Drain the swamp! Clean house! It takes a woman to do a man’s job!

Remember all that Year of the Woman rhetoric when liberal feminists were riding high?

Top Democrat women loudmouths in Washington would rather you forgot all of it now. If you ever wondered how to get one of them to clam up about gender and politics, now you know:

Pursed lips. Frosty glares. Polite demurrals. Icy silence. Women in politics are grappling with the distinctly unfunny choice of restraining themselves or letting rip what they really think about Rep. Anthony Weiner’s X-rated online conduct and whether he belongs in Congress. They’ll be vexed by the question awhile longer because the 46-year-old Democrat from New York City told the New York Post on Thursday he won’t resign.

The scandal presents a maddening choice for these female leaders, none shy, between speaking out or keeping quiet about behavior that, at best, is disrespectful of women. “You’re right, I don’t like” questions about Weiner, Sen. Dianne Feinstein said with a smile.

Does she think Weiner should resign? “I’m not getting into that,” she demurred.

…House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California, the first woman to serve as House speaker, said in a statement that she’s “disappointed” in Weiner and called for an ethics committee investigation. Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the new chief of the Democratic National Committee has said nothing, but concurs with Pelosi, a spokesman said.

One outlier: My Fox colleague Kirsten Powers.

Take note, Reps. Pelosi and Schultz:

Tommy Christopher: How do you view Rep. Weiner’s actions, in context with other sex scandals involving the likes of Sens. David Vitter and John Ensign?

Kirsten Powers: What I find distinctive about what happened with Anthony is that it wasn’t an affair, it wasn’t, you know, a one-time event, it was predatory behavior. And it was behavior that was done in his official capacity. He wasn’t doing this as an anonymous person. He was doing this where you have people who saw him on TV or thought he was a good Congressman or whatever going to him and saying, “Oh, you’re such a great fighter for Democrats, Congressman Weiner.” And then he was using that position to, sort of, being predatory on the internet and I can’t remember which woman said it. She said, “I just want to talk politics,” and then it started getting creepy. So he’s using his official division, he’s not doing this, as much as he wants to say it’s in a private capacity, I highly doubt these women would have been talking to him if he wasn’t a Congressman.

The sending the picture to the girl, to me it’s like sexual harassment. He’s a Congressman, she’s a student. He has tons of power. She looks up to him.

I can tell you as a woman who has received very inappropriate things from people who have more power than me, it’s very intimidating. And you often don’t even tell anybody because you’re so frightened of what this person could potentially do to you. And so, there’s a kind of harassment predatory aspect to this.

As I told Matthew Boyle of The Daily Caller back on June 3:

Conservative columnist Michelle Malkin told The Daily Caller Weiner’s “long history” of “skirt-chasing” raises more questions about the New York Democrat’s Capitol Hill sexual secrets and expects more women with similar stories to come forward.

“Stories about his hot pursuits of young Capitol Hill interns date back to 2001,” Malkin said in an email. “At least one young woman told liberal Vanity Fair magazine that Weiner hunted down her e-mail address, bragged about riding on Air Force One, and extended an invitation to visit his office in person. The photo gallery of his select group of young female followers/followees on Twitter suggests a continued hunt.”

…Malkin worries about the young female staffers and interns in Weiner’s office and in nearby offices. It’s a possibility they could feel threatened or pressured by Weiner’s advances.

“The latest buzz from D.C. Democrats is that other pictures of Weiner’s package are out there. This raises troubling questions about who the recipients might have been, how old, and whether they worked for or under the congressman (NO pun intended!). The Beltway is packed with young women dazzled by the attention of older men,” Malkin said. “As I observed after my own internship stint nearly two decades ago, some of the most dangerous lechers and creeps are not the drunks wearing rags on the street, but ‘respectable’ men wearing pinstripes and wedding rings who lurk in the halls of power.”

Self-respecting women of all political stripes should agree: Predatory misogynists have no business pretending to represent the best interests of wives, moms, and daughters in Washington. Period.

***

Read this from Patterico: Evidence that Weiner was talking to underage girls.

