Women Should Be Nice to Men

Author Caitlin Flanagan has written a book for the stay-at-home-mother-with-a-nanny set. It is called To Hell With All That. It’s about time, you might say. After all, we have all been assuming up to now that the nanny set were all out pursuing high-powered careers.

But Flanagan got in trouble with the feminists, so marriage advocate Maggie Gallagher decided to interview her. Flanagan is really a liberal, you see, except that

"I have one conservative standpoint," says Flanagan. "I really have traditional emotions about having a full-time, at-home parent, be it mom or dad. For that, the left has excoriated me, humiliated me, called me names in print - one of which I had to look up."

Welcome to the club, honey. But what has really got her into trouble is promoting the idea that women should be nice to men.

"Try just doing something nice for your husband. Set the table, cook something you know he loves and see what happens."

You see men are not what you think.

"Men really want to help women. Yes, there are bad men in the world. Avoid them. Most of them show their stripes very early."

Actually, men want peace in the house and they are prepared to put up with quite a lot to get it. Men the world over live with the truth that if She is happy, everyone is happy. But if She is not happy then nobody is happy.

Lesson of the Duke Rape Case

In all the flap over the Duke University lacrosse rape case one thing is being forgotten, writes Ann Coulter with her usual verve.

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.

She certainly has a point. Not only that.

You can severely reduce your chances of having someone playing the race card on you if you never get into a compromising position of any kind with an African American.

In general, white males seem to have internalized this lesson. That is what the government’s Table 42 in the National Crime Victimization Survey demonstrates year in and year out.

Here are the numbers for Table 42 in 2003 (pdf).

National Crime Victimization Survey 2003 from Table 42. Personal Crimes of Violence Perceived Race of Offender Incidents of Rape/Sexual Assault White Black   White victim 75,866 20,310   Black victim 0 21,105

There you have it. The numbers are pretty telling. Whites are happily raping away on white women. And blacks are happily raping away on black and white women. But whites are not raping black women. In the government’s Table 42 the zero has an asterisk. The sample is too small for a reliable number.

The question is: Why are white rapists so careful about not raping black women? The answer is obvious. Because it is too dangerous.

In this non-judgmental age there are still a few things that people are still really judgmental about. One of them is white-on-black rape.

If you didn’t know that before, you do now. That is what the Duke lacrosse rape case is all about.

Next They Will Lay Off the Journalists

We all know the agony of the layoff. We sympathize, more or less, with the grossly overpaid auto-workers and union pilots as they strike to maintain their rents. And then we are sorry when we read of 10,000 laid off at General Fishslice. But think of the coming layoffs for journalists. You haven’t thought of it? Well, Boris Johnson has. It’s all very well for the well-paid auto workers, but sooner or later they will come for the journalists, and there will

come a time when the forces of international capital will decree that there is no longer any economic justification for this space to be filled by the manual labour of this particular semi-skilled artisan.



The ancient word-plant will be shut. The gerundive turning-sheds will fall silent. The lathes will cease to hone the metaphors, and no sound will be heard in the vast grammatical assembly lines save the drip-drip-drip from the cracked skylight and the scuttling of rats in the stock of unused similes.

Yes, it’s a pretty grim prospect, for every ink-stained wretch knows

that ranged beneath us, smacking their chops, are hordes of brilliant and pustulant young thrusters, only too keen to show what magic they could produce in our places.

In a healthy economy there are lots of jobs being created and lots of jobs being destroyed. For all the lamentations of union leaders, tender-hearted progressives, and sundry other special pleaders,

It's the market and it's the only way.

President Hillary Means Same-old Same-old

After the stellar economic growth of the last 25 years you would think that all serious presidential contenders would be talking expansively about the wonders of low tax rates and the wisdom of the market. But you would be wrong, according to Larry Kudlow. A President Hillary Clinton would take us back to the days to industrial policy and a “national investment authority.” Sounds like Old Europe. Said Hillary in Chicago:

“Tax cuts are not the cure-all for everything that ails the American economy,” and that instead we need the “right tax system [and] the right investment, including infrastructure. . . . decisions and policies that only all of us acting together through our government can make to set the stage for future prosperity.

