And There Goes One of My Guys...

I liked Mike Pence, and liked the idea of a dark horse congressional candidate overturning Romney, Huckabee, and Palin for the nomination. So I'm a little disappointed that he's putting the kibosh on it now. That said, he's playing the smart route, and getting out of Mitch Daniels' way.

So now my Dark Horse is John Bolton.  He would rule

It's all about Meghan McCain. Especially when it isn't.

This gentleman came to Meghan McCain's GWU speech, heard her, and posted a YouTube video in response.



Most of it is a polite pointing out of Meggie's self-contradictions, but the most damning indictment comes at the four-minute mark, when he points out that the crowd of protestors she assumed were demonstrating against her were in fact protesting something else and didn't even know she was there.

Who Knew Towing Could Be So Dramatic?

Investigative Voice:

The FBI may be investigating Baltimore's towing business in light of the recent move by the city to privatize its impound lot and do away with the city’s medallion towing business, the fellow councilperson told Kraft, according to the sources.

Are you telling me there's a federal statute on how urban centers can operate towing firms? WHY?

But at least the mayor has the right idea:

“From what I understand the mayor believes there are things we should do and other things we should not,” Nelson told I.V. at the time.

Indeed. Until:

At the meeting she told minority-owned towing firms that a privatization plan would provide them a greater share of the city’s lucrative contract-towing business.

“We’re trying to increase the availability… of minority and women-owned businesses,” she said then. “We certify you as a minority or a woman so you can be named as a subcontractor.”

*sigh* I know this is boilerplate, but dammit, Baltimore is a minority-majority city. Anyone who can get a tow-license should be able to start a tow business. Why do they have to make everything so difficult?

Get Out of the Way, Here Comes Domino...

Egypt revolts, and this time, the Obama administration is determined to be on time for the party:

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that Washington supports the "fundamental right of expression and assembly," but she urged Egyptians to refrain from violence.

That's about as close to approval as we can get, inasmuch as we rely upon Mubarak to be no friend of al-Qaeda.

If It Bleeds, It Bores

Unlike E.J. Dionne, I don't have any particular animus against Eric Goldstein. But his column of today is bizarre to me, strangley formulaic and and bereft of real argument. So I'm going to fisk it, if for no other reason than to keep my claws sharp.

A Tunisian revolution that's more bloody than jasmine

What a powerful headline! So challenging in its assertions, so evocative in its construction, so tasty the bourbon at the hotel bar!

What's the Difference Between a Developer and an Environmentalist?

A developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods.

An environmentalist is someone who already owns a house in the woods.

Via Ace, Patrick Moore's Confessions of a Greenpeace Founder. Moore has been out and proud from Greenpeace for some time, but here he spells out where things went wrong:

Some activists simply couldn't make the transition from confrontation to consensus; it was as if they needed a common enemy. When a majority of people decide they agree with all your reasonable ideas the only way you can remain confrontational and antiestablishment is to adopt ever more extreme positions, eventually abandoning science and logic altogether in favour of zero-tolerance policies.

And this is precisely what people don't like about environmentalists: their zealotry and puritanical will to damn the Industrial Revolution. They're angry Romantics with a furry fetish.

The idea that we cannot pollute our land has taken hold. But some pollution will continue as long as humans will need a source of energy. And I am deeply suspicious of any alternative fuel that requires massive government support. If it truly works, it will work on its own.

The Industiral Revolution has created problems for the planet, but it is also the only way to address those problems. If the Environmentalists really cared about the earth, they'd stop standing in the way of its saviors.

Micheal Moore, Health Care: The Fisking (A Zombie Post from March 2010)

[Editors Note: I've been cleaning out the old blog today, adding tags, deleting drafts that would never see the light of day, when I stumbled upon this. God only knows why I got this far and never finished it. I was faced with either deleting it or getting rid of it. And for some reason I cannot choose to un-fisk Michael Moore. I just can't quit the big fat bastard]

Because.

To My Fellow Citizens, the Republicans:

Say, what you will about the man, he loves him some schtick. And he loves no schtick like the "Phoney Politeness" schtick.

Baby Doc Duvalier Splits Atoms...With His Mind

I mentioned earlier that Baby Doc returned to Haiti and was promptly arrested and prevented from leaving the country. Now we have some indication as to what prompted him to show his face:

Duvalier, 59, made the trip just before a Swiss law that could entitle him to at least $4.6 million takes effect on Feb. 1. To collect the funds, he would have to show Haitian authorities aren't interested in prosecuting him.

