| Dear Reader (including suspected terrorists like Steve Hayes), I probably shouldn’t be having this much fun with Steve’s plight. On Twitter I’ve been going on about my SteveHayesenfreude — the taking of undue pleasure at his misfortune. Hayes is a great guy, a real talent, and a good friend. But, how shall I put this? Bahaahahahahahahaha! I mean, the guy has been doing all of this intrepid reporting about the terrorist threat for more than a dozen years. And what does he have to show for it? Every time he wants to fly, some TSA agent is going to ask him to turn his head and cough and give new meaning to the phrase “packer fan.” It’s just so ridiculous. Unless, that is, there’s some truth to it. Imagine the scandal. If Hayes turned out to be deep, deep, deep, deep cover al-Qaeda, even Pamela Geller would be like, “Whoa, I didn’t see that coming.” Dick Cheney’s Secret Service detail would have to commit seppuku en masse and Bill Kristol would finally declare he was caught unaware of something: “I was shocked. Well, not shocked. I sort of suspected. Well not suspected. I knew. Yeah, I knew.” And, perhaps best of all, when coupled with the revelation that George F. Will is actually a sleeper agent for a radical Marxist splinter faction of Up With People! (equally as plausible), I could finally get some more panel time on Special Report. Women & War Earlier this week I wrote a column on the objectively idiotic notion that we are in the midst of a war on women. An excerpt: Sure, women still face challenges. But the system feminists have constructed cannot long survive an outbreak of confidence in the permanence of women's progress. The last thing the generals need is for the troops to find out that the “war on women” ended a long time ago — and the women won. The response from feminists — including any number of men who clearly put too much starch in their “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirts — has been less than adulatory. I wish I could say the criticisms surprised me. Over and over again women dismissed the very idea that there isn’t a war on women because, in the words of one, I am a “white dude.” Now anyone misfortunate enough to have wasted time better spent making replicas of Devil’s Tower out of their mashed potatoes reading left-wing academic gobbledygook knows that this response stands on a huge pile of identity-politics asininity. But, it should be noted, just because “white dude” lacks the polysyllabic panache of critical gender-studies jargon doesn’t make it any less serious. If anything, it is more serious because it is honest and decipherable. So much of what passes for academic writing these days is really a kind of guild-mentality gnosis, an impenetrable code intended to empower and elevate a priesthood (or in this case a priestesshood) as keepers of a truth the rest of us are too addlepated to grasp. (Time to recycle an old Jewish joke: Guy gives a piece of matzoh to a blind man. Blind man says, “Who writes this stuff?”) One could babble on for pages about “structures of power” and “false consciousness” and offer no greater insight or intellectual sophistication than “you’re wrong because you’re a white dude.” First, Kill the Messengers Of course, it’s not even original. It’s simply a fresh coat of paint on the decrepit edifice of cultural Marxism. That vast enterprise can be summarized as little more than shooting the messenger in order to have a monopoly on the message. If the truth isn’t to your liking, all you need to do is claim that it isn’t the truth, but merely a social construction deployed by the Pale Penis People to keep the rest of us down. Facts can be dismissed by attacking the motives of those presenting them. And if you are foolish enough to explain that your motives aren’t what the self-proclaimed champions of the oppressed say they are, you are guilty of false consciousness and must “ check your privilege.” Maybe it’s true that pointing out that women are doing much better today according to myriad measures somehow solidifies my rank in the Cult of Priapus, but I’m at a loss to figure out how. And, even if it did, even if pointing out there is no rape epidemic on college campuses earned me an extra round of martinis at the men’s club with Mr. Monopoly and the Koch Brothers, I cannot for the life of me see how that makes the facts any less factual. If I slapped my wife’s name on my column instead of my own, would the facts therein suddenly be more true? (“Hey don’t use ‘slap’ and ‘wife’ in the same sentence or they’ll compare you to Ray Rice.” – The Couch). The Revolution Will Be Internalized I didn’t set out to write a column on the war on women, I set out to make a larger point. But I couldn’t do it justice in the space required so I carved off everything but the bit about the war on women. (How do you carve an elephant? Take a block of stone and remove everything that it isn’t an elephant.) In the column I wrote: Obviously, this isn’t all about elections. There’s a vast feminist-industrial