Two defendants in military sexual assault cases cannot be punitively discharged, if found guilty, because of “unlawful command influence” derived from comments made by President Barack Obama, a judge ruled in a Hawaii military court this week.

Navy Judge Cmdr. Marcus Fulton ruled during pretrial hearings in two sexual assault cases -- U.S. vs. Johnson and U.S. vs. Fuentes -- that comments made by Obama as commander in chief would unduly influence any potential sentencing, according to a court documents obtained by Stars and Stripes.

On Wednesday and Thursday, Fulton approved the pretrial defense motions, which used as evidence comments that Obama made about sexual assault at a May 7 news conference.

“The bottom line is: I have no tolerance for this,” Obama said, according to an NBC News story submitted as evidence by defense attorneys in the sexual assault cases.

‘I expect consequences,” Obama added. “So I don’t just want more speeches or awareness programs or training, but ultimately folks look the other way. If we find out somebody’s engaging in this, they’ve got to be held accountable -- prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged. Period.”
The judge’s pretrial ruling means that if either defendant is found guilty, whether by a jury or a military judge, they cannot receive a bad conduct discharge or a dishonorable discharge. Sailors found guilty under the Uniform Code of Military Justice’s Article 120, which covers several sexual crimes including assault and rape, generally receive punitive discharges.

“A member of the public would not hear the President’s statement to be a simple admonition to hold members accountable,” Fulton stated. “A member of the public would draw the connection between the ‘dishonorable discharge’ required by the President and a punitive discharge approved by the convening authority.

“The strain on the system created by asking a convening authority to disregard [Obama’s] statement in this environment would be too much to sustain public confidence.”

The ruling sets the stage for defense attorneys to use the same arguments in sexual assault cases throughout the military.
Should other judges accept the same line of reasoning, commands would have to consider issuing lesser administrative discharges to servicemembers found guilty of sexual assault. In some cases, this could allow servicemembers found guilty of sex crimes to retain veterans benefits, according to Defense Department regulations.
“I think that as a defense attorney, I would raise this argument in virtually any [sexual assault] case I had,” said Victor Hansen, vice president of the National Institute of Military Justice and former instructor at the Army’s JAG school.

Hansen found Thursday’s ruling surprising, since judges have rejected “unlawful command influence” arguments under the logic that statements by high-level officials lose their effect as they reach the military’s lower levels.

However, in recent months there has been a lot more said -- and in overly specific terms -- about sexual assault by military and political leaders, Hansen noted. Obama’s call for dishonorable discharges is an example of such specificity, which begins to sound to military juries like a direct order from the commander in chief.

“This is bad lawyering on [Obama’s] advisor’s part,” Hansen said. “It’s certainly not a problem to say that sexual assault is a bad thing and we need to weed it out … that’s innocuous. It’s when they get very pointed that it’s problematic.”

Last year, Marine Corps defendants in more than 60 sexual assault cases filed unlawful command influence claims following comments by Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos, according to a May 9 McClatchy Tribune news report.

In one speech, Amos declared that 80 percent of sexual assault claims were legitimate, according to the report. Judges in nearly all of the 60 disputed cases found the appearance of unlawful command influence, according to the McClatchy report.

You would think a brainy legal scholar like Obama might have learned something from that experience.

Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, has suspended talks on a long-term security deal to keep US troops in his country after Nato leaves in 2014, accusing Washington of duplicity in its efforts to start peace talks with the Taliban.

The announcement came the day after the Taliban opened a "political office" in Qatar, saying they wanted to seek a peaceful solution to the war in Afghanistan, and the US announced plans for talks with the insurgent group.

News that American diplomats would sit down with Taliban leaders for the first time since the US helped oust the group from power in 2001 prompted speculation that real progress towards a negotiated end to the war might be in sight.

US officials underlined that they aimed mostly to facilitate talks between Afghans, although they do have issues to tackle directly with the Taliban, including a possible prisoner exchange.

But while the Taliban hinted at meeting US demands of a break with al-Qaida – saying Afghan soil should not be used to harm other countries – there was only the barest of nods to the Afghan government's request that they talk to the current administration and respect the constitution.

Diplomats say Karzai was kept in the loop about plans for the formal opening of a Taliban office in Qatar, but had expected it to be couched differently. After hours of ominous silence, his office issued a terse statement in effect condemning the move.

"In view of the contradiction between acts and the statements made by the United States of America in regard to the peace process, the Afghan government suspended the negotiations, currently under way in Kabul between Afghan and US delegations on the bilateral security agreement," the palace said.

The final straw for Karzai was their display of a white Taliban flag and repeated use of the name "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan", both in their statement and on a printed backdrop used for a televised press conference, according a senior Afghan official.

It was the name the group used when they ruled from Kabul, and together with their official flag gave the group's representatives the air of a government-in-exile as they addressed the media.

The US had pledged the Taliban would only be able to use the office as base for talks, not as a political platform, and Karzai felt the press conference was a clear violation of that promise, an official Afghan source told the Guardian.

The president was also unhappy about the lack of any reference to the country's constitution, which both he and the US say the Taliban must respect.

Instead the statement made more than one reference to the "establishment of an independent Islamic government"; as the group have often denounced Karzai as a puppet, that could be read as a call for a change of leader or change of system.

We'll say one thing: this certainly sends a clear message to our allies about the advantages of working with the United States.

Lt. Gen. Susan Helms is a pioneering woman who finds her career stalled because of a war on men—a political campaign against sexual assault in the military that shows signs of becoming an effort to criminalize male sexuality.

