L

arry Schweikart’s book, 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) is one infuriating read. It leaves you feeling impotent and frustrated, knowing that the liberals and their revisionist history are doing more to win the next generation than we are. But it’s an important read, so I’ll share quick summaries of the 48 lies here over time. I strongly suggest, however, that you read the book.

The title is almost self-explanatory. Let me just add that it is a review of college-level history text books. Here are lies one through three:

Lie #1: The first presidents intended for the United States to be isolationist.

In his farewell address, [George] Washington urged that the United States stay out of European affairs and make no permanent alliances, a principle that would be a hallmark of American foreign policy for a century and a half. – James West Davidson et. al., Nation of Nations

Of course, Washington spent much of his administration seeking foreign alliances, so any historian should ponder that line from Washington’s final address before drawing such a simplistic conclusion. Schweikart shows that Washington wanted about 25 years of breathing room without hard set alliances so the nation could get strong enough to stand alone, without alliances, if need be. Washington was particularly concerned with alliances entangled by old European prejudices, that he wished to leave to the Old World.

The chapter also deals with the leftist historians’ penchant for turning Jefferson into a pacifist, debunking that theory by reminding us that Jefferson sought, in effect, “an alliance of the willing” to fight the Barbary pirates, and when Europe cowed in fear, he pursued unilateral action. Sound familiar?

Lie #2: The Mexican and Spanish-American wars were imperialist efforts drummed up by “corporate interests.”

Ordering troops to the Rio Grande, into territory inhabited by Mexicans, was clearly a provocation … [The Mexican War] was a war of the American elite against the Mexican elite. – Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

Liberal historians want to look at wars like the Mexican American War and our campaign in the Philippines as proof of our societal racism, because we wage war against brown people.  And when we leave when we’re done, in order to not allow us to be disproved as imperialists, these historians make the case that we left because … you guessed it:  We don’t like brown people.

To make their case, liberal historians “ignored the eagerness with which our foes entered the wars,” Schweikart says.  Mexico’s army was four times larger than ours, and Europe was betting on Mexico as the winner.  Wrong.  We did win, but the books minimize the brilliance of our campaigns, like how Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish flotilla without losing a single man.

Lie #3: FDR knew in advance about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor

Schweikart thoroughly debunks this old myth, but fails to make the case for it actually being taught in college textbooks.  Still, I appreciated the chapter because it revealed the same ugliness we see in the 9/11 Truthers Dingbats:  That for their theory to be correct, hundreds of Americans would have had to conspire, and stay quiet after the fact.

That’s an atrocious view of America, and Pearl Harbor and 9/11 conspiracists are both beneath contempt.

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E

nglish prof Andrew Kent Hallam of Metro State University in Denver gets the Proving Academics Are Bigoted Idiots Award today for this, courtesy of Denver’s CBS news:

Metro State College is investigating a professor who asked students to write an essay critical of Republican vice presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin. One student said the instructor singled out Republican students in the class and allowed others to ridicule them.

“I was shocked, I was holy cow, this is just an open door for him to discuss politics with us,” said Jana Barber, a student in the class.

Barber shared the first class assignment with CBS4. Instructor Andrew Hallam asked students to write an essay to contradict what he called the ‘fairy tale image of Palin’ presented at the Republican National Convention.

“What the faculty’s responsibility is to provide opportunity for critical thinking and civic engagement so bringing something of relevancy into the classroom was the faculty’s goal,” said Cathy Lucas, spokeswoman for Metro State. “Should he have broadened it and included all the political figures, yes.”

Leftist that he is, Hallam refused to talk to defend his position to the media.  Instead, leftist that he is, he changed the assignment.

hat-tip:Jim

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W

hy would any sane parent allow their child to go to Berkeley in this day and age? Why would anyone want to hand over trunks of money to the state for the purpose of destroying the sensibility and future productivity of their progeny? Case in point:

BERKELEY, Calif. — UC Berkeley officials say they are preparing to remove four tree-sitters protesting a planned new sports center next to Memorial Stadium.

