A U.K. newspaper, The Daily Mail, has reported that a law is in the works in Egypt that would legalize a man's having sex with his wife's corpse (although 'with' doesn't seem exactly the right word...) up until six hours after her death. According to the news report a Moroccan imam, who last year opined that marriage is an institution which extends beyond death, was somehow the impetus for this legislation. Apparently, he demonstrated his support for equal rights by stating unequivocally that women enjoyed the same right to sex with their dead husbands, which is less magnanimous than it sounds, once one thinks about it for a short moment.
But, I digress. There is no solid evidence at this point that the story is true, and defenders of the Muslim Brotherhood (which is poised to take control of Parliament and is fielding a presidential candidate, in violation of a promise made last year not to) say it is just a story cooked up by Mubarak supporters to make the Brotherhood look bad. Time will soon tell, no doubt.
But even if it is a hoax, Egyptian women aren't laughing. They know that the advancement of legal equality for women will be significantly less of a priority for the Brotherhood than it was under the hated Mubarak regime. Less ghoulish but more concerning in terms of the broader implications, are proposed laws (according to the Daily Mail piece and other accounts) that would lower the marriage age and repeal a ten-year old reform which made it less legally onerous and time-consuming for women to divorce. Whether these become law or not there is little reason to doubt that the Brotherhood, once in control, will not only halt women's advances but attempt to roll back gains already made. Democracy, overall, doesn't look nearly as imminent as it did back in the heady days of the Arab spring, but hey, one didn't need a telescope to see this coming.
Which leads to the question, did the Obama administration see it coming? One assumes these highly-educated and reportedly brilliant people considered what would happen in the aftermath of Mubarak's ouster before they promoted it, so perhaps this is the outcome they expected, but still think it will all turn out in the end. Or maybe they were naive enough to think it was going to work out right away; who knows? Perhaps they didn't have a clue, but feared they'd be on the wrong side of history if they kept quiet or propped up Mubarak, not that the latter would have been likely given Obama's views about the past use of American power. I am not saying he should have, either, because I don't know, but serious arguments for that can be made.
I have a friend whose opinion I respect, but we disagree fundamentally about Obama's foreign policy record. He thinks it's what he's done best. I think the President's inexperience shows glaringly, although the consequences may not fully bloom for a while. Persuasion wasn't utilized much in Libya where we had comparatively little national security interest; we were told the bombing and material/logistical support for the rebels (something one suspects Obama would have condemned were he still a senator and it was authorized by George Bush) was necessary for humanitarian reasons, yet upwards of 10,000 people have died at the hands of the Syrian regime and we've done nothing active to help them. Obama lent his voice and American support for regime change in Egypt, but kept silent when a million (or maybe it was two million) people took to the streets of Tehran seeking the ouster of a government which openly threatens us and inexorably marches toward the means to make good on the threat.
I don't claim to be a foreign policy expert, but much of this is incomprehensible to me. I have the uneasy feeling these are not foreign 'policies' at all, but simply reactions. Perhaps Obama has discovered what hubris kept him from seeing when all he had to do was criticize his predecessor. It's a lot more complicated than it looks.
Friday, April 27, 2012
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Maureen Dowd uses the phony 'mommy wars' to wage the real war on Romney's Mormonism
In her column, "Phony Mommy Wars," Maureen Dowd dismisses as 'piffle' Hilary Rosen's comment that Mitt Romney was foolish to say he depended on his wife's feedback about women's economic concerns because she 'actually never worked a day in her life.' But next, Dowd goes on to criticize Ann Romney for capitalizing on the attack and turning it to her husband's advantage.
Hello? Maureen! Remember all the mileage the left got out of Limbaugh's attack on Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student whose starting salary after graduation will approach $200K but who wants her Catholic university to pay to protect her from the consequences of her own sex life? That's what people _do_ when they're jockeying for political advantage; it's kind of like you snarking about the "wealthy Palm Beach donors who came in fancy cars to eat snapper," while they listened to Mitt, while failing to mention the many dozens of high-dollar fundraisers Obama has attended over the last year. Or your newspaper calling the 'mommy wars' phony while it legitimizes the phony 'war on women.'
Actually, I don't usually mind Dowd--her opinions are rarely a surprise but she's generally not overtly hateful and, occasionally, she'll make me laugh (as when she described Newt Gingrich as a 'crazed Chuckie doll.' I kind of like Newt, but when something's funny, it's funny...)
But, Dowd's partisan panties are clearly showing. In mocking Mitt's claim to have promoted welfare reform in Massachusetts by spending more on state-funded daycare so mothers could have the 'dignity of work' than it would have cost to just continue their welfare, Dowd asks the question "So the dignity of work only applies to poor moms?"
