Mitch McConnell: Women protesting Kavanaugh Were "Clowns" and It Will "All Blow Over"

If one wants evidence of the contempt that today's Republican Party holds towards women, look no farther than GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the man who other than Donald Trump, has done more to destroy American constitutional government than anyone else.  McConnell in effect has labeled all survivors of sexual assault and women who are tired of GOP misogyny as "clowns" and has suggested that the whole Kavanaugh outrage as something that will "blow over," the inference being that women are shallow, gullible and of short memory capacity.  A piece in Daily Kos looks at McConnell's contempt for women and survivors of sexual assault.  Here are article highlights:

Nothing could exemplify the wholesale contempt the Republican Party has for women than the words of its own Senate Majority Leader, fresh off of successfully installing an accused attempted rapist and hard-right political operative onto the Supreme Court. . . . he considered them useful idiots too. “Harassing members at their homes, crowding the halls with people acting horribly, the effort to humiliate us really helped me unify my conference,” McConnell told the New York Times. “So I want to thank these clowns for all the help they provided.”

There used to be a time in this country when someone in as important a position as McConnell would, after a bitter political fight, attempt to mend fences with his opposition, particularly in a circumstance fraught with such a raw and emotional issue as rape.  There would be some act of simple grace in the acknowledgment of the validity of the other sides’ sentiments, even in defeat. That is the way the U.S. government worked for well over two hundred years, and it is in part what has kept us together as a nation.

More than anyone in the Congress and Senate, Mitch McConnell has worked to undermine those traditions, preferring instead to tear the fabric of this nation in two for the sake of imposing his party’s reactionary agenda on us all. So it’s not unexpected that rather than acknowledging their trauma, even in disagreement, he would instead belittle those rape victims, who protested and painfully told us their stories, as “clowns.”  Donald Trump has now made it acceptable to cruelly mock one’s political opponents, giving no quarter to the fact that they may represent the views of more than half the nation. McConnell’s remarks here simply signal that in the age of Trump the Republican Party has no decency left to spare . . . . .

Even here the undercurrent of misogyny is instructive. Demeaning and diminishing the victims of sexual assault, raising doubts about their truthfulness, was  the GOP’s tactic from the get-go in the Kavanaugh hearings. McConnell’s smug self-assurance that the anger and emotions poured out over the last two weeks will just “blow over” is simply another way of minimizing the experience of those who have had to deal with the trauma of sexual assault and its aftermath. It’s another way of saying that rape, in the end, is really not that big of a deal.

For those women and men who take a different view of sexual assault than that of the Republican Senate Majority leader, November 6 is now [less than] only thirty days away.

WikiLeaks Outed Gay Men In Countries with Death Penalty for Gays

My opinion of Wilikleaks has been plummeting and news that the organization has callously "outed" gays in countries where gays face the death penalty as well as identified rape victims and victims of domestic violence in countries where the victims face potential violence.  One of the countries where such disclosures have been made is Saudi Arabia - America's false ally - where gays are routinely executed.  Apparently, the self-stroking of Julian Assnge's ego is more important that the lives of those his organization is endangering. Towleroad looks at these despicable and uncaring actions.  Here are highlights:

A new report out Tuesday has found that hacktivist group WikiLeaks has on more than one occasion outed gay men in Saudi Arabia, a country where homosexuality is punishable by death.

WikiLeaks has increasingly shown little discretion when it comes to withholding private details about individuals named in documents it leaks online, even those of individuals who have nothing to do with the organization’s raison d’être: “We open governments.” Rather, it seems that WikiLeaks has no interest in taking the time to redact personal information that, if revealed, could endanger the lives of private citizens who have played no role in the Machiavellian machinations of statecraft it seeks to expose.

In the report, the AP found a staggering amount of “collateral damage to the privacy of hundreds of innocent people, including survivors of sexual abuse, sick children and the mentally ill” in WikiLeaks’ leaked documents. Among a trove of cables from Saudi Arabia, for instance, medical records and other personal information was revealed that effectively outs closeted gay men in that country. As the AP notes, “the site published the name of a Saudi citizen arrested for being gay, an extraordinary move given that homosexuality is punishable by death in the ultraconservative Muslim kingdom.”

The AP was able to get in touch with that man who said, “[WikiLeaks] published everything: my phone, address, name, details. If the family of my wife saw this … Publishing personal stuff like that could destroy people.” That individual is also in the midst of a custody dispute with a former partner.

