Rightbloggers on DADT: A Slow March Toward Tolerance, With Side Trips to Insanity

This weekend the Senate repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell -- the 17-year-old policy that allowed gays to serve in the U.S. military only if they could conceal their sexual orientation. The bill awaits Obama's signature.

You might expect rightbloggers to be angry about it, and some of them are -- hilariously so. But homophobia isn't what it used to be (that is, it's not as popular) so some have gotten with the new gay wave, while others resort to a softer, more passive-aggressive approach.

Their behavior gives a little clue as to who's really running the right-wing show these days.

Let's start with the refuseniks. Generally, the less lunatic rightbloggers went gently with the sad news, leaving the outrage to their readers. Weasel Zippers, for instance, got in and out fast ("DADT Repealed 65-31, Armed Forces hardest hit..."), but his commenters were far more voluble ("We are Rome and we are burning," "The problem is, you know how flamboyant these sorts of people are. Yeah, I said these sorts..." "Okay, what happens if a dyke lesbian insists on staying with the guys, and fighting as a man?" etc).

"If only the President was this committed to fighting the war in Afghanistan to a successful conclusion," bemoaned This Ain't Hell. Dan Riehl said he wasn't "much of a culture warrior and "I haven't paid much attention to this issue," then made a bunch of gay jokes ("Do military uniforms allow for cross-dressing, by the way?"). Stop The ACLU published the names of "The 8 Republican RINOs that voted for repeal."

Kevin McCullough had questions. For one: "How can you possibly be allowing for the flamboyancy of effeminate male soldiers to engage in sexual conduct and their notorious ever wandering lust for the new on one hand, and hold court martial for those who have discreetly hidden their sexual escapades while destroying their families?" We're sure DoD is working on it.

At The Astute Bloggers Alec Rawls -- best known for his tireless efforts to expose the proposed United 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania as a secret tribute to radical Islam -- applied his fertile imagination to the newly-gay military. At present, Rawls argued, military personnel serving overseas don't have many sexual opportunities, which made him proud: "Heterosexual young men are willing to join the military and put their sex lives on hold," he explained, "because the manliness of fighting for their nation makes the lack of access to females bearable."

?But "if a subculture of active homosexuality is allowed to burst out and grow amidst the suppressed heterosexuality of our military," Rawls added, look out: military service will become "a gauntlet of having to abide whatever in-your-face homosexuality the flamers want to throw up," like Tailhook, only gay and 24/7. This, Rawls predicted, "will be a death sentence for heterosexual recruiting." See how you like your all-gay armed forces, America!

Another big-picture thinker, Jane Jamison, identified herself to readers of Right Wing News as a "heterosexual conservative" who lives in the "very liberal San Francisco area," where she has been able to observe the gay menace at close hand. For example, "God forbid you happen into San Francisco by accident during the 'Bay to Breakers' race," she wrote, "you and the kids will see naked gay sex acts on the sidewalk with police standing by watching." Along with this travel tip, Jamison revealed that "there can be dire consequences for being unabashedly heterosexual" -- for example, "being 'homophobed,'" which sounds unpleasant.

Based of her experience, Jamison has determined that "repeal of DADT is just one more progressive step to shrink our defenses and weaken us in the world. That long-term goal has only a little to do with gays, but they are useful tools for now. Gay soldiers are just one way to create chaos and distraction and eventually end our military."

Jamison found relevance to this charge in the case of reportedly gay WikiLeaks soldier Pvt. Bradley Manning. She riffed off a post at Gay Patriot, which actually supported repeal on security grounds, that "gays have been lying for years to get hired into military jobs, and knowingly setting themselves up to be bribed by people who would do this country harm. What is patriotic about that? This is similar to the argument about amnesty for illegal aliens." She also read the Gay Patriot post to mean that "the gay community has been committing an 'extortion' against America - legalize us or we will keep joining the military and doing what we can on the inside to jeopardize the system." Also, gays will usher in "shariah law," but they'll have a hard time with those radical Islamists once they take over, etc.

Deebow of the milblog Blackfive found the news that the military will probably "'expressly prohibit' heterosexuals from using separate showers, bathrooms and bunking facilities from homosexuals" as proof that "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder... I am pretty certain that if I have to live in the same BEQ room with two other guys, who happen to be gay, I am nigh on to convinced that there are going to be, um... issues."

Disappointingly, Deebow didn't follow up on this speculative fiction opening, but did tell us that "even though it is the military, there are things you still can't make service members think or do" -- like accept gay people as comrades in arms. "I think the 'giant sucking sound' that America is about to hear," he added, "comes from the members of our military who are going to be leaving... So libturds, you might think that you have given us a kinder gentler military that is more fashion conscious and sensitive. All you did today was weaken a country." Deebow also quoted Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, presumedly for added authority.

