December 23, 2005 by s.z.

Those Wacky Gals at the Loosy Goosey Policy Institute Today Townhall presents a column by Monique E. Stuart, a program officer with the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute.  Her piece is called "Sex and the City influences a new generation of college journalists," and it's about how the TV program makes college girls write sex columns for their college papers. Unlike most of my female college classmates, I was never a fan of the show Sex and the City. My roommates would rent the videos and buy cheap champagne and watch them. I watched the show with them one night. After barely stomaching two episodes, I declared the show would be better titled “Sluts and the City” and then went to bed. I wish other students had followed my lead. I too wish that Monique's fellow students had gone to bed with her.  Instead, they chose to usher in a new wave of feminism: Slut feminism, where how openly promiscuous a woman can be without judgment or penalty is the new test of gender equality. Wow, this slut feminism sounds like a serious problem!  It's probably at least as dangerous as that deadly War on Christmas that is currently being waged against us by some elementary school somewhere.  What can we do about it, Monique? There’s not much parents can do, short of slapping a chastity belt onto their daughters and sewing their mouths shut. Well, I guess that would work.  (My idea was for parents to teach their children about morals and sex and such while the kids are growing up, and then to let the kids be in charge of their own sex lives once they grew up and went to college -- but that seems silly in comparison with Monique's plan.) Most student newspapers are independently run. And any attempt to have these columns removed would certainly be met with accusations of censorship by students who have been so indoctrinated that they don’t understand obscenity is not protected by the Constitution. So, the plan to slap chastity belts on daughters and sew their mouths shut wouldn't stop the women from writing sex columns.  I guess that's a drawback we need to consider. Students, on the other hand, do have some options at their disposal. With the help of organizations like the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, they can bring conservative women leaders, like Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, or Phyllis Schlafly, to their schools to challenge this type of thinking. Yes, Ann Coulter will challenge that "Sex and the City" sluttiness!  She'll come on stage in her black vinyl mini-dress and tell our young women, "Let's say I go out every night, I meet a guy and have sex with him. Good for me. I'm not married."  That will serve to turn them away from the bad example set by Carrie Bradshaw.  (Phyllis Schlafly and Michelle Malkin would just scare them into lives of celibacy by glaring at them.) Anyway, between Monique and our friend Lisa De Pasquale (whom you will remember is "Program Director at the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute"), I'm beginning to think that the DBL Institute is the place where they try to help unfortunate women with unhealthy fixations on Ann Coulter -- but with poor results, alas. 11:32:23 PM

The Return of Ultimate Wingnut Challenge: This Time It's Personal! I would indeed be remiss to let the year end without crowinng our Ultimate Wingnut for 2005.  I realize that this doesn't leave us much time in which to kill off nearly a score of wingnuts (and that we will have only a limited amount of voters with which to do it), but I figure that if we all work together, cut down on the time spent with so-called family and friends, and call a cease fire in the War Against Christmas, then we can accomplish this worthy goal. So let's get started. My records (which may be outdated, incomplete, and subject to personal biases) indicate that this is our current roster of contestants: 1.  The Korner Kids John Derbyshire Jonah Goldberg  2.  Town Hall Columnists VBen Shapiro Dr. Mike Adams Doug Giles  3.  The Low-Rent Pundits Pastor J. Grant Swank Debbie Schlussel Kaye Grogan 4.  Media Wingnuts Ann Coulter Rush Limbaugh Michelle Malkin  5.  Lifestyle Wingnuts Peggy Noonan Dennis Prager 6.  Blog Stars John Hindrocket, Powerline 7.  Respected Conservative Thinkers Charles Krauthammer Midge Decter To get things started today, let's have the Korner Kids battling the Blog Star. It should prove to be an exciting match! (Okay, I'm bored already, so to make things interesting, I won't try to be fair in choosing material, and will just find a recent quote from each contestant which I feel is representative of his work. 1.  