Now, there is new evidence to suggest that Congressman Weiner had intimate conversations with an underaged girl. For privacy reasons, I called this girl “Ethel” in a previous post. She is someone who argued with another underaged girl about having a crush on Weiner — shortly after posting messages such as “SERIOUSLY LOVING LIFE AGAIN BUT I GOTTA KEEP MY MOUTH SHUT OR ELSE…” followed by “I’m in love with married men, #thatswhyimsingle.”

There is plenty of evidence (as we will detail in future installments) that Congressman Weiner was Ethel’s favorite Congressman. In this post, this blog will not link the Web address that shows Ethel, together with her Tumblr posts showing her talking about Congressman Weiner. But here is a screenshot from the cache of that now deleted Tumblr account…

Go back to his fauxpology press conference and remember this passage I highlighted:

Women reporters getting impatient. Girls he tweeted are “young enough to be your children!”

Weiner denies knowing how old the girls were while claiming they were adults. Called out by female reporter.

Eupehmism-tastic: Weiner hopes this will be seen as “an aberration from which I’ve learned.”

Ruh-roh: “I never had an intention of having a relationship with underage women.”

Reporter to @RepWeiner: “Was there anything predatory about your behavior?”

Weiner: The girls he engaged in communications with “weren’t young per se.” *Per se.*

Will Democrat women wait for more fit to hit the shan before they stop playing Weinergate dodgeball?

***

Update: From Patterico, more evidence of Weiner’s high school girl problem. Hello, MSM? Perhaps you can take a break from chasing Sarah Palin and have a look at this:

Ethel declares her happiness, and says: “SERIOUSLY LOVING LIFE AGAIN BUT I GOTTA KEEP MY MOUTH SHUT OR ELSE……….” She has learned that openly declaring her love for Weiner by name got her unfollowed before, but she won’t make that mistake again. She’ll just come really, really close.

When another admirer (whom we have called Betty) asks Weiner to her prom, Ethel mocks Betty for openly declaring her love for a married politician. Weiner ends up unfollowing Betty, which upsets Betty greatly.

Ironically, Ethel continues to write things like “I love married men” . . . but does not name Weiner by name as she did before. Instead, she proceeds in what she evidently thought was a more subtle manner, writing “my one true love” while linking a video of Weiner. Ethel continues to talk about how she loves married men, in tweets interspersed with others praising Weiner.

On May 23, she tweets the obscene tweet about about 69ing and using honey mustard as a lube . . . adding: “Ohh yeahh baby I love bdh weiner.” (bdh likely means big damn hero.)

Three days later, Ethel is quoting Weiner talking about “cape and tights shit” — a quote that does not appear to be anything he ever said publicly, according to Google. The conclusion is irresistable that she is quoting a private message he had sent to her.

As I explained this morning, “tights and cape shit” is the same kind of talk Congressman Weiner used with Lisa Weiss:

[WEISS:] hi honey! computer’s back up…what’s up with you? busy saving my country rom this f***in tea baggers?

[WEINER:] Yep. Cape. Tights. Looking for my sidekick.

With Lisa Weiss, the talk eventually turned very explicit. With Ethel? We don’t know. At this point, we just have to make an educated guess about how they would talk in private, based upon things they said (or repeated!) in public.

Judge for yourself…

***

Update: Friday afternoon 17-year-old who tweeted with Weiner gets visit from Delaware law enforcement….

Police on Friday afternoon came to the home of a 17-year-old high school junior to ask her about direct online communications she has had with Rep. Anthony Weiner.

Two officers from the New Castle County Police Department arrived at the girl’s home around 4:30 p.m. and asked to speak with the girl’s mother about the daughter’s contact with Weiner. Another officer appeared at the home a short time later. A FoxNews.com reporter was at the home when the police arrived.

The girl, whose name is being withheld because she is a minor, told FoxNews.com, “I’m doing OK.”

Nancy Pelosi doesn’t seem to care — and declines to back resignation calls from other Democrats.

