Nancy Mace in a Brace

 

Rep. Mancy Mace of South Carolina apparently experienced the "Handshake from Hell" at the hands of a foster care advocate who was (checks notes) concerned about trans children. The man was arrested, and our fearless Potty Protector is now seen wearing a brace. Some people who were present at the alleged arm-spraining fracas claim they observed nothing unusual about the vigorous handshake. Other observers suggest Mace might avoid injuries by eating something containing calcium (like food). 

(Me. I am a concerned bystander who thinks ravioli and chicken cutlets might make at least some of her problems less so.)

Am I claiming bullshit on her claims of assault? No, I was not there and there is no video that I know of, so I am only saying, based on eyewitness testimony, it might not have happened. And she may very well have received death threats, last month, too. And of course her house was once grafitti'd by antifa:

Hey remember that time that Nancy Mace claimed "Antifa" graffitied her home & then people pointed out the graffiti was all in *HER* handwriting....and then she just never mentioned it again?

Seems like there's a pattern to ol' Nance's behavior. https://t.co/HpuaPByReT pic.twitter.com/J4CDGh8ZCq

— Kendall Brown (@kendallybrown) December 11, 2024

Portrait of a MAGA Patriot

 

Someone's angry MAGA mee-maw became profanely enraged when advised that she can't come in to vote with her Trump shirt so she goes ahead and votes in her foundational garment. 

Hallelujah. Be a suffragette, Ms. MAGA. Don't let them mothers tell you how to be.  Vote for that serial sexual abuser, you dusty old sister-shafter. 

Anyway, Trump's lil mini-me JD Vance rolled his eyes so hard his eyeliner flaked and responded:

"What a patriot."

A lot of people took this to mean he supported being abusive to poll workers, and wow! That truly seems to be the MAGA vibe. 

As Goes Ohio? Kansas? Arizona?

 

If Nikki Haley, who dropped out weeks ago, is pulling 20% in the GOP primary against Trump in Ohio--this is a worrisome thing for him. Here's what I'm thinking--it's well-educated and female voters who realize that Trump is an appalling person. Some of these people will end up voting for Biden. Some will stay home. But this is an issue that Trump actually CAN'T address. 

What do I mean by that? Take the E. Jean Carroll defamation suit. He counter-sued and lost, because what in the hell is the difference between assaulting someone digitally vs. with a penis? He's going back in against ABC and George Stephanopoulos because Nancy Mace kind of made him do it.  So we are now going to be talking about Trump's being a rapist and Trump INVITED it. 

We are going to go back to the Ukraine issue in the first impeachment because Trump invited that, too. We are going to se him condition Jewishness as it relates to Zionism, for a degree of Zionism that truly is anti-Palestinian. We are going to question what he REALLY wants done at the border because he stopped the border deal. We are going to question whether he understands foreign policy because after all--Russia is being expansionist, dare I say, imperialistic? And there's stupid tyrant fanboy Trump, wanting to be recognized by the Big Kids Dictator Club. 

The Fundamentals of My Feminism

 An artist depicted a Great Wall of Vaginas (Vulvas, actually) and because I'm me, I thought about the amazing plaster caster Cynthia Albritton of recent blessed memory, who got depictions of the units of so many male artists including Jimi Hendrix. The monuments to assorted gifted phalli aren't necessarily controversial--but someone has decided to be the decider of correct and appropriate vulvularity. 

We did not need that. Purity culture is already doing a wonderful job of telling female-bodied people we are having bad vulvas. They are telling young girls they are used up by just using tampons for their menses. 

We are told we are worth less because of our "body count" and that multiple penises and births are making our one interesting feature (our vag) less useful. Sloppy, slippery, loose, etc. 

They do not seem to know we have muscles on our pelvic floor that can push out whole human life many times over. We are not spent because of little penetrations (tampons, penises) when we are made to birth big-headed babies. Vulvas are elastic and fantastic. 

But anatomy is not destiny. Having a vulva or a uterus does not mean you identify as female, and I support referring to people who birth, menstruate, or have uteruses or vulvas, as being referred to in that way as appropriate. I am not being referred to when someone is talking about a "birthing person" and I don't feel excluded by that. I technically might be able to--but I know despite being female, that isn't me. It's a term of fact, not a judgment. 

What Do You See?