The university has refused to meet the protesters’ demand that it donate $6 million to environmental and Native American groups as part of an agreement for the tree-sitters to come down voluntarily.

Campus spokesman Dan Mogulof said Monday the university is preparing for what it hopes will be a “quick and safe extraction” in the coming days. (source)

After these thugs have attempted to blackmail (crackmail might be more appropriate, given the photo) the university, they’re still interested in a “safe extraction?” Were it not for the fact that these self-righteous excuses for humanity are poised to sue for any mistreatment they might suffer after mistreating the university for the last 21 months while they’ve tree-sat and delayed construction, I would opt for “quick” and leave the “safe” to chance.

These tree-huggers (in the most literal sense) apparently don’t realize that when they chose to come to Berkeley they chose to come to a school that is in a heavily urbanized area and has a longstanding sports tradition. If they want to save trees, pick a place outside the city. If they don’t like sports, find a school that doesn’t have an athletic program.

I understand most madrassa don’t offer sports. Try your shenanigans there, sloth boy.

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T

he best barbecue I’ve ever had? Well, that would be a tie between the Styrofoam clamshell full of fiixin’s lovingly cooked by a bunch of old black guys at a converted gas station in West Louisville, and the spread laid out at the place in the woods in Missouri, where the host was a porky white guy with a plastic pig nose.

Barbecue is the unique and uniting American cuisine that inspires odes of appreciation and passionate debates over the best recipes, whether it’s at NASCAR tailgate parties or southern church picnics or suburban back yards coast to coast. But to Europeans, it all looks very, very different. From a book review by Andrew Leonard on Salon:

To this day, writes [Andrew Warnes, author of "Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food," and] a lecturer in American literature and culture at Leeds University, barbecue “has yet to escape the fraught implications of savagery and cannibalism inbuilt and original to its name.” Barbecue’s early popularization in 18th century London was “wedded to the ascent of new notions of racial exoticism and mastery.” In one of the earliest English-language descriptions of this imported cuisine, Ned Ward’s “The Barbacue Feast,” published in 1707, “the whipping of slaves goes hand in hand,” theorizes Warnes, “with the savage barbecuing of meat. Both belong to the production of a new imperial supremacy that can corrupt those it empowers.”

Just because he spent a couple hours reading old documents doesn’t mean Warnes is smart enough to draw logical (as opposed to academic) conclusions from his research. He is a typical academic: He cannot breathe unless he’s over-read every situation he confronts and overloaded his analysis with notions born of false intellectual superiority coupled with belittling analyses of those of us not fortunate enough to be blessed with Warnes-like wisdom.

You see his over-amped brain at work again when he describes the first meeting – over barbecue – of Columbus’ crew with the natives, or Amerindians, as I guess we’re supposed to refer to them today:

Head to head, the Amerindian cooks and Catholic crewmen of Guantanamo Bay magnify the differences of the two worlds, each incarnating and distilling a veritable mass of humanity.

And here I thought they were just guys on a beach. Besides, is Warnes really certain that the misfits who sailed with Columbus reflected the “veritable mass” of European humanity? Let’s find an academic to study that! But I digress …

But this symetrey by no means places Native Americans on an equal footing with their Catholic conquerers. Rather, it lumps Natives together in order to fix them in place as innocent but heathen, and it lumps their conquerers together in order to fix them in the place of natural judges of the New World.

Wow. All because the Amerindians cooked their meat on open fires instead of pots! And if that conclusion is not rash or poetic enough for you, try this one: Warnes equates the delicious barbecued fish with heaven and the “sheer hideousness of the ‘disgusting’” barbecued iguanas with the “temptations and bedevilments of the Garden of Eden.”

So, here’s the bottom line: Europeans refused to be bedeviled and besmirched by heathen open-fire cooking, thereby cementing themselves as the socially superior masters, while we Americans gave in to our dark inner nature and accepted the open-fire cookery, necessitating that we kill all the heathens that brought it to us, then go on seeking other darker-skinned peoples to kill just because “barbarism” and “barbecue” sound so much alike.