WikiLeaks has also published medical records of teenage rape victims, including a male teen:

Three Saudi cables published by the WikiLeaks identified domestic workers who’d been tortured or sexually abused by their employers, giving the women’s full names and passport numbers. One cable named a male teenager who was raped by a man while abroad; a second identified another male teenager who was so violently raped his legs were broken; a third outlined the details of a Saudi man detained for “sexual deviation” — a derogatory term for homosexuality.

Scott Long, an LGBT rights activist who has worked in the Middle East, said the names of rape victims were off-limits. And he worried that releasing the names of people persecuted for their sexuality only risked magnifying the harm caused by oppressive officials.

“You’re legitimizing their surveillance, not combating it,” Long said.

Apparently, in 2016, medical records are no longer a legitimate secret, even if you’re gay and/or a victim of rape. It is unclear at this point if WikiLeaks has outed gay individuals in other anti-LGBT countries besides Saudi Arabia.

I have come to believe that the best place for Assange may well be in prison where, with luck, he will suffer severely for the harm he has done to innocents.

Quote of the Day: Andrew Sullivan on "Republican Islamists"

This blog looked at the batshitery of Missouri Republican Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin (pictured at left) yesterday.  For those who missed that post, Akin claims that "legitimate rape" doesn't lead to pregnancies.  It's part of his defense of his position seeking to outlaw abortion in all instances.   Andrew Sullivan calls it like it is:

[W]hat's striking to me is the enduring reality that alleged fiscal conservatives in today's GOP almost uniformly have social views that one normally associates with soft-Islamists. It should be possible to be a total fiscal tightwad and still adopt a live-and-let-live philosophy in government - and yet that is emphatically not the GOP we have today. Akin is a classic Islamist-Republican, seeing women entirely as temptations for men who somehow have responsibility for their fate even when being raped. Women are entirely objects - their lives and crises simply requiring an air-brush to keep the whole neurotic ideology intact.

Andrew goes on to cite other Republican candidates who have held this insane notion.  He finishes by describing this behavior as follows:

That's simply the public tidying up that the fundamentalist psyche constantly requires to keep messy, human reality at bay. It's a function of a backwardness and cultural panic that cannot be entirely disguised by an open and affirming convention stage.

Frankly, I'd be embarrassed to call myself a Republican nowadays.  The party has become something truly ugly.

Santorum to Rape Victims: "Make the Best of the Situation"

While as noted in the previous post I'm not thrilled and enthusiastic about Obama, the GOP presidential clown car continues to provide an endless supply of reasons why NOT to vote Republican (over and above the party's decidedly anti-gay agenda). Leading the lunacy is Rick "Frothy Mix" Santorum who has unbelievably said that rape victims should be denied abortions and "make the best of a bad situation." I am not pro-abortion, but heaven forbid that if one of my daughters or some other female family member I loved was raped that Frothy Mix would seek to force her to give birth to the rapist's child. Think Progress looks at Santorum's latest batshitery:

Standing steadfast as the most socially right-wing candidate in the GOP presidential field, Rick Santorum has repeatedly touted his extreme anti-choice position, which dictates that abortion should be uniformly illegal, even in cases of rape or incest. He even suggested that physicians who provide abortions to such victims should be criminally charged.

Last Friday, CNN’s Piers Morgan asked Santorum to clarify his reasoning behind such a callous position. Insisting that “it’s not a matter of religious values,” Santorum explained that sexual assault victims should “accept this horribly created” pregnancy because it is “nevertheless a gift in a very broken way” and that, when it comes down to it, a victim just has “to make the best out of a bad situation“:

SANTORUM: Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life. And this is not an easy choice. I understand that. As horrible as the way that that son or daughter and son was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or doesn’t, it will always be her child. And she will always know that. And so to embrace her and to love her and to support her and get her through this very difficult time, I’ve always, you know, I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. As you know, we have to, in lots of different aspects of our life. We have horrible things happen. I can’t think of anything more horrible. But, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation.

The problem with Santorum’s sense of humanity is that it doesn’t seem to extend to the victim. . . . What’s more, Santorum’s argument forces a woman in these circumstances to share his religious beliefs and “accept what God has given to [her.]” A woman may very well share his belief and decide to carry the pregnancy to the term, but the fundamental point is that that should be her choice — not the government’s, and certainly not Santorum’s.

