"Who in the name of God would bring a half-eaten eight-ounce jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise to a public meeting?"

A few days ago, I was talking about a problem that Kamala Harris has as she runs for President:

She's too much of a prosecutor to win the love of a minority group Democrats need to turn out if they're going to beat Mr. Criminal Justice Reform Donald Trump.

Shouting Thomas started off a comment with...

The job of a prosecutor is to put black guys in jail, as noted in "Bonfire of the Vanities."...

I said:

Thanks for reminding me of that book, which I've been meaning to read.

"Althouse, you're playing games with the men here. Abstract hypotheticals are the problem."

"Abstract hypotheticals serve your purpose in advancing feminism. Abstract hypotheticals screw men."

Wow! I remember when it was a major feminist talking point to accuse males of dominating the discourse with abstract reasoning. Women lived in context, embedded in relationships, and the privileging of abstract reasoning was a method of subordination.

The quote above is from Shouting Thomas in the comments to my post about the feasibility of instituting the military draft before and after the removal of the ban on women in combat. I'm trying to get commenters to focus on the precise issue and not drag in other material or emote about how they feel about me. I'm amused to see myself accused of oppressing the men with the use of the kind of rhetoric that feminists used to condemn as typically male.

Why, I remember "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" by Audre Lorde. But apparently the master's tools are working quite well!

"White House: Obama and Biden were never aware of requests for more Benghazi security."

Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy reports (after his earlier post "Biden contradicts State Department on Benghazi security," which I discussed at length earlier this morning). Rogin interviewed Deputy National Security Advisor for Communications Ben Rhodes, asking him "whether Biden was speaking for the entire Obama administration, including the State Department." What Biden said was: "We weren't told they wanted more security. We did not know they wanted more security there."

Rhodes said that Biden speaks only for himself and the president and neither of them knew about the requests at the time.

The State Department security officials who testified before House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa's panel Wednesday never said they had made their requests to the president, Rhodes pointed out. That would be natural because the State Department is responsible for diplomatic security, not the White House, he said. Rhodes also pointed out that the officials were requesting more security in Tripoli, not Benghazi.

So here's the harmonization that is supposed to save Biden from the charge of lying. When Biden said there would be an investigation into the security lapses and Raddatz (the moderator) interjected "And they wanted more security there," Biden said:

Well, we weren’t told they wanted more security there. We did not know they wanted more security again. And by the way, at the time we were told exactly — we said exactly what the intelligence community told us that they knew. That was the assessment. And as the intelligence community changed their view, we made it clear they changed their view.

That's not a lie because Biden was only talking about himself and President Obama. "We" means just Obama and Biden, per Rhodes. But then what do we make of the line "we were told exactly — we said exactly what the intelligence community told us that they knew"? And "That was the assessment"? If Biden knows now that wasn't the assessment and he and the President were not told what the intelligence community knew, he can't truthfully assert that "we were told exactly — we said exactly what the intelligence community told us that they knew"... unless you lay a whole lot of weight on the words I just boldfaced. That is, he was cleverly refraining from saying that the intelligence community told us what they knew. We heard what they told us they knew... and they were not telling the truth. They knew other things, but they didn't tell us. But what they told us, they told us they knew.

NOTE: There's another out: the scope of the term "intelligence community."

AND: Another out stresses the word "there" in Biden's "Well, we weren’t told they wanted more security there." As Rhodes points out: the requests were for more security in Tripoli and the attack occured in Benghazi.

IN THE COMMENTS: Shouting Thomas said:

Uh... yeah... But, how does that explain the prompt production of the "offensive" video as the reason for the attacks?

Here's my theory. It was 9/11, the last 9/11 before the election, and Obama wanted to do something 9/11-y. His people dug up this offensive video on YouTube for Obama to talk about in some eloquent mishmash that would somehow make him sound like a leader who has made a wonderful connection to the Muslim world. Then the al Qaeda attack occurred in Libya, taking over the 9/11 spotlight, interfering with Obama's planned message, and even tainting his legend as The Man Who Shot Bin Laden. A decision was made to absorb the Libya attack into the planned 9/11 story. It was a bad decision, but they doubled down on it anyway. The election was so close, and the truth could be sorted out later.

624 comments on the live-blogging thread last night.

Did the spam-bots find out I'd turned off word verification for commenting? I'll check it out. There's our liberal commenter Lindsey Meadows, who said (at 6:24 PM):

I think I'll just have casual sex tonight. After Romney, I couldn't possibly feel more violated (or bored).

When Clint Eastwood came on at 9, the liberal commenters, offset by Meade, went ageist:

elkh1 said... Clint is really really wobbly old.

Meade said... Clint looks great.

Alex said... Clint looks old and jittery. Remember folks he's 82. When he was in his 40s, it was scary.... Clint is just embarrassing right now. There is a reason for the old folks home and you're seeing it. Shoot me before I ever get like this. Senile.

2 of the long-time conservative commenters picked up the age theme:

Pogo said... Old, jittery, but vicious as hell.

Shouting Thomas said... Unfortunately, Clint is really struggling. Sad to see the great man suffering the humiliation of old age.

