Guilty (13 page)

On NBC's megahit sitcom
Friends,
when the pretty, popular “Rachel” gets pregnant out of wedlock, two of the three male stars fall madly in love with her. On
Sex and the City,
unwed mother Miranda acquires her most impressive boyfriend of the series, a handsome doctor, after giving birth to an illegitimate baby, but then dumps him to marry the father of her child and end up happily ever after. Back on Planet Earth, one's chances of finding Mr. Right do not tend to improve after having a baby out of wedlock. A Cornell University study found that unwed mothers are 30 percent less likely to marry than other single women—and, I would venture, 100 percent more likely to have received sex education and condoms in schools that don't believe abstinence works. “Both the likelihood of marriage and the quality of marital partners,” said the study's author, Daniel Lichter, “are adversely affected by out-of-wedlock childbearing.”
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Us Weekly
celebrated single motherhood with an article titled “The New Single Moms and How They Do It,” delusionally proclaiming, “Sisters are doing it for themselves.” No they're not. They're “doing it” at a colossal, unwelcome cost to every man, woman, and child in America.

Hollywood actresses have dropped sex tapes and moved on to single motherhood as a way to promote their careers. Among the current celebrity unwed mothers are Jessica Alba, Halle Berry, Minnie Driver, Bridget Moynahan, Nicole Richie, Jamie Lynn Spears, and Michelle Williams. There was also Shar Jackson, the ex-girlfriend of Kevin Federline, who was briefly married to Britney Spears, but if we're including people associated with Britney Spears, there's no telling how long the list would be. Starlets who have adopted children while unmarried include Sheryl Crow, Calista Flockhart, Camryn Manheim, Meg Ryan,
and Angelina Jolie. Apparently, busting up tribal wars to adopt foreign babies has become the latest form of Hollywood autoeroticism.

In 2004,
Vanity Fair
gushed about single mother Angelina Jolie, “Splashed all over the tabloids as the temptress who came between Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie sounds more like a stressed-out single parent than a screen siren.”
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People
magazine quoted single mother Jolie saying, responsibly, “that she engages in ‘adult relationships' with ‘men who were already very close friends of mine,' lasting a few hours and promising no commitment. ‘I can feel like a woman,' said Jolie, 28, ‘but it's not a relationship that interferes with my family.' She stresses it's not casual. ‘I've never had a one-night stand in my life— these are people I know very well.' ”
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How Angelina Jolie manages to lure men into brief, no-strings-attached sexual encounters is anybody's guess.

Meg Ryan was described in
People
as “raunchy in a new film— but keeps life as a single mom low-key.” The magazine reported that she was dating another single parent, little-known actor William Keane—who shared custody of a daughter with an ex-girlfriend.
¹³⁸

After a single mother from the ghetto, Fantasia Monique Barrino, became the 2004
American Idol
winner, she released her debut album, including the song “Baby Mama.” For unknown reasons, some narrow-minded people thought the song celebrated single motherhood—solely because it includes lines like “nowadays it's like a badge of honor to be a baby mama” and “B-A-B-Y M-A-M-A. This goes out to all my baby mamas!” So everything will work out fine in the end for single mothers, provided they become
American Idol
winners.

A child has no control over whether his parents are married, but society can create incentives that will dramatically increase the odds of children having married parents. So why all the reverence for “single mothers” but not for married men and women raising their kids in the traditional way? Parents who had shotgun marriages, or who relinquished illegitimate children to adoptive parents, or who stuck it out through tough times for the sake of their children—these are the ones who should be venerated, not somebody's “baby mama.”

A
fter global warming, the Republican Attack Machine is the imaginary phenomenon that scares liberals the most. The mainstream media are always bristling with warnings about Republican smear campaigns, with reporters fretting about “what the Republicans are going to do.” During a one-year period from June 2007 to June 2008, there were more than 700 documents on Nexis referring to the “Republican Attack Machine.” For that same period, Nexis produces only 16 documents using either the phrase “Democratic Attack Machine” or “Democrat Attack Machine.”

