Hillary Clinton and Robin Lakoff, the Idiot Professor

I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us. The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female.  

Robin Lakoff, Hillary Clinton’s Emailgate Is an Attack on Women http://time.com/4551711/hillary-clinton-emailgate/?xid=time_socialflow_twitter

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Robin Lakoff’s opinion piece in Time (excerpted above) is arguably the stupidest thing yet written about the 2016 election, and an ocean of stupidity has been flowing for months. Her piece is the mother of all non sequiturs.  

Lakoff, a professor of linguistics, of all things, leans into this screed with her raw emotion, how she is feeling. And guess what? She is not happy. “I am mad”.  Who cares? Join the crowd.  I am mad.  All of my friends are mad.  Everybody is mad these days, and for good reason. 

But wait! She is scared too, which is the reason, she says, she is mad, a curious causality. Can someone be scared and mad at the same time? Why would an arch feminist, supposedly a sophisticated thinker, jump into the fray all lathered up with the favorite unhappy stereotype of the emotional, hysterical woman?  

So far, though, we only have a very mad and very scared woman, but here is where the non sequiturs begin, a leap from a personal whiny sounding “how I feel” (fine, again, who cares) to the mailed fist feminist ukase, “if you are a woman you should be too.” We have moved now to the grand pronouncement ex cathedra. So, the deplorable status of women isn’t bad enough, they (all of womanhood) should like Lakoff be quivering with rage and fear, furiously jabbing pins into their Donald Trump voodoo dolls. Because? And off we go, a dumpster-dive into an alternative universe where facts, logic and empirical reality have no bearing on our understanding of current events.

“Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton.  It’s us.” A “bitch hunt?” No, let’s try for a simpler time and channel Sargent Joe Friday – “just the facts, Mam.” The target is Hillary Clinton.  She set up the private email server, exempting herself from the law and the rules, plus lying about it. The FBI director said she was “extremely careless.” If she would have done what she was supposed to do there would be no Emailgate, no one complaining about Hillary and her emails, no FBI investigation, no pronouncements of her carelessness. You don’t have to be Noam Chomsky or Hannah Arendt to comprehend such a simple cause-effect relationship. What you do have to be to ignore it is a tenured grievance specialist, intoxicated by your own moral goodness, dedicated to interpreting your place in the world as an eternal victim, invincibly oblivious to world as it really is.

However, let us continue this journey in the land of feminist paranoid imagination.  “The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female.” Really? Take a peek at “Ten times people were punished for far less than what Hillary Clinton did”. These ten people listed, including Bill Clinton’s former National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger “were actually punished for similar or lesser offenses than what Mrs. Clinton got away with.” Seven of them were men. http://www.thepoliticalinsider.com/hillary-clinton-email-10-punished-less/#ixzz4P3JYmLQA How does this square with “it’s only because she is a female” thesis?  You don’t let empirical reality intrude.

But being in a fantasy world, let us go on and pretend that in some years past Hillary had “transgendered” herself into Heinrich Rodham Clinton. Now as a man (gender is whatever you want it to be, so if you say you’re a man, you’re a man) running the Department of State now he sets up his private email system and sends out classified documents over the unsecured server. Would the FBI not pursue an investigation of Heinrich Rodham Clinton?

But enough of Lakoff's world. Being in it just briefly is too disorienting. Let’s go back and try to understand why this Berkeley professor is so scared. Mad, I understand.  Radical feminists are always mad and always will be. If and when Hillary becomes President they will be mad because of the sexist opposition. 

But what is she scared of?  She is tenured, presumably, so she has life time job security and no penalty for saying and writing whatever pops into her head, no matter how ludicrous, fatuous or absurd.  She is at Berkeley, for God sake, long a haven for the oppressed, protected by the diversity inquisitors, full of “safe spaces”, guarded by “trigger warnings”, a place where even “micro-aggressors” are ruthlessly tracked down, pilloried and ceremoniously ejected. If Professor Lakoff is scared at Berkeley, we have to be deeply, deeply sorry for her. Medication recommended.

But, as she says, “if you are a woman, you should be, too”… that is, mad and scared.  Well, Professor, good luck with that. Keep trying. There is an abundance of things for women today to be mad and scared about, but the vast majority of them do not hang out at Berkeley and they probably see things a bit differently. 

Shame on you, Time. Have you no standards? 