Spare me … and pass the spare ribs.

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Barack Obama referred to Bill Ayres, his Chicago buddy and former Weather Underground domestic terrorist, as an “English teacher.” Would that it were so! A better phrase would be a “Terror teacher.” From Sol Stern in City Journal:

As I have shown elsewhere in City Journal, Ayers’s politics have hardly changed since his Weatherman days. He still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.

Indeed, the education department at the University of Illinois is a hotbed for the radical education professoriate. As Ayers puts it in one of his course descriptions, prospective K–12 teachers need to “be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and . . . be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, a teacher teaching for social justice and liberation.” Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes.

One of Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn them into laboratories of revolutionary change.

And therefore, the mission of teachers is not to teach children real skills they need in the real world, like math, English and science, which after all are also nothing more than reflections of capitalist hegemony. Ayres is not even bright enough to figure out why capitalism has become the global economic hegemon (because it has proven itself better and more progressive than any other system), yet he is entrusted to teach the teachers of our children.

Does Obama know this? Possibly not, or he wouldn’t have referred to Ayers as an English prof in the debate. I’m much more upset about what Bill Ayres says about the state of education in America than I am about what he says about Obama.

Public pressure and a deceitful resume brought down Ward Churchill, who was much less dangerous than Ayres because he didn’t teach teachers. Let’s take a lesson from Ayres’ own playbook and show some struggle, outrage and action to get this #$%@! out of the classroom and banned from influencing future generations.

hat-tip: memeorandum

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Fighting anthropologists … the idea seems laughable, but there are indeed anthropologists in Iraq, helping protect our troops. And that ticks of the left.

As the leftist news compiler AlterNet explains it, their work sounds like a good thing:

The Human Terrain Systems (HTS) program, in operation for several years, was significantly expanded by the United States military last September. It has recruited anthropologists to be embedded with U.S. troops at brigade and division level in Iraq and Afghanistan. … [T]he program takes anthropologists, some of whom are not experts in the relevant cultures, and charges them with advising commanders to prevent them from misreading local actions and — potentially violent — situations. The idea is to reduce casualties.

The New York Times reported on 5 October 2007 on an anthropologists’ contingent involved in a major operation meant to reduce attacks against U.S. and Afghan troops. The anthropologists identified many widows in the target area and surmised that their young male relatives would be under pressure to support them and would be likely to join the attackers out of economic necessity. A job-training program for the widows led to a reduction in attacks.

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it; an elegant approach to diminishing the violence against not just our troops but also the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan. Certainly one would think that understanding the enemy is better than just killing them. But the left doesn’t share the view.

First, there’s the technical issue:

The anthropological profession has a code of ethics which, like the Hippocratic oath, mandates no harm to people who are studied, and requires their informed consent in participation in research. This is impossible under combat conditions, where there is no opportunity for embedded anthropologists to identify themselves with ordinary people.

So the left apparently would be happier if the military just shot up the young sons of the widows rather than breaking the obligation to inform subjects of “research.” The word is in quotes because by no stretch of the imagination can this work be defined as research; its intent is not to crunch data and publish papers, but to make quick decisions to help save lives.

Then there’s the whole leftist aversion to spying:

And the work looks enough like intelligence work to cause people to view anthropologists as spies (even under ordinary conditions), inhibiting their scientific mission.

First of all, their mission isn’t scientific here; it’s humanitarian and military, but really, looks enough like spying? Spying doesn’t look like something; it is something; it has a definition, and this program isn’t it. “Observing” is different from snooping, eavesdropping or taking on assumed identities in order to get information.

So guess what the anti-war anthropologists named their new little group? The Network of Concerned Anthropologists. How creative of them to use “network” instead of “union.” Their pledge: Not to participate in counter-insurgency.

Isn’t that pretty much the same thing as supporting insurgency? What makes insurgency acceptable and counter-insurgency not?