What liberals mean when they complain about “attacks” is simply that it is unfair to point out the things the Democrats believe. Republicans telling the truth about them is dirty pool.
There they go, calling our name again!
Naturally, the Republicans' damnable habit of talking candidly about the Democrats is enraging to people who are constantly
working on perfecting their fake-American costumes. They believe it is unsporting for Republicans not to blindly accept their lofty rhetoric about “hope” and “change.”

The rare appearance of the phrase “Democratic Attack Machine” in the media mostly comes from conservative columnists pointing out:
Hey, there's a Democratic Attack Machine too!
That is absurd. There is only one attack machine and that is the mainstream media. The media don't recognize what they're doing as attacks because their beliefs are axiomatic, the default position, what all “knowledgeable and fair-minded people”
¹
believe.

Both the Republican and Democratic Parties are penny-ante compared with the liberal media behemoth, which has been utterly unmoved by the smashing success of fair and balanced Fox News Channel. Mass mailings and “robo-calls” by political parties are like mosquitoes buzzing around the King Kong of the mass media as it stomps on cars and buses and terrifies Japanese extras. The only difference between the attack machines of the political parties is that the media will pick up and repeat the attacks produced by the Democrats but will vilify any attacks launched by Republicans.

Indeed, the media and the Democratic Party synchronize their work so closely, it's often impossible to tell them apart. Who's to say where a Clinton flack ends and
This Week with George Stephanopoulos
begins? But as Bill and Hillary Clinton found out during the 2008 Democratic primaries, it's the media that call the shots for the Left in America, not the Democrats. Without the mainstream media 100 percent behind the Clintons, suddenly Bill wasn't so sexy and Hillary wasn't so smart.

Liberals have nothing but admiration for criminal defense lawyers who lie remorselessly on behalf of child murderers, self-righteously informing us that this is “part of the process.” Without these “Twinkie defense” champions, liberals tell us, our adversarial system of justice would collapse. They boast “someone's got to do it,” as if they were Marines going into battle. (For any liberals reading, a U.S. Marine is … oh, never mind. It would take too long to explain.) But an adversarial system in politics drives liberals to distraction. It's one thing to vigorously defend a child molester, another thing entirely to vigorously defend
a Republican. Giving two sides of the story in a child kidnapping case is part of the process; giving two sides of the story in a political race is a dirty trick of the Republican Attack Machine.

IN LIBERALS' IMAGINARY WORLD, LONE BLOGGER MICHAEL Brodkorb is more powerful than the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
the
Minneapolis Star Tribune,
the
St. Paul Pioneer Press,
and the entire liberal blogosphere. As a hobby, Brodkorb started a blog called “Minnesota Democrats Exposed.” In short order, he was uncovering stories the mainstream media somehow missed. In 2008, Brodkorb discovered that Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken owed about $70,000 in back taxes and had a $25,000 judgment against his corporation in New York for unpaid workers' compensation insurance. Franken's spokesman responded to these allegations by denouncing Brodkorb as “the right-wing noise machine.”

In an Associated Press article about Brodkorb's repeatedly breaking news that the mainstream media had failed to uncover, the AP delusion-ally asserted that Brodkorb “has no real counterweight on the left.”
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No real counterweight? How about the Associated Press? The AP managed to file a decent report on Brodkorb. Why couldn't it report on Franken— not a conservative blogger, but a candidate for the U.S. Senate?

The Democratic base, not being particularly bright to begin with, has been infected with an almost paralyzing fear of Republicans. After Barack Obama sealed the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, Bill Kownacki fired off an indignant letter to
The Oregonian,
huffing, “I don't know how they'll do it, but somehow Republicans are going to attack Barack Obama both for [supposedly] being a Muslim and for attending a Christian church with an outspoken pastor for 20 years. The real challenge: Can they do it in the same sentence?”
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Republicans were being attacked for things they hadn't done, but they're the ones with an “attack machine.”