Before exploring all the things that are wrong with his rather polemical intro, let's explore all the things Taranto is right about (at least in this author's opinion).

1. It's not unreasonable to describe the hold placed on General Helms' nomination as politically motivated grandstanding. General Helms exercised her entirely legal authority to set aside a criminal conviction under the UCMJ. Simple disagreement with her decision does not magically render Helms unfit for confirmation, and smacks of politically motivated punishment for doing something Congress itself gave her authority to do. Having actually read both the memorandum justifying her decision and the very lengthy (over 450 pages) transcript of the proceedings, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the prosecution failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the accuser did not consent.

This is not a trivial point for two reasons. Firstly, our entire justice system rests on the presumption of innocence for the accused and the resulting requirement that to secure a guilty verdict, the prosecution must establish beyond a reasonable doubt that all elements of the crime are satisfied. And secondly, the UCMJ standard for lack of consent requires actual evidence that the defendant knew the Lieutenant did not consent. The only evidence brought by the prosecution was the uncorroborated (and in several cases, disputed) testimony of the "victim".

After reading the aforelinked (yikes - a neologism!) documents, I do not see how General Helms could have reached any other decision than the one she eventually rendered. The prosecution's burden of proof simply was not met.

2. Sen. Claire McCaskill's rhetoric has been consistently over the top. Describing the alleged victim as a "sexual assault survivor" is tantamount to declaring that Capt. Herrera is guilty of sexual assault. This is something that has not been established. Moreover, the deliberate conflation of the intentionally fuzzy term "sexual assault" with rape is inflammatory. Let's remember that we have no actual evidence of sexual assault, let alone rape, other than the word of the accuser. Publicly asserting Capt. Herrera's guilt (or innocence, for that matter) is unfair, irresponsible, and potentially slanderous.

Herrera was proven neither guilty nor innocent, and any statements to the contrary are factually inaccurate.

3. Taranto fairly describes the evidence as "he said/she said", and further notes that the alleged victim's testimony conflicts with the testimony of the accused, the driver of the car (a woman), and copious evidence from the accused's cell phone. When the only evidence of an alleged crime is the uncorroborated testimony of the alleged victim, establishing her credibility (or impeaching the credibility of the accused) is paramount.

That didn't happen.

4. This statement, by McCaskill, is both obscene and outrageous:

Ms. McCaskill said earlier this month that the clemency decision "sent a damaging message to survivors of sexual assault who are seeking justice in the military justice system."

The purpose of a criminal trial is not to "send a message to survivors of sexual assault" regardless of the evidence. Adopting McCaskill's reasoning makes a mockery of our criminal justice system. It is the mother of all end-justifies-the-means arguments, and ought to be offensive to anyone who professes to believe in the rule of law.

5. Taranto's argument here is dead on:

The presumption that [sexually] reckless men are criminals while reckless women are victims makes a mockery of any notion that the sexes are equal.

WHERE TARANTO IS WRONG

1. To describe efforts to revoke a commander's authority to set aside convictions under the UCMJ as "a war on men" is every bit as inflammatory and outrageous as McCaskill's assertions that she knows what actually happened that night, or that Herrera is guilty of sexual assault. Simply say a thing does not make it so. Herrera pled guilty to a lesser offense (indecent acts), not sexual assault.

The efficacy of adopting the frankly silly "war on women" rhetoric of our progressive brethren in Christ is at best unclear. Is the tactic inherently wrong? If so, then why are we doing it? Is it justifiable under certain circumstances? Then we're going to have to make a better case than simple disagreement on a complex public policy issue. Rhetorical bomb throwing doth not an argument make.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether it is a good idea to allow commanders to set aside jury verdicts, or whether it's a good idea to trust military commands to police their own ranks. Conservatives were rightly appalled at Eric Holder's brazen argument that the DoJ should investigate the DoJ. If we see a 'fox guarding the henhouse' problem there, why apply a different standard to the DoD?

I have no problem with the current system for two reasons. There is ample precedent for executives (governors, presidents) to issue extrajudicial pardons of convicted criminals. Though the idea is hardly novel, it has also been abused on many occasions. And the power is so rarely exercised (by one estimate, only 1.5% of such convictions are overturned) that changing it would do little to combat the so-called 'epidemic of military rape':

It is rare for commanders to grant clemency. The Air Force said it has recorded 327 convictions over the past five years for sexual assault, rape and similar crimes, but only five verdicts have been overturned in clemencies.

To characterize simple disagreement on this issue as "a war on men" undermines fundamentally serious conservative objections to the Obama administration's contemptible "war on women" meme.

2. Characterizing the admittedly politicized campaign to "end military rape" as "an attempt to criminalize male sexuality" is likewise objectionable on its face.

This debate isn't about changing the criminal definition of sexual assault under the UCMJ. It's about whether commanders should be allowed to set aside a guilty verdict with no public justification.

It is worth noting here that Gen. Helms' legal advisors counseled her not to overturn the verdict. They did so because of a little known fact: under the UCMJ, guilty verdicts in criminal cases with heavy penalties are automatically appealed. Moreover, the UCMJ court martial process is arguably more tilted towards acquittal than its civilian counterparts.