complex that is addicted to institutionalized panic. On college campuses, feminist- and gender-studies departments depend almost entirely on a constant drumbeat of crisis-mongering to keep their increasingly irrelevant courses alive. Abortion-rights groups now use “women’s health” and “access to abortion on demand” as if they are synonymous terms. The lack of a subsidy for birth-control pills is tantamount to a federal forced-breeding program. Well, this sort of thing is hardly restricted to feminism. One doesn’t have to read Crisis and Leviathan (or, you know) to see that progressivism increasingly finds its sustenance from the cultivation of fear and the demonization of political opponents. I could write pretty much the same column about law enforcement’s supposed open season on young black men or the anti-Muslim backlash that always seems to fall on Jews or the new elite fad of gender identity as the most important civil-rights issue of our time. Note, just as with feminists, I’m not saying that there are no legitimate problems or grievances among any of these constituencies (indeed, I’d argue that young black men face much bigger challenges and have more legitimate complaints than any Sandra Fluke or Wendy Davis acolyte). What I am saying is that the constant crisis-mongering outstrips the scope of the problem by orders of magnitude. And, more to the point, it’s deliberate. This is the great irony. When I say: “The U.S. has made enormous environmental progress.” Or: “Sexism and racism are smaller problems than at any time in American history.” Or: “Capitalism helps poor people more than socialism does.” Or: “The best way to feed a bear a marshmallow isn’t by putting your hands behind your back and holding the marshmallow between your lips.” . . . the response from the left is that I am merely trying to protect the vested interests of The Man and His League of Extraordinary Meat-Eating Oligarchs. But, when alarmists insist the Earth will burn like an ant under a magnifying glass if we don’t ban the internal-combustion engine by this Thursday at noon, it’s merely “speaking truth to power.” I mean it’s not like anybody is making any money off of global warming. It’s not like there’s any privilege that comes with being a climate activist. It’s not like big corporations would ever think to take advantage of the issue. Nor would government bureaucrats ever use climate hysteria as an excuse to expand their own power. Maybe liberals have a point about voter-ID laws — I don’t think they do — but even if I’m wrong, the relentless comparisons to Jim Crow and chants of “We won’t go back” are not merely incredibly dumb, they amount to a kind of insidious and willful slander against the society we live in and the progress we’ve made. Think about it: At least 70 percent of Americans support voter-ID laws, including a majority of blacks and Democrats. But in elite circles the push for voter-ID laws is proof of racism run amok. Think about that. When elites, in and out of the press, talk about voter-ID laws as troubling evidence of widespread racism, they are saying that the American people are racists. And yet they pose as if they are speaking for “real” America. This rhetoric and the reasoning behind it gives bureaucrats in Washington license to aggrandize — or hold onto — as much power as possible. (Don’t get me started on President Obama’s spiel yesterday about how the Civil Rights Division is the “conscience of the Justice Department.”) And because the mainstream media is on the same page, they celebrate expansions of government power for the “right reason.” I understand that none of this amounts to a particularly new insight. But it’s really worth pondering because I don’t think people see the problem in its totality. The vast complex of New Class intellectuals and activists, rent-seeking “capitalists,” liberal politicians, and the apolitical-in-name-only bureaucrats who work for them actually hold remarkably radical views better suited for the crowds marching in the streets. But they have brilliantly figured out a way to translate their radicalism into a license to boost their own prestige, power, and — quite often — material prosperity. Talk about renewables: They stoke the fires of hysteria and panic and use the heat to propel them into positions of ever more power and advantage. America can never simply be a healthy country in their eyes because healthy countries don’t need to follow doctors’ orders. And they are the self-appointed doctors. Marque It Down My column today is a partial defense of Bill O’Reilly and his idea to create a mercenary army. Again, I intended to write a slightly different column but things got away from me. As I’ve written here before (see this illegal bootleg copy of an old G-File), I think we need to be a lot more creative in how we do foreign policy and national security. What that would look is open for discussion. I am a big fan of Jeremy Rabkin’s idea of bringing back letters of marque to empower private-sector