***
Flashback: Nancy Pelosi’s office was told of concerns about Eric Massa…

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office was notified in October by then-Rep. Eric Massa’s top aide of concerns about the New York Democrat’s behavior, two congressional sources familiar with the matter said Wednesday night.

Joe Racalto, Massa’s chief of staff, was uneasy that Massa, 50, was living with several young, unmarried male staffers and using sexually explicit language with them, one source said. But what finally prompted him to call Pelosi’s director of member services, the source said, was a lunch date that Massa made with a congressional aide in his 20s who worked in the office of Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.).

According to a person briefed on the call, Racalto was concerned that the lunch followed a pattern by Massa — who is married and has two children — of trying to spend time alone with young gay men with no ostensible work purpose. Racalto, according to this person, also alerted Frank’s chief of staff. The sources spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the matter.

Massa resigned from the House on Monday amid questions about his conduct.

Neither Racalto nor anyone from Pelosi’s office responded immediately to requests for comment Wednesday night. Massa could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The revelation about warnings to Pelosi’s office comes as the House ethics committee closed its short-lived investigation of allegations that Massa groped and sexually harassed several young, male staffers in his office, according to two sources familiar with the decision.

The committee concluded that Massa’s resignation put him outside the reach of any punishment it could impose and would render any findings irrelevant.

***

Update: Weiner confirms what Patterico pieced together over the past several days: He did, indeed, trade several private direct messages on Twitter with the 17-year-old high school junior. The New York Times whitewashes the sexually-charged thoughts posted on the girl’s Tumblr social media account and reported at Patterico.

Weiner’s poor media flack tries to handle the story:

Representative Anthony D. Weiner said on Friday that he exchanged at least five private messages on Twitter this spring with a 17-year-old Delaware girl who became an admirer of his after hearing him speak during a high school trip to Washington.

Mr. Weiner’s spokeswoman, Risa Heller, did not provide copies of the messages, but said they were not inappropriate.

“According to Congressman Weiner, his communications with this person were neither explicit nor indecent,” Ms. Heller said.

At Patterico’s, Aaron Worthing dissects the NYT coverage tonight. Read everything at Patterico now. Because it’ll end up in the New York Times eventually…

***

I quote again the red-flag line from Weiner’s fauxpology: “I never had an intention of having a relationship with underage women.”

Nope, he never “intended” to have a “relationship” with underage women. He was, from all appearances, just trolling for Twitter pic targets, including a girl he knew was high-school age…

I’ve covered the phenomenon from the very inception of the grass-roots taxpayer revolt in the Age of Obama (see here, here, here, and here for refreshers).

Well, a year and a half after incessantly trashing the movement as racist/sexist/fascist/fill-in-the-blank-ist, it’s finally dawned on liberal journalists that politically engaged, Internet savvy conservative gals have fueled Tea Party activism. Slate.com’s Hanna Rosin belatedly parachutes in for an anthropological account of the foreign specimens known as Tea Party moms — and in introducing her profile, she sees fit to take a swipe at yours truly:

In a different political season, Lou Ann Zelenik would be too much an outsider to run for a congressional seat in Tennessee. A single mother, she owned a heavy construction company until she retired in 2007. She likes to remind people that she’s a “licensed blaster,” which refers both to her technical skills and her Rosie the Riveter attitude. “She’s bucked every trend, and if there’s ever an obstacle put in her way she breaks right through it,” says her spokesman, Jay Heine. Zelenik only really broke through in electoral politics, however, when she got involved with the local Tea Party. She put together a rally in Murfreesboro, and 3,000 people showed up. She hooked into a network of activist local moms who agreed to volunteer on her campaign. “A lot of the tea party women are inspired by seeing a strong woman run for office,” adds Heine.

Is the Tea Party a women’s movement? More women than men belong—55 percent, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll. And while no movement that uses Michelle Malkin as a poster girl could fairly be described as feminist, the party has become an insta-network for ambitious women like Zelenik.

Well, which dinosaur feminists died and made Hanna Rosin the Supreme Arbiter of Female Role Models?

Rosin, whose biography boasts that she “won a number of competitions on the debate team” at her high school, doesn’t explain her gratuitous slap.

