Jackie's Gang Rape Story: Early Lessons

Any woman with an ounce of estrogen in her body had to be seething as she read the Rolling Stone story of “Jackie’s” gang rape by nine University of Virginia frat boys. A reader’s desire to punish those men – in some creatively vile ways not fit to put on paper – would have been palpable.  In hindsight, that estrogen-infused, brain-deprived reaction appears to be exactly what the author and the magazine sought to achieve with the now-discredited story.

Jackie’s story began falling apart when others, exercising basic journalistic skills, discovered there was no party at the fraternity house on September 28, and the fraternity rushed in the spring, not the fall – two simple facts neither the author nor the magazine made any attempt to check. Rolling Stone issued a lame quasi-retraction, and Jackie’s own friends began backing away from her story. Now we learn that Jackie herself tried to withdraw from the story before it was published.

No doubt more will come out as the larger story unfolds, and it should. The innocents deserve exoneration, and the guilty deserve condemnation.  All of them.

In the meantime, we can draw a few early lessons from Jackie’s story.

One, liberal-progressives lie, distort, exaggerate, and emotionally manipulate with complete abandon to achieve their nefarious objectives.  The manufactured ‘war on women’ is one example.  Others include Jonathan Gruber’s candid (even proud) admissions of the public lies told by liberal-progressives to win passage of Obamacare, and IRS officials’ lies surrounding abuse of conservative organizations and individuals.  Lying worked in each case, but only for a time (a really short time in Jackie’s case).  Truth eventually raises her beautiful head and overcomes.  

Two, liberal lies cause real harm to the country and to innocent people.  Obamacare is the most extreme example.  A law now, the Affordable Care Act is a policy nightmare that has cost millions of people their health insurance and their health care providers, with more pain to come if implementation proceeds. With the truth of this disaster now obvious, a majority wants it repealed and replaced. 

Jackie’s story has caused harm to innocents, too.  The immediate damage is to the reputations of the men accused of such a reprehensible act and to their fraternity. The long-term damage will be felt by future rape victims who fear having their veracity doubted if they report the crime. 

Three, liberal college administrators are justifiably reaping the bitter fruit they have sown. They have been complicit in hyper-sexualizing campuses with co-ed dorms and bathrooms, bowls of free condoms, sex shows and Vagina Monologues plays, and titillating sex courses of no academic value. Add a generous supply of alcohol, and the situation becomes combustible.  A “sexual assault crisis” on campus?  Whatever did they expect?

Four, feminists have completely lost their minds, along with any moral grounds on which to speak for women. After Jackie’s story was called into question, feminist Zerlina Maxwell argued in the Washington Post that the facts [read truth] didn’t really matter because the story “helped dramatize what happens when the claims of victims are not taken seriously.” She’s wrong; facts and truth do matter above all else.

After decades of advocating that women play the non-committal hook-up sex game with men, feminists find women aren’t faring very well. So they’re petitioning the federal government for new Title IX regulations to tilt the campus sex-playing field in favor of women: to force colleges to adopt policies that presume the honesty of an accuser and the guilt of an accused. 

“It’s no coincidence that the Rolling Stone article spent a great deal of time advocating for the expansion of federal involvement in higher education via Title IX of the Civil Rights Act,” Jonah Goldberg points out; “regulations that would erode the presumption of innocence in rape cases on campus.”  God help the University of Virginia men if such regulations were already in place.

As we stand with and defend the innocents, whatever residual outrage we feel from reading Jackie’s story should be redirected to the guilty:  liberals who try to avoid the consequences of their incessant dishonesty.


Update:
U-Va Students Challenge Rolling Stone, T. Rees Shapiro, Washington Post
Rolling Stone and Random House Deserve Defamation Lawsuits, Leslie Loftis, thefederalist.com
Why the Media's Fact Problems are Way Bigger Than Rolling Stone, Mollie Hemingway

Donatelli: What Part of Constitution Do Liberals Still Support?

"[W]hat is most radically different about the Obama liberals’ interpretation of the Constitution is its neutering of the Bill of Rights," writes Frank Donatelli. "To be sure, liberals never had much good to say about the Second, Ninth and 10th Amendments, but now they’re striking at other amendments, even those they once revered."

Donatelli highlights several examples of liberals' recent abandonment of the Fifth and (perhaps most surprisingly) First Amendment rights as well.

Ironically, the only constitutional provision to limit government power that liberals still champion is the right of “privacy,” which of course is found nowhere in the Constitution.

In recent years, many Democrats have sought to rebrand “liberalism” and “progressivism.” This is not just a cosmetic name change. Liberals of a generation ago accepted limits on government action, especially those limits contained in the Bill of Rights. Progressives, by contrast, have always found limits on their power to be inconvenient. ...  If progressive government in this administration has taught us anything, it is that liberties that run counter to great progressive ambitions are in serious danger.