So the idea that "but for" General Helms' decision, Capt. Herrera would have had no legal recourse is questionable. It is distinctly possible that a reversal on the basis of erroneous fact finding is not a remedy in criminal appeals under the UCMJ. Generally, appeals are limited to examining legal or procedural errors committed during the trial. Appellate courts do not usually re-try the facts; instead, they examine trial procedures to ensure that the law was fairly and properly administered.

One final note: setting aside jury verdicts also has a civilian judicial precedent. I dimly recall from long ago law classes a legal remedy in which a judge can set aside an unreasonable jury verdict. It's called judgment NOV (non obstante veredicto, or "notwithstanding the jury").

The point here is that this debate, though highly politicized and laced with inflammatory rhetoric on both sides, is hardly a slam dunk. We do our own arguments no service when we stoop to tactics we have right deplored when our opponents use them.

...and you thought you needed to spend a lot of money on toys:

Update: this is wonderful, too.

I'm always somewhat mystified when I see "masculinity" defined as a flagrant lack of self control coupled with a broken moral compass. Sometimes it seems that we have forgotten the distinction between acting like a child and choosing to be an adult; between doing what comes naturally and doing what's necessary to ensure not just the survival but the continued evolution of our species.

Last week, I read an essay that moved me to tears. I read it again this morning and cried just as hard as I did the first time I read it.

They were tears of anger as much as tears of grief.

The essay was written by a man remembering his father, and that still, quiet voice reaffirmed everything I have always admired and loved about the best kind of man - the one who isn't in it for himself. The one who thinks ahead; who looks before he leaps; who tempers emotion with reason. Who thinks about the future of the society he lives in, the children he fathers, the destiny of the human race.

Who continually strives to be a better person than the one he was born to be.

After decades of self-justifying articles about how men are hard wired to value quantity over quality and transitory gratification over permanence and progress, we're now being treated to similar arguments about the true nature of women. Being female (and therefore no stranger to the darker impulses of femininity), I'm less skeptical about such arguments than one might suppose. Like Chesterton, I've always thought the traditional restrictions on men and woman were put there for a reason. They are there to restrain us, and to protect others from the deeply destructive aspects of human nature.

Both sexes tell themselves comforting stories about the nature of our better halves. Men like to believe they are the only ones whose instincts bear watching. It's comforting to reduce complex phenomena to a simplistic, almost mathemagical formula: women are hypergamous (which means men's looks don't really matter - in theory at least, any man with a fat enough wallet can die surrounded by compliant, nineteen year old Czech supermodels). Hope springs eternal, so long as one can view females as mostly inert, asexual objects of the male sex drive who can be relied upon, contradictory beliefs about the arbitrary and capricious nature of womankind notwithstanding, to behave in predictable ways. We women just live for marriage and commitment; never acting, always acted upon. When they don't, that's not nature! It's some outside force, acting upon them. Both sides do this, by the way. Conservatives do it every time they fulminate about how feminism has "tricked" a whole generation. It's as though we can't be expected to think about our own lives. When we screw up, it's not our fault! We were sold a lie.

Even our most idiotic lapses our not our fault, really. There's no personal responsibility; only helpless, pathetic victims of feminism (or patriarchal oppression - take your pick) whose choices, like those of all those men who are "only doing what comes naturally", mustn't be questioned or judged because people who judge are prudes. Or busybodies.

Such a framework explains so much. Except it doesn't, really. If women value marriage above all else, why are 60-70% of divorces initiated by women? The conventional wisdom has several answers: they're gold digging hussies (never mind that their standard of living actually drops, post divorce). Or they're brainwashed by the siren song of feminism (never mind that rising divorce rates predate no fault and The Feminine Mystique by a good century or so). Failed marriages are never their fault, nor their husbands' faults. Facts have never been able to compete with a really comforting narrative that essentially dismisses the notion that all of us - male or female - have the ability to move beyond our wiring and assume responsibility for the decisions we make.

We women have our own fables. Too many of us continue to believe that men can be trained, like seals, to want what we want and value what we value. We tell ourselves that it's "the system" that makes people behave the way they do. This is the opposite of the hard wiring meme - it's not human nature, it's those unnatural, rigid gender stereotypes that are holding us back. If we could just cast aside the shackles of patriarchal oppression, women could be just.like.men - wanting what they want, valuing what they value, and thereby achieving the same outcomes; improbably without sacrificing one iota of what makes us female, and feminine.

And men would be 'free' to want what women want and value what women value, in scrupulously equal amounts.

I'm so sick of reading articles about why women (and men) can't have it all. What about our children? What kind of selfish jerk seriously thinks he or she deserves to have everything they want?

All this focus on what men and women naturally want, coupled with furiously reflexive defenses of what various parties perceive to be "natural" for men or women, can't be good for the future of the human race. We have all but divorced parenthood from marriage, because why on earth should men and women have to limit their lifestyle choices simply because they chose to express their beautiful and natural desire to bring a child into the world?

Or not.

Selfishness and self absorption are the New Rationality. Self restraint is wimpy and eminently mockable, shame is off limits, and "What's in it for me?" is now the gold standard by which moral judgments are made. Thumbing our noses at our opponents (#winning!)has become more important than doing what's right even though it's hard. Or doesn't get us ahead. Or gets us laughed at.

Dear God, what a wasteland we're leaving our children.

... I learned, through being fired by the Obama administration, that performing one’s responsibilities as one should, and potentially adversely affecting the administration’s image, is not the way to keep one’s job. (Fortunately, I was not dependent on my federal IG salary.)

