Bad Choices Lead to Bad Consequences
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James Joyner | Friday, April 21, 2006 |
A conversation at dinner last evening about the increasingly vitriolic nature of punditry turned, inevitably, to Ann Coulter, whose writing most of us enjoyed immensely in the 1990s before she seemingly went off the deep end after the 9/11 attacks. One of my companions, who generally agreed with that assessment, nonetheless recommended her most recent piece.
Entitled, “Lie Down With Strippers, Wake Up With Pleas,” it makes some good points that are simultaneously obvious and profound.
However the Duke lacrosse rape case turns out, one lesson that absolutely will not be learned is this: You can severely reduce your chances of having a false accusation of rape leveled against you if you don’t hire strange women to come to your house and take their clothes off for money.
Also, you can severely reduce your chances of being raped if you do not go to strange men’s houses and take your clothes off for money. (Does anyone else detect a common thread here?)
[...]
Whenever a gun is used in a crime, there are never-ending news stories about how dangerous guns are. But these girls go out alone, late at night, drunk off their butts, and there’s nary a peep about the dangers of drunk women on their own in public. It’s their “right.”
Yes, of course no one “deserves” to die for a mistake. Or to be raped or falsely accused of rape for a mistake. I have always been unabashedly anti-murder, anti-rape and anti-false accusation — and I don’t care who knows about it!
But these statements would roll off the tongue more easily in a world that so much as tacitly acknowledged that all these messy turns of fate followed behavior that your mother could have told you was tacky.
The woman has a point.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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How about:
1. Go to Aruba, get drunk, stay out late, while underage.
2. Hire a drifter to do handyman work around the house in Utah while your attractive young daughters watch.
3. Get drunk with a bunch of female staffers and drive drunk to the beach. Then crash the car and not report it to the police.
Sorry, I forgot, no real consequences for the last one.
My how you've "grown". If you criticise the liberal theology you've "gone off the deep end"!
Just wait. Keep turning your backs on conservatives and watch as the Democrats and their illegal allies turn America into a bankrupt socialist state rife with American haters.
>My how youâ??ve â??grownâ??. If you criticise the
>liberal theology youâ??ve â??gone off the deep endâ??!
Just because X is wrong, that doesn't mean any argument against X is necessarily valid.
My big problem with Coulter and her ilk is how much she's dumbed down the level of discourse on the right. Conservatism used to be a philosophy of rationalism. Increasingly, though, our philosophy is driven by the most blatant emotionalism.
I don't consider it an improvement.
I don't care for the kind of punk journalism practiced by Coulter or her counterparts on the other side of the spectrum. But what really hurts is the occasional Coulter article, like this one, that shows that she is capable of much better.
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