 

The Alameda County Sheriff's office is investigating a group of men who disrupted a drag queen storytelling event at the San Lorenzo Library Saturday with homophobic slurs. https://t.co/46G1IDQzVB

— KPIX 5 (@KPIXtv) June 12, 2022

So consider the scene--people in costume are reading books to children in a calm and unprovocative setting, and then weird violent guys show up and say horrible things with language that has no business being said in front of children. It was not weird until these people decided to come on in and make it weird. It was the Proud Boys--you know, the ones who have nothing to be proud about, accept for being accepted by the Miami-Dade GOP and being affiliated with the insurrectionists. Maybe they haven't decided to be as entirely domestic terrorist as Patriot Front this Pride month, but they definitely decided to make an impact. 

Just as a necessary follow-on to what I posted about yesterday--this movement is aiming increasingly harsh public harassment at gender-nonconforming people in what looks to me like a way to "disappear" LGBT people. Like Gov. DeSantis (who was protested today at Chelsea Piers by Chelsea queers) whose "Don't say Gay" law tries to put people back in the closet and jeopardize the employment of LGBT teachers by focusing attention on whether they mention a basic facet of their personal lives, a lot of the legislation that pretends to "spare the children" from adult topics is really aimed at just making it publicly difficult to be any kind of queer. 

It's Like an Alternate Universe

 

Kyle Rittenhouse is introduced at the Young Women’s Leadership Summit as the ideal catch for a husband: “I want to talk a lot about what kind of man you should be attracted to .. Men’s #1 goal is to protect your family .. and Kyle Rittenhouse is a man who does that.” pic.twitter.com/WLjIdQhc6d

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) June 5, 2022

I've wondered about these echo chambers for RW yahoos to yodel in before, especially the Pepto Bismol Pink ones, but Kyle Rittenhouse is a potato with issues. I also wonder about what "Young Women's Leadership" has to do with catching hubbies. Also, nothing the boy did has anything to do with protecting a family.

It has to be trolling.

UPDATE: Wow. So the entire thing was like that--we're young, we're edgy, we're not the old conservative party, so please go to church and figure out how to be a Stepford Wife. People paid to go there and be told what their granny would have told them. If their granny was really conservative and churchy.

UPDATE: From the Strangely Blogged Archives: 

The GOP Strategy for the War on Women? Irony, I think.

It took me a little bit to sort out what it was reminding me of.  Same war on women, same lipstick on the chauvinist pigs. Now with more handmaidens.

Many Things Can Be True At Once

 

I was absolutely not interested in writing about a certain case which has been all over the news, but unfortunately, I get stuck in my writing if something like this goes by and I haven't commented. But I will not refer to anyone BY NAME because I know my readers will know what I'm talking about. And it feels like a nice blind item for a gossip column that way.

Sigh. So here goes...

It can be true that men can be abused. That does not give them a pass to also be abusive. Women can be abusers, but that does not mean that a woman has to be perfect to also be able to say that she has been harmed. The two people in this case both seem to have made each other thoroughly miserable and there was substance abuse involved. I hope for both of their sakes they are getting therapy. I'm not for the purposes of this post taking sides, but if you know what I've written about #MeToo and misogyny previously, you can probably imagine. 

That said, what I want to post about isn't this case per se, but the reaction to it--it's been weirdly personal, and despite getting more details than anyone ever could want and both of these people being famous--regardless, we don't know them. These are people underneath their celebrity and the roles they have performed. We know the cases their lawyers and PR professionals have made on their behalf.  Stories can have more than one side. 

But this case and its result should not affect anyone else's story, or anyone else's right to talk about their own abuse, and I think the reason in part this particular case became so riveting is because people wanted to fold it into some other narrative about cancel culture or whether men (all men, not this particular man) can now shrug off claims of abuse because women won't be believed, because this one woman wasn't believed. 

That doesn't seem right. 

But regardless, while I am not saying that all the people who sympathized with a certain nameless person are rotten people, it doesn't escape my attention that all the really rotten people are high-fiving each other over this jury's decision. And while I don't know the other nameless party personally, I know there are people who have suffered abuse and were not believed and can only imagine how gutting the gloating over this feels for them, because it's like their own predicament is being rubbed in their faces. It could have a dampening effect on other people trying to seek help or admit what has happened to them. 

That doesn't seem right, either.

So I want it clear that it really feels to me like there is some serious misogyny at play and while I'm not going to try to convince anyone about what happened in this case, I ask anyone who cares about domestic violence in general to take a good look around at who is supporting whom, and why. It can be eye-opening. 