Progressives destroy their government god, especially with young

The liberal-progressive faith relies on inculcating a belief in an omniscient, benevolent and just government god, so it's heartening to watch progressives systematically destroy that faith in their own deity (particularly among the young), as polling data now show.

Pondering how the IRS scandals (which occurred entirely on Obama's watch) have destroyed public confidence in the government agency, Peggy Noonan writes:

One irony here is that the Obama White House, always keen to increase the reach and power of government, also seems profoundly disinterested in good governing. It is strange. The long-term project of liberalism involves encouraging the idea of faith in government as a bringer or guarantor of greater justice. But who needs more government if government works so very badly, and is in its operations unjust?

Recalling Stein's Law in economics—If something cannot go on forever, it will stop—Charles Krauthammer writes:

Detroit, for example, can no longer go on borrowing, spending, raising taxes and dangerously cutting such essential services as street lighting and police protection. So it stops. It goes bust.

Cause of death? Corruption, both legal and illegal, plus a classic case of reactionary liberalism in which the governing Democrats — there’s been no Republican mayor in half a century — simply refused to adapt to the straitened economic circumstances that followed the post-World War II auto boom.

Dan Mitchell, in Atlas Shrugs in Detroit, argues:

Liberals' Pay for their Own Messes

File these 3 stories — tax hike pain, Obamacare repeal and repent, and eco-activists forced to pay damages — under "serves them right."

1. Tax Hikes: Liberals love tax increases, right? Wrong. They're squealing like little piggies about the 2% FICA payroll tax hike that hit their weekly pay checks. Here is an example from DemocraticUnderground.com:

The Liberal-Progressive Religion

Logic, consistency and civility aren't strengths of Liberal-Progressive ideology because it's a fundamentalist religion with its own canon, writes Robert Hall in a piece that would be funny if his observations weren't so true. Here are a few:

• If conservatives oppose gay marriage, it is an atrocity; but if Muslims call for the murder of gays, it's a heartwarming display of Multiculturalism.
• The Rich are evil, but only if they earned their money in business and are not Progressives. So mega-millionaires Michael Moore, Warren Buffet, Al Gore, George Soros, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Jim Johnson, Franklin Raines, Tax Cheat Tim Geithner, Angelo "Friends of Angelo at Countrywide" Mozilo and any number of entertainment and athletic stars are all righteous people, while a couple each working 60 hours a week to bring home $260k are among the evil rich who aren't "paying their fair share."
• It isn't racist to require minorities to identify themselves to cash a check, fly, drive, buy a gun, buy alcohol, buy tobacco, sign up for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Welfare, or to enter a government building, Obama rally, or the Democrat National convention, but it is racism to ask for ID to vote.
• Progressives think it's an outrage if you don't want to pay for free birth control for yuppie law students, but completely ignore the stoning of women, child marriages, female genital mutilation, honor killings of female relatives for even speaking to a strange man and oppressive inequality of women in Muslim countries under Shari'a Law.
• Children are a high priority. As long as they are children of the Progressive Elect voting blocks in the US. So banning DDT to save the birds to feel good about the Environment was wonderful, and several million dead black, brown, and yellow kids from malaria in the Third World mattered not at all. Nor did the birds, of course, when it was time to build eagle-chopper wind farms in homage to Big Green.

Worth the whole read for anyone who must deal with the cognitive dissonant positions of the Progressive self-righteous, self-annointed 'elect'.

Liberalism Explained: The "Herd" of Independent Minds

Why do liberals bitterly cling to their cults and mantras, impervious to rational counter-arguments and sound evidence? Victor Volsky offers an interesting theory called the "collective shaming code," a concept developed by Thomas Huxley ("Darwin's Bulldog") and further explored by Lee Harris in his book, The Suicide of Reason.

Huxley concluded that the shaming code was "the glue that holds together individuals in a group" in order to increase their individual chances of survival.

"It is this code that makes the members of the group feel as one," writes Lee Harris. "They are disgusted, angered, delighted and shamed by the same things. The unanimity of their visceral response is what provides the powerful sense of collective identity. It makes them feel and think as a tribal Us, in contrast to those tribes who are not disgusted by what disgusts us, or made angry by what makes us angry, and who feel no shame at what we think of as shameful[.] ... A tribe that shares a powerful visceral code that inhibits the natural tendency of the individual to self-assertion will present a united front against its enemies." ...

Barone: Cocooned Liberals

We all tend toward cocoon living, writes Michael Barone, "associating only with those who share your views, reading journalism and watching news that only reinforces them, [and] avoiding those on the other side of the cultural divide." But cocooning seems to hurt liberals more than conservatives.