The subtext of this clumsy attempt at sarcasm is that women who stay home with their kids are all like Ann Romney--they can do it without fear or anxiety because a well-off husband can afford it, and the only other moms out there are either welfare moms or 'waitress moms.' It was a silly thing to say, but in spite of its casualness, the remark conveys remarkable ignorance about a big swath of stay-at-home moms--those who aren't poor but who are far from wealthy. The ones who thought long and hard about the material sacrifices their families would have to make, about the added pressure on their husbands, about the possibly permanent effects of the hiatus on their own career trajectories. Those parents are not only letting their children know how much they're valued, but are teaching them by example about frugality, self-reliance, and discipline. So are millions of other parents who would like to make it work with only one earner, but can't, and who still struggle valiantly to do it all.
One gets the sense Dowd doesn't know many of the stay-at-home moms of the sort I describe, but that's no excuse for misrepresenting the choice as the province only of the privileged, like Ann Romney, so she can then call her husband a hypocrite for trying to do something to disrupt the cycle of dependent parents bringing up dependent children. Not only is that transparent partisan hackery, it doesn't even make sense.
The cries by Dowd and others about how the Romney campaign is exploiting what is--I agree--pretty much a tempest in a teapot, are laughable given their determination to similarly exploit anything they can. No doubt we'll be in for that, from both sides, for another six months. But watch for her and her cronies to amp up the sneak attack on Romney's religion. It's already begun, actually, and I say 'sneak' attack because they won't risk a direct one; they'll supply 'information' that's damning and creepy. A little more than a month ago, I commented to a friend that there had been very little floated about Romney's Mormonism, and that I thought it was deliberate--that the Obama campaign (through its surrogates in the media) were leaving the topic alone until Mitt was safely the nominee. Only days later, this column came out:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/dowd-is-elvis-a-mormon.html?ref=maureendowd
Not surprisingly, Dowd has worked the Mormon angle into the 'mommy wars' column, along with others. It won't be the last time. I am not a Mormon and don't know many Mormons and, frankly, even though I'm less than enthusiastic about him, I don't really care that Romney is one. If I thought he might be unduly influenced by it in a negative way as President, I would be concerned, but I don't.
I really hope I'm wrong, but I predict that a just-under-the-radar assault on him, because of it, is forthcoming, and it's going to be ugly. David Axelrod is no fool. He knows he can't run a positive campaign unless things dramatically improve soon, and those voters who aren't currently deceived by the spin aren't likely to fall under the spell. So to capture the undecideds and the waverers, it will be fear and smear. It's going to be a long six months...
Hello? Maureen! Remember all the mileage the left got out of Limbaugh's attack on Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student whose starting salary after graduation will approach $200K but who wants her Catholic university to pay to protect her from the consequences of her own sex life? That's what people _do_ when they're jockeying for political advantage; it's kind of like you snarking about the "wealthy Palm Beach donors who came in fancy cars to eat snapper," while they listened to Mitt, while failing to mention the many dozens of high-dollar fundraisers Obama has attended over the last year. Or your newspaper calling the 'mommy wars' phony while it legitimizes the phony 'war on women.'
Actually, I don't usually mind Dowd--her opinions are rarely a surprise but she's generally not overtly hateful and, occasionally, she'll make me laugh (as when she described Newt Gingrich as a 'crazed Chuckie doll.' I kind of like Newt, but when something's funny, it's funny...)
But, Dowd's partisan panties are clearly showing. In mocking Mitt's claim to have promoted welfare reform in Massachusetts by spending more on state-funded daycare so mothers could have the 'dignity of work' than it would have cost to just continue their welfare, Dowd asks the question "So the dignity of work only applies to poor moms?"
The subtext of this clumsy attempt at sarcasm is that women who stay home with their kids are all like Ann Romney--they can do it without fear or anxiety because a well-off husband can afford it, and the only other moms out there are either welfare moms or 'waitress moms.' It was a silly thing to say, but in spite of its casualness, the remark conveys remarkable ignorance about a big swath of stay-at-home moms--those who aren't poor but who are far from wealthy. The ones who thought long and hard about the material sacrifices their families would have to make, about the added pressure on their husbands, about the possibly permanent effects of the hiatus on their own career trajectories. Those parents are not only letting their children know how much they're valued, but are teaching them by example about frugality, self-reliance, and discipline. So are millions of other parents who would like to make it work with only one earner, but can't, and who still struggle valiantly to do it all.