It's Only A Hundred Years or so...

 

The more I think about the idea, present in Justice Alito's leaked draft of the decision to overturn Roe about the idea of rights "deeply rooted" in US tradition, the more I think about how women have really only had the right to vote for a hundred years give or take, and how he cited a man who didn't think marital rape was a crime and had witches executed. (It seems like I was just talking about how "witchcraft" and repro rights were related....) 

In just over a hundred years, part of feminist work has been not just to assert our right to manage our reproduction by way of birth control, but to even fight for the concept of consent with respect to our bodies themselves--to not be raped, to be made child brides, to be sterilized, and are still incomplete. 

I have a good idea what a step back would mean for us. We can't take one step back. Not one. 

An Unravelling Thread

 

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down Roe v. Wade, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and obtained by POLITICO.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Alito writes. https://t.co/nl3JFLx9xg

— POLITICO (@politico) May 3, 2022

A perusal of Twitter shows that many conservatives are more concerned with the leak of Justice Alito's draft of the decision to reverse Roe v. Wade than the decision itself, which takes aim not just at the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy, but at the right to contraception and the right to marry the adult partner of one's choice. It's as if the privacy of the Supreme Court to make these personal decisions for millions of Americans matters more than the privacy of those decisions for the individual.

They know full well that many people today have no intention of "lying back and taking it". The leak concerns them because it gives people an insight into the game plan (as if the game had not already been quite clear).  We should have always known our rights hung by this thread, but if anyone had not--there it is: the right of the state and the people who run it over your right to run your own life. 

The folks who go around saying they like small government and freedom are dirty liars. They just despise oversight and responsibility. But when they let you know they despise your personal pursuit of happiness, the right to medical care (such as the termination of an ectopic pregnancy, etc.) that can preserve your life, and gives you choices--liberty! They stand against you. 

Forced labor (how else to describe a state-mandated pregnancy?) is violence. It cannot stand. 

Josh Hawley Tries So Durn Hard

Josh Hawley says more men today are watching porn and playing video games because their masculinity has been criticized. pic.twitter.com/R0eXdRSYNT

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 1, 2021

More women are also watching porn and playing video games because these things are increasingly available due to technological advancements like getting wifi on your phone. It isn't deep. Porn is literally ancient. People play games for fun. It's the point. People do things they find fun. It's not a male thing. It's not a retreat from the cold cruel world. It's not the sturm und drang of opprobrium from the eternal and infernal female. It's just extremely convenient. And kind of fun.

Now, what manly men are supposed to do is become successful and find a good wife to occupy their definitely not porn and video game lifestyles. I guess. As if husbands time out of mind haven't fucked off to play pool or bowl or hang out at titty bars or catch a skin flick or whatever.  It passes the time. It's not some new obsession. It's really pretty trad--just the delivery medium has changed. Not all men are into these things, some always are. But that isn't a male-exclusive thing. (And it can be empowering, to women, but also sometimes doesn't feel that way.) Surprise--we're people. 

Or People Could Just Mind Their Own Business

 

lmfao pic.twitter.com/frUDUD76He

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) August 4, 2021

This is a very deeply weird thing to decide: that leftists hate babies. Now, I am not their biggest fan, largely for aesthetic reasons. Often they are so basic and derivative of their parents. (Given what we know, the recent Domenech child is probably a cut and paste job.)  Also they are lousy conversationalists and not one of them can mix a proper drink. But as a general rule, I think of having children like getting a pool or a nipple piercing--it isn't my thing, but if it's yours, you just go ahead and be sure to take care of it. 

The argument is that children are a refutation of the left.  I've never felt refuted by them--frankly, a lot of what I want, like a cleaner environment and good schools and access to health care, is about people being able to raise their kids knowing they will have opportunities to live up to their potential. I'd love it if maternity was medically safe for all people, that the kids in this world could be sure of being homed, fed, and educated well, and that we were leaving a safe, and not-stupid world for them to live in--I'm pretty committed to it! 