That reality was made apparent to me — and, through what happened to me, to all IGs — when I supported my staff of longtime dedicated civil servants, who had recommended taking action against one Kevin Johnson, a former NBA player who had misused, for personal purposes, about $750,000 of an AmeriCorps grant intended for underprivileged young people. What I did not then know was that he was a friend and supporter of President Obama — a fact that caused the proverbial you-know-what to hit the fan.

Without detailing all that happened, the bottom line was that I started to receive pressure to drop the case against Mr. Johnson. When I declined to repudiate my staff’s work, the guillotine fell: I was summarily telephoned that if I did not resign in one hour, I would be fired. And I was, along with my special assistant, John Park. The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote of my firing: “The evidence suggests that [President Obama’s] White House fired a public official who refused to roll over to protect a Presidential crony.”

Similar questions have been raised about other IGs who somehow have been discarded. Amtrak IG Fred Weiderhold, Treasury special IG Neil Barofsky, and International Trade Commission IG Judith Gwynn all left their positions after disputes that weren’t appreciated by the administration, giving more reason for others to go easy with the administration. Further, the president has significantly failed to fill IG vacancies in important agencies (State, Interior, Labor, Homeland Security, and USAID) – well-documented by former IG Joseph Schmitz — demeaning the importance of the IG position.

We are shocked.... shocked to learn that the administration would intervene on behalf of a wealthy one percenter who stole from poor, underprivileged youth.

CWCID

Of the 26,000 unwanted sexual contact incidents in 2012 contained in a recent Defense Department survey, only 3,374 were reported and, Ms. Gillibrand said, only one in 10 ended up going to trial.

The Post links to a list of DoD surveys. Apparently, selecting (never mind reading) the correct source and linking directly to it was a bridge too far. Had one of the Post's editorial board actually read the survey (you can stop laughing now), this paragraph in the summary section might have given them cause to doubt that the report describes an "epidemic" of rape. Can you spot the refrain running through the cited statistics?

Unwanted Sexual Contact. Overall, 6.1% of women and 1.2% of men indicated they experienced unwanted sexual contact in 2012. For women, this rate is statistically significantly higher in 2012 than in 2010 (6.1% vs. 4.4%); there is no statistically significant difference between 2012 and 2006 (6.1% vs. 6.8%). There is no statistically significant difference for men in the overall rate between 2012 and 2010 or 2006 (1.2% vs. 0.9% and 1.8%). Of the 6.1% of women who experienced unwanted sexual contact, 32% indicated the most serious behavior they experienced was unwanted sexual touching only, 26% indicated they experienced attempted sex, and 31% indicated they experienced completed sex. There were no statistically significant differences in the most serious behaviors for women between 2006, 2010, and 2012. Of the 1.2% of men who indicated experiencing unwanted sexual contact, 51% indicated the most serious behavior they experienced was unwanted sexual touching only, 5% indicated they experienced attempted sex, and 10% indicated they experienced completed sex. There were no statistically significant differences in the most serious behaviors for men between 2006, 2010, and 2012.

So much for the layers of editorial oversight and rigorous fact-checking that separate the pros from the wannabes.

But unlike India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Brazil. Costa Rica, Germany, Ireland, Argentina, the U.K., Russia, China, and Australia, America has never had a female head of state or government.

- Comment on Military Rape article

One of the more amusing themes that crops up in gender punditry is the notion that getting more women into X (whether X is government, corporate leadership, positions of power, or the male dominated profession de jure) will magically lead to more female friendly policies and outcomes. If some of the astoundingly tone deaf utterances we've heard from both sides lately are any indication, the idea isn't completely without merit. It's always somewhat appalling to the Editorial Staff how quickly humans of both sexes dismiss problems that uniquely or disproportionately impact the other half of humanity.

But there's plenty of evidence against the notion that simply getting more women (or more men, for that matter) involved in policymaking will result in policies that are fairer to people of the same sex. Furious denunciations of feminists (a notable minority in government) aside, most of the laws deplored by the "manosphere" were in fact passed by overwhelmingly majority-male legislatures bedazzled by the tantalizing possibility that passing Female-Friendly Law Y will get them laid attract hordes of lust-filled women clutching well thumbed copies of the Kama Sutra and dreaming of breaking all 10 Commandments at once. The mind boggles at the possibilities: "Come here, Mitch McConnell, you big female friendly law-slinger, you!"

Or maybe they're just afraid of having to sleep on the sofa when they get home, men being innately so much more logical and rational than women but yet utterly at the mercy of their hormones. Unsurprisingly, we find ourselves confused by the irrefutable logic of such arguments. Perhaps they're just too complicated for a woman to grasp :p

The thing is, contra the comment cited at the beginning of this post, nations that have had one or more female leaders are not exactly noted for the unusual freedoms and rights granted to the women living under female rule. Many of these nations are downright backwards in their attitudes towards the oft-debated humanity of women.

Believing as we do that neither men nor women have a monopoly on gender sensitivity or objectivity, imagine our delight at this mellow-harshing passage from an article on the military "rape" crisis:

When Senator Carl Levin of Michigan stripped a measure aimed at curbing sexual assault in the military out of a defense bill this week, it was widely seen as a trampling by a long-serving male committee chairman on female lawmakers seeking justice for victims.

But the truth reflects a more complex battle driven by legislative competition, policy differences and the limits of identity politics in a chamber where women’s numbers and power are increasing.

