Dems discover ... misbehaving pols
Liberals long tolerated behavior they now condemn
“I want your sex.” — George Michael
“Uh, George … we need to see you in HR when you get
a minute.” — His boss, five minutes later (probably)
If only Bill Clinton were alive to see this.
Oh, wait — I guess he is, isn’t he? Well, you know what I mean. If only he were still relevant, and not the emaciated-vegan shadow of his former self, using his wife’s political power to scam $500,000 speeches out of the Russians.
That Bill Clinton — who entered national politics as a low-level perv and, eight years and an untold number of stained blue dresses later, left the same way — is gone. At the end of 1998, when a majority of Americans told pollsters they believed Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton’s approval rating among women was still above 70 percent.
Yesterday, some of those same women held a press conference on Capitol Hill to denounce sexual harassment in the political workplace. Last month some Beacon Hill members of the “I Got Bill’s Back” coalition did the same.
It’s hard for a simpleminded conservative talk guy like me to keep up. After years of celebrating sex as the ultimate civil sacrament, liberal women have suddenly declared it a moral minefield. Some of the same women who praised Ted Kennedy as a hero of feminism are denouncing lowrent pervs as enemies of society. When did that happen?
This isn’t about Judge Roy Moore. He’s a Republican, and one who quotes scripture at that. So Democrats would declare him guilty of sexism even if he’d spent his entire life in a monastery knitting feminine hygiene products for homeless women.
But when women in the Massachusetts House complain about lawmakers who “pressed up against them, touched their legs or grabbed their behinds,” there’s a 74.1 percent chance the perp is a Democrat. (In the state Senate it’s 82.4).
Democratic women have finally decided to do something about Democratic men acting like the Democratic politicians they whole-heartedly supported for years. They call this “progress.”
Speaking as a knuckle-dragging, antiwoman, cisnormative rightwinger, I say, “Welcome to the club! Now calm down.”
It appears we’re headed into the “reformed smoker” phase of Democrats’ new- found opposition to sexual misbehavior. As in “nobody is more annoying than … ” When U.S. Rep. Barbara Comstock (RVa.) tells the story of a female staffer who was asked to bring paperwork to a (no pun intended) member’s home, and he greets her wearing nothing but a smile and a bath towel, I wonder: Do we really need House Speaker Paul Ryan’s new mandated sexual harassment training to figure out this is bad? Forcing everyone who works at the Massachusetts State House to sign a document declaring they understand the consequences of sexual harassment is fine, but is there anyone signing it who didn’t already know that demanding sex from employees or underlings is wrong?
Cathy Young writes about boy-meets-girl issues for Reason magazine, and she’s expressed publicly the concern I’ve heard privately many times:
“The #MeToo movement, which tends to lump together a wide range of male wrongdoing from rape to ‘creepy’ or boorish behavior, raises a basic question about human relations in the working world: Can work and sexuality or romance ever mix? For many supporters of this campaign, the answer seems to be no.”
I met my wife at work. So did Barack Obama and Bill Gates. A 2016 Harris poll found 37 percent of Americans have dated a co-worker and about one in four of those involved dating someone higher up the corporate ladder.
Telling guys that “flirting is hurting,” as some liberal women are, makes this far more dangerous and, therefore, unlikely.
The problem comes with assuming that the average guy is just like Bill Clinton — something the Clintonistas repeated nonstop over the years. It’s not true. The average guy would never treat women the way Clinton or Kennedy or Anthony Weiner did. Will we make mistakes, tell dumb jokes, mistakenly cross the line to inappropriateness? Yes, of course. It’s human nature.
But harassment? No. Violence? Absolutely not.
My advice to liberal women who want to stop the real problem without going too far: Stop assuming all men act like Democrats.