But some of what he's saying is just dumb--

Children are brave—terrifyingly brave. Girls are fierce and independent. Boys are heroically reckless. They are not the helpless, timid victims leftists say people are. Just as important, neither are we. That’s the Left’s real problem with children: they create families. They turn boys into men, couples into parents, and women into the archangels we call moms

.Children are terrifyingly brave because they have no concept of consequences--that is learned over time. They do stupid things and we have to childproof the electric sockets and keep sharp things and household chemicals away from them. They might not be timid, but I'm pretty damn sure you wouldn't leave them all to themselves or think they can talk to any old stranger or would count on them to have your back in a knife fight. Parenting is, near as I can tell, steering kids away from being victims (and some parents are absolutely shit at that by victimizing their kids first off) but what about the sexism! Men without children aren't real patriarchs. Women without children aren't "archangels". 

Lindsey Graham is on His Bullshit Again

 

Lindsey Graham tells young women that, “There’s a place for you in America — if you are pro-life — if you embrace your religion and you follow traditional family structure".

What a bad guy...pic.twitter.com/KwBppG65oV

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) November 1, 2020

I did not think Graham would make a more bare-faced exclusionary statement than the remarks he had regarding Black and brown people living in South Carolina, but here he goes again. Now, as for me, I have been in America since birth, and firmly believe in taking care of the health and rights of people who have been born (as well as the pre-natal care for pregnant people so that they can have healthy babies if they choose), am militantly agnostic, and understand that traditionally, people have formed many kinds of families, so I would certainly like to think there's "a place" for me in America. 

 (And I happen to also know that the phrase "young lady" rankles many actually young ladies who have just been told what they should believe as it rankles me at my big age. It always seemed a bit of a condescension.) 

 Like Trump's foolish "we're getting your husbands back to work" comment, these words show no recognition of the diversity ofwomen's lives. We are sometimes the sole breadwinners in our households, we go to work and have meaningful careers, we want to be paid what we are due, and not dependent on another person's labor, but women have suffered the brunt of job-losses in this pandemic. Trump talks about women wanting safety from hypothetical (and presumably Black and brown, because, wow, yes, dog-whistles!) strangers, when surrounding himself (and being, himself) persons who are abusive to their partners, in a party that that privileges the gun rights of abusers over our lives. 

 As with the right wing's touting of Amy Coney Barrett's seven young qualifications, we are faced with a picture-book image of women as household angel, who "keeps sweet" and raises babies, not hell. His view seems to me like a faded antique, and for many women who grew up as I did, the feeling should be that the genie has long been out of the bottle. This appeal he's making is towards certain evangelicals who go out of their way to extoll "family values" in a way that barely values people, let alone families.

And Graham wonders why he has been so dominantly outraised during this campaign. (Did he not know us frails control our own purse-strings these days?)

It's Almost Funny Until Someone is Killed

There is something about misogyny that even women sometimes get behind, and I don't even mean in a snotty Phyllis Schlafly full-throated sister-shafting kind of way. It's the funny joke where whenever women have spaces, it's because they have something against men. Feminists are called "Feminazis". It's assumed some are men-haters. They are feminists because they are womaning badly. The feminist is sketchy, possibly lesbian, likely fat, blaming men for her fuckups, and out for blood. Some women like the marginalization of feminism because they can show they themselves are cool and not-feminist--not weird, judge-y, man-hating, or against all things dick. It's a position with good male focus-grouping.

So, you take a guy who is just weirdly litigious for absurd right-wing/misogynous causes, like being against Ladies' Nights at bars and clubs. Huh. Seems merely eccentric and meninist. Such a person seems pretty human-interest-y, right? But now this same person is suspected of targeting the family of a judge, killing her son and injuring her husband. and also seems to have thousands of pages of hate that he has written about. Keeping in mind the carnage of Eliot Rodger and other MRA-affiliated killers, it seems pretty likely that misogyny was a big part of his intention to kill, and it no longer seems funny or eccentric.

Fox News had Mr. Den Hollander on  occasionally, which isn't a surprise, because the entire network is pretty antifeminist. Which you can kind of tell not just because of the programing, but because of the rape culture it has pretty much always been a big enabler of. Like, Roger Ailes--mad sexual harassment. Or Bill O'Reilly. Insane sexual harassment.  Or just everyday sexual harassment. Or Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson-related sexual harassment with Ed Henry being a rapist. It's just always a part of the FOX culture, apparently. And it looks as if promoting a view that women are a suspect class of potential feminazis of delinquent values might result in violence against them.

But conservatives in real life mirror these stupid, dangerous, anti-women values, as well. So Ted Yoho calls AOC a "fucking bitch".  And the Freedom Caucus thought they would beat up on Liz Cheney because she is self-confident and doesn't suck-up to Donald Trump. What if listening to women because we might not be stupid instead of lashing out at us was practiced more regularly? What if contradicting the words of almighty men was seen as our privilege and right as people who also think and have a POV?