Here are some Corner posts from Jonah: PARTISAN MIGRATION INTO MEDIA [Jonah Goldberg] This has always been a peeve of mine. I've always wanted to do a comprehensive list of former Democratic activists who became journalists versus Republican ones. There are a few examples of Republicans, but most of them have become explicitly conservative journalists. Meanwhile the number of former Democrats who've become "objective" journalists (or at least non-partisan "analysts") is enormous. Off the top of my head: James Fallows, Hendrick Hertzberg, Jeff Greenfield, Bill Moyers, Hodding Carter, Tim Russert, George Stephanopolis, Chris Matthews et al. Could it be that former Democratic activists are just better at being objective than the former Republican ones?  Or is it yet another example of how everybody is always picking on conservatives? To have worked at the New Republic or the Washington Monthly is a feather in your cap when it comes to looking for jobs in the mainstream media. It is, at best, a minor handicap if you've worked at National Review or the Weekly Standard. Charles Lane is the Supreme Court reporter for the Washington Post (and a fine one from what I can tell). But can anyone imagine the Post hiring Rich Lowry or Ramesh Ponnuru for the job? In fact, can anyone imagine any respectible publication hiring Rich Lowry for any position (including those of paper boy and wash room attendent)? And just try to get a job at the NY Times after serving as a columnist for Renew America or WorldNetDaily!  Clear proof that the media is biased! I could go on about this for hours.Posted at 04:28 PM I don't doubt it.  And why isn't Jonah being offered those plum jobs in the mainstream media?.  That's the topic of discussion for the next several hours. Oh, and Jonah obviously (and wisely) is considering Fox News to be part of the partisan media, so don't bother citing examples of all the (former?) Republican hacks who now work for Fox. GOLLY [Jonah Goldberg] I just wish life could be like an Old Navy commercial. Posted at 08:26 AM ANOTHER COMMERCIAL THAT BUGS ME [Jonah Goldberg] The New York Times's ads are awful. They talk to one person after another who makes subscribing to the Times sound like the answer to all of their character flaws. "It makes me feel like I'm informed." "When I read the Times, I feel like I'm on the inside." "Ever since I subscribed, I feel like people who don't read it are ignorant vermin I can be rude to without consequence." "If I only read the New York Times in high school, I never would have been locked in that garbage dumpster on prom night." Okay, so I'm quoting from memory. But the ads are weird. They make it seem like you should get the paper for self-esteem issues as much as anything else.  Posted at 10:22 AM If only life were like an Old Navy commercial where everyone was perky and attractive, and they all wanted to have fun in the snow with Jonah.  But instead, life is like a NY Times commercial, where people claim that reading the Times makes them feel informed and in-the-know, thus somehow implying that reading NRO makes people feel stupid and shunned by decent society.  And if only the Times would give Jonah a job ... 2.  Derb's Corner comments from the past couple of days have been, by and large, fairly reasonable (he's been defending the judge who ruled against Intelligence Design in Dover).  So, for his talent number, let's use a section from his NRO column from a couple of weeks ago (you know the one I'm talking about). Jennifer’s bristols.    Did I buy, or browse, a copy of the November 17 GQ, in order to get a look at Jennifer Aniston’s bristols?**  No, I didn’t.  While I have no doubt that Ms. Aniston is a paragon of charm, wit, and intelligence, she is also 36 years old.  Even with the strenuous body-hardening exercise routines now compulsory for movie stars, at age 36 the forces of nature have won out over the view-worthiness of the unsupported female bust.  It is, in fact, a sad truth about human life that beyond our salad days, very few of us are interesting to look at in the buff.  Added to that sadness is the very unfair truth that a woman’s salad days are shorter than a man’s — really, in this precise context, only from about 15 to 20.  And if Derb bypassed that issue of GQ in favor of a copy of Jail Bait Teases, what's it to you?  