkin’s image as he relives the time he called her “a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.”

But while “feminists” often excuse Bathtub Boy’s misogyny and find numerous justifications to continue watching his nightly hate fest, they don’t publicly embrace him as one of the sisterhood. But they might as well if they’re going to embrace his hateful misogyny.

In her important column of the stages of “conservative female abuse,” Michelle Malkin lists dehumanization as the fourth and final stage:

Conservative women aren’t real women according to the liberal feminist establishment’s definition. Remember when Gloria Steinem called Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison a “female impersonator?” Or when curdled NOW leader Patricia Ireland instructed Democrats to vote only for “authentic” female political candidates? Or when Al Gore’s fashion consultant Naomi Wolf described the foreign-policy analysis of Jeane Kirkpatrick as being “uninflected by the experiences of the female body?”

Sarah Palin has been the target of many of these attacks. Wendy Doniger wrote in the Washington Post that Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.” And Cintra Wilson began a Salon piece by saying that “Sarah Palin may be a lady, but she ain’t no woman.”

As explained when Keith Olbermann used his “mashed up bag of meat with lipstick” attack on Michelle Malkin:

Attacks like these are designed to dehumanize the target by casting her out of her very gender, rendering her less than woman, indistinguishable from a “bag of meat” were it not for the facade of womanhood she paints on with her lipstick each morning. Makeup is deemed the only thing that sets her apart from an inanimate sack of undifferentiated flesh.

It’s one thing when the Left attempts to exclude conservative women from feminism — that’s a ridiculous political tactic, hateful but not misogynist per se — but it’s another when leftists try to exclude us from our gender. No matter how hard Femisogynists wish otherwise, conservative Christians, gun totin’ hockey moms, and smart ass conservative blogger chicks still qualify as women.

—

By Lori Ziganto and Jenn Q. Public

(Originally posted at David Horowitz’s NewsReal Blog)

Originally published on September 17, 2010 at David Horowitz’s NewsReal
_____________

The inane self-congratulatory feel-goodery of pop feminism is captured perfectly in an old Onion headline: “Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does.” To the feminist Left, the obvious corollary is that everything that doesn’t empower a woman is oppressive, chauvinistic, and of course, sexist. And that’s exactly the ideological vampire being embraced by Christine O’Donnell supporters this week.

Jeri Thompson leads the pack of those seduced by the politics of manufactured victimhood with her excoriation of Karl Rove, Sen. John Cornyn, and Delaware’s “blue-blooded patriarchies.” It’s not the timing of Rove’s criticisms she finds troubling; it isn’t that Cornyn and the NRSC arrived late to GOP Unity Hour lip syncing the words to “Kumbaya.” It’s that they offered their strategic assessment of a female candidate’s political baggage and electability:

Funny, I don’t recall hearing similar talk from the likes of Mssrs. Rove and Cornyn after Scott Brown won in Massachusetts, Joe Miller won in Alaska, or Rand Paul won in Kentucky. In fact, despite similar sliming by the state party apparatus before Paul’s victory Rove was downright supportive of him, saying on Fox News that Rand Paul could win the general election, just as he could win the primary. And this was after the state party did its darnedest to tear Paul apart and to make him look like an incompetent kook, in many ways similar to what the Republican political class has been doing to O’Donnell.

The difference here is that once the primary was over, the political elites in Washington stood by their men. Why won’t they do it for the woman?

Where is the evidence that gender played a role in Beltway criticism of Christine O’Donnell? I like and respect Jeri Thompson, but twisting concerns about O’Donnell’s electability into some sort of political wilding by neanderthal good ol’ boys is out there. We can disagree about whether a candidate is “flawed,” “irresponsible,” or “kooky,” but those terms simply aren’t dog whistles designed to bring out the woman-haters.

This smacks of an ill-conceived attempt to duplicate the ferocious mama grizzly support Sarah Palin garnered when her surrogates pointed out sexist attacks. Cry sexism, rinse, repeat, right? Er, no. Most Palin boosters didn’t unfairly tar her critics with identity politics-based smears. They defended her from specific, verifiable, and brutal cases of weaponized misogyny.