I guess that would be different from how things are now. But I think they would be better.

This Would be an Awkward Office Situation

The news that Rep. Trent Franks, an anti-abortion "family values" warrior, was resigning because of sexual harassment didn't strike me as too shocking: holier-than-thou sorts are often bearers of disappointing personal morals because their pecksniffery is solely for other folks. But, peculiar as the actual details are, when I read that he had actually awkwardly approached female staffers about being a gestational surrogate to increase his family, it was like hearing a puzzle piece snap into place. 

He didn't do anything creepy and lewd. Gosh! He just wanted to see if there was anyone close to hand who had reproductive organs they weren't using at the moment. Since having babies was what they were for. Not in a weird, lusting in his heart way. Just in a using a woman's body according to Biblical precedent sort of way. 

Now, to get a little technical, as Franks is staunchly pro-life, in vitro is obviously not an option for his family, because not all embryos implant successfully. This leaves traditional surrogacy, in which the surrogate provides the egg and the patriarch provides the rest. This intrauterine insemination is a bit cheaper than in vitro, and can be done without sexual, um, congress. (Although, you know! It could be done the old-fashioned way, too.) But the whole upshot is that his message to some female employees was "You are female and I would like to put my sperm in you because this is what females are for, and it would be doing me a big old favor."  Not too different from how horny men just want to borrow their workplace subordinates' reproductive organs for a bit after all, is it?

And it is just as coercive. After all, it's just doing a favor. People donate kidneys and bone marrow to people they work with don't they? Except this is about making a child. That creates bonds. In a power imbalance situation like employer/employee, that can create bondage.

It's hard for me to fathom not seeing this as a wholly inappropriate thing to bring up with one's staffers, but what I know of Franks' worldview oddly put the "how" of his awkwardness into perspective. But it is really, deeply inappropriate. 

The Stress of Their Disregard

The reckoning we've been having over sexual harassment has been piling on names and stories of harassment and assault in a way that that can tend to enervate.  For some, it's a reminder of their own assault, harassment, or other abuse; for others, a discovery that the world is populated by too many abusive men entrusted with too much power over others' livelihoods; or maybe it's a mixture of both. It can be a shock to recognize the blind eye that has been turned to the abuse of others from people who considered themselves protected, or to come to terms with the degree that people with quite clear vision aided and covered up the exploitation and dismissal of the humanity of other people for their own personal reasons. 

It's a fucking lot to accept, although a lot of people who have been through it kind of already knew. The insult added to all this injury is the commentary of people who either haven't grasped the pain and waste of all this cultural sexual/sexist bullshit, or will happily lay the blame for all this at the feet of the victims. 

A lot of the handwringing has been about how the allegations against powerful men will now derail their careers and cast a pall over whatever work they've done--there's a better point to be made (as Caroline Framke at Vox has done) about how abusers have been gatekeepers that have hounded out and silenced good talented people from their fields. They could have brilliantly mentored them, building teams and encouraging fledgling enthusiasm, but chose to just be petty and treat them with a kind of disregard. I think of Charlie Rose, saying that he felt that he was "pursuing shared feelings". He, the celebrated interviewer--could not be bothered to ask the women what they felt? No--he disregarded them. Their feelings did not matter. The good, productive journalism they could have assisted in did not matter.

I feel the same sort of recognition regarding the allegations against Rep. John Conyers.  This employee was disregarded. The patterns of protection from his circle against the accuser's claims just seem too familiar to discount. Her ability to do her job was jeopardized by the very person she was working for. How can that be productive? Whatever good Rep. Conyers has done, I have to consider this sort of thing very seriously because it speaks to his effectiveness as a public servant. 

With the politicization of sexual harassment,  sexual abuse, and rape claims, the defenses are not a great look for any culture. We learn that Congress really has created a system where sexual malefactors never learn from their fuckups.  We learn that anti-gay activist Tony Perkins is okay with same-sex sexual harassment, if the perpetrator is also vocally anti-gay and in the process of gathering political power.  These are examples of disregard--people not caring who is harmed. 