One gets the sense Dowd doesn't know many of the stay-at-home moms of the sort I describe, but that's no excuse for misrepresenting the choice as the province only of the privileged, like Ann Romney, so she can then call her husband a hypocrite for trying to do something to disrupt the cycle of dependent parents bringing up dependent children. Not only is that transparent partisan hackery, it doesn't even make sense.
The cries by Dowd and others about how the Romney campaign is exploiting what is--I agree--pretty much a tempest in a teapot, are laughable given their determination to similarly exploit anything they can. No doubt we'll be in for that, from both sides, for another six months. But watch for her and her cronies to amp up the sneak attack on Romney's religion. It's already begun, actually, and I say 'sneak' attack because they won't risk a direct one; they'll supply 'information' that's damning and creepy. A little more than a month ago, I commented to a friend that there had been very little floated about Romney's Mormonism, and that I thought it was deliberate--that the Obama campaign (through its surrogates in the media) were leaving the topic alone until Mitt was safely the nominee. Only days later, this column came out:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinion/sunday/dowd-is-elvis-a-mormon.html?ref=maureendowd
Not surprisingly, Dowd has worked the Mormon angle into the 'mommy wars' column, along with others. It won't be the last time. I am not a Mormon and don't know many Mormons and, frankly, even though I'm less than enthusiastic about him, I don't really care that Romney is one. If I thought he might be unduly influenced by it in a negative way as President, I would be concerned, but I don't.
I really hope I'm wrong, but I predict that a just-under-the-radar assault on him, because of it, is forthcoming, and it's going to be ugly. David Axelrod is no fool. He knows he can't run a positive campaign unless things dramatically improve soon, and those voters who aren't currently deceived by the spin aren't likely to fall under the spell. So to capture the undecideds and the waverers, it will be fear and smear. It's going to be a long six months...
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Will any good come out of Trayvon Martin's death? Final thoughts.
Sooner or later, Trayvon Martin's death will fade from the headlines. Not in the next few weeks when a determination should be forthcoming as to whether George Zimmerman should be charged with a crime--and the certain backlash if he isn't--but eventually, it will be old news.
When that happens, will the utterly shameful Sharpton and Jackson, and others who have incited violence in the name of 'justice,' recognize their hypocrisy and perfidy and have a genuine change of heart? Highly doubtful, given that their past rushes to judgment (Tawana Brawley, the Duke lacrosse incident, etc.) have had no discernible chastening effect, and no apparent effect on the media's eagerness to give them a megaphone.
Will NBC think twice, next time, before they edit something to deliberately misrepresent and deceive? Will the rest of the media pack hold back and wait for the facts before they sensationalize the next big story in order to scoop their competitors and keep on top of the 24/7 news cycle? I think we all know the answer to those questions.
So who might actually learn some lesson of value, going forward? Consumers of news, hopefully, but it will only be those with some intelligence and discrimination. But those whom one would really like to see profit are the people--both black and white--who genuinely desire to see the black community flourish and fulfill its enormous potential.
Here is one of the things writer and professor Shelby Steele (who, like Barack Obama, is a product of a black father and a white mother) had to say about the exploitation of the Martin situation: "After the '60s—-in a society guilty for its long abuse of us—-we took our historical victimization as the central theme of our group identity. We could not have made a worse mistake. It has given us a generation of ambulance-chasing leaders, and the illusion that our greatest power lies in the manipulation of white guilt."
It is hard not to agree that those who have fanned the flames in this situation have done so with that goal of manipulating white guilt. How else could they claim, with straight faces, that young black men are being 'hunted down in the streets,' as several have put it, by whites? The numbers are there, and they don't lie. As Steele said--"blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites...the absurdity of Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites." (Writers on the left are attacking Steele, of course, largely on the basis that he is a black conservative, and therefore not worthy of any consideration.)
Someone they would dismiss even more on matters of race (as a white, Jewish conservative) is Mona Charen, who zeroed in on what is probably the most important takeaway in this whole thing. She asks the question, "Why do African-Americans, 12.6 percent of the nation’s population, account for 50 percent of the murder victims?" (And as Steele and a host of others have reminded us, they are overwhelmingly the victims of other blacks--not whites.)
Her answer? "Because fatherlessness is most pervasive among blacks."
She goes on to say that "among blacks, 72 percent of births are to unmarried women. And while some unmarried mothers go on to marry the fathers of their babies, it’s rare in the African-American community, where only 31 percent of couples are married (in 1960, it was 61 percent)...a full 85 percent of youths in prison come from fatherless homes, as do 80 percent of rapists, 71 percent of high-school drop-outs, and 63 percent of teen suicides..."
