Politico Throws Some Shade

Do you remember this ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lExHklIeFbo

It goes with this.

“John, what happened?” Obama asked, according to people briefed on the Oct. 2 conversation.
“I got overrun, that’s what happened,” Boehner said.

This is not good for my Wa, but it needs to be said

I'm bouncing back and forth between the homey task of making dinner and a discussion of "rapenado" over at LGM.  This is not healthy because Rape and Challah don't belong together. However, they go together in this world. Something which has not been said yet over there but which needs to be said is that there is a reason that the moral panic about drinking and girls and rape comes together with a clap of thunder, like matter and anti matter, annihilating all reason. Its because rape has to do with consent, and the way our culture thinks about alcohol and drunknness influences the way we think about consent. Thats because drinking and being drunk is gendered, like everything else--like our ideas about sexuality, responsibility, agency, and desire.  Basically, and I won't bother to go into my analysis i'll just put it out there--sex is something men are seen as needing, something which they "take" and which augments their masculine power. The more sex partners, the more powerful while, for women, the opposite is (largely) true: the sex is something that is taken from a woman, or that she gives up, and the more sexual partners she has, or the more sex acts she has, the more she loses socially.

What does alcohol have to do with this? Well first of all American culture has a very fraught relationship with drinking and with public drunkenness dating back before prohibition and bringing on prohibition. Thats to put it mildly. Drinking is seen as a valorized social act, a well loved social lubricant, that allows people (usually men) to blow off steam and relax and socialize.

Whats so bad about that? Why is alcohol the moral panic of the moment? Admittedly there have been several high profile cases of very young girls who were raped and videotaped while they were too drunk to protest or escape. But there have been some pretty damned high profile cases of girls who were kidnapped and raped and held prisoner for years and that has not produced the same moral panic and cries of "we must warn our daughters."  The drinking seems to be thought of as a form of contributory negligence on the part of the girls even though they were in the instant case definitionally too young to consent to the sex, and even too young to have gone to the party in the first place and done the drinking.

In addition to the hysterical cries that we must warn our daughters, but only our daughters, against the dangers of social drinking and the society of men there is a huge amount of pushback, amounting to some kind of deep seated psychological need on the part of (some) (male) commenters, to insist that it would be both wrong and unnecessary to lecture men about the evils of drinking to excess. Sometimes this is because of a cultural myth that it is merely deliberate predators who rape--its not the drunk guy who doesn't know what consent is and is not able to distinguish between a sleeping woman and a willing partner its some fanged, serial rapist, a nearly separate category of guy.  Sometimes its because of an incohate belief that drinking is a natural and normal part of being a guy but is something women have only lately adopted, possibly because of some stupid feminist equality shtick, and so women should be discouraged from drinking while men should be left alone with their culturally valued social practice.  Myself I put drinking shots and drinking to excess under the heading of "stupid cultural practices that social media encourage" like owning and playing with guns under the impression that because in the movies none of the important people ever die from being shot.

But something else, it seems to me, is going on in some of these arguments. And that is that society is still deeply suspicious of women and women's free enjoyment of public space and their own sexuality. Drinking, and drinking to excess, is seen as sloppy, disgusting, and dangerous. But its also seen as culpable, as though it reveals, beneath it all, a person who wants what happens to her. Meanwhile, for men, drinking to excess is seen as harmless fun--even the violence and property damage that results from a lot of male binge drinking is still put down to "boys will be boys."  Its as though the consequences of drunkeness for women are seen as the fault of the women, while the consequences of drunkeness for men are seen as the fault of the drink.  And you can see that in the way women who get raped are held partially at fault for having "put themselves at risk" and having been too drunk to save themselves from the actions of the rapist, while conversely the rapist himself is excused because the alcohol he has consumed has made him less responsible for his actions.

I'm not talking about the law here--the law in many places in the US has shifted so that it is classified as rape or sexual abuse to have sexual contact with an unconscious person regardless of the intent or capacity of the person who is initiating the sex. But I think thats a pretty fair analysis of the underlying cultural tropes and beliefs that enable rape cases to be dismissed because a drunken 13 year old is thought to have, in some sense, given consent or egged her abuser on while a drunken 17 year old is represented as helpless in the face of his own drinking and sexuality to avoid raping her.

This Guy Knows From Splittsville

Oh, this guy should know from splitting.

Remember this?

The day after Labor Day, just as campaign season was entering its final frenzy, FreedomWorks, the Washington-based tea party organization, went into free fall.
Richard K. Armey, the group’s chairman and a former House majority leader, walked into the group’s Capitol Hill offices with his wife, Susan, and an aide holstering a handgun at his waist. The aim was to seize control of the group and expel Armey’s enemies: The gun-wielding assistant escorted FreedomWorks’ top two employees off the premises, while Armey suspended several others who broke down in sobs at the news.

