Dead Air on the Radio

Oy…!

The asshats (Armstrong & Getty) were in rare form this morning. In a stunning display of virtuosity, in a brief five minutes they gave three examples of just how breathtakingly simpleminded they are. In a rant against multiculturalism and moral relativism, one of them somehow equated attempts to understand what could possibly motivate somebody to take over a school and kill little girls with excusing such behavior. Apparently, a disapproving and completely mystified “what the hell could he have been thinking…” is a question that just doesn’t occur to these guys. And these are the types of guys who do back flips trying to justify and excuse the rape of an adolescent girl and the murder of the girl and her family by US soldiers stationed in Iraq. The rant continued and wound up with questioning why it’s okay for a female Muslim student in this country to be excused from having to wear the usual P.E. uniform due to it being too revealing. I don’t think I’m being ungenerous to these mooks when I suggest that if you substituted “female fundamentalist Christian” for “female Muslim” they wouldn’t have a problem. And neither would I. Their problem here is that the beliefs of an adherent to a religion they don’t approve of are being accommodated, so they get their panties in a wad and go off ranting and raving.

Then, after the break, one of them read this, from the Wall Street Journal,

But in today's politically correct culture, it's easy to understand how senior Republicans might well have decided they had no grounds to doubt Mr. Foley merely because he was gay and a little too friendly in emails. Some of those liberals now shouting the loudest for Mr. Hastert's head are the same voices who tell us that the larger society must be tolerant of private lifestyle choices, and certainly must never leap to conclusions about gay men and young boys. Are these Democratic critics of Mr. Hastert saying that they now have more sympathy for the Boy Scouts' decision to ban gay scoutmasters? Where's Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on that one?

Asshat 1 and Asshat 2 then made noises as though they were at an Entmoot and agreed that this was the epitome of wisdom.

Oh my, where to begin. Let’s start with “leaping to conclusions about gay men and young boys.” That’s not the issue here; this isn’t about “gay,” though it’s understandable that with their prejudices that would be where they would focus. Certainly there are gay men in our society who prefer young boys to adults, just as there are straight men who prefer young girls to adults. I’ll suggest that depending on the age and maturity levels of the men and young boys and girls we are talking about there may be times when that is acceptable. This isn’t even close to being one of those times. There are never times when that will be acceptable when the man we’re talking about is 52 and the young boy or girl is 16. There are never times when that will be acceptable when the grown man is a congressman and the young boy or girl is a Congressional page.

I work as a staff employee at a university. I’m a few years younger than Foley and the students here are a few years older than the Congressional pages. There are certainly more than a few young ladies at this school whom I find attractive. It never leaves my mind, however, that these young ladies weren’t sent here by their parents so they can be preyed upon by middle aged men. It never leaves my mind that my job here, my role on campus, to enhance the educational experience of these students, doesn’t include sniffing after them. There are no laws or even university rules against me dating students. It’s just something that I, a godless liberal, recognize is wrong. Why do people like Foley and his apologists have such a hard time recognizing something so simple? It's not about gay scoutmasters or Congressmen. It's about adults abusing positions of trust. In this case the abusing adult was a Republican, so the creeps come out of the woodwork to find ways to excuse and defend the unexcusable and the indefensible.