Do conservative political views disqualify one as an acceptable feminist role model in the 21st century?

Or perhaps Mizz Rosin shares the view of the MSNBC misogynists who believe that right-leaning pundits are nothing more than “mashed up bags of meat with lipstick?”

Or maybe Rosin subscribes to the view, embraced by so many of her cohorts on the Left, that minority female conservatives are incapable of independent thought because they are nothing more than puppets of color for their white overlords?

Rosin is a working mother, journalist, author, and blogger inside the Beltway.

I am a working mother, journalist, author of four best-sellers, and blogger outside the Beltway who started a web enterprise from scratch in 2004, launched another one in 2006, and sold it successfully this year in an era when newspapers and magazines are falling like flies.

Like the Tea Party moms she profiles, I multi-task from home — and have been doing so since I voluntarily left an MSM newsroom in 1999 for an independent, self-directed career tailored for my family.

I point this out not for the purpose of horn-tooting, but to once again expose what I dubbed the “Sisterhood of the Protected Female Liberal Journalists” last fall.

Conservative “poster girls” not welcome, of course.

The gender card is the first and last refuge of House Scoundrel Nancy Pelosi.

She’s played it since Day One of her reign of error. She wielded it last week when she surrounded herself with kiddie human shields. And it appears she may be plotting it to use it in the Demcare end game.

Via Roll Call tonight:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is asking all female Democratic Members to attend a hastily called meeting Wednesday morning but isn’t saying what the meeting is about.

Pelosi’s office sent an e-mail out Tuesday evening requesting that all female Democrats come to the Members-only meeting at 10 a.m.

An aide to one Democratic Member said Pelosi’s office said the topic of the meeting was “to be determined.”

Female House Democrats have spent the last few days playing up alleged “gender discrimination” by insurers. They’ve come prepared with dubious or irrelevant sob story anecdotes. And as I noted back in November, Democrat women have organized on the House floor before — in that case, they exploited the House resolution process to play the gender card on Demcare and eat into general debate time through unanimous consent requests.

Memo to GOP leaders and Republican women in the House: Be prepared.

***

Joseph Bottum at First Things adds:

At a guess, it may be the meeting where she admits that she doesn’t have the votes for the bill without an abortion ban to lure in Bart Stupak’s coalition.

At least I hope that’s what the meeting is about. There’s something weird and off-putting about inviting only women, however—since I doubt Pelosi plans to reenact the scene where Lysistrata explains her political strategy to Cleonice.

***

Update 3/17 11:06am Eastern – Buzz on the Hill is that Pelosi has CBO numbers in hand and wants a vote Saturday. There’s conflicting buzz on whether the phantom House bill will be released today. Rumors on both left and right that CBO will release score at around 5pm Eastern tonight.

Jon Ward at The Daily Caller reports:

Democrats are set to release a final Congressional Budget Office report on their health-care bill early this afternoon, which would put them on pace to pass a bill by Saturday, before President Obama leaves the country for a week.

House Majority Whip James Clyburn, South Carolina Democrat, told The Daily Caller he will have 216 votes by Saturday to pass a bill.

“I think so,” he said in a brief interview, when asked about the Saturday deadline. “I’m closer than I was yesterday. And I’ll be closer tomorrow than I am today.”

The release of the bill’s CBO “score” today will allow the House Rules Committee to hold a hearing on the text, likely later Wednesday, and also allow Democrats to hold a vote by Saturday, in accordance with the rule that requires a bill to be released 72 hours before a vote.

As I surmised last night, the Pelosi meeting appears to have been a simple, estrogen-fueled pep rally to reinforce the gender-based talking points on Demcare:

Female House Democrats who met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her office on Wednesday morning said the meeting was not about abortion, and that there was no discussion of changing the Senate-passed health-care bill to make it more amenable to pro-life House Democrats.

The meeting, rather, was the latest in a series of events House Democrats have been doing to prepare their caucus for a robust promotion of the bill if and when it passes. Pelosi, a California Democrat, has already done events this week promoting the benefits of the bill for seniors and for children.

