Hermann Cain Might Could Endorse Gingrich

Stacy McCain hardest hit.

Gingrich: Comparisons and Myths.

I've always kind of liked Newt Gingrich for his brains and brashness. I've also often wondered about his judgement (having an affair while sticking it to Clinton over Lewinsky? Really?). Now that Hermann Cain has hit his first post-bounce drop, I'm prepared to lean toward him a little.

In the AmSpec, Jeffrey Lord compares Gingrich to Churchill. The parallels are interesting, but more interesting is this:

Not to be forgotten is what Fox News commentator Juan Williams, recently sitting next to Gingrich on the set of Special Report with Bret Baier, delicately referred to as the former Speaker's personal "baggage." By which Williams means the Speaker's three marriages, the extra-marital business and all the rest. The famous myth of the first Gingrich divorce is discussed here by Gingrich's daughter Jackie Gingrich Cushman, who was present at the time. Surprise, surprise -- fact, says Ms. Cushman, is different than left-wing fiction. The first Mrs. Gingrich, a private person, is very much still alive, present and accounted for and not deceased as is the tale. The story runs roughly that the dastardly Newt took divorce papers to his dying wife's bedside when she had no idea a divorce was in the offing, shocking her as she lay dying. In fact Mrs. Gingrich, says her daughter, had herself requested the divorce long before Gingrich entered her hospital room. The story, says Cushman, is fiction from start to finish. Gingrich's political mistake was not understanding that such a personal moment would be distorted and used by liberal opponents. Out of such a moment perhaps comes the Newtonian understanding of the need for a political rapid response team whose sole purpose is to flag political untruths on the spot. Be that as it may, this tale shows the endurance of a political Bigfoot tale, the political equivalent of the fictional monster repeatedly spotted but mysteriously never actually captured because, of course, in fact it doesn't exist.

The art of political judgement differs not greatly from the art of the bloodhound. One must learn to tell false scents from true ones. If Gingrich isn't really as personally awful as legend has it, then maybe -- just maybe, he has mellowed, and like Churchill, knows what the hour demands.

Of course, not everyone is prepared to embrace this rise. Robert Stacy McCain seems more hostile to Gingrich than he was to Rick Perry, which is saying something. This I cannot understand. Preferring Hermann Cain to Newt can be defended on conservative personal and policy preferences. Preferring Mitt Romney to Newt smacks rather of taking one's ball and going home.

Is Married at Sixteen Really Worse Than Pregnant at 16?

RS McCain has been following Courtney Stodden's (who?) marriage, for reasons that I suspect have something to do with his Rule #5. I find caring about the lives of demi-celebrities (or even the real ones) difficult, because I have a life. But he makes a fine point comparing Stodden's decision with Bristol Palin's:

But let’s ask a hypothetical question: Suppose that your daughter was determined to have sex at age 16. Given the choice, would you rather her first time be . . .
A. Drunk on wine coolers in a pup tent with Levi Johnston, orB. On her wedding night, in a luxury hotel suite, with her movie star husband.

Somewhere along the way, we as a society decided that the worst thing a 16-year-old (or 18-year-old, or 20-year-old) could do was get married and have a baby. Never mind that 16-20-year-old bodies, male and female, are screaming to make babies; it's become the sin by which one falls out of the middle class.

But getting wasted and dumbly engaging in the act that makes babies? Normal Friday night fun, acceptable so long as one pops a pill or convinces the young swain to slap an uncomfortable piece of latex on his John Thomas.

Never made a lick of sense to me. But my mom dropped out of college to marry my dad and have me, and she's having their vacation house renovated as we speak, so it's possible I don't know what I'm talking about.

"White Girl Bleeds a Lot"

Over at Other McCain, the blunt truth of "youths" engaging in mob violence yields another:

“Liberals believe ‘racist’ is the antonym of ‘Democrat.’”

Indeed.

New York Republicans...

...are apparently even more impotent than the Maryland variety, which put the kibosh on gay marriage this past winter.

Equality Über Alles, New York

Yeah, that should stop the demographic slide.