"Death Blow to Moral Chaos"

Nature it selfe cannot erre: and as men abound in copiousnesse of language; so they become more wise or more mad than ordinary.

                                                      Thomas Hobbes

The Communists in close rivalry with the Nazis for brutality and duplicity have been far superior to the Nazis in one crucial regard; the ability to cover up or rationalize their crimes and depredations.  In part this was due to the fact that Stalin with the help of the Western powers – Lend Lease, Studebaker trucks and a Western front – defeated Hitler.   Stalin won and winners usually get to write the script and exert control over the storyline.  In 1945 with the collapse of the Nazi regime, Auschwitz and Buchenwald became suddenly and spectacularly the horror story of the century. Upon the vanquished Germans fell the responsibility for the holocaust and the horrible collective guilt. “Genocide” entered the moral and legal vocabulary of the twentieth century, a neologism that met the need to underscore both the moral and physical magnitude of what the Germans had done to the European Jews.   Hitler was immediately and forever stamped with odium and all the appropriate markings of a sadistic monster.  Stalin’s mass murders, his Gulag, his Terror Famine in Ukraine, the forced deportations of entire peoples, and the Katyn Wood massacre he ordered, however, were ignored or lied about for decades.  Only much later long after Stalin was dead, did his atrocities begin to bear wide spread scrutiny and invite comparisons.  Those who attempted to bring the history of these comparable barbarities to light were attacked by the Left – by illustrious philosophers such as Jean Paul Sartre – as reactionaries and crypto-Fascists or dismissed as cranks. “An anti-Communist is a dog, I don’t change my views on this, I never shall” was Sartre’s response to those who might mention Stalin’s Hitler-like practices.  [Quoted from Hilton Kramer, “The Flowers on Sartre’s Grave”] And he never did.  Until he died in 1980 the bourgeoisie-loathing, café-lounging Paris scribbler exclusively reserved his admiration and support for the Gulag-humanitarians, first Stalin, then Mao and Castro.  

Also, the Communists, unlike the Nazis, were generously assisted in their efforts at self-sanitization by prestigious adulators from afar.   Off to Moscow they dutifully trekked for a peek at the promise land in the making and a friendly chat in the Kremlin with the yellow-eyed, pipe smoking man in the grey tunic. “Uncle Joe”, as he was to FDR had divined the blueprint.  Back they came deeply impressed – from FDR’s Vice President Henry Wallace to George Bernard Shaw to H.G. Wells. Socialism, central economic planning and egalitarianism were in in place and successful: they seemed to be working pretty well for the Russians. 

When the bright sheen wore off of the USSR after a time there were new Communist utopias under construction to visit and to enthuse over – China, Cuba and North Vietnam.  Hewlett Johnson, the Dean of Canterbury made three trips to Mao’s China from 1952 to 1959.  Johnson was touring just when Mao was launching his forced collectivization of the Chinese peasantry in imitation of Stalin’s efforts in the 1930s.  His impressions were recorded in The Upsurge of China published in 1961 just at the time when Mao’s Great Leap Forward was plunging China into a horrific famine. With what he saw in China he could not have been more enthralled and could not have been more extravagant in his praise.  Communism, Chinese style, was the way of the future, morally far superior in its organization and operation. “The new socialism and communism in China,” enthused Johnson, “provides a new moral basis for society.  It has struck a death blow to a moral chaos that reigns in the existence of many sovereign states, each restricted by any moral law curtailing its absolute sovereignty.” [Hewlett Johnson, The Upsurge of China, New World Press, 1961, 366] “Death blow to a moral chaos” – one can only speculate on the mental moorings that would produce this metaphor.  The “death blow” that Mao’s new China was striking was not to whatever "moral chaos" the good Dean seemed to dredge out of his imagination, but to millions of its peasants, deliberately starved by the government.

 Worshipful clerics, journalists, professors and intellectuals have remained a staple of Communist apologetics throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.  A master at special pleading for Communist despots, quite late in the twentieth century when much of the world possessed a fairly firm grasp about how lethal Peoples’ Republics had been for their residents, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky sought in his After the Cataclysm to air brush out of consideration Pol Pot’s mass murder in Cambodia.  “In the first place, is it proper to attribute deaths from famine and disease to the Cambodian authorities?"  Chomsky has always been consistent in holding up the most rigorous standards of responsibility to his own government and delineating with exactitude their particular inequities, but for one of the most brutal dictatorships of modern times he prefers to be generous and forgiving.