Thompson’s column is short on examples of sexism, long on baseless attacks, and devoid of any explanation for why sexist Karl Rove poured millions into Sharron Angle’s campaign. Mary Katharine Ham calls this approach “pulling a Meggie Mac“:

Criticism of O’Donnell from conservatives was not akin to the treatment Palin got and deploying the same type of attack on longtime conservative allies as one would on the New York Times or Nancy Pelosi is not productive. It’s the Meghan McCain strategy for winning friends and influencing people. We hate it when she paints conservatives and Republicans with a broad brush, reinforces our adversaries’ stereotypes of us, marshals little proof in defense of either, and then asks us to merrily join hands with her as she fights for our cause. Why are we pulling a Meggie Mac on each other?

Sadly, the unseemly Meggie Mac strategy of yelling “sexist hater!!!” at anyone who disagrees makes for a convenient political bludgeon, one Thompson uses throughout her column:

While they may not be intending to be sexist, the message, the attitude and whining sure make many in the GOP look eerily like the elites we are trying so hard to usurp. The sexism issues aside, it’s time for the Washington GOP establishment to man up and stop sulking over losing — no, getting walloped — by a woman they continue to insist is unqualified despite the fact that she has a pretty big win under her belt under pretty difficult circumstances.

Leaving aside the absurdity of going after so-called sexism with a gender-based barb (“man up”), what Thompson is doing is setting it up so that “the Beltway Boys” are no longer free to weigh in on women’s qualifications. By taking her arguments directly from the leftist victimhood arsenal, she’s unintentionally depriving Christine O’Donnell and other women of the chance to compete as equals. At the same time, these unfounded accusations diminish the seriousness of actual sexism, the kind that often slithered out of the scuzziest recesses of the feminist blogosphere during the 2008 presidential campaign. Matt Lewis calls Thompson’s approach “patently unconservative“:

Conservatives are rugged individuals who pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Crying sexism certainly isn’t conservative, especially when the criticism is fair. Sadly, it appears some “conservative” ladies have learned from the left that if you cry discrimination, you can change the subject, and undermine even legitimate questions and concerns.

It’s fine for Jeri Thompson to use her platform to ensure female candidates receive equal treatment, but agitating for special treatment is just the sort of identity politics pitfall that ought to send conservatives screaming in the opposite direction. When we start to see a pair of X chromosomes as the functional equivalent of a Get Out of Jail Free card in politics, all we’re doing is mimicking the worst the Left has to offer.

Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin once said that “feminism is hated because women are hated.” No, what people hate about feminism is the steady stream of fabricated outrage, holier-than-thou finger wagging, and the stomach-turning hypocrisy. Conservative women have every right to don the feminist mantle, but let’s make sure it’s free from the stench of faux victimhood, grievance mongering, and ginned up oppression.

Leave it to the Left to cry wolf whistle.

—–

Follow me on Twitter!

Little girls in Cameroon are being betrayed by their own mothers. Using piping hot stones, women “iron” their pubescent daughters’ breasts to destroy any visible sign of budding womanhood. Some of the victims of this torture are as young as nine.

The scars are horrific.

Women say it is love that drives them to brutalize their daughters this way, that they just want to protect young girls from being raped or becoming pregnant at an early age. Instead, they end up with daughters who are both mutilated and pregnant. Not only are the girls disfigured, but many suffer infection, pain, psychological distress, and damage to the breast tissue that can cause lactation difficulties and perhaps even breast cancer.

As with female genital mutilation, girls are having their bodies violated in unthinkable ways in order to control their sexuality. Why bother to address a high teen pregnancy rate with education about sex and birth control when you can scald away the flesh from your daughter’s chest? And of course, it’s easier to blame little girls for being too enticing than it is to repair a culture in which rape and assault are prevalent.

Please watch the documentary embedded below for more on this cruelty. (Note: The video contains some nudity.)

Via The Frisky.

The next time you hear a so-called feminist demanding the passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act or exploding with outrage at the inhumanity of being forced to pay for abortion, remind her that the systematic abuse of women and girls is real. She’s just never experienced it.