Of course, this is suitably vague, but it does suggest a lot of top-down political control. And if the infrastructure of the nation needs investment, it is because liberals siphoned the nation’s wealth in the 1960s and 1970s into social programs, and sneered at continuing to build highways until we had paved the nation over.

Of course, no speech from a Democrat would be complete without a bit of class warfare. Said Hillary:

“America did not build the greatest economy in the world because we have rich people.”

That’s true. We built the railroads with the money of rich people in Britain. But it is also true that we have rich people in the United States because we have built the greatest economy in the world.

There is another way to grow the economy and bring prosperity to Americans. Writes Kudlow:

Two weeks ago I was in the Oval Office with President Bush and a handful of financial journalists. The president spoke to us about his growth policies and priorities, such as making tax relief permanent, keeping the tax rate on dividends and capital gains low, maintaining lean budgets, and expanding free trade.



This vision is in deep contrast to the one being set forth by Hillary Clinton. The president places the risk-taker and the entrepreneur at the center of economic growth; the presidential candidate sees government as the driving force of the economy.

Amen, brother.

Gender Gap in High School

Looking back over the last half century, can we say that any liberal enthusiasm has resulted in a good outcome?

For decades liberals have been saying that girls are shortchanged in school. And they have forced us to implement programs of various kinds to discriminate in favor of girls.

But Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters beg to differ. The problem in education is not girl proficiency but sub-par performance from boys. While

72 percent of female students graduate from high school, only 65 percent of male students earned a diploma.

Well, that’s not too bad, you say. But when you unpack the results by race, as all progressives like to do, the results become alarming.

The difference in graduation rates between females and males was about five-percentage points for white students and only 3 percentage points for Asian students. Among Hispanic and black female students the graduation rates are 58 percent and 59 percent, respectively, compared to 49 percent for Hispanic males and 48 percent for black males. Thus, the gender gap is twice as large for minority students as for white students.

So why is this, liberals? Institutional sexism? Institutional racism? How could this be? Schools in minority areas are run by and for liberals. How could there be racism and sexism there?

There is probably something dark and menacing here. But it probably isn’t racism or sexism. Understandably, liberals really don’t want to look at it too closely. It is beginning to look as thought liberals have been wrong about everything, and especially wrong about education.

Sooner or later we are going to have to admit that the progressive enthusiasm for helping the marginalized has had the opposite effect. People must not be coddled and pushed around. They must learn to make it on their own with minimal help from the helping professions and maximum effort of their own.

But that would be an America with a lot less jobs for liberals. And we can’t have that, can we?

Still, liberals can count one success. They set out to favor girls over boys in the education system, and the result is now in. Girls now do much better than boys in school. But isn’t that discriminatory?

Germans Accuse Brit Tabloids of Bum Deal

War has broken out between the German and the British tabloids. And nobody can tell when it will be over.

The British Sun, famous for its Page 3 beauties, published a photo of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bum—that she had incautiously bared while changing into a bathing suit. According to Roger Boyes in the London Times, in the accompanying article

headlined “I’m big in the Bumdestag” and containing eight puns about bottoms, The Sun gave a backhanded compliment to Frau Merkel’s positive effect on the economy and its “much-improved bottom line”.

Well! The Germans were not about to take that sitting down.

“Very bad form,” said Eduard Lintner, of the Christian Democrats. “There should be no place for such pictures.”

The Germans may be the most advanced country in Europe but they certainly aren’t doing much to counter the stereotype that they don’t have a sense of humor.

This may just be the beginning of the conflict. Coming up soon is the soccer European Cup and the prospect of headlines like “‘Achtung! Surrender’ and ‘Blitz the Fritz‘”

Tension in Baghdad

In Iraq blogger Iraq The Model is getting cranky. He wants to see the politicians quit playing games and get a government on the ground. In his latest report Prime Minister Jafari agreed to step down and then decided no to.

The worrying thing is the deteriorating security situation in Baghdad. Writes Omar:

The security situation had been steadily deteriorating since after the elections and the Samarra mosque bombing and Baghdad has become more dangerous a place than it used to be.

Makeshift barricades that block entrances and inner streets are now a common sight all over Baghdad.

The delay in forming a government has everyone worried and accusatory.

Baghdad's residents are managing their daily life with great difficulty and each delay in forming the government makes the situation even tenser and people more worried.

Faster please.