Perfectly Okay…..

.. To “Hate F…” a woman you disagree with – according to a feminist?

I stayed off this story yesterday, but Playboy published, then withdrew, an article about 10 conservative women they’d love to  – well – rape – for grins and giggles. Today a so-called feminist said that was really, really bad – except for Michelle Malkin – which would be her just asking for it, according to said feminist.

I also want to note that at least one woman on the list is so venom-spewing, she unfortunately invites venom to be shot back at her: Michelle Malkin. Her posts and her “routine” are so venomous and predictable, in fact, I stopped paying attention to her years ago.

Others on the list, however, are not venom-spewing at all. One woman mentioned on the atlasshrugs2000 blog is a regular guest on my PBS show. Amanda Carpenter, on the show at least, eschews personal judgment of people with whom she disagrees politically. So her inclusion on the Playboy list is much more offensive to me than is the inclusion of Ms. Malkin, although their political views may not differ greatly.

We’ll just point out that Erbe doesn’t even begin to catch the irony of her complete failure to eschew personal judgment of people with whom she disagrees politically. We will, however, point out that Erbe and US News & World Report owe some apologies here.

Not “Sorry if anyone was offended” ones, either.

Now, Ask Yourself Why…

Why would struggling auto companies want to cut off the dealers that sell their products? Why cut off any potential source of revenue in hard times? Why not keep every mother’s son that wanted to sell their product?

I have no idea what the reasoning is here. Nor do the victims of the forced dealership closings by Chrysler and GM:

“I am the face of GM and Chrysler in my town,” said Peter Lopez, a Spencer, W.Va., dealer unlucky enough to be selling the brands of both fallen automakers.

Russell Whatley, a Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep dealer in Mineral Wells, Texas, said his grandfather opened the business in 1919. “A 90-year investment is just gone,” he said. He called Chrysler’s actions “wasteful and devastating.”

Lawmakers expressed sympathy for the dealers and some impatience with the automakers. But retrenchment is inevitable as taxpayer-supported GM and Chrysler fight to stay afloat once they emerge from bankruptcy protection.

Chrysler President James Press told the hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee his company was “working hard to achieve a soft landing” for dealers. But if underperforming dealers aren’t selling cars, the company can’t return to profitability, he said.

That is, quite frankly, pure crap.  Chrysler has no interest whatsoever in who sells their cars, just so long as they are sold. Unless I am completely missing something here, we are being sold a bill of goods. It is to the advantage of the producer to have his product in as many places as possible. The producer should not care – at all – whether the dealers get into price wars with one another, compete with one another or simply fade away all on their own.

So long as the dealer, no matter how small, meets his dealership obligations, the producer has no interest – at all – in how the dealer runs his business.

There is a clue as to what this is really about in the last sentence of the article:

Car dealers are a potent political force, contributing more than $9 million to federal candidates for the 2008 elections.

One has to suspect that this entire bit of political kabuki is a disguise. The real motive for cutting off dealers has nothing – at all – to do with the economic health of the car companies involved.

UPDATE: Anthony has many more links.  For the record, I suspect “thugocracy” pretty well sums it up.

If One… Then One Could

Greg Sargent ascribes it to an “obscure (rhetorical) tense”. What, exactly did Barack Obama say in an interview with a French media outlet? Obama’s exact words lead the following excerpt, Sargent’s follow:

Now, the flip side is I think that the United States and the West generally, we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam. And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslims Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. And so there’s got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.

Hard-core rhetoricians will note that Obama was employing an obscure tense known as the “conditional,” and an arcane rhetorical device known as a “hypothetical.” He said that if you were to take the number of Muslims in America, then one could see America as ranking up there with other Muslim countries – in numerical, hypothetical terms.

So Sargent’s defense of Obama – the Obama did not call the US a “Muslim country” is correct. But let’s use that obscure rhetorical tense in another way:

If one were terminally unable to understand basic arithmetic, one could claim a status that the numbers prove is ludicrous -  in numerical, hypothetical terms.

Because the US ranks below Tajikistan in the number of Muslims living here.

You have to decide if Obama is incapable of understanding numbers in any real sense of the word, or if Obama is willing to flat out spin complete falsehoods – hypothetically, of course – in order to curry favor for himself ahead of a speech.

Either choice reveals rather a lot more about the man than I suspect he calculated when he made his patently absurd statement.

As I said earlier, Sargent’s defense is quite correct – as far as it goes. Had George Bush made a claim like this, however, I rather suspect that Sargent would not be defending it. Rather he would have been all over the statement as fraudulent, stupid or both.

If the media was doing its job, they would be treating Obama’s statement as the ridiculous object that it is. 

Via Memeorandum