Krauthammer and Will Earn the Animus of Other McCain's Commenters

They are snobs, elitists, slide-rule minds in a Twitter world. And why?

They don't much care for Sarah Palin.

I'm not going to be impressed with Palin until her defenders can do something other than wave the bloody shirt like they were defending Acre from Saladin. If she is in fact, good enough, smart enough to be President, how's about forwarding some evidence to underscore that assertion?

Or you know, just keep doing this.
Worked like gangbusters for Christine O'Donnell.

Feminists are Stooges.

Stacy McCain again piles on the No Boys Allowed Club. This time, his target is Stephanie Coontz and her anti-mythological mythologizing. Naturally, he cannot resist quoting her during the Great Lewinsky Betrayal:

So we see that, at a time when the Predator-in-Chief was caught perjuring himself about an exploitative affair with an emotionally unstable subordinate less than half his age, Coontz’s principle concern was that the scandal was distracting attention from the important issues that mattered to liberals. Whatever credibility Coontz as an advocate for the equality and dignity of women in the workplace, she was willing to cast it aside — ignoring Clinton’s sordidly sexist behavior — rather than to let Clinton’s conservative critics gain any advantage by the exposure of his Oval Office affair.

Which reminds me of my own rant on this subject, from my baby days as a blogger:

And all you feminists out there: the fact that you stood mum while he sidestepped that very same law you fell over yourselves applauding in '94, the fact that you threw every nasty caveman stereotype you claim to abhor at Jones and Lewinsky, that you lined up to protect this Lothario, tells me everything I need to know about you. Like your spiritual mother de Beauvoir, you don't care what the Power does to others as long as you have a room of your own.

This is tangential to McCain's point, however, so Read the Whole Thing.

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.

Rape-Rape Rapity Rape

Other McCain takes a shot at Feministe's opining on Julian Assange's sexual assault charges and ends up making the wrong point:

In an era when some 40% of U.S. births are to unmarried women, in a culture where “Girls Gone Wild” and “hook-ups” are normative, where threesomes, bisexual experimentation and amateur video-porn orgies have become a virtual rite of passage for many young Americans, where chlamydia and herpes are pandemic — in this era of rampant sexual decadence, I say, does Jill Filipovic (J.D., NYU) seriously expect horny strangers to negotiate consent calmly on an act-by-act basis while they’re knocking boots, making the beast with two backs, in flagrante delicto? 

Listen up, sweetheart: You buy the ticket, you take the ride.

If you will forgive the puns, I take his thrust, but not his point.

Sex does not submit well to legalese. It is the animal in us, acting on non-rational desire, creating an experience that our bodies ride but do not fully control. Contracts made in such a state lend themselves easily to misunderstanding.

And yes, women would do well not to shag impressive-seeming strangers just because their goddamn names are in the paper. That's stupid, and no one should be subject to a harpy-bomb of dull denunciations ("slut-shaming!") because they point out that it's stupid. Sex should come from a well-ground of mutual respect and commitment. You can't have that with someone you don't know, and it's stupid to assume otherwise, and it's irresponsible to teach young people the contrary.

So yes, so-called "sexual liberation" has made it easier for cads like Assange to behave caddishly.

That said, just because a gentleman is hip-deep into a lady does not prevent her from applying the breaks, however foolish her actions up until that point. I don't accept the idea that once the pants are off, she's obligated to cut him a slice of trim. No man could walk into any court of law and say "Hey, she took my pants off. She owes me at least an old-fashioned." Life just doesn't work that way.

So yes, when she says "STOP," he's obligated to stop.

Whether his failure to do so meets the legal definition of rape is another question. The circumstances would play an enormous role. Say, for example, he doesn't hear her, because he's climaxing, and her protests aren't loud enough. Say she tells him to stop, and she does, because of some sudden thing he did/said that kicked her completely out of mood. But then they talk some more, and he moves in again, and she doesn't say "no"? Tacit consent? Not? Murky?

I don't know, myself. But I suspect that yelling the louder will not illuminate the issue.