Now the peaceniks do have a good idea:

She advocated the establishment of a large research program leading to a socio-cultural knowledge database, recruitment of young cultural analysts into government service and establishment of a clearing house for cultural knowledge. None of these would be a problem.

They wouldn’t for me either — in fact, I wish we had done this before Iraq so we would have understood this whole tribal dynamic a bit more.

The problem, though, is that Saddam would have killed them all before they finished their research, which kind of makes it a better idea to team up the anthropologists with the soldiers, where they can actually do good and save lives.

Unfortunately, “saving lives” apparently also means “helping the US,” so the ivory tower dwellers in our formerly great bastions of higher education must take up arms … pens … against the few, the sensible, the good members of their profession.

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I asked Incredible Daughter #1 if she was experiencing a lot of Leftist indoctrination at Chapman U., and she affirmed it’s there in some classes:

From what I’ve seen, there is a liberal slant, but the students aren’t afraid to call BS on stuff that is way out there.

I’m proud to say that she’s one of those unafraid students:

We had some guest speaker in that human diversity’s class, and the class would push them very hard afterwards based on what they said. You may go cross eyed over what one of them said.

She said that it is DISCRIMINATION to assume that someone is heterosexual and that it is OFFENSIVE AND NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT to ask a guy if he has a girlfriend because he might be gay. I told her that if you assume he is gay and he’s straight, you might get your butt kicked, so sorry, I’ll err on the side of political incorrectness.

She was a little shocked at my response.

Interestingly, in our work I’m becoming concerned about writing about real estate developments as “homes for families,” and a cringe a bit each time I see “mom” or “dad” in copy, especially if it’s copy that’s directed to children.

I’m dreading the day gay activists get on us for assuming that houses will be filled with families, not gay couples, or that schools will tell us they’re not interested in materials that assume children have moms and dads, rather than dads and dads, moms and moms, dads and ponies or whatever.

I’m sticking with the good ol’ fashioned copy for now, but feel the ice getting thinner at all times.

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My step-dad (Bill) is a retired senior Foreign Service Officer who led a fascinating career and has maintained long-time friendships with some very bright foreign policy folks.

He forwarded this analysis of the current situation in Venezuela to me. It was authored by a Foreign Service acquaintance who Bill holds in very high regard, but he asked that I refer to the author only as “a friend of my stepfather.” So with no further adieu:

Finally got around to reading the journalist’s note on Venezuela/Ecuador vs. Colombia, which was true when written but explained nothing.

Colombia’s civil war began in 1948 and the FARC guerrillas trace their ancestry to that date. Then, it was a group of passionate revolutionaries ­ today it is a 20,000 man criminal enterprise, led by rich thugs who make a fine living from cocaine. Reyes, the FARCs # 2 whom Colombia killed just inside Ecuador, was wearing in his jungle camp a ROLEX worth $10,000.

It’s not surprising that Colombia got Reyes, who thought himself untouchable in Ecuador, even using his camp for a classroom for “internationals,” among them 10 Mexican students (most died in the air strike).

The most important aspect may have been the “information warfare” bonus. Seizure of Reyes’ computers and a notebook at his rainforest office have already led Costa Rican police to a cache of $500,000 in moldy $100s in the back yard of a 79 year old professor ­ an aging Robespierre who kept a rainy day fund for the FARC.

The moral, your e-mail is not secure. In more important places, among them Mexico and Brasil, information from Reyes’s files is also being tracked.

So while Ecuador got an apology and Chavez strutted, Colombia and President Uribe won big. Reputable polls show Uribe’s popularity has risen from near 60% to 82%. The only dissonant note: President Bush ­ unpopular in much of Latin America, ­ broke s recent sensible silence about Chavez to growl loudly, a welcome diversion for Chavez and for the FARC. [Would he have criticized a Bill Clinton statement in a similar situation? I doubt it.]

None of this means the war on drugs goes well, it doesn’t. But Colombia may have won a decisive battle against a shrinking FARC, a good thing.

Mindful of Scotty Reston’s dictum that “the American people will do anything for Latin America except read about it,” I will stop, before you delete all reference to Latin America from your computers.

