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The War on Women Is Back
It’s been nearly a week since the Access Hollywood tape helped to persuade key parts of the nation that Donald Trump might have a character problem. “Would you vote for a sexual predator?” asked New York Magazine. “Donald Trump Versus Hillary Clinton: Choose Your Sexual Predator” headlined The Federalist.
Yet, while rumors are flying that other shoes remain to drop, only a few women have so far come forward with stories of loutish behavior by the Republican standard bearer. Natasha Stoynoff’s is the most disturbing. She alleges that she had visited Mar-A-Lago for a People Magazine spread on Donald and Melania (who was then pregnant). While Melania left the room to change her clothes for a photo shoot, Stoynoff recounts, Trump pushed her against the wall and “shoved his tongue down my throat.” He backed off only when the butler announced that his wife was returning.
While it’s possible that many more women will come forward with similar accounts, my guess is that Trump’s actual gross conduct is probably some fraction of his claimed gross conduct. You have to apply the Trump-adjuster to every statement. Assume that 90 percent of what he claims – even when he’s boasting of unpardonable behavior – is false.
Some of us have argued for the past year that Trump’s candidacy, and his presidency, if one were to transpire, would do incalculable damage to the Republican Party and to conservative ideas.
We see one aspect of that mutilation playing out now. In 2012, Democrats invented the absurd “Republican war on women” theme. It was so over the top that it began to fray and dissolve in 2014, when Sen. Mark Udall was mocked as “Mark Uterus” for overdoing it. He lost to Cory Gardner.
But with Trump heading the Republican ticket, the war is on again. Nothing is too extreme to allege about Republicans now. Donald Trump lives down to every crude stereotype that the left has ever conjured about the right. If Clinton mad scientists attempting to create the only candidate she could defeat had concocted him in a laboratory, he could not be playing his role any better.
The damage goes far beyond an electoral defeat. Conservatives, particularly religious conservatives, who have rallied to Trump have squandered their own integrity and tainted the reputation of conservatism. They signed on for all of this when they saluted smartly and, in effect, acknowledged that all that character talk about Bill Clinton was so much gas.
Across America, college students are being instructed that “traditional” masculinity is to blame for the rape “crisis.” Young men are taught that, until feminism came along, their sex had been cruel and even criminal in its understanding of and treatment of women. The website MenCanStopRape, for example, seeks to “Promote an understanding of the ways in which traditional masculinity contributes to sexual assault and other forms of men’s violence against women.”
Conservatives saw the world differently. They argued that the sexual revolution had freed men from the responsibility to treat women respectfully. If sex was “no big deal,” then the old rules no longer applied and women were left more vulnerable. Traditional masculinity, while it may have had some disadvantages, also had its virtues. Men who were raised to be gentlemen, or whose religion required sexual restraint, attempted to live by a code. They didn’t always live up to their own standards, but they had standards. Gentlemen didn’t cheat at sports or cheat on their wives. There were lots of rules about how to behave with women. None of them included groping or unwanted touching. They didn’t use foul language in front of women or speak disparagingly about them behind their backs either. They didn’t treat women as “pieces of a—“ to quote Donald Trump, or if they did, they didn’t boast about it.
The sexual revolution was a project of the left, not the right. Yet the man who now represents the right is a pure product of the left’s cultural inheritance. Trump, a lifelong Democrat, learned about women, he told a friend (who recounted it to PBS’s Frontline), from Playboy. It shows. In fact, his critique of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was that Clinton did not choose a “really beautiful woman of sophistication.”
Trump is a user and abuser of people, not just women. But his disgusting behavior fits a narrative the left is spinning about sexuality and masculinity. He’s the poster boy for “toxic masculinity,” and every conservative who justifies or excuses him is digging the grave of conservatism even deeper.
Published in General
Mona – where were all these woman and accusations all these years? Really?? Women have not stood for this type of behavior for decades, yet there they are, lurking in the shadows and their stories comes out 3 weeks to voting – does not any of that strike you as odd?? I am not discounting their stories. All of a sudden, three weeks in, we have Bill Cosby on the ticket? Yet nowhere in the MSM are people questioning anything that has come out on WikiLeaks about very serious judgement, slanders, serious incrimination against Hillary Clinton, Bill, the Clinton Foundation – nothing!
It is in everyone’s best interests to ask people why did you wait with these allegations? Oh – I just brushed it off doesn’t hold water. We are in a dangerous place – and reporters, journalists, and even you, are part of the problem. If you cannot corroborate your information as fact, then you need to disclose that it is not fact, with all due respect.
Mona Charen thinks Evan McMuffin will win it all
Delusional.
Even if the media presents something that’s actually true (still debatable in this case), if the media’s presenting it in such a way as to completely obscure uncomfortable truths coming out about Democrats, it makes sense to not focus on what hurts the Republican. Otherwise, you’re just being played.
Why we can’t see stuff like this is hard to understand.
We think we’re fighting dishonesty and immorality, but the left fights us. That’s why we lose.
One simple explanation was that they didn’t speak until he went on national television and categorically denied that he’d ever assaulted anyone. That might motivate someone who’s been keeping it quiet all these years.