The Military's Secret Shame - Heterosexual Rape of Other Men

Given the fact that the military chiefs have found so far that there are no problems to date with DADT repeal, it's timely that Newsweek has a major article that looks at the real source of sexual impropriety in the military ranks: "male-on-male assault in the military, experts say, is motivated not by homosexuality, but power, intimidation, and domination." Yes, that's right - its the straight service members who are abusing others. And typically, it is more senior service members preying on and abusing subordinates. Male rape is about control and an act of violence, not gays with same sex attraction. I wonder what Ms. Donnelly and her fellow gay-haters have to say about reality? As the Newsweek article notes (the photo is from the article) it is long past time that the military face up to the magnitude of the problem (female soldiers are even more likely to suffer sexual abuse by these straight males. In some ways, given the military's lowering of standards and waiver of violent crimes in order to achieve recruiting goals, it should be little surprise that there are many "bad eggs" within the ranks. Here are some article highlights:
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Greg Jeloudov was 35 and new to America when he decided to join the Army. Like most soldiers, he was driven by both patriotism for his adopted homeland and the pragmatic notion that the military could be a first step in a career that would enable him to provide for his new family. . . . Less than two weeks after arriving on base, he was gang-raped in the barracks by men who said they were showing him who was in charge of the United States. When he reported the attack to unit commanders, he says they told him, “It must have been your fault. You must have provoked them.”
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What happened to Jeloudov is a part of life in the armed forces that hardly anyone talks about: male-on-male sexual assault. In the staunchly traditional military culture, it’s an ugly secret, kept hidden by layers of personal shame and official denial. Last year nearly 50,000 male veterans screened positive for “military sexual trauma” at the Department of Veterans Affairs, up from just over 30,000 in 2003. For the victims, the experience is a special kind of hell. . .
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While many might assume the perpetrators of such assaults are closeted gay soldiers, military experts and outside researchers say assailants usually are heterosexual. Like in prisons and other predominantly male environments, male-on-male assault in the military, experts say, is motivated not by homosexuality, but power, intimidation, and domination. Assault victims, both male and female, are typically young and low-ranking; they are targeted for their vulnerability. Often, in male-on-male cases, assailants go after those they assume are gay, even if they are not. “One of the reasons people commit sexual assault is to put people in their place, to drive them out,” says Mic Hunter, author of Honor Betrayed: Sexual Abuse in America’s Military. “Sexual assault isn’t about sex, it’s about violence.”
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According to Hunter and others, the repeal of the military’s policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell” might actually help the institution address the issue. Under that rule, being gay meant being fundamentally unfit to serve; it meant you didn’t belong. It also meant that victims were even more reluctant to report their attacks. “I wouldn’t say that the repeal is going to make it safe,” says Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center, a think tank on gays in the military. “But male victims will be a little bit less reluctant to report their assaults.”
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“The military doesn't want to talk about it because, as embarrassing as male-female rape is [from their perspective], this is even worse. The very fact that there's male-on-male rape in the military means that there are warriors who aren't strong enough to fight back.”
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Blake Stephens, now 29, joined the Army in January 2001, just seven months after graduating from high school. The verbal and physical attacks started quickly, he says, and came from virtually every level of the chain of command. In one of the worst incidents, a group of men tackled him, shoved a soda bottle into his rectum, and threw him backward off an elevated platform onto the hood of a car. When he reported the incident, Stephens says, his platoon sergeant told him, “You’re the problem. You’re the reason this is happening,” and refused to take action. . . . His assailants told him that once deployed to Iraq, they would shoot him in the head. “They told me they were going to have sex with me all the time when we were there,” he says. Stephens twice attempted suicide. His marriage fell apart.
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Because reports of such crimes happen outside the reach of police and are handled by a unit’s commanding officer, according to the Pentagon’s own figures, last year just 15 percent of reported cases were actually prosecuted.
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What’s clear is that the Pentagon has only just begun to figure out how to treat men who have been sexually traumatized. Until 2006, sexual assault was classified as a women’s health issue, and even today, Pentagon awareness campaigns target women almost exclusively. Kathleen Chard, the Cincinnati VA psychologist who runs PTSD programs, says that more than 11 percent of the men she works with eventually admit that they were sexually victimized.
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In March, Rep. Chellie Pingree, a Maine Democrat, introduced a bill that would make it easier for victims like Blake Stephens to get benefits and medical coverage. “It’s the hardest thing we hear: people who have suffered a sexual trauma and then have to prove it,” she says. “We can’t leave them out there hanging. It’s unconscionable.” Even if the bill passes, it will likely be too late to help Jeloudov, the soldier who was raped in basic training. Shortly after his attack, with his assailants threatening to send him “back to Russia in half,” his commanding officer told him to sign a document stating that he was a practicing homosexual. He was subsequently discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Less than two years later, his wife has left him, he is unemployed, and he is racked by emotional problems. His VA doctors have prescribed him half a dozen psychotropic drugs that target, variously, his PTSD, insomnia, flashbacks, and depression. He receives a fraction of full VA benefits, which helps explain his determination to prove that he was raped. Embroiled in the bureaucracy of the VA system, he easily descends into despair. But he’s insistent on telling his story. “America to me is justice, truth, and fairness,” he says. “Everything that happened there, none of it had to do with any of that."
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This situation is beyond disgusting. And it is the macho straight service members who are the ones committing the crimes, not the gays.

