June 24, 2005 by s.z.

That 9th Grade Literature Class Pays Off My American Street post is up.  It's called Lord of the Wingnuts.  It's about how a Human Events Online column ties together Lord of the Flies, post-war decadence in the Netherlands, Natalee Holloway, and John Kerry. (The secret ingredient is liberalism.) I hope you like it.  8:05:19 AM

America's Worst Mother, and the World's Worst Ann Coulter Impersonator What with TBogg being on vacation and all, I guess we forgot to check in on Meghan Cox Gurdon.  Well, here's what's new with her: she's doing Paris.  Um, the city.  With eldest daughter Maussade.  Apparently, Meghan took the kid on a little holiday to France so that she could show her that her Mom used to be cool (and also to punish the ungrateful wretch for not wanting to be home-schooled).  Plus, it was a chance to dump the other children on their usually absent father, and see how HE likes it. So, here's Meghan.  (Note the international dateline.) Paris, France — Now and again one is seized by the desire to recapitulate the madcap, carefree days of youth; and while in the mildest circumstances this urge produces nothing more undignified than a man with a bad hangover or a mature woman in a skirt too short and tight for her socioeconomic bracket, Okay, let's stop for a minute and analyze that last bit.  Is Meghan saying that only working class women wear short, tight skirts (because such women are basically skanks)?  Or is she saying that only the very rich wear such attire (because, like Paris Hilton, they are basically skanks)?  In any case, thank heavens Meghan doesn't belong to the socioeconomic bracket that wears short, tight skirts, and instead is part of the classy, upper-middle class group whose only unseemly public display is of the private thoughts and actions of its children. Back to Meghan. ... there are, alas, more extreme cases, and I am chagrined to report that mine is one of them. At least it was, last week, when Molly and I detrained at the Gare du Nord full, in my case, of the unaccustomed zest of student-style, infant-free travel, and, in her case, of the alarm of finding herself in a seedy Parisian neighborhood with a lot of leering drunks and a mother who had obviously gone mad. To make a long story short, Meghan decides that they'll walk from the train station to their hotel.  She and Maussade get tired, but Meghan refuses to relent and take the metro or a bus or something, because "I had already decided there was to be no cheese-eating surrender from me."  And in return for Meghan's recycling of Jonah Goldberg's recycling of a slur from the Simpsons, the French treat Meghan with courtesy and hospitality.   Meghan attributes this to their short work week, and not any basic humanity or anything. So, it's a story with a moral.  Until ... "Ooh, la-la," we heard, or something along those lines, as a beery fellow emerged from of the throng and said something admiring, and no doubt avuncular, about the teddy bear clutched in Molly's arms. Then Meghan sells Maussade to the beery stranger, and uses the proceeds to take a taxi to the hotel. (Hat tips to Vestal Vespa and Chris V for Lil' Debbie.)  And what's shakin' with Debbie Schlussel? Well, that column about how all the the players of the WNBA are lesbians, ugly, or 'hos finally attracted some attention.  Here's Debbie to tell you all about it. When WNBA Players Attack: WNBA'er Article Vs. Me in Arizona Republic The she-males in the WNBA sideshow just can't take it. First, I received a "creative" F-U e-mail from Phoenix Mercury Assistant Head Coach (Lute Olson's Granddaughter) Julie Brase.Now, it is Mercury player Kayte Christensen, who is so bothered by my anti-WNBA column, she's written an anti-Debbie-Schlussel-anti-WNBA column in the Arizona Republic. But apparently Christensen needs to go back to school to learn how to read. She claims that I take "credit away from a female trying to succeed in a man's world." I do? Where? In my anti-WNBA column, I give credit for Danica Patrick for doing exactly that. How many WNBA players play against men? Well, that may be a trick question, because there actually may be a lot of male WNBA players--based on appearance, anyway. Yes, Debbie's point was that if women want to make it in a man's world, they have to be cute, have long, feminine hair, and be petite and dainty, like Danica.  So, Debbie wasn't taking credit away from female basketball players, she was saying that they never had any credit to begin with, because they were trying to suceed on the basis of ability and effort, and that's not what people want in women. Debbie then addresses Christensen's remarks that Debbie thinks that female athletes should be judged only by their looks, while male athletes are judged by their performance. As I, again, wrote in my column, sports is showbiz. Looks count. In men's sports, men want to be them, and women want to date (euphemism) them. In women's sports, unless you look like Anna Kournikova or Danica Patrick, there won't be that dynamic--unless you count the lesbian audience, and you can't build a sports league on that minute customer base. Sorry, Kayte. Um, that may have showed us more about what's going on in Debbie's head than we wanted to know.  