GayPatriot

The Internet home for American gay conservatives.

Martin Bashir resigns

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Follow-up to an earlier post, Why wasn’t this guy fired? After a couple of weeks, Bashir has resigned from MSNBC. As Allahpundit puts it:

This is a guy who took Mormon-themed digs at Mitt Romney; brought on a shrink to analyze the allegedly violent, possibly psychotic tendencies of tea partiers; accused Republicans of treating the word “IRS” as a racist dog-whistle against Obama; and wondered if Rick Santorum wasn’t some sort of theocratic second coming of Stalin. When Steve Jobs died two years ago, he turned his on-air eulogy into an excuse to — ta da — bash Sarah Palin again. All of this is par for the course on MSNBC so imagine Bashir’s surprise, after all of that, upon finding out that introducing a little actual rhetorical scat into the figurative scat-flinging at righties was an unpardonable sin worthy of suspension.

I just say: Better late than never!

Why wasn’t this guy fired?

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The background is recent remarks of Sarah Palin’s:

Palin said that the debt being accumulated will result in the next generation being “beholden to the foreign master.”

“Our free stuff today is being paid for by taking money from our children and borrowing from China,” Palin told a crowd of supporters…“When that money comes due – and this isn’t racist, but it’ll be like slavery when that note is due. We are going to beholden to the foreign master.”

It’s more likely that we will default on our debt, so Palin is not 100% correct. But she’s well on the right track. You always know she is, when she gets the Left to reveal its snarling hatred.

This time, Martin Bashir of MSNBC dropped his mask.

In his “Clear the Air” segment, Bashir lit into Palin straight away, referring to her as America’s “resident dunce” and characterizing her remarks as “scraping the barrel of her long-deceased mind, and using her all-time favorite analogy in an attempt to sound intelligent about the national debt…”

“One of the most comprehensive first-person accounts of slavery comes from the personal diary of a man called Thomas Thistlewood…In 1756, he records that a slave named Darby ‘catched eating kanes had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector, another slave, sh-t in his mouth…Mrs. Palin…confirms if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, she would be the outstanding candidate.

In short, the left-wing Bashir suggested on TV that someone should forcibly defecate in Palin’s mouth.

Now, Bashir went on to apologize, but my question is this: If Rush Limbaugh had said it about Nancy Pelosi, would any amount of apology be enough?

Have not some other conservatives been chased from the airwaves after saying less and apologizing as much (or more)? Given that Bashir’s remarks were “wholly unacceptable” (as he says), why does MSNBC still have him? How low are they?

Ted Cruz: Up next for destruction?

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From Rich Lowry’s brief profile of Senator Cruz at Politico, he sounds pretty smart, like he might be an effective leader for small government (or the Tea Party, if you prefer).

So…is he next? As the Left has proven with Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, and others: Any small-government leader with a bit of effectiveness or charisma MUST. BE. DESTROYED. REGARDLESS OF TRUTH. Especially if they could hold some appeal for women, blacks, or Hispanics.

Jammie Wearing Fools has gathered a few links on the nascent Cruz Derangement Syndrome.

Social Psychology, Politics, and Disgust

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I saw this item at Reason.com the other day.  It’s a short piece reflecting on a video of a speech by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talking about how one’s “sensitivity to disgust” is supposedly some sort of predictor of one’s political views.  I haven’t watched the whole video yet, but the speech was given at the Museum of Sex in New York City, so some amount of its content seems designed to appeal to the audience that would be attending a speech in that location.

Jim Epstein at Reason.com summarizes the key points of the speech as follows:

“Morality isn’t just about stealing and killing and honesty, it’s often about menstruation, and food, and who you are having sex with, and how you handle corpses,” says NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who is author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics.

Haidt argues that our concern over these victimless behaviors is rooted in our biology. Humans evolved to feel disgusted by anything that when consumed makes us sick. That sense of disgust then expanded “to become a guardian of the social order.”

This impulse is at the core of the culture war. Those who have a low sensitivity to disgust tend to be liberals or libertarians; those who are easily disgusted tend to be conservative.

The full video of the speech is available at the above link.

My reaction to all this is that it 1). depends on how one defines conservative, and 2). it depends on what kinds of things one labels or considers to be examples of disgust.

With respect to point 1)., I think that a large portion of the conservative coalition is rather heavily libertarian-leaning, and it just makes more sense for us to identify as conservative and vote for Republicans because  the Libertarian party seems doomed to remain a fringe party, at least as long as that party’s leadership continues to endorse an isolationist or head-in-the-sand approach to foreign policy.  Now while it may be the case that many traditional “social conservatives” have a “high sensitivity to disgust” with respect to issues of sex, I’m not even convinced that that is as widely the case as Haidt’s remarks suggest.  I’ve heard socially-conservative Christian ministers talk about sex in ways that show they may have a better understanding of the variety of human sexual experience than many academics who claim to be experts on the subject.

On the other hand, with respect to point 2)., I can find many, many examples of “disgust” fueling the attitudes of liberals and leftists.  One could begin by looking at their intense hatred of Sarah Palin and anyone like her.  Some of that hatred, I would argue, was fueled by a disgust at the lives of anyone who doesn’t live the life of a modern liberal in a major coastal city.