At The American Spectator, W. James Antle III said that while DADT was "flawed and unstable," it had attempted "to balance two competing realities: Many individual homosexuals serve honorably and effectively in the miltary even as, all other things being equal, open homosexuality as such is a disruptive force... Now instead of trying to avoid the incidence of sexual attraction within the armed forces, there will have to be myriad rules and regulations trying to cope with its consequences."

If you think this argument is flawed because heterosexual women serve with men in the military without much difficulty, you should know Antle doesn't approve of that either. "...introducing into the military women as a group ensured that some of the women will inevitably be attracted to some of the men (and vice versa) over time... DADT repeal ensures that this element of sexual attraction and tension will be repeated in still more intimate settings and in combat situations." So the trouble all really started with the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, or perhaps Florence Nightingale.

Ah, such larks. But there were rightblogger repeal supporters, and those whose position might best be described as Tolerant, But With An Explanation.

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Rightbloggers Say They'll Change The Constitution to Fix Problems You Never Knew You Had

Two years ago, conservatives were on the ropes. But the GOP victories in last month's elections have them dreaming big again. They're back to talking about destroying the Democrats once and for all. Even Newt Gingrich is talking about running for President in 2012, which shows how general the optimism is.

Some in the political meth labs of the right dream bigger still, and push for new Amendments to the Constitution. So what would you expect these newly-empowered Sons of Liberty to push? The Human Life Amendment? Repeal of the Civil Rights Act? A ban on the cursed TSA?

No, comrades, those are from the old wish-lists. The front runners so far are an Amendment to have state legislatures, rather than citizens, directly elect U.S. Senators, and another allowing state legislatures to overturn federal laws.

The first proposal would repeal the 17th Amendment, passed in 1913, which gave citizens the right to choose their Senators directly, back when progressivism was all the rage.

Tea Partiers have been warm to repeal 17A. Alaska Tea Party Senate candidate Joe Miller supported repeal; that he later felt obliged to dodge the issue we can put down to pressure from the liberal media, which also discouraged Rand Paul from his principled stand against the Civil Rights Act.

If you think giving voters less power on Election Day is a strange way to promote liberty, you're just greedy, rightbloggers tell us -- that power rightfully belongs to the states, not to sheeple like you.

For one thing, your insistence on roads and bridges is costing us money as well as Constitutional authenticity. Back in the glorious pre-17A era, Senators "didn't have to worry about bringing home 'pork' and other such nonsense to bribe voters with, because they were accountable to the state legislatures," said Thoughts from a Conservative Mom. This makes some kind of sense: It was probably cheaper for the Republic when pre-17A Senators accepted Credit Mobilier stock or other emoluments for their services, instead of trying to get public works for their states.

?"While the 17th Amendment was meant to prevent outright bribery of state representatives in Senator selection," said Tea Party candidate Glen Bradley, "today, the winning candidate is most often the one backed by the most special interest money. The avenue of US Senate corruption was taken away from the State Legislatures and handed to the corporate lobby. The corporate lobby is able to buy the media needed to reach the whole State."

This seems an odd complaint, given how excited conservatives were when the Supreme Court, in Citizens United v. FEC, freed corporate lobbies to dump as much money into political media as they wished. But better that power should go to them, we guess, than to whatever other "special interests and mobs demanding more from the people's treasury" World Net Daily's Devvy Kidd was talking about when she discussed 17A. (She didn't favor repeal, as she believed the Amendment was not properly enacted in the first place.)

For others the real issue is that other Lost Cause, states' rights. "Prior to the ratification of the 17th Amendment, the states, through their representatives, had a say in legislation that was passed by the central/federal government," explained The Federal Observer. "With the passage of the 17th Amendment, that say was passed to the people, leaving the states almost devoid of any say in the operations of the federal government."

"The 17th Amendment was necessary to eliminate the voice of the states in congress," said Random Bits of Randomness, who laid the blame on a (new, to us) historical progressive villain, William Howard Taft.

The call to end 17A reached National Review, where Todd Zywicki claimed that with direct election of Senators, "progressives dealt a blow to the Framers' vision of the Constitution from which we have yet to recover," and created a "master-servant relationship between the federal and state governments that the original constitutional design sought to prevent." Among the atrocities Zywicki laid to this corrupt deal: Motor Voter Laws.