Hey, if his wife didn't leave him after learning that he finds her naked body uninteresting now that she's left puberty, I guess it's none of our business. ** Derb explains that "bristols" are Cockney rhyming slang for titties.  This demonstrates why the Corner keeps Derb around: for his intellectualism. 3. John Hindrocket's latest post is lengthy discussion of why it's perfectly legal for President Bush to order NSA to eavesdrop on Americans (as you will recall, his shorter discussion boiled down to "Because he's the President, and therefore has Super Powers"). For your reading pleasure, I've summarized his case for you. a.  The President already has the authority to kill terrorists in caves, so why shouldn't have the power to eavesdrop on Americans?  If our soldiers or intelligence agencies discover a terrorist in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere, the President or his designees can order an air strike or other attack to kill him. It would be very odd if the President has the authority to kill a terrorist, but not to intercept his telephone calls or search his cave. [...] A Special Forces soldier can pick a cave arbitrarily and search it. He isn't trying to prosecute terrorists, he is trying to kill them. He doesn't need probable cause. So, as we have seen, if you're just trying to kill people, you can be arbitrary and random -- which is why it's okay for the President to do whatever the hell he wants to anybody who might be acquainted with somebody associated with terror.  b. Case law prior to FISA demonstrates that the president wasn't bound by FISA back then.  So, if we discount FISA, there is no law for President Bush to break. c.  Even though the intercepted communications we're talking about may have involved U.S. residents and citizens, NSA could have scooped up the electrons (or whatever it that phone conversations and emails are composed of) when these electrons were outside the U.S., and therefore not bound by U.S. law or warrants.  The U.S. courts have no jurisdiction over electrons once they leave our borders, as far as you know. d.  Once we've determined that the part of the Bill of Rights where it talks about warrants isn't applicable to this situation, then the wiretapping just has to be "reasonable."   And if a shift supervisor at NSA thinks that it's reasonable to tap all communications where somebody in the U.S. is talking to somebody in one of those foreign-y countries, then everything is Constitutional.  Capiche? This brings us back where we started, i.e., the Constitution. The only constitutional limitation on the President’s power to intercept communications by Americans for national security purposes is that such intercepts be “reasonable.” Is it reasonable for the administration to do all it can to identify the people who are communicating with known terrorists overseas, via the terrorists’ cell phones and computers, and to learn what terrorist plots are being hatched by those persons? Is it reasonable to do so even when—rather, especiallywhen--some portion of those communications come from people inside the United States? I don’t find it difficult to answer those questions; nor, if called upon to do so, would the Supreme Court. And in defense of Mr. Hindrocket's argument, may I cite a section from U.S. v. Fat Tony, 407 U.S. 297 (1992): Bart:  Are you guys crooks? Fat Tony:  Bart, uhm, is it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving family? Bart:  No ... Fat Tony:  Well suppose you got a large starving family. Is it wrong to steal a truckload of bread to feed them? Bart:  Nuh-uh Fat Tony:  And what if your family don't like bread. They like ... cigarettes. Bart: I guess that's okay. Fat Tony: Now, what if instead of giving them away, you sold them at a price that was practically giving them away. Would that be a crime, Bart? Bart: Hell no! Therefore, it's clear that President Bush legally is not a crook.  I rest Mr. Hindrocket's case. Okay, you've seen our three contestants in action.  Now, two of them must be eliminated!.  Yes, there can be only one.  Will it everybody's favorite fanboy, Jonah "Insert Witty Nickname Here" Goldberg?  Or will it be John "Sodomy and Statutory Rape" Derbyshire?  Or will John "President Bush is the Dreamiest, and Nothing He Does Could EVER Be Wrong!" Hindrocket win the day?  The voice of the people will decide. So, vote for the one whom you want to see as the sole survivor of the Korner/Blogstar faction of Wingnuttia. Do it for Peace On Earth, and Goodwill to Men. 12:08:10 AM