November 27, 2006 by s.z.

The Latest Threat to Conservatives: Women Voters Human Events Online features one "Loredana Vuoto" and her review of  What Women Really Want: How American Women are Quietly Erasing Political, Racial, Class, and Religious Lines to Change the Way We Live, the new book by Kellyanne Conway and Celinda Lake.  After briefly discussing the book, Loredana tells us what the authors failed to reveal: that women basically shouldn't be allowed to vote.  The title of Loredana's piece, "Femme Fatale: The Lethal Voting Bloc," tells it all. But let's still look at a few bits from it, just for fun: Although women are a force to be reckoned with their emancipation has not come without a price—something Lake and Conway fail to discuss. Women have rejected the quintessential essence of their being: Their ability to love and be loved. Because having good jobs, making good money, being educated, owning property, etc. all make women unlovable and keep them from loving men the way they should: in a state of powerlessness. This has undermined the beauty of marriage and the happiness that comes with raising a child. Women may be more successful and influential than ever, but are they truly happier?  Wait, don't answer yet, because Loredana doesn't care so much about the happiness of women as she does about the good of the conservative movement. The rise of women as a voting bloc poses a potentially serious threat to conservatives. As Lake and Conway reveal, most professional women see big government as a positive good in helping them lead their independent lives separate from men. Women generally want more state assistance on issues such as health care, day care, education and the environment. The issue women tend to support the GOP on is national security. Ultimately, Lake and Conway shed fascinating light on the modern woman and her rise to social and political power. Women are reshaping America’s future. But will we like what it looks like once we’re there? Since conservatives will undoubtedly hate that future, they must act now and get Judge Roberts and Judge Alito to declare the 19th Amendment unconstitutional. Loredana Vuoto is a speechwriter for Assistant Secretary Wade F. Horn at the Administration for Children and Families at the Department of Health and Human Services. The views expressed in this article are her own. Sure they are.  Asst. Secretary Horn hired Loredana because of her way with words (and/or her knockers), not because she shares his views and values.  (Okay, what that disclaimer was probably meant to convey is that while Loredana does work for the Dept of Education office which hired columnists Maggie Gallagher and Mike McManus, her pieces for Human Events, Townhall, NRO, etc. do not violate the President's ban on paid shilling, as far as you can prove.) Oh, and in case you're interested, WorkingForChange had an interesting piece about how Horn was placed in charge of "drumming up support for, and doling out grants to, abstinence-only sexual education programs."  It mentions that Horn is a co-founder and former president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, and also served on the Board of Directors of the anti-feminist Independent Women's Forum.   So, yeah, Loredana's views are entirely her own. BTW, here's part of Loredana's NRO review of Warren Farrell's Why Men Earn More (the title of her review, "Now, a Masterpiece," would tell it all, except that Loredana believes that Farrell is part of the feminist conspiracy because he tells women that they could earn as much money as men if they would stop complaining and take jobs in coal mines and on oil rigs, and such). This book poignantly illustrates why feminism’s war on human nature is destined to fail: Instead of chasing the chimera of perfect wage parity between the sexes, women will continue to harbor the natural desire to be devoted mothers and wives. I think that Secretary Horn should immediately fire Loredana, so that she can stay home and more fully express her natural desire to be a devoted mother and wife. 5:29:04 PM

The Face That Launched a Couple Dozen Swift Boats Yes, it's Midge Decter.  (A personal confession: Every time I see her name, I read it as "Midge Detector."  Every time.  And then I think, "Do we really need a device to detect midges?  Sure, they're annoying, but won't bug zappers take care of them?"  And I bet I'm not the only one.) Anyway, from Big Trunk, we learn that Midge is Bruce Kesler's spiritual mother.  She's the reason he went to Vietnam, which later led to him "rising up" with John O'Neill to slime John Kerry. And when Kesler told Decter how she was responsible for the Swift-Boating of Kerry, "she responded, overgraciously, but only as a proud mother can, that my contribution saved the country. A son was never prouder."  That's such a beautiful story that it almost makes me retch.   Now, here's Bruce: Unbeknownst to Midge Decter, until last year, although having children of her own to raise, she has been my spiritual mother since I was 20. [ ...] As I was completing college, I was moved by what Midge Decter -- then editor of Harper’s Magazine -- wrote there in April 1968: “Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studied contemplation but an action, even if only an inner action.  Their acquisition obligates a man in some way to change his life, even if it is only his inner life. They demand to be stood for. [...]" Instead of continuing to the graduate school that had admitted me, I enlisted in the Marine Corps, my priority “beyond the realm of the merely reasonable” having to be my personal contribution to our mission in Vietnam. As my regular readers know, that led to my organizing the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace in 1971, to rebut the outrageous charges made by John Kerry and his small band of fake and disaffected Vietnam veterans, trumpeted by an anti-war media, that we were a criminal country with blood-lust crazed troops. John O’Neill joined me. Thirty-three years later, we and Vietnam veterans arose from our middle-age like Minute Men to finish the internment of Kerry’s lies and deceptive presentation of himself, to avoid the national disaster of this mendacious maggot in the Oval Office. I'm sure Midge is indeed very proud of her spiritual son, both for the way he saved the country from competent leadership, and for his skilled use of alliteration. Beside singing songs of praise for Mother Midge, both Bruce and Big Trunk point us to her recent Heritage Foundation lecture, "The Never-Ending War: The Battle Over America's Self-Meaning."  It's one of the wackier things I've read this year, and proves that Midge hasn't lost her touch, despite being about 200 years old. Its thesis is that there is a cultural war going on -- and while many think it started during the Vietnam era, it actually began when America failed to properly appreciate its robber barons (seriously -- that's what she claims).  Midge says that the only reason that the cultural elite (consisting of artists, intellectuals, and college professors -- socialists all) isn't winning the war is that the majority of men live quiet lives of desperation, and therefore don't really care that much about culture wars.  Oh, and there is also the Heritage Foundation's conservative counterculture, and "kids in Iraq who are reintroducing into the public consciousness the virtues of bravery and determination and love of country."   Here's a choice bit from Midge's speech: To state the matter very crudely, the divide over the [Vietnam] war had turned out mainly to be one between the children of privilege, a most significant number of whom spent the war years horsing around in school with drugs and protests while being praised for their moral superiority, and the children of the “ordinary” folk—people who lived, as a very popu­lar and very ugly folk-style song of the time had it, in “ticky-tacky houses” and who, happily or not, submitted loyally to what their government demanded of them. I'm sure that if Midge's biological son John Podhoretz was just a little younger, he would show that he was no child of privilege, and would be serving in Iraq with the other children of the "ordinary" folk. Because otherwise, he'd be a hypocrite or something -- per Midge. 12:48:19 AM