Donald Trump and the Normalization of Sexual Assault

Over the last few years we have heard numerous stories about sexual assault on college campuses and efforts to change the mentality of males who would possible disregard the meaning of the word "No." Enter Donald Trump as revealed in the 2005 tape released last Friday and his excuse - and that of far too many of his surrogates - that all he was doing is engaging in "locker room talk." I may be gay, but over the years growing up, I was in many locker rooms and secured a varsity letter in high school.  Yes, there is racy talk at times, but in my experience it is about how much women supposedly want a guy (at least in the guy's imagination), not the fact that the guy can assault them at will  because he's a "star."  Trump is a sick and disgusting individual and a case study in the reality that money cannot by class and decorum.   A column in the New York Times looks at how Trump would normalize the sexual assault of women.  It also looks at how a Trump/Pence administration would likely be anti-women.  Here are highlights:

 After recently being caught on a 2005 tape gloating about sexual assaults, Trump issued an unapologetic apology in which he focused on the “big difference” between words and actions. And he has a point.

But there’s abundant evidence that Trump has indulged in not just scurrilous rhetoric, but also in heinous actions. Several more women have stepped forward to offer on-the-record accounts of having been aggressively groped or kissed by Trump against their will, right after he met them.

Some Republicans have demanded laws to ban transgender women from entering women’s restrooms or locker rooms, but instead they might focus on the risk of Trump doing this. He has boasted that he marched unannounced into changing rooms to ogle beauty pageant contestants naked, and a former contestant, Miss Arizona, Tasha Dixon, said he did just that as they were changing into bikinis. “Some girls were topless,” she said. “Other girls were naked.”

The pageant theme that year? Empowering women.

There’s more. In Trump’s 2005 tape, he referred in vulgar ways to a married woman, Nancy O’Dell, he had unsuccessfully pursued, but what’s less known is that in 2007 he reportedly tried to have her fired from hosting the Miss USA Pageant. Why? Because she was pregnant.

What is dehumanizing is not necessarily dirty words as such, but rather the casual braggadocio by men that normalizes assault. One study of 16,000 comments on a website for fraternity men found that the most common body part mentioned was “ass,” followed by “tits.”

There’s some evidence that hearing sexist language may be linked to greater tolerance of rape. And we already have a national problem with sexual harassment: One large survey found that almost one-quarter of American women said they had been groped in public spaces.

So I’m delighted that at least one person, Billy Bush, is paying in a concrete way for the words in the Trump tape. Maybe this can be a wake-up call for us men to appreciate that sexist epithets are no more acceptable than racist epithets.

If we’re outraged by vulgar words, shouldn’t we be even more appalled by predatory actions? And policies? Here the truth is that a Trump administration’s policies might be less titillating than his words, but they would be far more dangerous.

Every year, 550,000 women in America require medical attention after an assault by a boyfriend or husband. That’s an issue that is belatedly being addressed through screenings under Obamacare, which Trump wants to repeal, and by the Violence Against Women Act, which a large bloc of Republicans opposed in Congress. Trump’s concern about such assaults seems dubious, and in fact both he and his campaign C.E.O., Steve Bannon, have been accused of domestic violence themselves.

Since he never held public office, Trump lacks a voting record. But his running mate has tended to look at what might help women and do the opposite, including voting against equal-pay legislation.

At a time when 11 women a day die of cervical cancer, Trump and Pence have also been stalwart opponents of women’s health programs that provide cancer screenings. They are motivated partly by hostility toward Planned Parenthood over abortions, but Pence, while a congressman, also sponsored legislation to defund Title X, the main federal family planning program. It does not pay for abortions but does help screen more than 750,000 women for cervical cancer a year.

New York magazine once quoted Trump as telling a friend about women, “you have to treat ‘em like——” well, manure. But to me, his language pales beside his behavior and likely policies. So let’s try to pivot from outrage at gross words to condemnation of unconscionable behavior and policies. 