Pogo said... No way, ST, he's an elderly man whose body betrays him a bit, but he's hitting a million right notes. Hurrah!

What I liked about Clint's routine — which you had to trust not to feel nervous about — was when he said "We own this country... Politicians are employees of ours... When somebody does not do the job, we've got to let them go." As I said in this post, this was a play on something Romney said, something that's been used against Romney: "I like being able to fire people." Clint imposed the correct interpretation on that: When somebody does not do the job, we've got to let them go.

I didn't say much about Romney's speech last night, because I was way too tired by then. Our liberal friend Alex said: "ROmney talking too much about his family and church. Where are the policy initiatives? Obama is going to be speech-ifying policy like crazy next week." (Yeah, lotsa policy wonkery, that would have kept me awake.)

And our liberal Lindsey said: "I just watched Mitten with the sound on...sound on/sound off...same amount of policy specifics. Meade must be in seventh heaven." Oh, she wants policy too. If only they'd have bored us all to tears all week with specifics.

Shouting Thomas continued his lugubriousness:

Romney played small ball. I think that's what we need. He doesn't have an overriding theme, only the promise that he has the technical and managerial skills to lead.

Obama will promise social justice and payoffs to his favored groups.

The debates should be interesting.

Meade responded:

Exactly right. What we need now is boring small ball competence. Time to put obama's failed presidency behind us. Romney will be a fine president.

Lindsey with the liberal lady's focus on sex not baseball had no trouble seeing the opportunity to say:

Well by all appearances, you got a guy with small balls. I was actually hoping that all the non-policy fluff was just to woo the far right but I am now pretty locked into that being all he has. Sad really.

If a man had said something equivalently sexual about a woman, Democrats would cry "war on women." If that kind of rhetoric is okay, we ought to call out Lindsey for her "war on men."

Ah! No spam. Maybe some not-so-admirable comments in there, but nothing robotic, and so Morning on the Althouse Blog continues (i.e., no word verification for commenting). And I just want to say one thing about this supposed lack of policy specifics from the GOP and the implication of Democratic superiority on said specifics. I mean I want to quote something from Paul Ryan's speech:

[President Obama] created a bipartisan debt commission. They came back with an urgent report. 

It was loaded with specifics.

He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.

Ryan put a long pause between "did" — the action word — and "exactly nothing."

The Occupy Madison encampment.

The group has moved to Veterans Park, which is right by the State Street corner of the Capitol Square. This is how it looked at midday yesterday, right after the peace march.

IN THE COMMENTS: Shouting Thomas links to his photographs of the Occupy Wall Street crowd. He's got some great material over there:

The above picture has everything! These young people are reading about themselves in the New York Post. Note the guitar. One of the young men has covered up his face with a bandanna, emulating a Latin style revolutionary. And, of course, in the background you can see a banner featuring Che Guevara, Fidel Castro's executioner. That romantic fantasy seems to always appeal to the young.

ALSO: Commenter edutcher says, "They always look like bums." And asks "Wonder why that is?" Presumably, he's implying that these people are bums. But when you live on the street, you look like a street person, so it's inherent in the choice of protest style that the Occupy [Your City] people will look like bums.

So the real question is: Why have these people chosen this image? If people go home at night and regroup in the morning, they will look clean and well-groomed and basically normal. If they camp out, they'll soon look like derelicts. It's their intentional branding. Now, maybe it was a bad choice. But it is a choice. They want to appear to be the desolate masses of the world.

"Blog comment of the day."

Instapundit honors Shouting Thomas.

"Woo Hoo! Feingold at Walkerville tonight, maybe my other honey Jon Erpenbach will be there too!"

"I do love rubbing up against those two!"

In light of Weiner's Twitter troubles, it's fascinating to read a tweet like that.

ADDED: "A 5pm visit by former WI Sen/rockstar Russ Feingold will result in streets overflowing w/adulation."

So it's at 5. I'll try to get some pics of the idolators... and the rubbers-up-against.

IN THE COMMENTS: Shouting Thomas said:

Haven't read it, but this brings to mind the theme of Ann Coulter's new book, Demonic.

Having heard Coulter discuss this book on the radio the other day, I'd had the same thought as I was writing this post. So I bought the book — you can buy it here — to extract some relevant material.

Manifestly, liberals fanatically worship their leaders. FDR, JFK, Clinton, Obama, even Hillary, Liz Holtzman, and John Lindsay—they’re all “rock stars” to Democrats. They’re the Beatles, Elvis, or Jesus, depending on which cliché liberals are searching for. As Le Bon says, the “primitive” black-and-white emotions of a crowd slip easily into “infatuation for an individual.”

Le Bon is Gustave Le Bon, who wrote a book "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind" (1895), which Coulter relies on heavily. Back to Coulter:

The most Reagan-besotted conservative would never seriously refer to his presidency with something as hokey as “Camelot.” But in the bizarro-world of the Democrats’ Camelot cult, all we ever hear about is the youth, the vigor, the glamour, the “Kennedy mystique,” and the rest of the cant.... Bill Clinton was called a rock star often, the expression “rock star” [is] the most irritating cliché of the century....