But he goes on …

Hardly anyone in the U.S., with the exception of the Spanish language news media, paid attention to the Venezuela and Ecuador vs. Colombia dust up. Now that their Presidents have shaken hands in Santo Domingo, Latin America will be forgotten, until the next crisis.

Colombia got its man (plus the gift of another of the FARC’s top leadership). Most Colombians, who detest the FARC and support Uribe because he vigorously prosecutes the war, think an apology is not a heavy price for striking a hard blow at the insurgency.

For Ecuador, the crisis was about honor. That may sound strange, but history has given Ecuador a losers complex with respect to its larger neighbors. Uribe’s apology settles the matter, until the next incident.

The chief protagonist, however, is Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez.

That’s probably true for Ecuador, but not for Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who has a blood feud with Colombia and President Alvaro Uribe. Chavez will keep on backing the narco-guerrilla FARC, simply because it is a way of striking at the U. S.

Now the FARC, which has just suffered some hard blows, is nowhere near taking Colombia, who democratic [sorry; the text gets messed up here]

Experts say no; the parties want control of the narrative about who is at fault, not fight. Ecuador voted for an OAS resolution that fell short of its demands though the text gave the Correa government satisfaction by noting Colombia’s violation of Ecuador’s territory. By accepting OAS good offices, Ecuador, which doesn’t have the military horses, signaled a desire for peace.

If this were only about Ecuador and Colombia we could be confident the OAS, with a fine record of defusing state on state conflicts, would talk the dispute to death. The real protagonist, however, is Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who has a blood feud with Colombia and President Alvaro Uribe, mostly because Chavez backs the FARC’s narco-guerillas as a way to get at the U.S.

In the conventional wisdom, Chavez goads the U.S., knowing that we recognize that hostilities would drive oil prices through the roof and that our forces are tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps that is still true, but his calculations may be changing.

It is important to recognize that Chavez sees himself as the heir of Simon Bolivar, who liberated South America from Spain. In Chavez’s mind, he is the new “Liberator,” destined to throw off the Yankee yoke. He takes heart from OPEC’s success in damaging the American economy but his effort to build an anti-U.S. coalition has not gone well, massive expenditures to support Latin political friends notwithstanding.

Today, Bolivia and Nicaragua are acolytes, while Ecuador and Argentina are friends. Brazil humors Chavez but ignores him when it comes to Brazil’s vast ties with the U.S. Elsewhere, he is often detested, for meddling and for his anti-democratic stance. By helping the FARC, which is nowhere near taking power, he has earned the enmity of most Colombians.

Chavez is in a race against time before his popularity runs out at home. Oil production is declining and inflation the highest in the Western Hemisphere. He is about to lose his favorite target, a Bush administration unpopular in much of Latin America.

Our next President, regardless of party, is likely to enjoy warmer relations with the region. A policy of giving Chavez enough rope with which to hang himself could pay off in 2009.

Autocrats in trouble at home resort to foreign adventures. If Chavez recognizes he is on the clock, a war with Colombia may commend itself as a way to drag U.S. forces into the fray, a last chance to mobilize Latin America before declining fortunes and a new U.S. administration cut short his Bolivarian destiny.

None of this, except for trying to bankrupt the U.S. through oil, is rational to us. But in Chavez’s Mussolini-style search for glory, war may be logical.
Uribe is alert to this possibility; by not responding to Chavez’s troops on the frontier, he positioned Colombia to avoid blame, should Chavez initiate hostilities.

That is key, for Uribe and for ourselves — no ambiguity about who is the aggressor, should Chavez use force. In Latin America, self defense beats pre-emption every time. In saying this I don’t want to fall into what Secretary Gates ­ back when he was DDI — used to tell me was stuff for a “Cassandra column.”

What Teodoro Petkoff (Venezuelan guerrilla turned staunch democrat) said may well be correct: “Chavez barks but will not bite.” But have shin guards
handy, just in case.