Bernie Sanders Remains Delusional, Republicans Consider Voting for Hillary

While Bernie Sanders remains locked in an ego fueled fantasy that he will somehow win the Democrat nomination (to me, his ego seems as big or bigger than Donald Trump's), sane Republicans are now considering what they once thought unthinkable: voting for Hillary Clinton in November. Sanders seemingly cares nothing about making sure a Democrat wins in November - perhaps because he is not really a Democrat -  and prefers to indulge his egomania by continuing an unwinnable contest, only aiding Donald Trump in the process.  A piece in Politico looks at the situation of sane, non-extremist Republicans.  Here are highlights:

Ted Cruz’s sudden suspension of his campaign following his double-digit loss to Trump in Indiana Tuesday night is forcing anti-Trump Republicans to finally confront the Hobson’s Choice of a general election matchup between Hillary Clinton and a demagogic conspiracy theorist untethered to conservative principles.

While many conservative stalwarts are conflicted and stuck in a state of paralysis, some are considering the ultimate betrayal.

Schmidt predicted that “a substantial amount of Republican officials who have worked in Republican administrations, especially on issues of defense and national security, will endorse Hillary Clinton in the campaign.”

Trump is eager to unify the Republican Party, recognizing Cruz as a “great competitor” with a “brilliant future” just hours after suggesting that the Texas senator’s father was involved in the assassination of JFK and promising to “win big in November.

Cruz, in his farewell speech, didn’t mention Trump. At least three Republican senators —Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse and Cory Gardner of Colorado — signaled Tuesday night that they remain opposed to a Trump candidacy. Like many in the #NeverTrump brigade, they’re thinking beyond November 2016 and about the very survival of the Republican Party.

"If we nominate Trump, [the party] is lost beyond this cycle. I think we lose women for a generation, in big numbers,” said Katie Packer, who served as Romney’s deputy campaign manager and now leads the Our Principles super PAC that spent $10 million in an effort to stop Trump.

“There’s a feeling among Republican women that I talk to that the people who would nominate this guy don’t have any real respect for us as women—especially professional women. They would rather see us in a Mad Men era, where women knew their place and catered to their husband, cooked dinner and met their sexual obligations and didn’t have any other role in society. And there are other people who are supporting him because the guy’s a blatant racist and they identify with that.

“So there’s a sense that if this is who my party is, I don’t really identify with it anymore.”

But the most absolutist opposition to Trump is largely held by the GOP’s donor class and Washington-based establishment—the very people Trump and his supporters have delighted in offending from the start.

For the last several months, the increasingly panicked GOP establishment looked at the first mainstream Republicans to line up behind Trump—first, endorsements from Chris Christie and Jeff Sessions, later former RNC staffer Rick Wiley taking a job with Trump’s campaign—as “Vichy Republicans,” likening their appeasement of an outsider who, in their view, was hijacking their party to the appeasers of Adolph Hitler during his takeover of France.

"It’s like everything that I was taught to believe about conservative philosophy is totally out the window,” Packer said. “When Newt Gingrich and Bill Bennet are defending Trump and making excuses for him—these are people I used to look to as real pillars of conservatism—it’s like bizarro world. It just doesn’t make sense to me anymore."

But now that Trump’s takeover is nearly complete, Republicans are at odds over who that label applies to more—the conservative appeasers of Trump or those willing to back a Democratic nominee.

[I]t’s very difficult for me to come up with any principle by which Donald Trump is aligned with the Republican Party,” said Stuart Stevens, the strategist who guided Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign.

“That’s the same argument the Communist Party used for years—you have to do it for the party. I’m not going to go along with the Brezhnev logic. If the party stands for nothing but election, it stands for nothing.”