So he tried to collect money by proving that Haiti wasn't going to prosecute him, which he did by showing up in Haiti, where they are now prosecuting him.

Palinoia is Bush Derangement Syndrome in a Skirt

Losing your mind over Sarah Palin has it's own cute name: Palinoia.  I won't take Taranto's argument and run with it, the way Robert McCain does, because I'm not that devoted to the vigorous thwacking of contraception. Rather, I found the key quote in Taranto's column early on:

They resent her because, in their view, she has risen above her station.

Sarah Palin is a state-college grad, and state-college grads aren't supposed to eke out Ivy-Leaguers for the top spot on the greasy pole of politics. She's the American equivalent of what Roman patricians called a homo novus, a New Man, one whos family had never had a consul before. Thus a good deal of the "she's a moron," is more or less the same as calling Gaius Marius an Italian hayseed with no Greek.

I do not mean to say that Sarah Palin is as accomplished as Gaius Marius. As I've said before, I have my doubts about her aptitude for the presidency. But snobbery is snobbery, and we've seen this before:

There are many among our political and media elite, and among those on the coasts who are in their zone of influence, who simply cannot believe that a born-again Christian from Texas can ever be right about anything, ever. Decades (centuries?) of internalized bigotry of urbanites against provincials, of secular humanists against unsophisticated believers, does not vanish overnight, not even in the face of an act of war, not when the same group has drank deep of the waters of Wilsonian collective security and refuses to believe that their enemy is their enemy because he wants to be so.

In short, George W. Bush has been despised since long before the Iraq War, because he is the living embodiment of Those People, and the habit of the American media and political establishment has for some time been to mock Those People as cruel, stupid, and dangerous.

The oldest kind of elitism in the world is the only kind that our ruling class celebrates.

UPDATE: In light of this post at Classical Values, I should point out where exactly my doubts on Palin spring from.

To start with, they aren't properly "doubts." That implies a bias toward thinking Palin is not competent to be President. Really, my problem with her is that there's been so much dust kicked up about her, that it's hard to discern the true person underneath. At the moment she was tapped to be Vice President, I liked everything I heard about her. Her speech at the convention was good (not great, but better than McCain's). After that, she entered the Media Circus and to date, hasn't come out. Almost everything about her is now part of the ongoing drama of her against her assailants. All of which I find a distraction to determining whether she really can handle the presidency.

If she steps up in the campaign, and takes the heat, and demonstrates her acumen, then I'll give her a vote. If not, there are others.

Old and Busted: Sarah Palin Made Loughner Shoot People

New Hotness: Zeitgeist, which is anti-semetic and right-wing, made Loughner Shoot People

You have to ignore a LOT to make Zeitgeist a Republican film. You also have to ignore a lot to make it a Democratic one. Mainstream American politics -- of which, like her or not, Sarah Palin is a member -- has as little to do with this sort of vision-dreaming. These people aren't on the political fringe. They aren't even cranks. They're nothing, detritus, the equivalent of the tinfoil they doubtless wrap around their heads to avoid the CIA mind control.

Kooks. Jared Loughner was a kook. And kooks do kooky things.

The Left likes to portray Tea Partiers as kooks, for the same reason that Federalists called Thomas Jefferson the Anti-Christ: for rhetorical purposes, an entirely cynical exercise in fear-mongering. And if I wanted to stretch it, I could make a comparison between that and the fear-mongering of Zeitgeist. But I'm not going to do that, because there's a world of difference between "You guys are lunatics!" and "the Federal Reserve is poisoning the wells, the Bilderbergers are unwittingly causing us to bow down to the Beast, Jesus is the Devil!!!eleventy!!!" Cynicism does many things, but it does not willfully deny reality.

Dictator Rule #1

If you get gone, stay gone:

Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier was charged with corruption and the theft of his country's meagre funds last night after the former Haitian dictator was hauled before a judge in Port-au-Prince

Two days after his return to the country he left following a brutal 15-year rule, a noisy crowd of his supporters protested outside the state prosecutor's office while he was questioned over accusations that he stole public funds and committed human rights abuses after taking over as president from his father in 1971.