In the defense of former Judge Roy Moore, the arguments go further: Pastor Flip Benham claims Roy Moore may have favored underage girls because older women were either married or tainted. It's disgustingly reminiscent of the abstinence lessons that compare a woman who has lost her virginity to chewed gum.  It disregards a woman's value as being about anything but what is between her legs. Pastor Earl Wise performs an astonishing act of victim-blaming, managing to cite the young girls being pursued as having asked for it and looking like they were 20 years old, anyway.  I would be interested to know if Pastor Wise has made this mistake about the age of young girls, himself, and whether he ever felt himself the prey of their "sweet dreams". 

What I don't hear in any of these arguments is any empathy for why these accusations are being made, or any acceptance that Moore may have behaved inappropriately at all. The accusers are disregarded. But of all shocking defenses, I have to go to Stephen Moore--who equated Roy Moore's underage predation with...being pro-choice.  Of all the nonsensical claims that could be made his has the worst math. Both the issues of reproductive choice and not getting raped rely on a respect for bodily autonomy and the world where support for reproductive liberty equals child molestation only exists where one divides both sides by the proposition that women have no rights that a man need respect.  This is horrific. Women, their right to and ownership of their bodies, are disregarded. For the sake, as near as I can tell, of tax cuts. 

And of course, President Trump likes Moore too. And he would.

This is the disregard that stresses us; the claims that we are liars when we talk about our abuse, or that our abuse doesn't matter because we are taking things the wrong way. This is the narrative that we don't know what is best for us, and the lie that our careers are only made possible by support of "great men". This is the dismissal of children's innocence. This is the blame that falls on victims. This is sexism and class war.   This is religion reinforcing a cultural crime. 

And while I hate it all, I am glad we are finally airing it out, even though there will be lies, and bullshit, and tears all around. Because too many people have been disregarded and we need to stop and recognize we all benefit when we all can live our potential. 

The above scene is Bernini's Apollo and Daphne. Daphne was a nymph pursued by Apollo who chose to be a tree rather than succumb to his advances. Things happen in mythology for reasons.  The title of this post is a call-back to the novel by Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard. Who got his title from here. 

The Pitch That Defiles

President Donald Trump's Chief of Staff spoke at length about the process in returning a US soldier home and the nature of how Gold Star families are informed of their loss. General Kelly has an intimate and experienced knowledge of that process, and I don't care to take away from that--except to call out that this was a very moving wrap, a sort of turgid tortilla, for a bullshit burrito. Because while he spoke movingly about the process, he also slammed into his address some actual indefensible nonsense. 

Here are some excerpts of note: 

Well, let me tell you what I told him. Let me tell you what my best friend, Joe Dunford, told me — because he was my casualty officer. He said, Kel, he was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed. He knew what he was getting into by joining that 1 percent. He knew what the possibilities were because we’re at war. And when he died, in the four cases we’re talking about, Niger, and my son’s case in Afghanistan — when he died, he was surrounded by the best men on this Earth: his friends.

That’s what the President tried to say to four families the other day. I was stunned when I came to work yesterday morning, and brokenhearted at what I saw a member of Congress doing. A member of Congress who listened in on a phone call from the President of the United States to a young wife, and in his way tried to express that opinion — that he’s a brave man, a fallen hero, he knew what he was getting himself into because he enlisted. There’s no reason to enlist; he enlisted. And he was where he wanted to be, exactly where he wanted to be, with exactly the people he wanted to be with when his life was taken.

For one thing, this only corroborates the statement that was made by Congresswoman Wilson that Trump stated that her husband knew what he was getting into when he signed up for service. This particular bit only reinforces the statements of the people who heard the call. Also, talking about Rep. Wilson "listening in" was inaccurate, because it sounds like she was eavesdropping, and wasn't invited to share in that call by the widow because she, also, was a close friend of the deceased.

It stuns me that a member of Congress would have listened in on that conversation. Absolutely stuns me. And I thought at least that was sacred. You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country. Women were sacred, looked upon with great honor. That’s obviously not the case anymore as we see from recent cases. Life — the dignity of life — is sacred. That’s gone. Religion, that seems to be gone as well. 

Gold Star families, I think that left in the convention over the summer. But I just thought — the selfless devotion that brings a man or woman to die on the battlefield, I just thought that that might be sacred.

The member of Congress, once again, listened in by invitation of the family of the deceased. That choice has its own sanctity. The dignity of life? Don't make me laugh! We're talking about the dignity of death, and whether the dead also serve the CIC. For whatever use he has for them, for a kind of order they have no ability to refuse. Whether the currently serving POTUS gets to use General Kelly's son as a human shield.