Many long-time conservatives find themselves in a state of paralysis, unable to decide which side of that line they’re going to be on. “The goal is to defeat the Democratic candidate,” said Fred Zeidman, a prominent Republican in Houston who was been a bundler for Jeb Bush and eventually opted to support Cruz. But asked if he would support Trump, he hedged. “I’m just not ready to answer that question.”

It is time for Sanders to suspend his campaign and his followers to focus on keeping Trump out of the White House come November.

Donald Trump's Alienation of Women

Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump has seemingly sought to alienate as many demographic groups as possible.  With his latest misogynistic remarks about women and abortion (and his past comments are equally bad), he has added women to the list of voters who basically hate him by large margins.  Meanwhile his GOP opponents - who in actuality are little better than Trump when one looks ta their records - and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders must be salivating. The take away?  If Trump is the Republican nominee, he may lead the GOP to a serious defeat and set the party back for a decade or more.  There simply are not enough uneducated white male voters to counter balance the massive negatives that Trump holds with women, blacks, Hispanics, and non-Christofascists.  A piece in Politico looks at what might be the beginning of the end for The Donald. Here are highlights:

Just how bad are Donald Trump’s problems with women? Bad enough that roughly seven out of 10 women voters in recent polls say they have a negative impression of him. And that was before the news coverage of his threat to “spill the beans” about Ted Cruz’s wife and his talk about punishing women who have abortions.

Trump is already so dangerously underwater with female voters – who represent a majority of the electorate -- that it raises questions about whether a GOP ticket led by the billionaire could lead to a historic gender gap and blowout defeat.

The percentages of women who had an unfavorable or negative impression of Trump in recent public polls are staggering: 67 percent (Fox News), 67 percent (Quinnipiac University), 70 percent (NBC News/Wall Street Journal), 73 percent (CNN/ORC) and 74 percent (ABC News/Washington Post).

“Those are stunningly unfavorable numbers. It would be tremendously difficult for Donald Trump to win the general with those kinds of numbers,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University poll. “Historically, I can’t imagine anyone having worse numbers with women. But historically, there’s never been anyone like Donald Trump.”

Trump does not acknowledge the deficit he faces with women voters, and has instead claimed that he will be “the best thing that ever happened to women.”

The ABC News/Washington Post poll, in particular, points to a troubling trend for Trump: Republican women have been turning against him as the GOP race has unfolded. In November, about two-thirds of Republican women had a favorable opinion of Trump in an ABC News/Washington Post poll, while now only 43 percent do.
The gender gap is hurting him in Wisconsin, where Republicans go to the polls next Tuesday.

If Trump does win the nomination and heads to the general election, he faces a daunting demographic reality among a statistically important sub-group: white women. The most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll shows white women, who have voted Republican as a whole in each of the past four elections, have a terrible impression of Trump: Only 29 percent view him favorably, compared to 68 percent who have an unfavorable opinion of him.

Head-to-head polls of registered voters released this month -- all of which put Trump significantly behind Hillary Clinton overall -- show massive Clinton leads among female voters. A Quinnipiac University poll placed Clinton at 16 points ahead of Trump among women. Clinton also led among women by 19 points among women in a Fox News poll, and by 27 points in a CNN/ORC poll.

Fights Over "Religious Freedom" And Gay Rights Are Costing Republicans

Opponents of an Arkansas religious objection measure chant outside the Arkansas state Capitol -

Danny Johnston AP

I have pondered before why the Republican Party as a whole continues to pander to a shrinking aging white, racist, religious extremist base when anti-gay, anti-Hispanic, and anti-women policies are alienating the emerging majority of Americans.  Then I remember something: the party base has been taken over by people out of touch with objective reality who believe that their view of the world is the only one - even if history and objective facts prove otherwise.  When people unquestioningly base their lives and world view on a selective reading of myths and fairy tales written largely by Bronze Age herders - i.e., the Jewish Old Testament - that even most Jews no longer believe in, political insanity is easier to understand.  The latest battles over "religious freedom" s\laws that are thinly veiled licenses to discriminate, and not just against gays, under score just how sick the GOP has become.   A piece at West Virginia PBS looks ate how the GOP is slowly committing suicide (even West Virginia defeated a "religious freedom act).  Here are higlights:

Following a firestorm of criticism, Republican governors in Indiana and Arkansas signed revised versions of their states' Religious Freedom Restoration bills Thursday night. In Indiana the language was adjusted, and in Arkansas it was significantly scaled back to more closely align with the federal law.