Latest House whip count is here.

Premiums will rise under Demcare, contrary to what the White House claims, reports the Associated Press.
How’s that female-friendly?

Update: It’s past noon. Still no damned bill.

It’s moronic exchanges like this one between White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett and rambling Indian magazine editor Shoma Chaudhury — who slobbers all over President Obama for his “womanly” leadership — that should make every rational woman cringe.

First, there’s the nauseating gender identity politics pandering.

Second, there’s the snort-worthy detachment from reality (the Chicago thug-in-chief is “bringing the temperature down”?).

Third, there’s the embarrassing non-question question of a “journalist” unabashedly engaging in the obscene ego stroke of a government official.

This is the danger of thinking with your ovaries instead of your brain:

If you can’t watch neuron-impairing feminist drivel this early in the morning, I’ve transcribed the above clip for you:

Chaudhury: The criticism of the Obama administration seems to be particularly “male,” you know? When you say ‘why aren’t you fighting back, why aren’t you policing?’ I think we’ve been talking about having women in leadership positions, and Obama’s attitude to leadership is really a very womanly one, you know, which is consensual, which is thought through, which calms the temperature down of the world, and it’s very important to remember that, you know.

Jarrett: Thank you. I’m going to tell him you said that. I think he’ll be very pleased to hear that that’s how you describe it. And I think I’m going to use that in terms of taking the temperature down. Because it has to come down if you are actually going to listen to one another, you have to take a lot of the heat out of the discourse. I think he’s very good at doing that, thank you.

Uh-huh.

Examples of Obama’s “womanly leadership” on the domestic front: “Punch back twice as hard” and Shut up and get out of the way.

I suppose this is what Chaudhury means by “womanly leadership:”

As for “bringing down the temperature,” I guess Ms. Chaudhury missed this:

Dozens of Indonesian Muslim students protested in front of the US embassy Friday against US President Barack Obama’s visit later this month to the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.

The around 50 protestors, who were coordinated by a Muslim university student body, shouted “Reject Obama… God is greater,” and threw their shoes at posters of Obama, copying a protest in Iraq against former US president George W. Bush.

Obama, who is hugely popular in Indonesia as he spent several years of his childhood in Jakarta in the late 1960s, is expected to visit the country for three days starting from March 20.

“Just like Bush, he is a war president and an enemy of Islam,” protest coordinator Fikri Ahmad Irhamul told AFP.

“He sent thousands of soldiers to Afghanistan, and many of our Muslim brothers have died because of him,” Irhamul said.

Small protests were also held in other cities across Indonesia.

And this via Yahoo News Photos/AP:

And this from Hamas’s flag-burning brigade last year:

Looks pretty hot to me.

Amen:

The feminist tirades against Sarah are mostly so tiresome, but one line of their complaints is really funny. After 40 years of telling wives and mothers to get out of the home (which Betty Friedan called “a comfortable concentration camp”), put their children in day care (tax-funded, of course) and join the workforce, these same feminists now tell Sarah to stay home with her children.

Sarah doesn’t need feminist approval for her lifestyle; the only person whose OK she needs for her double career as mother and politician is her husband’s, and he seems very happy with Sarah.

Sarah Palin is an exemplar of a successful, can-do woman, and the feminists simply don’t know how to deal with her. I hope she will usher in a new era where conventional wisdom recognizes that feminist negativism is ancient history and American women are so fortunate to live in the greatest country on Earth.

Just saying.

***

G.F., Daily Breeze, 3/7/08: “It’s been a very sexist media.”

Christina Hoff Sommers investigates the quota-mongers’ plan to “fix” the “problem” of gender equity in the physical sciences:

Women now earn 57 percent of bachelors degrees and 59 percent of masters degrees. According to the Survey of Earned Doctorates, 2006 was the fifth year in a row in which the majority of research Ph.D.’s awarded to U.S. citizens went to women. Women earn more Ph.D.’s than men in the humanities, social sciences, education, and life sciences. Women now serve as presidents of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and other leading research universities. But elsewhere, the figures are different. Women comprise just 19 percent of tenure-track professors in math, 11 percent in physics, 10 percent in computer science, and 10 percent in electrical engineering. And the pipeline does not promise statistical parity any time soon: women are now earning 24 percent of the Ph.D.’s in the physical sciences—way up from the 4 percent of the 1960s, but still far behind the rate they are winning doctorates in other fields. “The change is glacial,” says Debra Rolison, a physical chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory.