The vote to replace the measure offered by Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, in favor of a more modest provision pushed by Mr. Levin, the Democrat who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, did not break down along gender lines: of the seven women on the committee, three, including a fellow Democrat, Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, sided with Mr. Levin. “I think all of us need to acknowledge that this isn’t a gender issue,” said Senator Deb Fischer, Republican of Nebraska, during a recent hearing on the issue.

Nor was it particularly partisan. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, two of the most conservative Republicans on the committee, sided with Ms. Gillibrand, while seven Democrats and an independent peeled away.

This carefully crafted narrative dies so beautifully.

My [ex?] girlfriend is the most amazing girl I’ve ever dated. She’s one of those who even wanted it more than me, sometimes, and would kind of sadly paw at my man-totem like a cat after it has killed the prey. Some of it comes from natural sex drive, yes, but this same girl took like six months to get into bed the first time.

This is incredibly touching. Even after she heartlessly toyed with his dead man totem, he still pines for her.

In 2010, NBC News reporter Michael Isikoff detailed similar secrecy machinations by the Obama administration, which leaked to Bob Woodward “a wealth of eye-popping details from a highly classified briefing” to President-elect Barack Obama two days after the November 2008 election. Among the disclosures to appear in Woodward’s book “Obama’s Wars” were, Isikoff wrote, “the code names of previously unknown NSA programs, the existence of a clandestine paramilitary army run by the CIA in Afghanistan, and details of a secret Chinese cyberpenetration of Obama and John McCain campaign computers.”

The secrets shared with Woodward were so delicate Obama transition chief John Podesta was barred from attendance at the briefing, which was conducted inside a windowless, secure room known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or “SCIF.”

Isikoff asked, quite logically, how the Obama administration could pursue a double standard in which it prosecuted mid-level bureaucrats and military officers for their leaks to the press but allowed administration officials to dispense bigger secrets to Woodward. The best answer Isikoff could find came from John Rizzo, a former CIA general counsel, who surmised that prosecuting leaks to Woodward would be damn-near impossible to prosecute if the president or the CIA director authorized them.

The political uses of official leaks never goes unnoticed by the opposing party. In 2012, as the presidential campaigns gathered speed, after the New York Times published stories about classified programs, including the “kill list,” the drone program, details about the Osama bin Laden raid, and Stuxnet, all considered successes by the administration. The reports infuriated Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who essentially accused the Obama White House of leaking these top secrets for political gain.

“This is not a game. This is far more important than mere politics. Laws have apparently been broken,” McCain cried. To the best of my knowledge, no investigation of these alleged leaks to the press have been ordered or are active, and I have yet to hear Messrs. Brooks, Simon and Cohen describe these leakers of those details as self-indulgent, losers or narcissists. [Addendum, 9:24 p.m.: There is a Stuxnet investigation.]

Another variety of the political leak is the counter-leak or convenient declassification, designed to neutralize or stigmatize an unauthorized leaker. The National Journal’s Ron Fournier, a former Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, explicitly charges the Obama administration with dispensing intelligence about the bin Laden raid to the press to “promote the president’s reelection bid.” He claims that virtually every unauthorized leak ends up being matched by the release of classified information or “authorized” leak. Indeed, immediately following Snowden’s NSA leaks, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, is said to have claimed NSA spying helped defeat a planned attack on the New York City subway system, although that claim is disputed.

Sometimes the counter-leak is more revealing than the leak it was intended to bury. In 2012, then-national security adviser John Brennan went a tad too far counter-leaking in his attempt to nullify an Associated Press report about the foiled underwear bomber plot. In a conference call with TV news pundits, Brennan offered that the plot could never succeed because the United States had “inside control” of it, which helped expose a double-agent working for Western intelligence. Instead of being prosecuted for leaking sensitive, classified intelligence, Brennan was promoted to director of the CIA; that’s the privilege of the policy leak.

We're not enamored of the argument that, because some lawbreakers escape prosecution, all lawbreaking should go unpunished. Still, we'd sure like to see some of the white hot outrage generated by the self-described "outing" of Valerie Plame applied to Obama administration officials who endanger the lives of agents and double agents still in the field.

Guess that level of intellectual consistency is too much to hope for in a supposedly impartial press.

To Stop Being the Party of Stupid You Must Stop Being Stupid

Good advice, that is. If only more people would take it. Consistency being the hobgoblin of great as well as little minds, Mr. Coates continues in much the same vein:

My label-mate David Graham finds the GOP saying dumb things about women, pregnancy, and rape again:

"Before, when my friends on the left side of the aisle here tried to make rape and incest the subject -- because, you know, the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low," Franks said.

Franks continued: "But when you make that exception, there's usually a requirement to report the rape within 48 hours. And in this case that's impossible because this is in the sixth month of gestation. And that's what completely negates and vitiates the purpose of such an amendment."

This got us thinking: do political parties really "talk"? Perhaps more to the point, who is empowered to speak for a party composed (as most parties are) of people whose beliefs, intelligence, and backgrounds cover a wide spectrum?

Yet for some strange reason, progressives like Mr. Coates feel entitled to elevate a never-ending procession of random nitwits to the august position of Official Spokesman for the GOP. First, there was an inflammatory talk radio host well known for slamming the GOP establishment. At first glance, a loose cannon who openly criticizes the GOP Establishment might seem an odd choice for an official party spokesperson. But you see, when someone with no actual role or power within the Republican Party says something deplorable, it's downright useful to be able to smear that organization with a broad brush held by one of its fiercest critics.