I honestly did not see this coming. I assumed that if Baby Doc was coming home, that he would have, you know, some kind of a plan for surviving, something to avoid this kind of nonsense. Of course, maybe he does. Papa Doc surely would have. But this is Baby, so...

Liquor Board Inspector Works for a Club

Investigative Voice has been on this story from the beginning:

Pigtown residents who gathered to hear plans for a new 5,000-square-foot bar on the 700 block of Washington Boulevard at a community meeting last week said they were a bit confused when the three prospective owners were joined by a liquor board inspector who said he would be working as security consultant to the project.

 And now, Chanel 11 has found it worthy of their time:

A Baltimore liquor inspector has been reassigned amid allegations that he violated the firewall that's supposed to separate the inspectors from the businesses they regulate.

Now, I-V mentioned Fitzgerald's re-assignment, too, but at the end, giving the impression that it was the normal process of investigations, and not the lede of the story. I-V also managed to interview the co-owner of the prospective club, Tiffany Felder, who brought Fitzgerald in as a security consultant. Channel 11 makes do with a "businessman" named Paul Ely who's clearly hostile to the proposed club.

So basically, Stephen Janis scoops the Baltimore Media again, and gives us an actual damn story. Compare the two, and see which one gives you more actual information.

A Brief History of Haitian Democracy

Since I mentioned the return of Baby Doc below, I think it meet and proper to look at Haiti's sad history, and why cynicism survives longer than anything else there:

One Tyrant Out, Another Returns

The official silence surrounding the Tunisian Revolution invites gales of laughter. This sort of things isn't supposed to happen in the Arab world, where the people have two choices:

1. Bloodthirsty screaming Islamists who will behead your brother for reading Oscar Wilde, and stone your sister for reading anything; or
2. Meretricious gasbags who will funnel the wealth of your country into Swiss Bank accounts, and cause your cousin to vanish in the dead of night when he snarks too loudly about it.

But here the people, having already voted out the Islamists 24 years ago, have sent the gasbag, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, into exile. No doubt he can buy an estate in San Marino and commiserate with Roman Polanski about the world's injustices.

Obviously, this too will pass. Though the sight of furious young men in beards and galabiyeh, invoking the Prophet's wrath, has been blessedly absent from Tunisia's popular uprising, they may soon return. Algeria, which has experienced a civil war between Islamists and anti-Islamists for nearly 20 years, is just over the border. And there's no guaruntee that a secular government will govern any better than Ben Ali did.

But for the moment, let's enjoy watching the Saudis, Syrians, Egyptians and Iranians glance warily over their shoulders. Let's quietly savor the obvious discomfort of the French, who are again hung upon the hypocrisy of their crypto-colonialism. 'Tis time to kiss, when tyrants seem to fear.

On the other hand, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier, the dictatorial heir who was flung from Haiti like a wormy apple the year before Ben Ali came to power, has returned. The feckless son of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, the humanitarian medical man who murdered 30,000 Hatiians during his 14-year reign, Baby Doc has shown up out of the blue during Haiti's elections, for no stated reason. Perhaps Ben Ali can rent his chateau.

On the New Civility

Jim Treacher calls out Richard Cohen for being the hypocrital swine he is:

Go ahead and insult anybody you want. But please excuse me if I don’t take you seriously when you turn right around and call on the rest of us to be nicer to each other.

And then, of course, there's Don Surber's Rant Heard Round the Right-osphere:

The left suddenly wants civil discourse.

Bite me.

The left wants to play games of semantics.

Bite me.

The left wants us to be civil — after being so uncivil for a decade.

Bite me.

The problem with all this is we don't even have an agreement about what civility consists of. What is it about the Tea Parties that the Left finds uncivil? The entirely peaceful protests, which usually leave the site cleaner than it was found? The dissent from the Keynsian Consensus of 2008? The accusations of socialism/fascism/communism levelled at Barack Obama? What?

If we could agree upon what was out of bounds, and we could trust the other side not to violate those bounds, perhaps we could establish this new civility.

As it stands though, I'm off to buy a bigger soapbox.

NY Schools Chancellor Jokes About Birth Control to Fix Over-Crowding; Hilarity Ensues

When demand outstrips supply, and service cannot be refused, what happens?

