The Amateur Webzine Slate, as Predictable as the Phases of the Moon: Republicans "Hypocritical" On Jack Ryan

William Salletan, a writer who obviously takes Ronald Reagan's warnings about labor very seriously -- "They say hard work never killed anyone, but why take chances?" -- cranks out yet another must-miss formulaic "Republican hypocrisy" piece, the sixth-thousandth in his eminently-dispensible oevure.

This one is about Republican hypocrisy in defending Jack Ryan. Now, ol' Will has too look pretty hard to find actual Republican defenders of Jack Ryan, as the entire party is about to pull the plug on him (unfairly, I think, but true nonetheless); but Will finds five or six people making pro forma defenses and decides that the Republicans are every bit as savage in defending Ryan as liberals were in defending Bill Clinton.

Well, we'll see about that. We'll see, in a week, when Ryan has quit the race, citing "family reasons" (for once, this reason will be the true reason).

Salletan chalks this all up to hypocrisy:

Now we know why Bill Clinton got impeached. He was in the wrong club.

Oh? Is that the only difference? Let's take a look at some important distinctions, distinctions Salletan just must have missed along the way to his inevitable conclusion of hypocrisy.

1. It wasn't illegal. Actually, Salletan mentions this as Republican "spin." There are two different ways to view it; one, as "spin," two, as the proveable, undeniable truth.

Salletan apparently completely misses the fact that the public furor over Bill Clinton's affair wasn't actually over his affair; had that been all there was to it, he would have suffered a few points drops in the polls and that would have been that.

No, Bill Clinton, see, actually committed the crimes of perjury and obstruction of justice in order to conceal his affair from a complaining witness in a sexual harassment case and from the judge who ordered him to answer questions concerning Monica Lewinsky.

Without that predicate -- without proveable (and ultimately admitted-- sort of) lawbreaking during a legitimate court proceeding -- there would have been no Monica Lewinsky story, or rather, no Monica Lewinsky story lasting more than a month.

2. Liberals seem to have divergent standards as regards procedural fairness and personal privacy depending on the partisan affiliation of the man involved. During Lewinskygate, we were constantly being told that Ken Starr was using unfair and extreme methods of coercing the truth out of Monica, such as the medieval, abhorrent practice of threatening to charge a witness who's lied to the court with perjury unless she comes clean about the truth.

Liberals were positively aghast at the notion that someone who committed perjury might be forced to tell the truth, especially when the truth that would be told would damage a liberal President.

In the Ryan case, a California judge decided that the press had a right to paw through sealed court documents containing entirely unproven and uncorroborated allegations from an admittedly-adulterous wife in a child-custody case.

This seems not to trouble Salletan one whit. One might say this is hypocritical.

3. Liberals seem to have changeable standards as regards the amount of proof needed before tarring someone with sexual allegations. I seem to remember the press spiking the Monica story when they first had it; suppressing the Juanita Broadderick story until after Impeachment was safely over; and generally pretending for eight or nine months that it was quite plausible that Bill Clinton had merely been "ministering" to Young Monica, and that to assume the claims were true would be to engage in Sexual McCarthyism.

The press admitted the truth of the allegations just before Bill Clinton did, to wit, after the Stained Dress had been discovered but before Clinton's grand jury testimony.

In the Ryan case, of course, Salletan assumes straightaway that Jack Ryan behaved precisely as Jeri Ryan alleges. No Stained Dress is needed here.

After all, she is Seven of Nine. The Borg do not lie.

Or was that Vulcans? Either way.

And since Salletan assumes the claims are all true, he finds it quite hypocritical that Republicans are asking for irrelevancies like "proof" or "corroboration" or "anything, really, that shows these claims aren't fabricated like a thousand other charges ina a thousand other custody disputes." He suddenly finds people requiring that there be some scintilla of evidence before conclusions be drawn to be quite churlish and, you know, real pills and buzzkills besides.

4. Liberals seem quite inconsistent regarding what should be deemed boorish, loutish, or positively predatory behavior. Bill Clinton is alleged to have groped Kathleen Willey. Bill Clinton is alleged to have raped Juanita Broadderick. Bill Clinton is alleged to have recommended that Paula Jones "kiss it."

Apparently all these are the acts of a charming rogue dealing with his inner Fat Boy.

But Salletan becomes quite the defender of Feminine Virtue when it comes to Jack Ryan. Suddenly he's the Grand Marshall of the Chastity Brigade:

The woman's discomfort is no big deal. She says three times over eight years [of marriage], we went to places that she felt uncomfortable," Jack Ryan said Tuesday. "That's the worst of it. I think almost any spouse would take that as, 'Gosh, if that's the worst someone can say about me after seeing me live my life for eight years ... ' then people say, 'Gosh, the guy's lived a pretty clean life.' " In another interview, Ryan said, "What's in those documents at its worst is that I propositioned my wife in an inappropriate place."

You know what, Will? A woman's discomfort in refusing sexual activities proposed by her husband is not, in fact, a "big deal." Men and women often disagree about sex. Now, the new liberal feminist bromide seems to be that not only should men never prevail in these disagreements, not only should men take no for an answer, but that they also should never so much as put a woman in a position of having to say no.

If you don't take no for an answer, you're engaging in rape. We all know that. But if you ask a woman for something and force her to say "no," you're engaging in rape's second cousin, "Causing a Woman Discomfort in Having to Refuse Your Sexual Advances."

In the first degree.

That may sell with the wymynyst crowd, or with Slate's moronic readership, but in the real world, guess what, men ask women to do all sorts of things, and women sometimes say yes, and sometimes say no. The only way to find out is to ask, isn't it? And the only way to be sure that the past "no" was a "no, now and forever no" is to ask again, more sweetly, at a later date.

If any man in the world took "no" to mean "no, and don't ever even ask me again, even if I seem more charged up later on," the species would have died out 100,000 years ago.

Once again, liberals have a bizarre ability to "compartmentalize" what they know about the world on a personal, tangible level from their often-absurd political beliefs, which often maintain the precise opposite.

No straight liberal man -- even the weenies at Slate -- ever took a "no" on a date to also be a "no" on the next date, and yet Salletan is now harumphing that Jack Ryan is alleged -- alleged -- to have asked his wife for kinky sex on three fucking occasions.

Three.

I've asked for sex-stuff more than three times in one fucking sitting, Will. Sometimes three times in one sentence: PleasePleasePlease.

How 'bout you?

Will-- have you ever fucking even kissed a girl? You can tell me if you haven't. It'll be our little secret. I promise.

So, what to make of Will Salletan's cocksucker conclusion?:

Now we know why Bill Clinton got impeached. He was in the wrong club.

No, Will, he got impeached because he actually committed felonies; Jack Ryan hasn't yet been proven to have even acted in bad taste.

What should Jack Ryan be impeached for, I wonder?

Had Jack Ryan been a Democrat, we wouldn't even be having this conversation, because the court records never would have been unsealed; and had they been unsealed, the media would have refused to report them; and had the media reported them, they would have cautioned they should not be taken as true without evidence; and in any event, we would have had no right to ask Jack Ryan about these matters, because his personal sexual life is no one's business but his own.

And all your hypocrisy over alleged hypocrisy won't change that.

posted by Ace at 02:38 PM

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