Mr. Limbaugh was soon replaced as official spokesman of the GOP by another public figure whose authority to speak for the party is similarly unclear: one Todd Akin, a representative for Missouri's 2nd Congressional district who was running for re-election. Republicans Stupid people who lack Mr. Coates' obvious brainpower might be forgiven for wondering how a relatively minor Congressman from a fairly obscure state came to be The Voice of the GOP, but Akin's bona fides are self-evidently self evident to the intellectual elite: he said something that was useful both stupid and sexist. And he was roundly criticized for it by his fellow Republicans.

Which seems an odd thing for "the GOP" to do to their own spokesman, doesn't it? Oh well, maybe Akin's Republican critics didn't get the official memo.

But let's ignore this insignificant fly in the rhetorical ointment for now. In his turn, Mr. Akin was duly replaced by yet another obscure Republican we had never heard of before he opened his mouth just wide enough to fit both feet inside it. Once again, stupid people and conservatives (but we repeat ourselves!) may be excused for not immediately flashing on what more nimble minds grasped immediately: the "Stupid Party" (as it is affectionately known by far more tolerant and enlightened souls) really need to find better official spokesmen.

In a way, though, we are oddly comforted by the knowledge that it is now considered fair game to smear the opposing party with the most embarrassingly sexist utterances and deeds of any one of its members. Because if we adopt the same standard Mr. Coates so willingly applies to the GOP, it would appear that the Democratic Party is The Party of Sexism:

As the Democratic nomination contest slouches toward a close, it's time to take stock of what I will not miss.

I will not miss seeing advertisements for T-shirts that bear the slogan "Bros before Hos." The shirts depict Barack Obama (the Bro) and Hillary Clinton (the Ho) and are widely sold on the Internet.

I will not miss walking past airport concessions selling the Hillary Nutcracker, a device in which a pantsuit-clad Clinton doll opens her legs to reveal stainless-steel thighs that, well, bust nuts. I won't miss television and newspaper stories that make light of the novelty item.

...Political discourse will at last be free of jokes like this one, told last week by magician Penn Jillette on MSNBC: "Obama did great in February, and that's because that was Black History Month. And now Hillary's doing much better 'cause it's White Bitch Month, right?" Co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski rebuked Jillette.

I won't miss political commentators (including National Public Radio political editor Ken Rudin and Andrew Sullivan, the columnist and blogger) who compare Clinton to the Glenn Close character in the movie "Fatal Attraction."

Usefully (for those who can't wait to apply Mr. Coates' strategy to the DNC) the 2008 Democratic primary offered up a veritable gold mine of hate-filled, sexist invective:

Hillary Clinton is a bitch. A big ol’ bitchy bitch. And a c**t. A “big f**king whore.” Fortunately, you can “call a woman anything.” She’s “Nurse Ratched.” She’ll castrate you if she gets a chance. She would like that. She’s a “She-Devil.” She’s a madam, and her daughter’s a whore. She’s frigid, and she can’t give head. She’s a “She-Devil.” A lesbian. A nag. When things get tough, she cries like a big dumb GIRL. In fact, she’s just that — a “little girl.” In FACT, she wants to “cry her way to the White House.” To be, ahem, “Crybaby-in-Chief.” That proves that she’s not tough enough. But she’s also not feminine enough. She’s “screechy.” She’s an “aging, resentful female.” She’s “Sister Frigidaire.” She really ought to quit running for President and stick to housework. She basically spent her entire times as First Lady going to tea parties. She’s a monster who just won’t die. In fact, she really should just die. You can buy a urinal target with her face on it to express what you really think of her. OMG she’s got claws! She’s crazy. In fact, she’s a lunatic. She’s petty and vindictive and entitled. She’s a washed-up old hag. She’s “everybody’s first wife standing outside probate court.” She’s a “scolding mother.” She’s shrill… shrill… shrill. She can’t take it when people are mean to her. She’s a “hellish housewife.” She’s Tanya Harding. She CAN’T be President, what with the mood swings and the menses. Any woman who votes for her is voting with her vagina, not her brain. Women only like Hillary because she’s a fellow Vagina-American. And because they vote with their feelings. Frankly, anyone who still thinks we need “feminine role models” should get over it and move on, already. Oh, and men who supporters are castratos in the eunuch chorus. You shouldn’t make her President because she wants it too much. She’s totally just banking on support from ugly old feminists. And she looooves to “play the victim.” She cackles! And cackles. And cackles. It’s like she’s a witch or something! She’s definitely“witchy.” And now you can buy her cackle as your ring tone. Her voice, too, is “grating”–like “fingernails on a blackboard” to “some men.” She’s hiding behind her gender. She isn’t a “convincing mom” because she’s too strident. She never did anything on her own. Her husband keeps her on a leash. She hates men. Her campaign is a “catfight.” She makes people want to kill themselves, is like a “domineering mo ther,” and is cold. And OMG she has boobies! All of which are reasons to hate her. (And boy, could I go on.)

This is exactly the kind of talk that, had it been pointed at his fellow blacks, would have had Mr. Coates in high dudgeon. Fortunately, the targets - women - are "people" (we use the term loosely, of course) who don't really rate the white-hot outrage normally reserved for coded racist dog whistles. We apologize for posting such crude, ugly fare but we're simply passing along stupid/sexist things "the DNC has said". Be sure to click through to the original post, which is full of links to all those deliciously sexist bon mots, straight from the mouth of the Democratic Party! Or you could just ask EJ Dionne. Or Kirsten Powers.