People make grim, bitter jokes:

The public-service novice, who has spent her entire career in media and publishing, also dropped jaws at the meeting by likening her task of satisfying space-crunch concerns in every neighborhood to making "many Sophie's Choices" -- a reference to the book in which a mother in the Auschwitz death camp is forced to decide which of her two children will live.

I know what she meant: she has to make impossible decisions, and she feels bad about it. The woman has to meet unlimited and ever-growing needs, with limited and and difficult-to-grow resources. Why anyone expects different is a mystery to me.

But faith in the endless power of public institutions marches on.

We're All Perverts Now.

From the WSJ's "Eek! A Male!" (h/t: Althouse)

What's really ironic about all this emphasis on perverts is that it's making us think like them. Remember the story that broke right before Christmas? The FBI warned law-enforcement agencies that the new Video Barbie could be used to make kiddie porn. The warning was not intended for the public but it leaked out. TV news celebrated the joy of the season by telling parents that any man nice enough to play dolls with their daughters could really be videotaping "under their little skirts!" as one Fox News reporter said.

The more we think about children as victims of pedophilia, the more pedophilia is on our minds. It's a self-perpetuating obsession, the Last Taboo.

And that's not the worst. In England in 2006, BBC News reported the story of a bricklayer who spotted a toddler at the side of the road. As he later testified at a hearing, he didn't stop to help for fear he'd be accused of trying to abduct her. You know: A man driving around with a little girl in his car? She ended up at a pond and drowned.
We think we're protecting our kids by treating all men as potential predators. But that's not a society that's safe. Just sick.

When you catch a predator, the predator also catches you.

Nifty.

Pope John Paul II to be Beatified May 1.

For those non-Cat'licks, Beatification is the half-way point to being declared a saint. Afterwards it will be customary to refer to him as Blessed John Paul II.

You may return to your pedophilia jokes now.

Obama's Tucson Speech

Hopefully this will be the last I write on this subject.

My initial reaction to Obama's speech, which I read last night, was that he was sounding the right notes, and appearing presidential for the first time in his presidency. By explicitly calling attention to the Loughner's victims, he made the subject what it should have been all along. It was the right re-focusing of the national attention and mood.

Now, many on the Right are not going to be satisfied with this. For them, nothing short of defending Sarah Palin and telling the unhinged of his own camp specifically to silence themselves, will be acceptable. As with his Iraq Speech, I'm not so picky. I don't expect a Democratic President to specificaly call out members of his own party for rebuke. There's simply no benefit for him to do that. No Republican President would do it either.

No, last night, however briefly, Obama was the President of the whole country, not just the people who agree with him. That is more than I usually expect from him, so I will grant it respect.

Progressive Logic

Not taking more money from people who make 250,000 a year? Plutocracy.

Giving export assistance to one of America's largest corporations? Common-sense, reality-based government work.

Sarah Palin is Absolutely Right

I don't care about Sarah Palin. I saw very little of her in the 2008 campaign that really impressed me. By the same token, it doesn't take much subtelty to see that the response to her from the Left is preposterously out of proportion to her actual deeds. Like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, she seems to evoke a particular deranged fury from those who consider themselves our credentialed elite.

For both of these reasons, I hope she doesn't win the 2012 GOP nomination, and don't plan on voting for her to get it. To my mind, better candidates can be found, and if she does win, then the election will become a referendum on her media image, rather than anything about the issues or her ability to grapple with them.

That said, her response to the Gifford hysteria is absolutely dead on:

There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal. And they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated? Back in those “calm days” when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols? In an ideal world all discourse would be civil and all disagreements cordial. But our Founding Fathers knew they weren’t designing a system for perfect men and women. If men and women were angels, there would be no need for government. Our Founders’ genius was to design a system that helped settle the inevitable conflicts caused by our imperfect passions in civil ways. So, we must condemn violence if our Republic is to endure.

One of the mushy middle's more tedious fallacies constantly refrains that our politics are so loud and obnoxious now, and getting worse. The demonstrable falseness of this belief doesn't stop them from holding it. So-called "moderates" and "centrists" believe it because they don't know anything about politics or history, and they don't know anything about politics or history because they find it distasteful.

Politics has never been nice. History has never been nice. Lament this if you will, take pains to curtail it if you must. But don't pretend that we're seeing anything new. Humanity makes innovations on this front but rarely.