Perhaps sensing that he was losing the crowd, Zywicki quickly added that "the provisions of Obamacare that override state policy decisions... would have been unthinkable" without the 17th Amendment; better repeal it before a 17A-enabled Obama establishes a national car pool or something. (World Net Daily's Henry Lamb agreed: Obamacare "would have never seen the light of day" without 17A. Maybe they should work next on an Amendment authorizing the development of a time machine.)

Zywicki also claimed that "there is some evidence that the indirectly elected Senate was more accessible to non-career politicians than today's version is." He did not, alas, provide examples, though he might have cited the grand might-have-been that was Senator Caroline Kennedy. (It seems a weird talking point, anyway, after a Tea Party election in which activists bucked their own political establishments to nominate "non-career politicians" like Christine O'Donnell and Joe Miller. Maybe, after reform, state legislatures will endeavor to find even less careerist candidates by going into warehouses and slaughterhouses, quizzing the guys on civics, and appointing the ones who get the lowest scores.)

That one's still cooking, but recently there's been a flurry of rightblogger commentary on another kind of "Repeal" Amendment -- not to restore old ways, but to newly empower state legislatures to nullify federal laws if two-thirds of them can agree.

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Rightbloggers on WikiLeaks: Kill Julian Assange, But Not Till We Use His Stuff Against Obama

This weekend we got another fat load of WikiLeaks, based on purloined diplomatic cables to and from the U.S. State Department. As happened when Julian Assange's muckraking endeavor leaked U.S. military data from Iraq earlier this year, conservatives are outraged, and some call, as before, for the expeditious arrest of Assange, or fantasize about his assassination.

Rightbloggers generally take a two-pronged approach to the leaks: They believe the new document dump is an unpardonable breach of U.S. security -- except to the extent that it may be used to denigrate the Obama Administration, it which case they feel it deserves wider dissemination.

It's not as if rightbloggers have been alone in denouncing Wikileaks, as mainstream media outlets from the New York Times on down have attacked Assange from all directions -- while sopping up his revelations on the basis of their newsworthiness.

But that is an old, time-honored form of journalistic hypocrisy: Using hot news to draw readers with one hand, and tut-tutting its shameful provenance with the other. Rightbloggers have added a few new wrinkles to the game.

Back when Assange leaked the Iraq War data, for example, they dismissed the revelations of bad behavior by our Iraqi allies ("they appear to illustrate the inherent -- and forseeable -- problems with the nation-building strategy we pursued in Iraq and are still pursuing in Afghanistan," soothed The American Spectator), and cheerfully plucked the bits that supported their own interests.

The documents suggested to them that a previous, speculative accounting by The Lancet had overestimated real Iraqi casualties of the war, and that the discovery of some old chemical weapons proved that Saddam had WMDs after all. Counter-arguments could be made that The Lancet was measuring different kinds of casualties than the leaked documents addressed, and that the discovered chemical weapons did not constitute a real threat to the United States ("Later investigation revealed those contents to be vitamins"). But for rightbloggers the message was clear: "... the two biggest scoops from the latest document dump are that the infamous Lancet study was bogus, and that WMDs were found in Iraq in quantity."

They apparently thought Assange had made these revelations by accident or out of self-sabotage, as he was of the "Left" and thus was leaking on his own cause. "I delight in the unintended consequence Assange's revelations has produced," said Melanie Morgan. "It seems to be the Left contradicting itself in the propaganda arena," said Right Pundits. "The WikiLeaksters seem to have inadvertently done history a bit of a favor in the their obsession," said NewsBusters, in dispelling "leftist folklore."

None of this altered their feeling that by leaking this info Assange was aiding the enemy, and possible guilty of murder.

"Gosh, isn't it nice that the enemy will be able to identify Iraqis who died by name and whose side they were fighting on, so they can go after their families, either to kill them or recruit them, depending on the circumstances?" said BizzyBlog. "What a guy this Mr. Assange is." "Julian Assange: Jerkoff troop killer," wrote The North Star National.

?National Review's Jonah Goldberg asked, "Why wasn't Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?" Goldberg asserted that the leaks were "going to get people killed, including brave Iraqis and Afghans who've risked their lives and the lives of their families to help us." Nonetheless, he lamented, "Even if the CIA wanted to take him out, they couldn't without massive controversy. That's because assassinating a hipster Australian Web guru as opposed to a Muslim terrorist is the kind of controversy no official dares invite."

(Goldberg tried to hop out of his own overheated logic train at the end -- "Ultimately, I don't expect the U.S. government to kill Assange, but I do expect them to try to stop him" -- and complained, when called out on his homicidal fantasy, that "there's nothing in the quote at Balloon Juice to justify the claim I call for [Assange's] murder." To shore up his position, he challenged a writer at Gawker to a fistfight.)