Or John Walsh:

Or Julia Gillard, who is having her own problems with the Liberal Party in her country:

The Australian prime minister has again been forced to confront sexism in the country's politics after it emerged that the menu at an opposition fundraising dinner offered "Julia Gillard quail … with small breasts, huge thighs and a big red box."

Gillard, who has repeated attacked misogyny among her political rivals, called on the Liberal National party to drop Mal Brough, the candidate responsible for organising the dinner.

She implicated opposition leader Tony Abbott in a pattern of behaviour culminating in a "grossly offensive and sexist menu" being produced for the fundraiser in Brisbane in late March.

Does Mr. Coates seriously believe that smearing an entire party with the embarrassingly sexist quotes of a few members is a legitimate debate tactic? If so, he may wish to consider another old maxim: those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

There are a lot of stones out there.

Think back on your experiences with Lego men and Lego women. Probably you have happy memories of the time you spent with those tiny figures ...But a new study reports an ominous finding. “The children that grow up with Lego today will remember not only smileys, but also anger and fear in the Minifigures’ faces.”

...While the “vast majority” have happy faces, “the trend is for an increasing proportion of angry faces, with a concomitant reduction in happy faces,” as Christian Jarrett explains in his summary of the study for Research Digest. Hence the researchers’ concern about our children’s futures. They connect this finding with the “considerable array of weapon systems” that are now part of the Lego family, with the toys “moving towards more conflict based play themes.”

Less trumpeted is the fact that each face “received an average of 3.9 emotion labels,” i.e., there was a lot of disagreement about what each face was communicating. ...The real lesson here, I think, is that today’s children are growing up at a time of unparalleled Lego diversity.

Thankfully, we're to be spared the existential angst of Racist Lego:

While attaching the faces to “a body tended to increase ratings for anger and happiness but reduce ratings for disgust and sadness,” skin color “made no difference.”

While we're on the subject, what in the holy heck is wrong with "conflict based play"?

Update: we'd forgotten the Pink Ghetto brouhaha. And don't even get us started about the blatantly oppressive male privilege of "Erector Sets".

How do you maintain desire in a long-term relationship? How can you keep that edge of excitement and danger through long years of monogamy, convention and familiarity? How do you keep rutting like horny adolescents when you're pushing middle-age?

Well now there's a unappealing mental image for the ages. "Get some, Grandpa!" may well be the stuff of which nightmares are made.

Daniel Bergner, author of What Do Women Want? Adventures in the Science of Female Desire, is asking readers to contemplate such questions at Slate's Double XX. Specifically, he asked, "How can women maintain desire within long-term committed relationships?" In response, readers have written in with a series of predictably titillating responses from the familiar grab-bag of shocking alternative lifestyles and fetish. You've got threesomes, you've got costumes, you've got group sex, and so forth. As of this writing we haven't gotten to bondage or S&M yet, but presumably something along those lines will show up before we're done.

The almost ritual tour of kink suggests strongly that Bergner's question is less an interrogative, and more an excuse. The way the issue is framed—how to maintain desire?—makes the answers inevitable. This is, clearly, good copy—everybody likes to read about sex. But it seems like the predetermined nature of the exercise might, possibly, be leaving something out.

...I read his essay and the responses and I feel like every possible lifestyle choice is validated—except that old, boring one, where you have sex occasionally with your wife and maybe go to Good Vibrations if you're in San Francisco, and generally enjoy your marriage in part because it means you don't have to place desire at the center of your lives. How many people will react to this essay by assuming that my marriage is less stable than I think it is, or by thinking that I'm missing out on real passion and real love and real life? The one sin left, it sometimes feels like, is not being sexy enough.

By far our favorite head exploding comment was this one:

... there are simply too many of us for whom sexual satisfaction is key. For me, it's a pillar of who I am as a man, and whether or not I'm in a committed relationship, I deserve a fulfilling, rewarding, and exciting sex life, period.

When we wonder what has happened to marriage, it might help to look at attitudes like this. How does anyone come to believe they "deserve" a fulfilling/rewarding/exciting sex life regardless of their relationship status? Such self absorption boggles the mind. If you "deserve" something, are others obligated to provide it to you? Or does this simply mean that you're entitled to it, that whole for better or for worse thingy be damned?

Married sex can be many things: joyous or simply comforting, elevating or debasing, magical or tawdry, selfish or generous, cherished or regretted. But a pillar of who we are as human beings?

We must be more screwed up than we thought. We can think of many things that make us who we are, but up until now we wouldn't have said that having an exciting sex life was one of them.

Good Lord.

When news broke in late 2005 that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping without warrants — surveillance that was authorized by President George W. Bush — Democrats were not happy campers. More than six in 10 (61 percent) Democrats said the practice was “unacceptable” in a Washington Post-ABC News poll shortly after the story broke.

But Democrats have changed their tune in the wake of new disclosures that the NSA is tracking millions of phone records under President Obama. According to a new Post-Pew Research Center poll, fully 64 percent say the agency’s latest program to access phone records is “acceptable,” which is 27 percentage points higher than their tolerance for the NSA’s probes when polled in 2006.

...Republicans have shifted as well, but in a predictably different direction: 75 percent were OK with the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program in 2006, but a bare 52 percent majority says the NSA’s current phone tracking program is acceptable.

If there's one takeaway from all of this, it's that those durned Independents are an unprincipled bunch.

To be continued....