Feminism for Me, But Not for Thee

Classical Values, noting the absence of the rather obvious sexism narrative:

When I said this:

If we suppose that Loughner's victim had been black or hispanic, I think there would be a pretty loud chorus on the left that the racist motivation for the shooting was obvious. Similarly, had Barney Frank been shot, there would have been immediate cries of homophobia. 

I should have noted that it would not be true if the black, hispanic or gay victim happened to be on the right side of the political spectrum. Thus, if, say, Clarence Thomas or Alberto Gonzales were assassinated (especially by leftist gunmen), they would not be seen as victims of racism. Similarly, when Pim Fortuyn was assassinated by an anarcho-primitivist nut, this was not condemned as homophobic by the PC classes.

It is a basic law of identity politics that such identities are conditioned upon being on the left. Which is another reason that no indignity heaped on Sarah Palin can ever be condemned as sexist.

Read the whole thing.

Taxing Less and More

I don't suppose I'd object to simplifying the tax code along the lines of this article in the Fiscal Times.

The beauty of tax reform is that it starts with a belief everyone shares: The current system is horrible. Monstrously complex, unfair and inefficient, the code has fewer friends in Washington than Mahmoud Ahmadinejab, and in principle, throwing it over for something simpler is a sure bipartisan crowd pleaser.

For starters, lowering the top bracket and corporate tax rates is long overdue, if only to bring us in line with other developed nations. And I don't have a problem with closing loopholes, which I see as essentially government manipulation of private behavior via the tax code. Anything to reduce the Byzantine nature of the tax code is a benefit to me.

But I suspect they won't go far enough; won't lower the rates enough, won't remove enough loopholes. Instead of a 60,000 - page tax code, we'll get a 30,000- page one. How long would it take for interest-group pressure and regulatory creep to return us to the same place we are now?

But I salute the effort.

Right-Wing Rhetoric is So Violent, and Man Do I Wanna Slap Sarah Palin!

Via Carthago Delenda Est, another example of great lengths to which the left is willing to go to improve the tone of our national discourse, to calm the raging waters of our rhetorical madness.

The blogger (who is not the cartoonist) responds to objections thusly:

Now look at the first few comments there. It's people complaining that the cartoon is in bad taste! Good grief, have you people ever actually listened to Rush Limbaugh or Michael Savage or looked at Sarah Palin's campaign strategy? I say again, madness.

See? All you have to do is look at them, and you know that they are scum who deserve nothing. And are way too angry all the time. It's so frightening!

Self-Esteem vs. "Chinese" Parenting

This article in the WSJ about the superiority of "Chinese mothers" has been making the rounds of late. The debate has been had by people who know far more about raising children than I do. But the reason the debate exists, I think, is right here:

By contrast, I don't think most Westerners have the same view of children being permanently indebted to their parents. My husband, Jed, actually has the opposite view. "Children don't choose their parents," he once said to me. "They don't even choose to be born. It's parents who foist life on their kids, so it's the parents' responsibility to provide for them. Kids don't owe their parents anything. Their duty will be to their own kids." This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent.

Without question, this is the blinkered, self-emasculating guilt that the modern Western parent has willingly embraced. For some reason, we have decided that to have a child is a dastardly act, and that a parent must labor for decades, giving up all trace of adult life or personality, in order to atone for it. It's gotten so bad that a complete 180-degree turnaround -- becoming a totalitarian shame-dispenser -- can now be seen as an outre position worthy of a new look.

For myself, Here is what I wrote on the subject in September of 2005:

Our modern child-rearing techniques seem focused on the emotional lives of children. I think this is wrong, because in the grand scheme of things, the emotions of children are transitory and relatively unimportant. Child-rearing should be about not the blooming of the child's life but the coaxing into existence of the adult the child must become. None of the research-approved, peaceable parenting skills that the elite would foist on us are half so valuable as inducing a child to think beyond his immediate wants and desires. And I am unconvinced that this can be done without the use of fear.

Yes, I said fear. It is written that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. To this, I add that the fear of parents is the beginning of familial peace. the State of childhood is a state of constant physical and emotional flux. They are long on impulse and short on experience. Catering to that mind-set gives that mind-set power that it neither deserves nor can use justly. To make up for that experience, it is necessary for parents to set boundaries and defend them to the utmost. As the best defense is a good offense, a properly built fear of parental anger keeps boundaries defended, sometimes without the parent even knowing it.