Rolison, who describes herself as an “uppity woman,” has a solution. A popular anti–gender bias lecturer, she gives talks with titles like “Isn’t a Millennium of Affirmative Action for White Men Sufficient?” She wants to apply Title IX to science education. Title IX, the celebrated gender equity provision of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, has so far mainly been applied to college sports. But the measure is not limited to sports. It provides, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex…be denied the benefits of…any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

While Title IX has been effective in promoting women’s participation in sports, it has also caused serious damage, in part because it has led to the adoption of a quota system. Over the years, judges, Department of Education officials, and college administrators have interpreted Title IX to mean that women are entitled to “statistical proportionality.” That is to say, if a college’s student body is 60 percent female, then 60 percent of the athletes should be female—even if far fewer women than men are interested in playing sports at that college. But many athletic directors have been unable to attract the same proportion of women as men. To avoid government harassment, loss of fund­ing, and lawsuits, they have simply eliminated men’s teams. Although there are many factors affecting the evolution of men’s and women’s college sports, there is no question that Title IX has led to men’s participation being calibrated to the level of women’s interest. That kind of cal­ibration could devastate academic science.

Read the whole thing.

The road to hell…

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin says he is “a vagina-friendly Mayor.”

Nagin made the remark while welcoming the author of the Vagina Monlogues, Eve Ensler to the city to promote the “V-Day” celebration in New Orleans next month.

Mayor Nagin began his comments at the news conference by saying, “How am I gonna stand up and say, I’m a ‘vagina-friendly’ Mayor to these cameras after ‘Chocolate City’ and some of the other stuff that I’ve done. But you know what? I’m in.”

I really, really don’t want to imagine the photo-ops.

***

Feb. 13, 2008: Ray Nagin photo caption contest.

***

The death cry of Gloria Steinem
Michelle Malkin
Copyright Creators Syndicate 2008

Behold with me the politics of gynocentrism. What a depressing and desiccative sight it is. Just look at Gloria Steinem. From once-ripe feminist icon to idea-barren harridan, she offers nothing to young women but anachronistic man-hate, anti-military bigotry and woe-is-me wallowing.

Hope and change? Try harp and whinge. Some things get better with age. The women’s rights movement isn’t one of them.

In the dark and desperate days of gyno-candidate Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Team Hill dragged Steinem out of the leftist dustbin for a grieve-a-thon in Austin, Texas. The 73-year-old activist sulked about Barack Obama’s ascendancy to The New York Observer, blaming voters who “want redemption for racism” and complaining that not “as many want redemption for the gynocide.”

What does she mean by gynocide? “There are six million female lives lost in the world every year simply because they are female,” Steinem asserted, making a passing reference to pregnant women killed by male partners. Presumably, she’s not including the millions of unborn girls aborted around the world every year because of their gender. (Not exactly the kind of empowerment the fist-raising, bra-burning pro-choicers had in mind.) And nothing in Steinem’s record indicates that she’s thinking of the untold numbers of girls and women murdered for “honor” in the name of Allah by Muslim relatives.

It’s Western men Steinem detests. You know, the ones who watch football, whom the NOW propagandists tried to blame for a mythic rise in domestic violence on Super Bowl Sundays, and the ones who serve in the U.S. armed forces — like that gyno-enemy, John McCain.

As the Observer reported, Steinem launched into a full-scale tirade about McCain’s war heroism — peddling a double standard that simply doesn’t exist:

“Suppose John McCain had been Joan McCain and Joan McCain had got captured, shot down and been a POW for eight (sic) years. [The media would ask], ‘What did you do wrong to get captured? What terrible things did you do while you were there as a captive for eight years?’”