Eleanor Clift described the doughy Clinton-Gore team as “the all-beefcake ticket,” gasping that she was “struck by the expanse of their chests”... The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn said women identified with Clinton because of “the softness, the sensitivity, the vulnerability, that kind of thing.”... An infatuated Jonathan Alter babbled in Newsweek about the Clinton hug: “Bill Clinton hugs other men. It’s not a bear hug, usually—more like a Full Shoulder Squeeze. Women get it, too, but the gesture is more striking in its generational freshness when applied to the same sex....”

When Obama came along, guess who liberals started having sex dreams about?... The New York Times’s Judith Warner reported, “Many women—not too surprisingly—were dreaming about sex with the president.”... The Obamas, Warner wrote, were “a beacon of hope, inspiration and ‘demigodlikeness.’ ”...

NBC’s Matt Lauer noted that “people” have called Obama “ ‘The Savior,’ ‘The Messiah,’ ‘The Messenger of Change.’ ” Try to imagine conservatives coming up with such honorifics for Dwight Eisenhower. Being rational individuals, conservatives don’t turn their political leaders into religious icons. Liberals, by contrast, having all the primitive behaviors of a mob, idolize politicians. 

Bob Dylan turns 70.

Thanks for staying alive, Bob!

IN THE COMMENTS: Shouting Thomas said: "Well, shit, Althouse, I was expecting a more expansive Dylan Hullabaloo."

I don't find birthdays and aging that interesting. I write about Dylan all the time, and most of the people here don't even appreciate it. I'm supposed to hold a birthday party? Does Dylan care about birthdays? The word "birthday" appears but twice in all the Dylan songs.  One is in "Desolation Row":

Now Ophelia, she’s ’neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic...

That's not about celebrating birthdays. "Birthday" is just there to say the woman is 22. She's old at 22. Being older when younger is a theme in at least 2 Dylan songs that spring instantly to my mind. If they don't spring instantly to your mind, then you probably don't care what they are anyway.

The other Dylan song with the word "birthday" tells us something about what he thinks of birthdays. It's "She Belongs to Me":

She’s got everything she needs
She’s an artist, she don’t look back...
You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees
You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees
But you will wind up peeking through her keyhole
Down upon your knees... 
Bow down to her on Sunday
Salute her when her birthday comes...

I don't think Dylan likes getting down on his knees or bowing down, and I think we can infer that he scorns birthday celebrations. That's what I think, and I've been interpreting Dylan songs for 45 years.

I talk to Matt Welch about freedom...

... and sex scandals, politicized media, and the meaning of various buildings:



IN THE COMMENTS: Shouting Thomas said: "One hour and two minutes. No can do. Is there a highlight reel?"

And Deborah made this clip:

California already requires its public schools to teach women's history and black history, so why not gay history?

There's a bill in the state legislature that has already passed the senate.

Advocates say that teaching about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in schools would prevent bullying and shatter stereotypes that some students may harbor. They point to several students who have committed suicide after being taunted by peers for being gay. But the bill has drawn vociferous criticism from opponents who argue that when and how to talk about same-sex relationships should be left to parents.

So the motivation behind forcing this study of history has little to do with history. It's about controlling behavior.

I have this idealistic belief that young people would behave better if they were respected as students, if the study of history would be premised on the value of studying history, and if, when history is studied,   historical principles determined the subject matter. 

A similar bill was approved by the Democratic-controlled Legislature in 2006, but vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who said that school curriculum should be left up to local schools. But there is a new governor now. And both supporters and opponents of the bill expect it will sail through the heavily Democratic Assembly and be signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat who has been supportive of gay rights.

How much easier it is for a politician to sign a bill than for students to slog through political lessons year after year instead of learning what truly belongs in a history class. It's disgusting to compel young people to go to school and then to treat them like this.

And don't tell me that the gay rights movement genuinely belongs in a history course. Let that topic be integrated into history courses to the extent that they truly belong in a history course, not because some politicos wanted to score points or because their emotive constituents feel that there's an epidemic of bullying and suicide and it can be cured by making heroes out of Harvey Milk and his ilk.

“It is very basic to me that people dislike and fear that with which we are less familiar,” said Mark Leno, who sponsored the bill and is one of the first openly gay men elected to the State Senate. Students who come to view their fellow classmates as regular members of society, rather than misfits, will find that “their behavior changes for the better,” Mr. Leno said.

Leno just intuits cause and effect. "It's very basic to me" isn't a good enough foundation for a law that appropriates and exploits millions of hours of the time of other human beings. I could just assert that it's very basic to me that when young people are compelled to spend day after day, year after year, under the control of adults cranking out what sounds like state indoctrination, that they will rebel against authority. And then where's the good behavior you had your warm heart set on?

ADDED: Shouting Thomas cites "South Park":

The parents in that series are all veterans of the 60s, and they think that rebellion ended with them. They think that all of the issues of authority versus kids were solved when they were adolescents. So, they are constantly astonished to discover that their kids think they are pompous windbags preaching bullshit. Their kids are rebelling against them.

Click through to see what Shouting Thomas thinks about bullying.