And what about "Women were sacred, looked on with great honor" and "Religion, that seems to be gone as well"?

Are women uppity tarts now that we get to serve in congress and are without honor or sacredness? Are people just entirely falling down on the routine offering of "Merry Christmases"? Do either of those things have any fucking thing whatsoever to do with whether Trump tried to use the fallen soldiers to shield himself from criticism regarding the Niger mission, whatever that was, as if their blood expiated him from the basic sin of incompetence? Was the Gold Star  Khan family really to blame for the debasing of their conversation?  Why not Trump, who started it by demeaning immigrants, many of whom serve this country, and then lashed out at the Khans when he didn't like what they had to say?

It was a kind of dutiful clean-up where Kelly tried to mop up Trump's mess regarding what he had to say about fallen servicemembers, that became Kelly's mess about how he served a lying, stupid, unacceptably unprepared man.

That is still who Trump is, by the way. Nothing Kelly said changed that, either. It only made him a little more responsible for it.

The Usual Warning Signs

This profile of James Fields, the 20-year old Nazi-fanboy who allegedly murdered Heather Heyer and injured at least 19 others, is chilling in that there were obvious warning signs that this young man was headed for violence--because he was already performing violence:

In a report sourced to police records, the newspaper said that wheelchair-bound Bloom called police in Florence, Kentucky, at least nine times starting in 2010 seeking help with her sometimes violent son.

Soon after graduating high school in 2015, Fields joined the U.S. Army but left by December after failing to meet training standards, the Army said in a statement.

What kind of person physically assaults his disabled mom? What kind of person seeks out a profession that involves firearms and violence but displays no aptitude for the actual working parts of the job description? A person with a fuse easily lit in a tiki-torch atmosphere.

I've covered this before--Elliot Rogers.  Ismaayil Brinsley. James Hodgkinson.  (There are others, but these posts stand out in my mind.) Sometimes you know someone is liable to hurt masses of people because they already hurt people, often women, they already associate with.

This violence ideation was apparent with Dylan Klebold, who dwelt upon Nazis, and Eric Harris, who dwelt upon all kinds of things, but also a dehumanized image of female sexuality.

They all failed to see people as just...people. So they resorted to violence against people. There was no understanding what the humanity of their victims even was.

There are warning signs. They just look an awful lot like our culture. We separate people by race, creed, gender, religion. We objectify people based on what they can do or can't do for us. And we depersonalize them by creating narratives about them based on our ignorance, not based on our curiosity about the Other and how those who are not ourselves even live. And I include myself in that "we". Trying to break out of that othering, dehumanizing, and situational dealing with other people is a struggle everyone deals with. But we don't talk about it intelligently, if we talk about it at all. And those who don't sort it out within themselves, do violent shit, because they never learned that people were people. And none of us are fucking special. We just live, bleed, try to get by, and hopefully find other people who will love us for our difficult and unspecial selves.

But we don't need to be special to have earned the right to live. We are all here. It's all we have. It is all we need to have. I don't understand how it eludes anyone that human beings not yourself have their hereness to justify their existence, and that life is not cheap, but a daily struggle for air and water and calories, and room to move and think and be, but it is the basic principle on which I think any kind of reality needs to be based--the other is not unlike you in uniqueness and rights. They like you are physically capable of suffering and can be injured, get sick, fear death, deserve love. And this is the best part of them, and you. Because it makes it incumbent upon us all to see one another for what we are.

Be fearless enough to love and be loved, be ready to hold back your worst until you've seen your fellow human for their best. And if their best is Nazi shit, well, I guess, bust them up until their asses get fixed. Because that way is a sunken place and nothing any good can come out of.

Phyllis Schlafly Has Left Us

As a feminist and social justice warrior type since I could walk, basically, the existence of someone like Phyllis Schlafly has posed a conundrum, that I want to air out as a kind of eulogy. Admire her for making her way through a man's world? Or repudiate and drag her for whatever she's done or said to make things harder for other people than they needed to be? And the answer is "both".

She was a woman of great intelligence and talent, who raised six children and received a fine education, and displayed through her communications a deliberatively and exceedingly capable mind--also she was a narrow bigot of the very worst sort, and devoted her life to reinforcing the kind of hierarchy that kept white male Christian gatekeepers as the arbiters of the kind of society she thought we ought to have because people who didn't meet her "values" just weren't her people. Or maybe even people at all.