In fact, nasty anonymous fliers in South Carolina did attack McCain’s years in captivity, and liberal websites have spotlighted the grievances, doubts and conspiracy theories of some of McCain’s fellow POWs.

But it’s not just about John McCain. “Steinem’s broader argument was that the media and the political world are too admiring of militarism in all its guises,” the Observer helpfully explained.

“I am so grateful that she [Clinton] hasn’t been trained to kill anybody. And she probably didn’t even play war games as a kid,” Steinem spewed, later adding that “from George Washington to Jack Kennedy and PT-109 we have behaved as if killing people is a qualification for ruling people.”

From Vietnam to Iraq, self-contradictory feminists have always behaved as if serving in the military was about nothing more than “killing people” — even as they clamored to put women on the front lines in combat roles in the name of gender equality. Leave it to the progressive left to smear their sisters after pushing for decades to integrate them into the “war machine.” They don’t care about the accomplished careers of women in the armed services. They care about haranguing Congress on government funding for their favorite contraceptive pills and abortions, portraying female soldiers as victims, hounding military recruiters, and exploiting accusations of harassment and abuse to undermine military institutions.

American women are the freest, wealthiest, most educated in the world. They are liberated enough to choose someone for president other than a female candidate out of uterus-based loyalty. This should be viewed as progress, not heresy. But the old-guard feminists — the “ruling people” — deeply resent this independence as they cling to what’s left of their power base and their shrinking absolute moral authority card.

Like their increasingly whiny candidate Clinton, Gloria Steinem and the fading gyno-saurs just can’t accept when it’s time to quit.

The campus rape movement highlights the current condition of radical feminism, from its self-indulgent bathos to its embrace of ever more vulnerable female victimhood. But the movement is an even more important barometer of academia itself. In a delicious historical irony, the baby boomers who dismantled the university’s intellectual architecture in favor of unbridled sex and protest have now bureaucratized both. While women’s studies professors bang pots and blow whistles at antirape rallies, in the dorm next door, freshman counselors and deans pass out tips for better orgasms and the use of sex toys. The academic bureaucracy is roomy enough to sponsor both the dour antimale feminism of the college rape movement and the promiscuous hookup culture of student life. The only thing that doesn’t fit into the university’s new commitments is serious scholarly purpose.

Read the whole thing.

It goes a long way toward explaining why liberal campus feminists have such little time or energy to focus on bona fide oppression of women.

Carrie Lukas has more in today’s NYPost on what women do and don’t want to hear:

Plenty of media outlets target women – from sappy dramas on Lifetime and Oxygen to family-centered morning shows and magazines – and draw large audiences and big advertising dollars. GreenStone Media sought to imitate those successes. Its Web site explained, “Talk That Women REALLY Want . . . Only Green- stone Media gives you a lineup of personality talk that best appeals to the demo advertisers want most – women 25-54.” It seemed a good sales pitch; certainly advertisers welcome the chance to reach this coveted female audience on the radio.

GreenStone’s problem was it couldn’t attract an audience of either gender. The programming was picked up by only eight affiliates in small to mid-sized markets. Apparently, GreenStone’s programming wasn’t the talk that women really want.

GreenStone’s president and CEO Susan Ness laments the end of its programming as a loss for women, opining that “women need a voice on commercial radio,” and “radio needs women’s voices.” Perhaps Ness should use her time off to tune in to other stations. She’ll find there are many prominent women on the airwaves; they’re just not saying what she thinks they should.

Laura Ingraham, an outspoken conservative and former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thomas, has been on the air since 2001 and is now heard on 340 stations. Ingraham draws an audience in excess of 5 million, and regularly ranks among the top-10 most influential radio hosts.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger draws an even larger audience with very different programming. It can be best described as an advice show, but is anything but touchy feely. “Dr. Laura” serves as a hard-hitting host, unabashedly lecturing her callers about their morals and values. Other women, such as Martha Zoeller, Janet Parshall and Tammy Bruce, join these two powerhouse hosts.