Despite some breaks and mysterious repetition, perhaps caused when it was copied and forwarded to me, I thought the piece insightful and worth sharing.

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My friend Jim tells me he’s seeing the post University of the Absurd all over the Internet, and I can see why.

It’s from the site Minding The Campus, and presents an interview of a UC San Diego student who has just finished a three-quarter, 16-unit required series of classes called “Dimensions of Culture.”

The entire interview is an outrage and a damning indictment of the depths of foolish hypocrisy and idiotic teachings that have overcome and threaten to destroy our universities. Here’s one excerpt. The student has just explained the module on diversity and goes on to talk about the justice module:

A. I liked that quarter best because all it was about were Supreme Court cases like affirmative action and Brown v. Board… My teaching assistant, who you have in discussions twice a week, was crazy. I remember one day she was talking about how there should be affirmative action in terms of who becomes a Fortune 500 CEO and that they should require that a certain percent of all CEOs in Fortune 500 companies be women.

I said I disagree, “Who’s to say that a woman is going to be a better CEO than a man? Let’s be honest, you know, a lot of women don’t become CEOs because most women choose to not work as much ’cause you have no life if you’re a CEO to raise a family or anything.” But she said, “How can you be a woman and think that? That’s totally wrong. That’s what’s wrong with women in our society because we need affirmative action to get ahead.” She was unbelievable.

When we talked about investment bankers and people who worked in finance… she said, “Well, I hate investment bankers anyway, I hate them, I hate their whole attitude.” And she went on and on how they’re terrible people…

Apparently the Teaching Assistant missed out on the diversity module. How could she hate investment bankers if she’s supposed to be tolerant? Oh wait … “investment banker” translates as “white male.” No tolerance required.

And how can you embrace diversity without embracing that women can have different views about women? Is only one point of view allowed? Yes, indeed. One viewpoint is the new diversity.

I particularly liked this passage:

A. I guess what annoyed me most about this class is that they said that it was, you know, everyone can have their opinion, you’re really entrusted in like learning, but if you said anything against what they thought, they were mean. And I remember on my paper I wrote about the Supreme Court case that dealt with Seattle [racial quotas] in which I said that it’s unconstitutional, which is what the Supreme Court decided, I literally spent an hour arguing with my TA before I turned it in because she said, “I think you’re wrong.”

Q. And you wrote that it was unconstitutional to do what?

A. The Seattle case was about having quotas for different races going to high school. They presented it as only white people were upset about it and never talked about how minorities were just as upset … but so yeah, I spent an hour, and she finally was like, “Okay, we’ll agree to disagree. I don’t agree with what you’re saying, I think it is constitutional.” So I turned in the paper, I get an A, and she writes on my paper, “Just so you know, I still think you’re wrong.”

It was supposed to be a persuasive essay or argumentative, and I wanted to say, “Aren’t you supposed to be grading on how I’m arguing, not on my opinions?” It was ridiculous. I didn’t learn to write at all in that class. You had to write pretty much what they wanted, or you had to go and fight for an hour. And I’m sure she just knew that she couldn’t give me a B-, or else I’d have gone and complained. So I was just disgusted by it and that she was just so rude.

Remember: The student being interviewed was on the same side of the Supreme Court of the United States, but that didn’t matter to the TA — the student was wrong. All that mattered to the TA is that her view of the world be held by all.

For this, you get to pay $8,062 a year as a resident (plus books and everything else) or $20,021 as a non-resident. You’d think you could destroy a young mind for much less ….