National Republicans, especially the ones running for president, have to hope it's enough to get them out of the hole they dug themselves on religious freedom and gay rights. It's worth taking a look at what the whole brouhaha has cost the GOP.

[H]ere are four questions about what this issue means for the GOP: 

1) Why didn't Republicans anticipate this firestorm?  It's possible that Republicans' big electoral victories in November blinded them to just how controversial this would be. Gov. Asa Hutchison, R-Ark., and Gov. Mike Pence, R-Ind., seemed genuinely taken aback by the demand for boycotts and the backlash from big corporations like Eli Lilly, WalMart and Apple, as well as the NCAA.

It's as if Republicans — particularly in the deep-red states of Arkansas and Indiana — operate according to a different political calculus, insulated from the divide between their own conservative constituents and changing national opinion. . . . . moving forward with an agenda that satisfies their base of social conservatives but is seen as intolerant and divisive by the business community and a growing majority of voters in the country. This week, those two opposing dynamics reignited the culture war, with Republican politicians as the first casualties.

2) Is this about more than just religious freedom?  Yes! It's about a much bigger, much more fundamental problem for the GOP. A new Pew poll showed that 61 percent of young Republicans favor gay marriage. Hutchinson said his own son signed a petition asking him to veto the bill that he instead sent back to the Legislature for revision.

The Republicans can't appeal to young voters if they're on the wrong side of gay marriage, because gay rights is a symbol of tolerance for so many young voters — not to mention suburban women. The same is true for one of the fastest-growing parts of the electorate — Hispanics. How do Republicans show Hispanics that they are welcoming and inclusive if they oppose a path to legalization for hard-working immigrants here illegally?


The views of the GOP's white, older, conservative primary electorate are farther away from the center of American public opinion than the Democratic base is right now.

3) [H]ow will Republican candidates resolve this larger tension?   Good question! The debates during the primaries will, presumably, reveal the answer. . . . . Of all the GOP presidential hopefuls, Jeb Bush has given this the most thought. He seems determined not to fall into the trap that Mitt Romney did in 2012. . . . Bush has said his strategy is to run as if he's willing "to lose the primary in order to win the general."

4) How's that working out for Jeb Bush so far?    Not so great. All the leading Republican presidential hopefuls, including Bush, came out in favor of the Arkansas and Indiana bills. By Wednesday, though, Bush was backtracking, insisting that religious freedom is a core value but that we also shouldn't discriminate based on sexual orientation.

Meanwhile, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has no doubts about what side he's on. In Iowa on Wednesday, Cruz blasted the "big business" wing of the GOP, saying they are "running shamelessly to endorse the radical, gay marriage agenda over religious liberty. "

Personally, I don't see how the GOP adjusts to the changing American majority unless and until it admits that evangelical Christians are radioactive with the rest of America and efforts are made to begin purging them from local county and city committees.  How this will be done is hard to say given how entrenched the religious extremists have become.  Moreover, moderates like myself and my entire extended family have fled the GOP and what former moderates that are left seem to be drinking the "Kool-Aid" by the gallon full.  The GOP establishment created a Frankenstein monster and now it doesn't know how to kill it.  Anyone with common sense should have been able to see where allowing Christofascists to gain power would lead.