Of course, most significantly, women don’t just listen to women radio hosts. Women tune in to men on a wide variety of topics. Rush Limbaugh’s 20 million listeners include millions of women. Millions more tune in to hear Sean Hannity and the other conservative, male talk-show hosts around the country. Although Ness may not want to hear it, Limbaugh and conservative talk radio apparently is programming for women.

It’s 2007, you live in the United States. You have a pen, phone and Internet connection. Stop whining. It’s unattractive. If you want to have an impact, just work. That’s how the guys do it. That’s how we gals do it.

I began tracking the maleness of this media last spring while I was a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. An intrepid graduate student created a spreadsheet of the top 90 political blogs. A full 42 percent were edited and written by men only, while 7 percent were by women only. Another 45 percent were edited or authored by both men and women, though the “coed” mix was overwhelmingly male. And, not surprisingly, most male bloggers linked to male bloggers.

I was curious about the spreadsheet whose results Goodman saw fit to print in her Globe column. I’m not doubting its veracity. I’d just like to know more about which 90 political blogs were chosen by the “intrepid graduate student,” what criteria were used to assess the gender mix of group blogs, and how blogger-to-blogger links were analyzed. Just curious, you know? So, I e-mailed Ms. Goodman and her for the name of the spreadsheet author:

From: Michelle Malkin
Date: Aug 13, 2007 11:07 AM
Subject: Copy of spreadsheet you referred to?
To: ellengoodman@globe.com

Best,
Michelle Malkin

Here was Ms. Goodman’s reply:

On 8/14/07, goodman@globe.com wrote:

Dear Michelle— I know you’re a female blogger. In fact you were near the
top of our spread sheet and as a conservative and woman you defy those
other realities I was writing about. The curse of MSM writing is that we
do, in fact, have word limits so that and other tidbits end up on the
cutting room floor. Anyway, I’m not comfortable passing along my
researcher’s work. We’re hoping to use it for a conference this [fall]
or at least for background. After that I’ll ask her how she feels about it.
Cheers,
Ellen Goodman,

Eenteresting, no?

My follow-up:

Thanks for your reply, but my question was whether you would refer me to
the author of the study so that I may ask her directly about obtaining a
copy of her work, not whether you would pass on her work to me. Would you
please let me know her name?

And Ms. Goodman’s final response:

I’m on vacation but if you remind me after labor day, I’ll see if she wants
me to pass along her name, etc…cheers

Well. The results of the spreadsheet are good enough to publicize in her column, but we’re not able to look at the data ourselves until Ellen Goodman is good and ready to share what she has seen and cited.

Typical MSM gatekeeper arrogance.

“Intrepid graduate student,” if you are out there, drop me a line. There are no word limits in the blogosphere. I’d be happy to reproduce your entire spreadsheet here so bloggers of both sexes, who appreciate open-source journalism, can take a closer look.

No mention of hate-monger Jane Hamsher’s “b**ch is dead meat” and “sandpaper sn**ch” attacks on Kate O’Beirne.

No mention of other “feminist” attacks on independent-minded (read: non-left) bloggers–a phenomenon Dr. Helen noted here.

And, of course, no mention of this or this.

Some women are more equal than others, in the eyes of the “progressive” female blogosphere. But that’s how it has always been. As I noted a few years back when Mo Dowd was whining about how difficult it was to be a woman with opinions:

Conservative women aren’t real women according to the liberal feminist establishment’s definition. Remember when Gloria Steinem called Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison a “female impersonator?” Or when curdled NOW leader Patricia Ireland instructed Democrats to vote only for “authentic” female political candidates? Or when Al Gore’s fashion consultant Naomi Wolf described the foreign-policy analysis of Jeane Kirkpatrick as being “uninflected by the experiences of the female body?”

And so it is with conservative women bloggers. Because we have “betrayed” feminism, because we hold unorthodox political views on abortion, government race/gender preferences, education, the war, and taxes, and because we reject identity politics, we’re not “authentic” women, we deserve what we get, and we just don’t count.

Thanks to my partners:

Kirsten at Powers-Point
La Shawn at La Shawn Barber’s Corner
Mary Katharine at Townhall

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