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In her recent excellent post, Rape, Bookworm gives us this quote from a Harvard female student who told this story of being raped — or at least “raped” in today’s warped sense of the word:

What can I tell you about being raped? Very little. I remember drinking with some girlfriends and then heading to a party in the house that some seniors were throwing. I’m told that I walked in and within 5 minutes was making out with one of the guys who lived there, who I’d talked to some in the dining hall but never really hung out with. I may have initiated it. I don’t remember arriving at the party; I dimly remember waking up at some point in the early morning in this guy’s room. I remember him walking me back to my room. I couldn’t have made it alone; I still had too much alcohol in my system to even stand up straight. I made myself vulnerable and even now it’s hard to think that someone here who I have talked and laughed with could be cold-hearted enough to take advantage of that vulnerability. I’d rather, sometimes, take half the blame than believe that a profound evil can exist in mankind. But it’s easy for me to say, that, of the two of us, I’m the only one who still has nightmares, found myself panicking and detaching during sex for many months afterwards, and spent more time looking into the abyss than any one person should.

The inequalities of the consequences of the night, the actions taken unintentionally or not, have changed the course of only one of our lives, irrevocably and profoundly.

She didn’t even remember the party. She was making out with a guy she hardly knew. They slept together. Is it rape? Or as I said in my post on the same topic, The Rape of Rape on America’s Campuses, was the guy guilty of no more than saying “OK” to her “Lesh do it?”

Before you answer, consider this email I got from a friend regarding the post:

Your past few blogs have been really excellent! I’ve OFTEN fumed about the feminist agenda when it comes to rape statistics. While at UCSB, the TAKE BACK THE NIGHT parade always had me miffed. They always quoted the 25% number. As the only “sober sister” at my sorority, I witnessed first hand the drinking, promiscuity and tears that followed over and over and over again.

When I asked why the girls would get so hammered knowing that they would probably make a choices that night that they would later regret, they all, without fail, said that they were “in college and just wanted to have fun without stressing about it.” Sleazy, cheap, drunken sex never sounded that great to me. It also doesn’t sound like RAPE. If the boys are just as drunk as the girls, how are they expected to be more accountable?

They shouldn’t be. When a woman opens herself to a man and encourages him, the resulting act can be many things, but it can’t be rape. But apparently some prosecutors don’t get the difference. With a hat-tip to Bookworm, here’s a case from England, told by The Daily Mail:

The sex trial nightmare of a Cambridge graduate ended yesterday leaving a huge question mark over the decision to charge him.

Jack Gillett was accused of assault by a fellow student after a drunken night of passion. He has spent nine months under a cloud of suspicion and facing the threat of up to ten years in jail.

But after a three-day trial this week, a jury took just two and a half hours to throw out the £50,000 case. Afterwards, Judge Gareth Hawkesworth questioned why it had ever been brought by the Crown Prosecution Service.

“It is a very sad thing that a case like this should come before the court involving two young people struggling to come to terms with the complexities of life and about to start on their careers,” he said.

Indeed it is sad. Gillet, 23, was accused by a 22-year-old, whose charges included that she had begged Gillet many times to stop. Her anonymity is protected by the law despite the fact that the jury discounted her tale, and despite the fact that Gillet is anything but anonymous.

The girl’s charges appear to be not unlike her Harvard sister’s:

The jury had heard that Mr Gillett’s accuser, the daughter of a well-known personality, had twice left the room on the night of the incident, but returned.

That effectively neuters her claim that she told him to stop early on, but he kept going. He counter-claims that he did stop, but she came back for more — twice, apparently.

As for her cries for help:

Two students in a nearby room testified that they had not heard her calling for help, even though their door and Mr Gillett’s were left ajar throughout the alleged ordeal.

This case has a fair amount of “she said/he said,” but the circumstances obviously weighed in Gillett’s favor — especially testimony of one of the “victim’s” friends:

A friend of the accuser said last night that she had not wanted Mr Gillett convicted, but just wanted to “give him a scare so he wouldn’t do it again”.

This is the even more unseemly flip side of the promiscuousness that permeates our society. It’s all about morals: There’s really not much difference between a girl having no compunction about going to a man’s room and having sex with the door open, and a girl not being able to think proportionately about any other of her actions. Subjecting a person to a lengthy, public court process to “give him a scare?”

“My son’s reputation has suffered, while she remains anonymous,” [Gillett's mother] said. “If she could have been named maybe she would have held back.”

Maybe if she had been taught logic, civics and morality, she would have held back as well.

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