Throughout the Thirty-Years'-War Democratic primary campaign, circa 2007–2008, all Democratic arguments were pitched in terms of the nonexistent, but still very frightening, Republican Attack Machine. Democrats accused one another of adopting Republican smear tactics,
they bleated about being victims of imaginary Republican attacks, and, most impressively, they raised the specter of the Republican Attack Machine as a stalking horse to launch attacks on one another.
Really, I have no problem with Obama being a Muslim—but wait until Republicans get ahold of it!
It was a twofer for liberals: Attack your opponent and smear Republicans at the same time. Republicans could only watch in perplexity, thinking,
Wait a minute! We didn't say anything!

This isn't normal politicking—unless you are a catty twelve-year-old girl. The Republicans held primaries in 2008, too, but they attacked one another's policies, records, and character. They didn't say,
Wait until the Democrats hear about this!
Indeed, judging by the candidate they chose, the Republicans appeared to be unaware of the existence of an opposing party. Even the smarmiest of Republican candidates never resorted to such a backhanded slime. When Mike Huckabee wanted to attack Mitt Romney, he innocently asked a
New York Times
reporter, “Don't Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?” Unctuous? As Sarah Palin would say, You betcha! But at least Huckabee didn't say,
I don't have any problem with Mormons believing Jesus and Satan were brothers, but wait until the Democrats find out!

The innovation of Democrats was to say, while putting the knife in a fellow Democrat,
Isn't it better to hear it from me than from the right-wing hate machine? Hey, don't blame me—I'm just giving you the printable version of what Republicans are going to say.
In a column on Reverend Jeremiah Wright—with long excerpts from his sermons—Clinton flack Lanny Davis wrote in the
Wall Street Journal,
“One thing is for sure: If Mr. Obama doesn't show a willingness to try to answer all the questions now, John McCain and the Republican attack machine will not waste a minute pressuring him to do so if he is the Democratic Party's choice in the fall.”

Ah, the notorious Republican Attack Machine!

Jamie Rubin, assistant secretary of screwing up national security— oops, I mean “of state”—under Clinton, warned that “the Republicans are going to fight very, very hard and they're going to start looking to Senator Obama's record on a number of issues that really haven't gotten much attention so far.”
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In other words, Republicans were going to campaign.

Former Clinton White House assistant deputy fellatio apologist
Ann Lewis defended Hillary's attacks on Obama by warning that “in the fall election the Republicans are going to come after us with everything they've got.”
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As usual, Lewis was about a mile and a half off the mark. If only McCain had come at Obama with everything he had! Or even with everything I had. Hillary supporter Lisa Caputo explained that Hillary was talking about Obama's racist loon pastor, Jeremiah Wright, because “these are the kind of attacks that the Republicans are going to throw at Senator Obama.”
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Well, thanks for the heads-up!

Was the issue why Obama had sat through a deranged segregationist reverend's sermons for twenty years? No, of course not, you stupid racist. “The issue is,” as Clinton hatchet man Harold Ickes said of Obama's Rev. Wright problem, “what Republicans [will do] … I think they're going to give him a very tough time.”
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It's not a question of what Sirhan Sirhan did. That's beside the point. It's what Sirhan Sirhan's critics are going to do with it that concerns us.

Warning of what Republicans would do with the Reverend Wright, an unnamed Clinton ally told the
New York Times,
“The Republicans made John Kerry look like a coward in 2004,” and quoting Wright “wouldn't even look like ‘Swift-boating.' ”
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For something called the “Republican Attack Machine,” it sure seems to get used by a lot of Democrats. These are the lionhearted warriors who plan to lead us through the terror war? (I only raise the point of their collective, pants-wetting cowardice now because, if I don't, you can bet al Qaeda will!)

Clinton's New Hampshire campaign cochairman William Shaheen injected the idea that Obama had been a drug dealer into the race by raising What-the-Republicans-Will-Do: “The Republicans are not going to give up without a fight … and one of the things they're certainly going to jump on is his drug use.” Shaheen continued, “It'll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?' ” Of course, Shaheen himself had no problem with Obama's being a major stoner, but there were “so many openings for Republican dirty tricks.” America still awaits the first Republican to criticize Obama for his admitted drug use. Maybe their attack machine is in the shop or something.