GOP Lawmaker: If Witnesses Saw College Rape, It Was "A Really Great Party"

GOP State Rep. Mike Bocchino

The sickness of the Republican Party simply ceases never to amaze me.  Where else would one see an elected official  say that if witnesses existed to a college campus rape, "it’s a really great party."  The sick individual in question?  Connecticut Republican State Representative Mike Bocchino.  As the father of two daughters, I can only ask WTF is wrong with Bocchino?  The GOP can claim that the GOP war on women is over, but Bocchino and the other foul trolls like him make it clear that such is not the case.  The New Civil Rights Movement has details.  Here are excerpts:

Why can't Republican lawmakers stop the stupid talk about rape. It might as well be labeled the Todd Akin syndrome, but it extends back much further than the disgraced Missouri former Congressman.

You'll remember, of course, it was Akin in August of 2012 who claimed "if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

There have been countless others since, some joking about rape, others serious in their ignorance of what rape actually is, or how it affects victims, both physically and emotionally.

Today you can add Connecticut Republican State Representative to the shameful list.

During a debate on a campus sexual assault bill Tuesday, Connecticut state Rep. Mike Bocchino offered up an unwise opinion. The bill would require both parties about to engage in an intimate or otherwise sexual moment to both consent by saying "yes."

"No question that sexual assault is a horrific thing," Bocchino, who voted for the bill, told his colleagues. "No question that date rape things that happen on college campuses are disgusting," he added. "Because at the end of the day, there are no witnesses…or at least if there are, it’s a really great party."

Nearly 24 hours later, Bocchino finally offered a statement that incorrectly characterizes and incorrectly quotes his comments,a nd offers a slim apology.

Bocchino actually said, "it’s a really great party," not "some kind of party." 

Bocchino is one sick bastard. Why do I suspect that he also campaigns as a "family values" Christian?  

West Virginia Republican says Rape can be "Beautiful"

GOP's Brian Kurcaba

I never cease to be amazed by the batshitery that comes from the mouths of today's Republicans.  It's little wonder that so many of us Republicans of yesteryear have fled the GOP as it has become one big insane asylum.  The key ingredient to the party's descent into insanity?  The rise of the Christofascists within the party.  What began as a slow grow cancer has now metastasized.  How else to explain the statement by West Virginia Republican Delegate Brian Kurcaba who says rape is "beautiful" when it results in a child.  Perhaps in the crazy world view of the likes of Tony Perkins, Pat Robertson, Victoria Cobb, and Tim Wildmon, but not for those of us who live in touch with objective reality.  The Raw Story looks at this batshitery which increasingly is the norm for Republicans who see women as some sort of chattel property of men:

Republican state lawmaker in West Virginia said on Thursday that while rape is horrible, it’s “beautiful” that a child could be produced in the attack.

According to Huffington Post, Charleston Gazette reporter David Gutman was on the scene when Delegate Brian Kurcaba (R) said, “Obviously rape is awful,” but “What is beautiful is the child that could come from this.”

Kurcaba made the remarks during a House of Delegates discussion of a law outlawing all abortions in the state after 20 weeks’ gestation. At 20 weeks, anti-choice activists and lawmakers allege, a fetus can feel pain and is therefore too viable to abort.

The bill was passed by West Virginia Republicans in 2014, but vetoed by Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin. Now the state GOP has revived the bill and voted to remove an exception for victims of rape and incest.

Kurcaba’s remarks echo a string of embarrassing statements by Republicans regarding rape and women’s bodies. 

In 2012, Missouri’s Rep. Todd Akin said that pregnancy can’t result from rape because “If it’s legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”

Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock said that while sexual assaults are unfortunate, the resulting pregnancy is a “gift from God.”

Republican leaders convened an emergency meeting in 2013 urging the rank and file to stop talking about rape altogether lest it further alienate women voters, who have been abandoning the Republican Party in droves.

Nonetheless, Kurcaba — a financial advisor who was elected in 2014 — appears eager to bring discussions of rape back into the dialogue about women’s access to reproductive health care.

Here in Virginia, Republicans are seeking to pass a similar law with no exception for instances of rape.