Last weekend the diplomatic leaks was released, and with them came the usual calls for Assange's death and/or detention. "Julian Assange, Why is He Still Breathing?" asked Paladin's Page. "Assange should be looking at the inside of a container on a ship doing lazy racetracks around the Indian Ocean," said Blackfive. "I won't think twice if Julian Assange meets the cold blade of an assassin," said Donald Douglas. Etc.

The Obama Administration denounced the leaks but, having not the stones to send a cold-bladed assassin to preempt Assange, failed to prevent them, which rightbloggers declared proof of the Kenyan Pretender's malfeasance or worse.

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Rightbloggers Denounce Stewart - Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity Cat Stevens

On Saturday in Washington Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held their Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Keep Fear Alive. The purpose of the event, which drew more than 200,000 people, was to help Cat Stevens win support for his fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

What, you didn't know that? You must have missed the rightblogger coverage. You probably also missed that the rally was a huge failure and not funny. Well, that's what you get for relying on the Lame Stream Media, sheeples.

You probably recall that Cat Stevens some years ago converted to Islam, took the name Yusef Islam, and backed the Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence on author Salman Rushdie.

Stevens/Islam now claims he was kidding, so maybe it was his sense of humor that got the planners to invite Stevens to the stage. Or maybe it was the idea of him doing "Peace Train" with Ozzie Osbourne doing "Crazy Train" and the O'Jays doing "Love Train" that they found exciting.

Or maybe Colbert and Stewart just wanted to do their bit for militant Islamic jihad.

"It's worth remembering the insanity that this man has endorsed," said the American Spectator. "Remember when Jon Stewart was against those who use threats of violence to suppress freedom of speech?" asked Patterico's Pontifications. "A Fatwa at the Sanity Rally," said Solomonia. "Jon Stewart likes to lecture about political extremes," huffed Say Anything. "Is there anything more extreme than wanting someone to die because of something they wrote?"

"Are [Stewart and Colbert] such shallow middle-aged men that they have the need to tell adults they think it would be cool if America were destroyed, so that they feel as if they have street cred?" cried The Infidel Bloggers Alliance. "They are telling us they are cool with Muslims destroying the First Amendment."

Nick Cohen claimed to have heard from Rushdie himself regarding the rally: "If [Cat Stevens'] a 'good Muslim' like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar then I'm the Great Pumpkin." Well, it sounds like Rushdie, anyway.

?"Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert," asked Roger L. Simon, "Are They Pro-Islamofascist or Just Stupid?... why not invite Khalid Sheik Mohammed to perform? He actually took the head off Daniel Pearl. He didn't just talk the talk. He walked the walk." After many insults, Simon finally decided Stewart and Colbert were stupid, and that the Democratic Party, dragged into it at the last moment for some reason, was both stupid and evil.

"The irony is, that the organizer of this insane wankfest, Jon Stewart, is a Jew," said Winds of Jihad. "For him to suck up to Islamofascist ex-pop idol Cat Stevens aka Yusuf Islam... is the ultimate irony. Sanity is hard to come by in a madhouse. Among these loons, drug addled Ozzy Osbourne is probably the sanest of them all." Oh, well, at least they liked Ozzie.

Those rightbloggers who noticed anything else about the rally hit a few basic themes. For one: That there weren't many black people there. For the most part, this was a joke, because liberals are always making fun of the whiteness of conservative events, and turnabout is fair play -- though some of the brethren seemed not to be kidding.

Instapundit wrote, "AN OVERWHELMINGLY WHITE CROWD at the Stewart/Colbert rally. Well, Stewart and Colbert are Stuff White People Like." "Just look at the predominantly white crowd at their rally," said The Scratching Post. "If that doesn't make them racist, nothing does." "At right a rare shot of the only African American within 10 miles of the Mall yesterday," said Phil Butler, who also said the attendees were "stoned." "WHERE ALL THE BLACK FOLKS AT?" asked Angry White Dude. (If only these guys had been around for the Million Man March! We bet they would have loved it.)

Freedom's Lighthouse found video evidence of "Racism & Hate At 'Restoring Sanity' Rally" -- a guy who said that in America "we're lynching niggers," and that U.S. soldiers called Arabs "sand niggers." The fellow seems to be going for irony, but that's never a safe bet with rightbloggers, and the thing went viral. Now your grandmother will send you an email informing you that liberals don't like those people, either.

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Rightbloggers fulfilled find a black Guy Scared of the Muslims, in defense Juan Williams

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Celebrity journalist Juan Williams had a good week, on balance. First, he was fired by National Public Radio for remarks he made on Fox -- his other major employer -- about his fear of Muslims on airplanes.