This statement of hers is the one that should really make people sit up and take notice: "In The Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote that the 'relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature.'"
_Erases_ the connection. That's big.
So while this will have to be the subject of another post, I have to comment that there is a tie-in here, for sure, with the latest canard of those who are trying to shore up the women's vote for Obama--the so-called 'war on women.' The illogical equation being posited is that opposition to forcing the Catholic Church to pay for contraception is the same as trying to take away contraception, or that the mere mention of the fact that sexual freedom hasn't been an unalloyed good indicates the desire to send women back into the kitchen, barefoot. It's absurd, of course, but as I said above, there are many credulous people.
But how can it be a matter of dispute between people of good will, whatever their political persuasions, that fathers and family structure matter. As a letter writer to the WSJ rather succinctly put it: "I have nothing to say about whether the sexual revolution has been good for women or not. But I think an important question is, has it been good for children?" Wouldn't it be great if the Sharptons and Jacksons asked that question about black children?
When that happens, will the utterly shameful Sharpton and Jackson, and others who have incited violence in the name of 'justice,' recognize their hypocrisy and perfidy and have a genuine change of heart? Highly doubtful, given that their past rushes to judgment (Tawana Brawley, the Duke lacrosse incident, etc.) have had no discernible chastening effect, and no apparent effect on the media's eagerness to give them a megaphone.
Will NBC think twice, next time, before they edit something to deliberately misrepresent and deceive? Will the rest of the media pack hold back and wait for the facts before they sensationalize the next big story in order to scoop their competitors and keep on top of the 24/7 news cycle? I think we all know the answer to those questions.
So who might actually learn some lesson of value, going forward? Consumers of news, hopefully, but it will only be those with some intelligence and discrimination. But those whom one would really like to see profit are the people--both black and white--who genuinely desire to see the black community flourish and fulfill its enormous potential.
Here is one of the things writer and professor Shelby Steele (who, like Barack Obama, is a product of a black father and a white mother) had to say about the exploitation of the Martin situation: "After the '60s—-in a society guilty for its long abuse of us—-we took our historical victimization as the central theme of our group identity. We could not have made a worse mistake. It has given us a generation of ambulance-chasing leaders, and the illusion that our greatest power lies in the manipulation of white guilt."
It is hard not to agree that those who have fanned the flames in this situation have done so with that goal of manipulating white guilt. How else could they claim, with straight faces, that young black men are being 'hunted down in the streets,' as several have put it, by whites? The numbers are there, and they don't lie. As Steele said--"blacks today are nine times more likely to be killed by other blacks than by whites...the absurdity of Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton is that they want to make a movement out of an anomaly. Black teenagers today are afraid of other black teenagers, not whites." (Writers on the left are attacking Steele, of course, largely on the basis that he is a black conservative, and therefore not worthy of any consideration.)
Someone they would dismiss even more on matters of race (as a white, Jewish conservative) is Mona Charen, who zeroed in on what is probably the most important takeaway in this whole thing. She asks the question, "Why do African-Americans, 12.6 percent of the nation’s population, account for 50 percent of the murder victims?" (And as Steele and a host of others have reminded us, they are overwhelmingly the victims of other blacks--not whites.)
Her answer? "Because fatherlessness is most pervasive among blacks."
She goes on to say that "among blacks, 72 percent of births are to unmarried women. And while some unmarried mothers go on to marry the fathers of their babies, it’s rare in the African-American community, where only 31 percent of couples are married (in 1960, it was 61 percent)...a full 85 percent of youths in prison come from fatherless homes, as do 80 percent of rapists, 71 percent of high-school drop-outs, and 63 percent of teen suicides..."
This statement of hers is the one that should really make people sit up and take notice: "In The Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote that the 'relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature.'"
_Erases_ the connection. That's big.
So while this will have to be the subject of another post, I have to comment that there is a tie-in here, for sure, with the latest canard of those who are trying to shore up the women's vote for Obama--the so-called 'war on women.' The illogical equation being posited is that opposition to forcing the Catholic Church to pay for contraception is the same as trying to take away contraception, or that the mere mention of the fact that sexual freedom hasn't been an unalloyed good indicates the desire to send women back into the kitchen, barefoot. It's absurd, of course, but as I said above, there are many credulous people.
But how can it be a matter of dispute between people of good will, whatever their political persuasions, that fathers and family structure matter. As a letter writer to the WSJ rather succinctly put it: "I have nothing to say about whether the sexual revolution has been good for women or not. But I think an important question is, has it been good for children?" Wouldn't it be great if the Sharptons and Jacksons asked that question about black children?
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