Lawsuit Says Military Is Rife With Sexual Abuse

Elaine Donnelly and other rabid anti-gay professional Christians and faux experts would have the public believe that allowing gays in the military would undermine good order and open the door for sexual misconduct. It's a lie, of course - like just about everything that comes out of the mouths of the Christianists. Worse yet, it ignores the fact that sexual misconduct by straight service members is already rampant and the fact the the good old boys in charge like to turn a blind eye to the ongoing misconduct. Apparently, especially when women are the victims of sexual abuse. Now, a lawsuit has been filed seeking redress of the outrages that have been permitted which one would hope would expose those in the senior brass who have turned a blind eye to misconduct under a "boys will be boys" mindset. From some of the male chauvinist military brass I've encountered locally, the claims of the lawsuit ring true. It's long past time that the macho cowboy mindset of those in command be reined in. Here are highlights from the New York Times:

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WASHINGTON — A federal lawsuit filed Tuesday accuses the Department of Defense of allowing a military culture that fails to prevent rape and sexual assault, and of mishandling cases that were brought to its attention, thus violating the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.
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The suit — brought by 2 men and 15 women, both veterans and active-duty service members — specifically claims that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and his predecessor, Donald H. Rumsfeld, “ran institutions in which perpetrators were promoted and where military personnel openly mocked and flouted the modest Congressionally mandated institutional reforms."
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There was severe maltreatment in these cases, and there was no accountability whatsoever. And soldiers in general who make any type of complaint in the military are subject to retaliation and have no means of defending themselves.”
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The plaintiffs’ stories in the complaint include accounts of a soldier stripping naked and dancing on a table during a break in a class on preventing sexual assault, physical and verbal harassment, and the rape of a woman by two men who videotaped the assault and circulated it to the woman’s colleagues.
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Though the suit, which was filed in Federal District Court in Virginia, seeks monetary damages, those involved with the case said their goal was an overhaul of the military’s judicial system regarding rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment. “You should not have to be subjected to being raped or sexually assaulted because you volunteered to serve this nation,” said Susan L. Burke, the plaintiffs’ lead lawyer.
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Don't expect a word out of the mouths of the gay haters in defense of women. Ms. Donnelly would no doubt claim that women asked for assault by joining the military in the first place.

Palin To Rape Victims: Bring Your Checkbook

While the storyline is that John McCain selected Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to appeal to women voters, I continue to be dumbfounded by Palin's anti-women agenda both while mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, and now on the campaign trail where she doesn't support equal pay for equal labor. Other than Christianist women who want to remain bare foot and pregnant and in the home, I do not see what Ms. Palin has to offer women voters other than her gender. Does McCain really think women are that stupid? Apparently so. Of all the things that have come out about Palin one of the cruelest is the fact that under her watch Wasilla was the ONLY jurisdiction in Alaska to charge rape victims for rape kits which cost between $300 to $1,200 apiece. Imagine. You've been raped, Mayor Sarah wants your to have to pay for the rape kit, and then, if given her way, you'd be forced to carry your rapist's child since all abortions would be illegal. Here are highlights from Huffington Post:

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So, for four years - from 1996, when Palin took office to 2000 when this law was passed - Palin didn't seem to have a problem with charging rape victims to solve their own crime. And if she did, she certainly didn't communicate that to her hand-picked Police Chief, who didn't have a problem with it. I guess that's one way to be a "Maverick."

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As much as this seems like a post about Sarah Palin, it's really not. It's about John McCain. What I want to know is at what point in the vetting process, after going through Mayoral records, did the McCain campaign learn that Palin condoned the charging of rape victims the cost of processing rape kits? And after they found out, before he selected her, did he discuss the matter in the extensive discussions he had with Palin about her record and her views?

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Oh wait, that's right he didn't do any of this, because he made his decision after a short phone call. And now he has, on his ticket, someone who didn't seem to think that charging rape victims for forensics processing in their rape cases was all that big of a problem. Or, at least it wasn't a big enough problem to use her "responsibility" to change the policy.