It resulted in this:

The coup lasted all of six days. By Sept. 10, Armey was gone — with a promise of $8 million — and the five ousted employees were back. The force behind their return was Richard J. Stephenson, a reclusive Illinois millionaire who has exerted increasing control over one of Washington’s most influential conservative grass-roots organizations.

It is remembered on the Tea Party side this way:

“There was a coup during the election, and it was powerful,” Beck said.  “They were trying to get rid of the libertarian, Tea Party-minded power players, and first and foremost on that hit list was Matt Kibbe and his allies. They didn’t like the fact that FreedomWorks was cleaning house in the GOP…that they were targeting people like Orrin Hatch.  It didn’t sit well with the Karl Roves of the GOP world…”

This may explain why Dick Armey was willing to go on record making fun of the Tea Party and its lack of foresight during the shut down.

I will predict this: When they agree on a spending bill, it will speak not at all to Obamacare and it will be at budgetary numbers higher than the sequestration level. And so in the end, the Republican conference will lose ground on the budget, they will lose ground on health care, they will lose ground politically, and they’ll be in a worse position than where Boehner had them going into this process. And they’ll all blame Boehner, bless his heart.

IOKIYAAR

Before this goes down the Memory Hole I'd like to point out that whatever this sauced goose is having ought to remind us that the right wing vortex routinely spits out stuff that it condemns madly in Democrats. I mean, this is no more than to repeat "Its OK If You Are A Republican" but come on.  The original accusation, which circulated madly in right wing circles at the time, was that Hillary Clinton was no true Methodist but a crazed, satanic, holder of seances in the White House.  I can't find any links to those stories and sermons but they were always served up in a Janus faced format: for the true believers, the kind of people who morphed into the Tea Party, you would hear about this in sermons, jokes, and hate radio as a well known "fact."  Hillary herself admitted it, so it was true in some existential sense, but the gloss that was put on it was quite toxic and formed part of the generalized attack on the Clintons as alien/liberal/satanic products of an alternate and unamerican history in which Eleanor Roosevelt was admired and invoked as a patron saint.  For people interacting with a non evangelical or moderate audience the entire thing was offered up as a sign that she was kooky and fringey in a lefty kind of way. It wasn't asserted, there, that she was actually holding a literal seance or invoking ghostly spirits but more that she drew inspiration from the wrong people in a creepily liberal way.  So pervasive were both attacks that the Providence Journal, in a link that is now broken, had to report the rumors in this fashion:

Hillary Clinton says imaginary talks just ‘intellectual exercise’, The Providence Journal Bulletin, Tuesday, 6/25/96, p. A3. “Hillary Rodham Clinton said yesterday her imaginary conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt were merely an ‘intellectual exercise’ … Trying to douse what she called ‘sensational’ speculation, the first lady rejected inferences that psychic researcher Jean Houston, who led her in several White House sessions, was her ‘spiritual adviser’.”

“In a written statement, Mrs. Clinton was firm in her denial that there were any psychic or religious overtones to the sessions. ‘The bottom line is: I have no spiritual advisers or any other alternatives to my deeply held Methodist faith and traditions upon which I have relied since childhood.’ ”

“Mrs. Clinton met with Houston several times from late 1994 until March of this year, according to a new book [by Bob Woodward, 'The Choice'] that says Houston led the first lady through imaginary conversations with her hero, Mrs. Roosevelt and Indian leader … Ghandi … Mrs. Clinton said she engaged in hours of ‘freewheeling discussions’ with Houston.”

A Clean Kitchen Is Like a Blank Page

I am working on a long post about Andrew Solomon's "Far From the Tree" and, what else, right wing anxiety about the future of a multi cultural America in which our "descendants" and "heirs" don't look like us or sound like us or want what we thought we wanted.  But first I see before me, ready to my hand, that most delectable of places: a clean kitchen. And naturally I want to detour through it and make it rich and warm and happy and messy so I'm off to prep a sabbath dinner.

Challah
Chicken in milk and sage with stuffing
kale and dried cherries
tarte tatin or another version, maybe small open faced carmelized apple tarts.

Will my chicken come robed in a "chasuble of golden skin" like Francoise's? I hope so.

What Is Best In Life? Oh, Come On, Like You Didn't Think It Too?

Your Evening Chutzpah

He also alleged that President Obama was the one willing to crash the federal debt ceiling to win the fight, saying the White House was banking on the media blaming Republicans if a breach occurred.
"I think that's something our leadership has been pretty naive about. They think they're negotiating with somebody who's unwilling to breach the debt ceiling," Labrador said. "I think he has wanted to breach the debt ceiling because he knows that the media will blame the Republican Party."