Betty Friedan once called her an "Aunt Tom"--my preferred term for her sort is "sister shafter". The kind of prim, reserved woman, who can't conceive of the sort of wretched abuse another married woman might face at the hands of a spouse, denying that marital rape is even a possibility, is a disgraceful denial of empathy. The lack of sympathy for the woman who needs must be a breadwinner because she has no man is as unchristian as the Christianity she used to justify such disturbingly dehumanizing attitudes towards her fellow female. Her attitude regarding queers was no less shocking, and not at all ameliorated by having an actual gay son.

And she was also a garden-varietal mid-20th century racist. She sided with Goldwater and you can read between the lines with that, and with Donald Trump because her attitudes regarding the browning of America were predictably "anti". She thought baseball had gotten very disturbingly colored--by foreigners. She was an agitator and proud of it, no matter what she thought other, lesser females ought to do with themselves.

I never liked what she stood for, or particularly understood how she stood for any of it. Rather than disliking her as any sort of formidable conservative mind, I tended to view her as a sort of relic--a mind trapped in amber, forever extolling a world that probably did not exist and wouldn't ever again, and "Hooray!" for that.

It's probably fit that she passed before a liberal woman became our US President. It would have discomfited her to no end.

What Ever Set Him Off?

So, let me get this straight, a woman-beater and accused rapist with a history of antisocial activity shoots a bunch of people and now claims he saw atrocities and is a "warrior for babies"? Hm. Seems like a heap of murderin' cancels out his moral high road, but at least we understand what the problem with him is now.

The pro-life movement is anything but "pro-life". And it gave this fool the idea that he could combine his hatred of women's autonomy with his general enjoyment of the feeling of doing violent shit. And now he thinks that is a good reason to have been shooting people.

Was it something to do with watching lots of fetus snuff porn videos and people talking past the idea that pregnancy is a condition that adult people may not be able to reconcile with their actual fully-realized-human lives? Because when someone talks about 1st trimester fetuses as "babies", I always bite my lip the way you do when a toddler says "mines". No little guy, "mine" is never pluralized. And no, big fella, what's happening in someone else's uterus has nothing to do with you.

"No More Baby Parts."

If the "mainstream media" is to be believed, Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooter, Robert Dear, said "No more baby parts," when he was finally taken into custody after his violent rampage.  But, why, whatever could he have meant by that, do you suppose? Maybe he was just down to the clinic to borrow a cup of baby parts and found they were all out?  Maybe he was building a Frankenstein-esque creature and got peeved at the glut of juvenile bits on the market? Maybe he was misheard and was unhappy with "A. B. parts."

As Sherlock Holmes might have said, if he were prone to using my vernacular, if every other possibility is so fucking stupid and fanciful that you'd have to be a lying bastard to propose them, you should consider the evidence staring you in the face.

And it might just sound a little self-serving if one admits that Dear was a domestic terrorist, as Gov. Mike Huckabee has, but then plays victim by saying it especially harms the pro-life folks. Does this make the anti-abortion people really look bad? Do they need much help, there? And the knee-slapper is, this is the guy who was going to use the US military to forcibly close health clinics. It's "domestic terrorism" if you are a DIY-type. If you're president, you do what you want!

Failed tech-CEO Carly Fiorina takes a slightly different tack--it's just "typical left-wing tactics" to blame anti-abortion rhetoric for violent actions.  How dare we connect those dots in chronological order! This was the candidate, mind you, who imagined a scenario that wasn't even in the highly-edited videos who had to go on to produce one yet more lurid. Which we are not supposed to find incendiary or deceitful in the least, mind you.

Now, a handful of people are just looking at this guy's criminal records and immediately dismissing him as a lunatic. Mental illness is a spectrum, charges against this miscreant were regularly dismissed, and the things he was accused of weren't necessarily out of bounds for people who are considered perfectly sane. Being antisocial or even sociopathic doesn't exclude this person from having political views. People have made note of the fact that Colorado Springs is the headquarters for Focus on the Family. The founding member, Dr. James Dobson, justified both wife-beating and animal abuse.  (Not that I'm saying Dear was influenced by Focus on the Family, at all, at all--after all, he wasn't originally from Colorado Springs. He was from North Carolina. Where Eric Rudolph was found holed up. And there's some folks to this day who consider Rudolph a folk hero. )