Why Not Have Two Standards Instead of Just One?

This week two rude and vulgar women in show business made two rude and vulgar remarks. There is nothing unusual or interesting about that. However the  consequences each suffered are interesting for what they say about the media in this country.  Roseanne Barr  tweeted likening Valerie Jarrett to an offspring of a union between Planet of the Apes and the Muslim Brotherhood.  Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a feckless cunt on her TV show and suggested an incestuous interest or relationship between her and her father the president.  Barr was not only fired. Her show and everybody working on it got the ax. Her actions were big news for several days.  Bee was scarcely noticed and got off with making  a weasely so-called apology that backed off the “cunt” but said nothing about the suggested incest.

Leftists and their followers in the traditional media are denying that this illustrates a double standard by claiming that what Barr did was far worse.  That is nonsense.  In the first place Jarrett is a  long time and big time political player in Washing ton and  the Democratic Party. She was an important official in Obama’s administration who was said to have power and influence well beyond her official duties. She is a  rough and tumble contestant  in the political arena and has been for years.  Ivanka Trump, though she is more involved in the administration than some other presidents’ children, is mainly a civilian whose activities  are focused on philanthropic concerns. She is not in the arena. Besides,  presidents’ children traditionally have been treated as being off limits for  political obloquy. (A poor congressional staffer was fired for making a mildly critical remark about the way one of Obama’s kids was dressed and behaving.)

 As to the remarks themselves, one likened a black woman to simians, and the other suggested the President of the United States had the incestuous hots for his daughter.  It would be  hard to choose between them for rudeness and vulgarity, but the remarks themselves were not decisive.  If Bee had called Secretary Carson Trump’s organ grinder monkey, and Barr had called Chelsea Clinton a cunt and suggested that she slip into a blue dress and titillate and  entice her father to support Trump’s policies on trade, the results likely would have been about the same.  Bee probably still would have skated, and Barr probably still would have gotten the worse of it. It is not what was said, but what side each of the women was seen as being on that mattered.  Some animals clearly are more equal than others. 

A Question of Manners

The political questions around the so-called   trans issues are fairly easy, at least for libertarians. If adults wish to pretend to be of the opposite sex or have themselves surgically or hormonally altered to more nearly resemble the opposite sex, it is their business.  If other people wish to consider their behavior praiseworthy, daring, wonderful, evil, sinful, stupid, crazy, delusional, or a matter of indifference, that is their business.  As to the bathroom controversy, each private owner of restrooms should be free completely   to make his own decisions leaving  government organizations to make rules only about facilities on their  property on the basis of the usual interplay of political pressures, inducements, payoffs,  and threats.

That leaves  the (for libertarians) non-political question of how one should behave  – the question of what one should do to be decent and mannerly.  The politically correct answer favored by people in the traditional media is  that one should go along completely with the pretense or delusion and  treat and refer to men who say they are women and women who say they are men as  though their claims were true. (Some go beyond this and claim one should also believe the claims are true.)

I think that is wrong. Good manners do not require saluting someone who says he is Napoleon or genuflecting before  a person who claims to be Jesus or Mohammed. Neither do they require one to treat and  consider a  Caitlyn Jenner as a  woman when he is not or to treat and consider a  Chaz Bono as a man when she is not. Of course there is no reason to be unnecessarily rude about it. Most of the time  the whole business can be ignored easily.  In this as in many other things, minding your  own business and keeping your  judgments to yourself as appropriate tend to work well in social situations. However  there is no requirement to accept or pretend to accept something false as true because someone wishes you would or would be offended if you didn’t.  For people who try to be intellectually honest, there is a requirement not to do so.

Nixon

I think now and have thought for a long time that Richard Nixon was a bad president, one of the  worst.  He gave us  wage and price controls, the 55 mile per hour speed limit, the EPA, the beginning of affirmative action quotas along with his handling of the war in Vietnam,  relations with the Soviets, and an oil embargo and “energy crisis”.  (Of course he also did some good things such as ending conscription, and the mess in Vietnam was inherited from Johnson.)  However I had not thought much about the circumstances of  his being pushed out of office for many years until recently.

 At the time, even though I disliked Nixon, the official story that the  guardians of righteousness in the government and the traditional media did the job on Nixon in a noble and disinterested way to protect the nation from the dangers of abuse of power was hard to buy.  I knew the actions  he was accused of (and worse) were fairly commonplace in other administrations.  After all his immediate predecessor was Lyndon Johnson, and the director of the FBI until 1972 was J. Edgar Hoover. The notion of an epiphany on the dangers of abuse of power occurring in mass  just in time to be bad luck for Nixon did not seem likely.  I guessed  that since people in his own party deserted him, he must have gotten caught doing something really bad that the powers in both parties did not want revealed to the public. So they agreed  to remove him -  nominally  on the basis of other,  fairly insignificant things.   While that could have been dismissed as the overly imaginative conjecture of a naïve kid  who had read too many spy stories, it seemed at the time less improbable than the  idea that an American president  was being railroaded and removed in a cynical coup d’état.

Watching what has been going on lately with Trump and the politicians and bureaucrats has led me both to think about Watergate again and to reconsider my earlier guess.   It is no longer reasonable to claim  that a concerted effort by powerful, well connected people and members of the traditional media to smear and remove a president for no good reason is impossible in this country. We are seeing one now. Irrespective of what one thinks of Trump, there is evidence that people in the bureaucracy and traditional media and politicians in both parties have attempted  and are still attempting to work up a Watergate on him without much concern for fairness, context, seriousness, or accuracy.    If Nixon had been caught doing something really bad, a lot of people would have had to have known about it for him to be forced out of office.  Forty four years is a long time for a secret known to a lot of people in Washington not to come out.  The official version of Watergate remains improbable and, after observing the behavior of officials and people in the traditional media over several decades, risibly so.

So my best guess now is that Nixon was railroaded and removed in a cynical coup d’état . I still don’t care for him, but that is beside the point.   

Credit Cards

Recently we cancelled two of our credit cards.  One with First National of Omaha was tied to Best Western hotels and motels and offered points on stays at members of that chain.  It was not the card associated with the NRA.  However when First National decided to stop issuing the cards tied to the NRA, we decided to stop doing business with them.  The other was a card from Bank of America that we had had for thirty years.  We decided to cancel it when Bank of America announced it would deny credit to manufacturers of civilian firearms that leftist politicians and their allies in the media disapproved of.

I generally do not like boycotting or favoring a business because of its owners’ or executives’ political, philosophical, or religious opinions.  I prefer to make decisions on the basis of the quality and value of the goods or services offered.  However I believe these were cases where it was appropriate to make an exception.   

The behavior of the leftists in claiming all gun owners were complicit in the actions of a murderous madman and demanding that the rights of innocent people be abrogated because of the actions of that madman was not merely wrong but disgustingly and dangerously so. The attacks on the NRA and its members were despicable. The stampede by those in the traditional media was no less repellent for being completely predictable.

By their actions First National of Omaha and Bank of America joined in the attacks and ran with the stampede. I do not know if they did so cravenly under pressure (or what they thought was pressure) or cynically to try to gain favor somewhere.  It seems very unlikely the decisions were matters of principle, since the fact that criminals sometimes use guns to kill people was well known before the shooting in Florida and should not have been news to them.   

The leftists seem to want a (so far mainly metaphorical) knife fight. They are quite willing to put pressure on businesses to get things want, and they often succeed. We need to make it clear to the those  running businesses that there is a cost to caving in to the leftists and  insulting and attacking the rest of us.  It’s not a nice thing to have to do, but this is not a nice situation.