It is not that I love children the less, but that I love adults more.

Jeff Danziger is an Self-Important Asshat, and Other Thoughful Musings

Apparently if you're not within the actual confines of a court of law, you have no obligation to back your statements up with any kind of connection to fact.

Jeff Danziger, who doodles blurry editorial cartoons for the WaPo and presumably, other places, made his contribution to setting a new tone of calm introspection so needed after the Giffords shooting:

Really?

Ed Frank of Frank Strategies asks him to explain himself. Danziger replies with the usual boilerplate, that the Tea Parties anti-government rhetoric created a mind-controlling memefog that drove Loughner like the talking dog commanded Berkowitz. He does so while demonstrating command of no facts other than his Vietnam war record, which is as impressive as it is irrelevant.

Frank asks for a single piece of solitary evidence to back up his assertion. Danziger replies with the following atom-splitting chunk of Pure Genius:

Ed. We are not in court. I have been watching the development of this combination of loons and opportunists since it started. The Tea Party, the very name is ridiculous. Crazed fat people tortured by their lack of success in life, following the absolute worst of our politicians. Palin, Angel, Quayle’s rotten kid. These people are your choice for anything? The whole thing is based on unreality. Don’t you understand? And Mcveigh was reading that crazy shit from the enbd times or whagtever it is called.

If I was going to make up a stereotypical cornered-nitwit misdirecting non-response, I would not have penned one this utterly bereft of reason. It is adolescent in its mind-set: a set of assumptions based on hearsay and prejudice, into which knowledge of any kind cannot enter. The half-assed typing just seals the deal; I am dissapointed not to find ALLCAPS or a string of exclamation points melting into a string of 1's.

But wait, there's more:

In the end the government has GOT to work. We are in competition with the world. Car companies don’t compete. nation now compete. And these asses want to go back to the 1700′s. I’ve written enough. The whole thing is probably unstoppable except with another dumb war. That’s what usually happens. You can have it.

"Big Brother has to protect us, and if you disagree you're a Luddite, and Good Day, Sir! I'm going to slink off and Profoundly Despair For My Country. [music swells]"

This man believes himself wiser than the rest of us. He really really does. It makes me sad inside.

The Essayist #22: Politics and the Oedipus Effect

The Greeks believed in destiny. Unlike Old Testament prophets, Greek oracles weren't interested in changing behavior. If the gods let you know that something was going to happen, then that thing was going to happen. That thing was not going to change, no matter what you did. The message was not "Check yourself," but "Brace yourself."

Oedipus proves this perfectly. His parents, and then he, were told that Oedipus would murder his father and marry his mother. Everything that Laius, Jocasta, and Oedipus did to prevent this guarunteed that it would happen. By abandoning baby Oedipus on a hillside, Laius and Jocasta guaruntee that Oedipus grows up not knowing who his real parents are. By getting away from the people he thinks are his parents, Oedipus puts himself into his true parents' path. As Camille Paglia put it in Sexual Personae: "Oedipus, fleeing from his mother, runs right into her arms."

Owen Honors Pooped in the Punch Bowl. End of Story.

A good few wingnuts are up in arms over the fall of Owen Honors, the Captain of the USS Enterprise, who was a bit too Kirk for his own good. Here's Other McCain:

Just to be clear about the rules of the New Navy in the post-DADT era: An admiral can dress in drag and march in the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade, but any sailor who makes a wisecrack about such behavior will be drummed out of the service.

And Ace of Spades:

Honors is being hung out to dry for something that was either fine with his then superiors or which he was duly critiqued for and allowed to move on in his career. Either way, this is ex post facto outrage and the senior leadership of the Navy has simply thrown a dedicated and decorated officer to the wolves.

I respect their point of view, but I'm not sure I share it. There is no line of work in which you can make raunchy videos with your co-workers and subordinates and not get fired for it if it should come to light and embarass the higher-ups. Everybody blows off steam. Bosses are inclined to overlook blowing off steam, up to the point when it causes the public to question the judgement of the organization.

If you poop in the punch bowl at the company Christmas party, you might get away with it, depending on how funny everyone thinks it is. If you poop in the punch bowl at the company Christmas party and the pictures end up on Facebook, you're going to get fired, no matter how hard the boss laughed at the time.