That might seem at first a minus, but Williams was immediately rewarded by Fox with a new $2 million contract. Plus, he cemented his reputation among conservatives as one of those liberals who -- like Joe Lieberman -- can be relied upon to criticize liberals.

You could argue (as some liberals did) that Williams' shouldn't have been fired for his comments, especially since he said some less-offensive things later. Some rightbloggers did make that argument. Some even denounced prejudice -- against conservatives. Prejudice against Muslims, though, they didn't mind. In fact, that was mainly what they liked about what Williams said.

Williams' fatal remarks were made on The O'Reilly Factor, in response to one of Bill O'Reilly's anti-Muslim rants:

...political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis where you don't address reality I mean, look, Bill, I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.

Later in the show Williams supplied some context:

But I think there are people who want to somehow remind us all as President Bush did after 9/11, it's not a war against Islam. President Bush went to a mosque... if you said Timothy McVeigh, the Atlanta bomber, these people who are protesting against homosexuality at military funerals, very obnoxious, you don't say first and foremost, we got a problem with Christians. That's crazy.

We who have free souls, it touches us not, but NPR canned Williams, and suddenly he was the recipient of what's known in the business as a Strange New Respect from rightbloggers -- but not for the comments in the second box.

Rightblogger Instapundit, who had only previously noticed Williams a few times, has at this writing 12 posts about his firing. One of Instapundit's themes was that NPR was "racist" to fire the African-American Williams. (This is a joke based on the ancient conservative trope that liberals are the real racists.)

For some it wasn't a joke. "People will think I'm kidding by saying Juan Williams was fired because he's a black man," said Dan Riehl, "but I'm not." He explained: "If Juan Williams is impacted by the behavior of Muslims, then progressives -- and NPR is that -- can't lecture white America that their concerns are based on hate, religious intolerance, bigotry or xenophobia."

So if a black person admits prejudice, apparently, that lets white people off the hook. (Riehl himself enjoys telling his readers about black people he considers racist, but we guess this schtick only works with liberals.)

Jammie Wearing Fool noticed that NPR now has no on-air talent of color. "NPR - where the 'P' stands for 'Plantation,'" said small dead animals.

?Anonymous Attorney of VDare -- a website celebrating what we might politely call white exceptionalism -- said, "Indeed, it's a little hard to categorize Williams as a 'bigot,' i.e., someone who would take the side of whites in a racial dispute. He may have thought -- like Rick Sanchez -- that his own race gave him a longer leash to be honest about things." (This, from a guy prone to complain about "the abuse of whites in the mainstream media.")

Some boldly defended Williams on the grounds of the First Amendment, which guarantees reporters a right to jobs with the employer of their choice, or at least it does in their version of it.

"Screw Free Speech," projected Big Journalism onto NPR. The firing was "nothing more than the latest chapter in liberals' recent and sordid history of thought-policing," said Michael Schwarz of the Ashbrook Center.

And it goes all the way to the top! "But what happens when paranoia grips those in power?" asked Schwarz. "What really matters here is that the Obama administration's petulant 2009 crusade against FOX News, complete with the equally petulant narrative that spawned that crusade, retains its relevance among the paranoid left." Thus, liberals "convince themselves that their opponents act from feelings of paranoia rather than legitimate opposition born of serious reflection, and when one among them gets control of the government, it then becomes possible -- imperative, actually -- to de-legitimize the sources and the forces of this so-called paranoid opposition." We have to admit: He makes a better case against paranoia than he probably intended.

At Pajamas Media Richard Fernandez said the firing indicated the return of "blasphemy" to the "secular West," classed Williams a victim of it along with Larry Summers and Ginny Thomas, and suggested that in this dangerous new age "next time Anita Hill can call the FBI and get you arrested." Gasp! No wonder Ginny Thomas wanted an apology.

"Self-styled liberals," declared Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom, "no longer support actual liberal policy." In fact, "'Liberalism' in this country, where it truly exists, has migrated -- as I did -- to the right side of the political aisle." Hmm, so they've got the liberals and the conservatives -- don't see what they're complaining about.

Bernie Goldberg said Williams' firing proved that liberalism had died, and worried that "his firing will make lots of other Americans think twice before they say something the boss may not like." Even worse -- what if they instead expect to immediately get a new job that pays $2 million? Think how disappointed they'll be.

The perfidy and racism of liberals was just a fun sidelight for rightbloggers, though -- the important message was that fear of Muslims on planes is normal, even admirable.

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