So, let's move on to Debbie's latest triumph, a piece in the Wall Street Journal.  It's about how Debbie was invited to be on an ep of Morgan Spurlock's reality TV series "30 Days."  Debbie blows the whistle on the enterprise, revealing that the show was trying for a certain outcome, so it's NOT ACTUALLY A DOCUMENTARY!!!  (Now I'm beginning to wonder if "Survivor" is really a documentary about what happens when people are left to survive on their own in the jungle, and I am starting to suspect that "The Real Gilligan's Island" may not actually be the true story of the historical Gilligan.) But here's Debbie: A show summary sent to me before taping said: "This process aims to deconstruct common misconceptions and stereotypes. . . . Our character will learn firsthand about Islam and the daily issues that . . . Muslims in America face today. The viewers will witness our character emerge from the immersion situation with a deeper understanding and appreciation for the Muslim-American experience. . . . The potential is great for this program to enlighten a national television audience about the Muslim American experience and increase their compassion, understanding and support." [...] I asked the show's executive producers--all of whom worked on "The Awful Truth With Michael Moore," a cable TV show--how this could be a documentary when they had decided the outcome in advance. And what kind of a documentary makers would believe that Debbie would learn valuable lessons about how Mulims are people too in just thirty days?  Obviously, this whole thing was a farce from the get-go. Anyway, Debbie says that the central character, David Stacy was a moron (" I told Mr. Spurlock's executive producer that I felt David Stacy was, well, a moron"). Stacy was supposed to learn about Islam during the thirty days, but when Debbie met him a couple of weeks into the project, he didn't even know what Wahhabism was.  No wonder Debbie refused to give the show approval to use her footage, and won't be appearing on Wednesday's show.  (Well, that's the reason SHE gives.) She concludes: The biggest morons, though, will be not Mr. Stacy but the critics and viewers who fall for this supersized phony "documentary." Because gaining a greater appreciation for the Muslim-American experience without learning that they are all terrorists can't be reality, so don't let this program fool you! Oh, in her blog, Debbie reveals the scenes that the WSJ didn't want you to see.  Such as: He [Stacy] told me and a Detroit radio show that Muslims are no more representative of Qaeda and Hamas than Timothy McVeigh is representative of Christianity. Actually, McVeigh was an atheist. Actually, McVeigh was a lapsed Catholic.  He came from a Catholic family, and was raised a Catholic.  He later said that he was an agnostic (which isn't the same thing as an atheist, Debbie).  He was even given the Catholic last rites before his execution.  But no, he wasn't a faithful Catholic -- and apparently at least some of the 9/11 terrorists weren't faithful Moslems.  And neither McVeigh nor members of Hamas are representative of either their religions or their ethnic groups, which is what the moron was trying to tell you, Debbie. The WSJ presumably edited out Debbie's paragraph before publication because, even though they almost hit rock bottom by publishing a column by Debbie Schlussel, they still have somestandards.  And here's another bit that the WSJ didn't include: Stacy's Muslim family was selected with the help of Haaris Ahmad, an activist in CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations), which two former FBI counterterrorism directors have described as "a Hamas front-group." Debbie, Debbie, Debbie.  Your link is to one of your previous columns, in which you make the same claim, but give no attribution.  So I did some Googling, and I think I found where you got that quote: from WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah.  But what Farah said was: Founded in 1994, CAIR is a spin-off of the Islamic Association of Palestine, identified as a "front group" for the terrorist group Hamas, according to Steve Pomerantz, former chief of the FBI's counterterrorism section. Another ex-FBI counterterrorism chief, Oliver "Buck" Revell, has called the Islamic Association For Palestine – Hooper's former employer – "a front organization for Hamas that engages in propaganda for Islamic militants." So, the FBI guys were talking about the Islamic Association of Palestine, not CAIR.  (And Farah provided that info without context, citations, or dates -- and it's not like Farah is considered a fair-minded and knowledgeable expert on Islam, so we have to take even this claim with a couple of grains of salt.) The WSJ presumably edited out Debbie's paragraph because they didn't want to get sued by CAIR.  (And as Stossel would no doubt say, this proves that the free market system does work.) Anyway, although Debbie won't be appearing on this reality TV series, I do hope that she hasn't given up on the genre, because I'd love to see her on "Fear Factor" or "All-Star Wingnut Mud Wrestling."  Or maybe Spurlock could do an ep where Debbie has to spend 30 days with the women of the WNBA.  That could be fun too. 4:45:57 AM