Even in a cocoon, conservatives cannot avoid liberal mainstream media, liberal Hollywood entertainment and, these days, the liberal Obama administration. They're made uncomfortably aware of the arguments of those on the other side. Which gives them an advantage in fashioning their own responses.

Liberals can protect themselves better against assaults from outside their cocoon. They can stay out of megachurches and make sure their remote controls never click on Fox News. They can stay off the AM radio dial so they will never hear Rush Limbaugh.

The problem is that this leaves them unprepared to make the best case for their side in public debate. They are too often not aware of holes in arguments that sound plausible when bandied between confreres entirely disposed to agree. We have seen how this works on some issues this year.

Barone offers two examples: liberals' shock that "a majority of justices seemed to take the case against Obamacare's constitutionality very seriously indeed," and the Wisconsin public-unions-vs-Gov-Scott-Brown drama that isn't going well for libs.

No Compromise with Progressives

Who are progressives? What is their vision, and how have they changed our American democratic republic? In a three-part series of articles, Thomas Sowell offers insight into the Progressive Legacy, while Senator Jim DeMint explains why there can be conservative compromise with them.

Sowell highlights the following:

• Progressives can be found in both political parties.
• Progressives hold a "vision of an expanded role of the federal government in the economu and a reduced roles for the Constitution of the United States."
• Progressives are determined critics and foes of big business and often demonize business people with labels such as "robber barons" (early 20th century) and "1 percenters" (today).
• The Progressive movement rose and flourished a hundred years ago in the U.S.
• Progressives were subsequently so discredited by the problems the policies of their vision created "that they started calling themselves 'liberals'" during the mid 20th century, "and after they discredited themselves again, they went back to calling themselves 'progressives', now that people no longer remembered how progressives had discredited themselves before."

Then ... and now:

• "'Often wrong but never in doubt' is a phrase that summarizes much of what was done by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt [Republican] and Woodrow Wilson [Democrat], the two giants of the Progressive Era, a century ago."
• Theodore Roosevelt "stood the 10th Amendment on its head," interpreting "the Constitution to mean that the President of the United States could exercise powers not explicitly forbidden to him."
• "Wilson attacked the Constitution in his writings as an academic," and "once in power, his administration so restricted freedom on speech that this lead to landmark Supreme Court decisions restoring that fundamental right."
• "Theodore Roosevelt was also morally offended by the fact that Standard Oil created 'enormous fortunes' for its owners 'at the expense of business rivals'. How a business can offer consumers lower prices without taking custormers away from businesses that charge higher prices is a mystery still unsolved [by progressives] to the present day, when the very same arguments are used against Wal-Mart."
• Woodrow Wilson's Progressivism was very much in the same mindset. Government intervention in the economy was justified on grounds that 'society is the senior partner in all business'."
• "Barack Obama's rhetoric of 'change' is in fact a restoration of discredited ideas that originated a hundred years ago."

Senator Jim DeMint believes America is at a tipping point—the same tipping point Sowell writes of in the early 20th century Progressive Era.

Against the backdrop of American public opinion calling on Congress to just "get along," Senator Jim DeMint argues in his new book, Now or Never: Saving America from Economic Collapse, that there can be no compromise between two such polar opposite visions for the nation.  Progressive/liberals seek dominance of the federal government in all economic and social aspects of citizens' lives, while conservatives seek individual freedom and limited federal power over citizens' social and economic pursuits.

How can I compromise and work with someone whose vision is so different from mine? It would be like a football coach telling his team, 'I want you to go out on the field and work with the opposing team. Try to help them out. Cooperate with them. Compromise with them.' He can't. The other team has a goal that is the opposite direction from ours, and they are there to beat you. As bad as it sounds, that's where we are in America.

The clash in Washington DC today is once again between progressive/liberals and conservatives over the vision and future course of this nation. It's a battle that conservative must fight to win.

Sources:
Sowell: Progressive Legacy Part I
Sowell: Progressive Legacy Part II
Sowell: Progressive Legacy Part III
DeMint: Speech to Conservative Women's Network (pdf)
DeMint: book review

Will: Liberals' Rendezvous with Regret

Liberals' "largest achievement is today's redistributionist government," writes George Will. "But such government is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself. Government becomes big by having big ambitions for supplanting markets as society’s primary allocator of wealth and opportunity. Therefore it becomes a magnet for factions muscular enough, in money or numbers or both, to bend government to their advantage."

Rather than producing "social harmony by decreasing antagonisms arising from disparities of wealth," the Left's redistributive policies increase social strife, increase wealth disparity among citizens, and increase governments at the expense of the people--utterly destroying any hope of achieving its stated mission.