Stop Right There! I love that scenario. Alas, it’s not to be.
A lot of people seem to actually be approaching the election this way, acting as if by voting for neither candidate that somehow “none of the above” will win.
Obviously. The Clintons would never be devious enough to guide people to share their stories (and coordinate between various press organizations) exactly when all sorts of nasty stuff is coming out from WikiLeaks and Juanita Broaddrick is about to hit the spotlight.
I wouldn’t put it past them either. But nor would I be surprised if it turns out that the Clintonistas did their best to ensure that Trump would be the candidate that Hillary had to face. Because Trump was, is and ever more shall be a weak candidate: remember, they know this guy. They’ve been pally. If The Donald knows what Bill says about women on the golf course, Bill knows the same about The Donald.
Heck, it was probably Bill who, between putts, rasped “Of course you should run, Donald! there’s a White House Intern with your name on ‘er, buddy!” If you were Bill Clinton’s wife and enabler, who would you want to face in a fin d’ leObama election—one of the many sensible, rational, successful and squeaky clean conservatives, or a guy who could give your hubby a run for his creepy-gropey-dirty-old-Democrat money?
In other words, why limit our conspiracy theorizing about the Clintons to the last few weeks, or months even? They’ve been planning this for years. Isn’t there a wiki-leaked e-mail that proves it?( The one they really feared was Rubio.)
No. As many of us have said repeatedly, we are not voting for either candidate because we cannot vote for either of them.
Trump voters just cannot seem to accept that. So they say: You don’t care about the country. You think “that somehow ‘none of the above’ will win.” You want Hillary to win. And on, and on, and on.
I believe Trump voters when they say that they think Trump is the lesser of two evils. Why don’t Trump voters believe abstainers are telling the truth about what they are doing?
Perhaps you’re right, in which case when the primary comes we shouldn’t nominate Trump. Problem is, primaries are over.
I know lots of people “told us so”, but we are where we are. “You should have listened to us months ago accomplishes very little today”.
I said “a lot of people”, not “everybody”, or “EB”. So maybe I wasn’t talking about whomever you define as “we”.
If the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it.
You are fooling yourself if you think Trump’s character was the means for reopening the war on women.
The Dems were going to use this tactic on whichever Republican candidate ran. The form would be different, but it was always coming back.
Fundamentally, I agree with Klavan. It’s predetermined that they will use these tactics because they can’t talk substance since pretty much none of the progressives policy solutions are defensible anymore.
Its war on women from here on out.
Yes, that is also a possibility. Or some combination of the two – they became easier to guide after Trump spoke.
Well it’s a good thing the Democrat cabal didn’t use rule #12 War on Women against Romney. He might have lost.
Haha! I love you, Kate.
What about their personal violation? Does that not trump (no pun intended) what he would say in public decades later? Talk about a lack of respect for oneself!
Amen.
That’s how it looks to me too.
It’s too bad we didn’t have this battle during the primaries. But we didn’t. And it’s not as if the information about Trump wasn’t out there. He said some pretty despicable things in his books.
We voter goalies let this puck into our net. We’re stuck with it now. But people are having trouble with the fact that we are out of options, and the game is between not Clinton and Trump but between the Democrats and the Republicans.
I am surprised that anyone automatically assumes these latest accusers are credible. The War on Women narrative started way before Trump came along. They accused Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich along the way. This is not a new tactic for the Democrats. All of these so-called “attacks” happened over a decade ago and yet we are supposed to believe these women waited until now to come forward? Trump has been a celebrity for many years and none of these women contacted TMZ or the tabloids? How convenient for Hillary. Based on the timing alone I give it a 95% chance these stories are false.
We are finding out about various ways the Clinton machine has cheated with every WikiLeaks dump. How can anyone assume Trump is guilty of any of this? Where is the proof?
The bigger issue here is the future of our Country. Even if we assume Trump has kissed someone against her wishes, Hillary is still the worse of two evils. She is the most corrupt Presidential candidate ever. I will go as far as to say both candidates are morally lacking and call that issue a draw. Trump’s policies will be better for our economy and more importantly his Supreme Court appointments will protect our Constitution. I really don’t care if he fooled around 10 years ago or 30 years ago or whatever. I care about the future of the USA and I know for a fact Hillary will destroy that future.
That’s how I see it too.
One woman sued him for sexual assault in 1997, so not everyone waited. But for a lot of these complaints – that “Trump grabbed my rear end” – I bet you could have called every news network in the country twenty years ago and nobody would have cared. Two things have changed: first the culture around sexual harassment and consent has gotten a lot less tolerant of this kind of crap (largely, though not exclusively, in a good way), and second, Trump asserting boldly that he’d never do such things created a critical mass in which every story – even the ones that never merited a legal complaint and would never have attracted attention – gets heard.
Side note: a lot of the women in my life have stories of being groped or grabbed by strange men. None of them went straight to the police station, but I do like seeing the culture become less tolerant of this kind of thing.
I’ll bet it wasn’t by someone famous though.
True.