Scenario 1: Hacker who participates in cyberattacks to uncover self-incriminating evidence from rapists stupid enough to brag about their misdeeds by cell phone and social media...

Scenario 2: Liberal president who promised to restore the moral legitimacy squandered by the Evil BusHitler administration and protect America's civil rights draws up a Disposition Matrix for cyberattacks at home and abroad, where doing so would advance the administration's interests...

We used the term "cyberattack" advisedly, because in both cases what we're contemplating is the deliberate invasion of someone else's communications and/or computers, whether they be handheld telephonic devices, electronic communications, or secured networks.

Legal rationales or prohibitions on such attacks aside, we think it's useful to explore the moral justifications as well. The two are (though some might argue they should not be) distinct issues. Such questions become particularly interesting when applied to a president who has taken it upon himself to school both his predecessor and the global community on the transcendently shiny morality of his own world view whilst secretly violating the values he publicly professes to hold sacred:

When Merkel meets Obama, “you can safely assume that this is an issue that the chancellor will bring up,” Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, told reporters on Monday. Merkel grew up in the East German system, where the government collected vast amounts of information about its citizens.

Other German officials said they were unhappy that their citizens appeared to have fewer rights than Americans.

“I cannot be happy that U.S. citizens might be protected in an appropriate way — I’m not sure if they are — but we are not,” said German Federal Data Protection Commissioner Peter Schaar, who is charged with protecting the privacy of German citizens both from private companies and from governments. “In the Internet, we cannot distinguish anymore between us and them, inside and outside our country. It’s an international network, and the data is going around the world.”

One analyst said the concerns are not merely about privacy, but also economic.

“The German business community is on high alert,” said Volker Perthes, director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “It’s not just about listening in on some bearded guy from Ulm who bought a ticket to Afghanistan and makes conversation with his friends in Waziristan. . . . The suspicion in large parts of the business sector is that Americans would also be interested in our patent applications.”

In the brave new world that is Obama's America, long time allies see us as little different from the Chinese. That can't be good for international bonhomie.

But we had another reason for raising the moral question. Simply put, most people (the Editorial Staff included) can find all sorts of reasons to justify an action whose outcome we applaud, especially when committed by actors who share our inflexibly suburban viewpoints. But when we do what comes so naturally to us - loyally defending "the good guys" and being outraged at the nefariousness of "the bad guys", what happens to our principles? In a particularly well written essay, Cathy Young addresses just that question:

The Steubenville, Ohio rape case that ended with the conviction of two high school athletes last March has faded from the headlines—but now, fallout from the scandal is causing a new stir in the online media. A member of “Anonymous,” the activist hacker group that championed the victim, has gone public out of concern about his legal troubles. Deric Lostutter, formerly known as KYAnonymous, had his home raided by the FBI last April and his computers confiscated. Reports that he may face prison have sparked outrage in the left-wing blogosphere. “Hacker Who Exposed Steubenville Rape Case Could Spend More Time Behind Bars Than The Rapists,” proclaims a ThinkProgress.org headline. On Slate.com, Amanda Marcotte hails Lostutter as one of the Steubenville saga’s “anonymous heroes.”

But the online vigilantes of Anonymous are no heroes—except of a false narrative—and their crusade has been far from benign.

At the center of the false narrative lies the idea that if Anonymous had not “exposed” the story, the Steubenville rapists would never have been brought to justice. Yet by the time Anonymous got involved last December, the criminal case against the two teenagers who sexually assaulted an intoxicated girl after a school party was already well underway. Despite allegations that the authorities had tried to protect the local football stars, Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond were arrested and charged with rape on August 22—six days after the victim and her parents went to the police—and on October 12 Judge Thomas Lipps ruled there was sufficient probable cause for the case to go to trial. The claims of a “cover-up” had to do with the belief that other boys were also implicated in criminal acts; but the efforts of Anonymous have not led to any new charges, though a state grand jury on the case has been meeting since late April.

Anonymous also did not “out” the rapists, as some bloggers have suggested—their names had been mentioned in news reports at least as early as October—or even propel the story into the national media. The group’s first post about the Steubenville rape case was made on December 23, a week after The New York Times published a 5,800-word story about it. Indeed, a Mother Jones article which gives Lostutter credit for “turning Steubenville into a national outrage” quotes Lostutter himself as saying that he first read about the incident in the Times.

We have many times criticized the press for recklessly publishing unverified information in their rush to beat their competitors to the punch. In this case, the press were actually fairly restrained for once, and that restraint was seized upon by people who were justifiably horrified and outraged by the Steubenville story as justification for blowing the lid off the story... even when that involved getting several key facts wrong and committing acts they would find hard to justify, had they been committed against more sympathetic victims.

We here at the Editorial Staff were among those horrified and outraged by Steubenville. The story pushed every emotional button we possess (and trust us, there are a LOT of buttons). That's why we didn't write much about it.

Over the years, the "need" to blow the lid off some story that wasn't developing quickly enough to satisfy various interested parties has been used to justify some pretty specious acts. NYT Editor Bill Keller claimed it was necessary to expose the SWIFT terrorist training program because the mere suspicion that an elected official *might* be breaking the law (this turned out to be utterly false, by the way) somehow empowers unelected and unaccountable for-profit journalists to break the law.

Legal justifications aside, we should be just as suspicious of would be saviors who claim to be exposing wrongdoing by committing wrongdoing as we are of public servants who promise transparency and accountability while practicing their polar opposites.

Discuss amongst your ownselves, knuckle draggers.