cyber privateers to go after cyber-pirates. Every few years, I write about how we need a League of Democracies to, at least, provide some useful competition to that hive of feckless crapweasels and feckful thugs at the U.N. I never understood the moral objection to assassinating Saddam Hussein instead of killing tens of thousands of his soldiers. And oh, before you leap to explain it to me, please mind the differences between bad, impolitic, and illegal policy versus immoral policies. These distinctions are important because I whenever I argue with people about this kind of stuff, they get morally outraged about the notion we should ever violate international law. I get it; international law has its purpose (though I will never respect it as much as I do our own national laws). But if international law is preventing us from winning or preventing wars and saving more American lives, then maybe the problem isn’t the idea, it’s the law. Anyway, my point is that the national-security and defense complex has become incredibly bureaucratized and unimaginative. I remember talking to an ex-Mossad guy once. He went on quite a rant about how Israeli intelligence used to be much more creative because the business hadn’t been professionalized. Holocaust-surviving violinists, novelists and accountants from Eastern Europe and Jewish refugees from Muslim countries didn’t really know how to be spies so they just made it up as they went along. I’ve heard similar things about the old OSS versus the modern CIA. Professionalization has a lot going for it, but it also creates lots of jobs for people who get ahead by handing everything off to the lawyers for approval. Rather than O’Reilly’s mercenary army, I’d prefer something closer to an Americanized French Foreign Legion, in large part because I agree with Charles Krauthammer that calling Americans “mercenaries” doesn’t negate the fact they are Americans (thought it did for Markos Moulitsas, remember?). Maybe that wouldn’t work either. Fine. But I’d rather see a constructive conversation about creative ways to fight the enemy — and help our friends — than reliance on the same old thing. Various & Sundry Zoë update: So it’s been a while since there’s been any news of America’s Favorite Dingo. On the one hand she’s more amusing every day. She’s quite the snuggler (damn it spell-check, I don’t care if you don’t recognize that as a word). If she’s not in bed with me already, she jumps up in the morning to take a nap under my arm, with her head under my chin. That’s cute, until the licking begins. Anyway, the bad news is that she’s still very hard to train. Remember all of the animals that the Tasmanian Devil ate in the Loony Tune cartoons? (Aardvarks, ants, people, gnus, bats, antelopes, etc., etc.?).Well, Zoë chases them. Not only that, she chases things she imagines might be them. She chases rumors of them. Unlike Cosmo, who could walk anywhere off-leash, we have to be very careful with Zoë. The other day the Fair Jessica took the dingo for a run along the canal in D.C. This has worked out well many times before. But this time Zoë saw something that had to be chased. She jumped into the canal, up the steep embankment and almost into the traffic on canal road. Anyway, we’re working on it. Another problem is that, much like Gore Vidal, she likes to roll around in deer poop. We immediately give her a bath afterward and then she’s like “I just got the stink of that shampoo out with some healthy deer poop!” It’s a vicious cycle. Speaking of vicious cycles, Kevin Williamson’s speech to the Heritage Foundation about the future of liberalism is great. Oh, and speaking of Kevin Williamson, he had a very good piece on Ruth Bader Ginsburg the other day. I joined the pile-on. There was no G-File last week because I was on Fox’s Outnumbered. Despite numerous warnings to the contrary, it was actually a lot of fun. Here are a few highlights. I have one of the cover essays in the current issue of NR. I have no idea if my capricious overlords will bring out from behind the firewall, but if they do, you will be blown away by my truth bombs. Or maybe not. Either way, you should be subscribing! And here are some seminal works of art improved by Mr. Bean. 24 inevitable advertisements for when all drugs are legal. Japan is beating us at the quirky snack food game. A story about a dude with turtles in his pants that isn’t about Joe Biden. As foretold, the Corgi shall lie with the lamb. Stupid Kansas — every month is Zombie Preparedness Month. Freedom means being able to dress like a horse! World's scariest playgrounds! Nature! For the Win! Why do you wake up early after a night of drinking? What’s the problem? Join the 500-plus NR Post-Election Cruisers who've signed up for a glorious week with over 3 dozen conservative all stars, including VDH, Allen West, John Yoo, Ralph Reed, Jonah, Rich, Mona, Jay, Tim Pawlenty, Fred Thompson, Jon Kyl, and many more. Click here for details. | 
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