Most modern liberals are disgusted by hunting, by the people who shop at Wal-Mart, by the petroleum industry, by the food industry, by the military, by evangelical Christians, and by the reality of life in small-town, rural America.  James Taranto and British Philosopher Roger Scruton call it “oikophobia”: it is a worldview which accepts or excuses the transgressions of select special-interest groups or of non-western cultures, while it judges the familiar by a harsh standard and condemns them with expressions of disgust at the nature of their lives.

Chick-fil-A: Latest object of the left’s “two-minute” hate
Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day: response to left-wing bullying

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As we’ve noted on more than one occasion, all too many on the gay left — as well as some of their straight allies — are ever ready to call opposition to gay marriage as hate speech. Their reaction to prominent defenders of traditional marriage, like Chick-fil-A’s president Dan Cathy, resembles that of their reaction to certain prominent Republicans, from Ronald Reagan in the 1980s to Newt Gingrich in the 1990s to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin in the 2000s, to the Koch Brothers in the current decade.

Some have developed quite a habit of using harsh language to decry what they describe as “hate”.  Indeed, more often than not, their language seems far more hateful than that of the supposed haters.  Like the loyal citizens of George Orwell’s Oceania, they seem to delight in venting their negative emotions upon those deemed enemies of the party.  Yet, their venting does seem to last longer than two minutes.

Mr. Cathy’s unapologetic advocacy of traditional marriage made him — and his chicken chain — an appropriate target to which certain leftists could direct their venom.  This whole hullabaloo seemed more about the need of some to vent than about the merits (or lack thereof) of the target’s arguments.

No wonder that Glenn Reynolds, like a good number of social moderates and libertarians, doesn’t think the response to this venting, AKA Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day . . .

can be interpreted as opposition to gay marriage, so much as a response to bullying. But I do think that the bullying has probably tainted the gay-marriage brand, which is too bad. The gay-marriage argument is already winning — there’s no need to engage in Rahm Emanuel-style attacks, and doing so merely invites pushback. And, frankly, I’m happy to live in a country where people’s response to bullying is to push back.

It is those very “Rahm Emanuel-style attacks” that served as the tipping point for many social libertarians (including yours truly).  As blogging law professor William A. Jacobsen put it:

The threat to free speech represented by the actions of the liberal political leaderships in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, D.C., New York, and Philadelphia should be the ultimate wake up call. [Read more…]

HRC blogs about 3-year-old using anti-gay slur;
silent when adult gay activist uses it

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This is a screen capture I just made of my search on HRC’s blog for “Dan Savage“:

It has been a full month (and three days) since Mr. Savage used “faggot” as a derogatory slur.  And still HRC still hasn’t spoken up.

And yet when Sarah Palin’s grandson used the same slur and his mother said (on her reality show) that this suggests she’s “doing a terrible job disciplining Tripp. I know he’s going to continue to push the boundaries and push the limits.” Seems she’s acknowledging this is not a good term to use.

Maybe she should talk to Dan Savage.   Someone’s been doing a terrible job disciplining that bully; he continues to push the boundaries, push the limits.

The folks at HRC’s blog found the Palin episode worthy of a blog post, reminding us “this isn’t the first time the anti-gay phrase has landed one of the Palin daughters in hot water. Two years ago, Willow herself used the same slur on Facebook.”  (H/t reader Just Me in the comments.)

When a three-year-old utters the word, “faggot,” HRC sees fit to issue a blog post.  When a grown man uses it to slur his political adversaries, the supposed gay advocacy outfit is silent.  Wonder why that is.

UPDATE: Did 3-year-old really use the gay slur? (Via Mark Steyn.)

What explains Conservative Woman Derangement Syndrome?

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Back in the 1990s (and into this century), whenever conservative men criticized the then-First Lady within earshot of her partisans, they quickly lashed out against us, telling us how afraid we were of strong women.

Such folks quickly forget how many Hillary critics in the 1990s had been, in the 1980s, enthusiastic supporters of then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, a Mrs. (now Lady) Margaret Thatcher who just happened to be a woman.  And some of us also admired an American woman whom for some reason I have long called Lady Jeane, the Democrat Ronald Reagan tapped to serve as his Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick.

As I read Peter Collier’s biography of this great lady, Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick.  I am reminded that despite her intellectual acumen, Ambassador Kirkpatrick was subject in the 1980s to the same sort of attacks, another more charismatic conservative woman would face a quarter-century later.

Gloria Steinem called the ambassador a “female impersonator”.  Wendy Doniger quipped that Sarah Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”

How ready some folks on the left who see us as somehow sexist when we don’t love the women they love.  Yet, when conservative women rise in public favor, some liberals are quick to criticize them — and question even the reality of their sex.  You would think feminists would welcome women who succeed in endeavors once reserved for men — and earn the admiration of men, particularly conservative men.

Why do accomplished conservative women arose such ire on the left?

Why do some refuse to acknowledge Sarah Palin’s accomplishments?

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May build on this post later.  Was just at a brunch where a very intelligent man refused to accept that Sarah Palin had a record of accomplishment as Governor of Alaska.  Why is it that some Democrats (and a few Republicans) refuse to acknowledge — or even familiarize themselves with this woman’s record?

Is it because she is a woman?

I mean, when John McCain tapped her as his running mate, she enjoyed a 75% approval rating . . . among Alaska Democrats.  When Katie Couric interviewed the then-Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, the CBS News anchor didn’t once ask her interlocutor about her record.  Or what she had done to win support among Democrats as well as Republicans.

Do these folks just assume that a woman can’t stand up to a corrupt political establishment and effect real reforms?