Peggy Noonan is a very weird lady. Noonan wrote a column scolding liberals and liberal Catholics for having the temerity to hold an opinion that differs from Peggy Noonan’s on the next Pope. For your enjoyment, an excerpt:
I once read an account of Anne Boleyn’s death. In the moments after she was beheaded her head was held aloft by her executioner, to show the crowd. Her nervous system was shocked, her neurons misfired, her head didn’t know it was severed from her neck. Her eyes blinked, her mouth moved crazily. Those critics who go on TV now to tear down what they don’t even understand: they are removed and unknowing. They are Anne Boleyn’s head.
Well, that’s an interesting characterization. I guess comparing us to Hitler no longer had the desired shock value.
Nashville-based syndicated conservative talk radio host/Tea Party hero Steve Gill is quitting his radio show. All together now: Awwwwwww.You’ll love the reason why:
He said the growing corporate influence on radio also has made it more difficult for small broadcasters to thrive.
“When we started 15 years ago, radio was a different animal,” Gill said. “The way corporations work, it’s difficult to have a grassroots, listener-focused show right now.”
Wow. The guy who never met a tax or regulation he couldn’t slam, who devoted his career to selling free market snake oil, who promoted the Tea Party every chance he got? That guy? He appears completely oblivious to the fact that the very policies he promotes has created an environment of corporate consolidation, which actually suppresses free markets and free speech.
I mean, I could spend all day dredging up more of Steve Gill’s greatest hits, but I think you get the point. Gill is the worst sort of political hack who never missed a chance to twist a fact or gin up an outrage if it slammed liberals, President Obama, or any politician with a “D” after their name. Amazingly, people seem to be tired of that shit! Hoocouldanode?
The free market has spoken.
I’m not crying for Gill, he’ll no doubt benefit from Wingnut Welfare. But at least he won’t be spreading his crackpot ideas on the public airwaves anymore.
By the way, I dredged up this excellent 2009 piece from the memory hole. Mary Mancini saw it all coming. She predicted not just the decline of conservative hate ratio, but the destruction of the GOP brand overall.
UN-believable. Anyone who gave so much as $1 to the Tea Party got fleeced in a well-orchestrated conservative con job:
“The arrangement was simply FreedomWorks paid Glenn Beck money and Glenn Beck said nice things about FreedomWorks on the air,” Armey, the former House majority leader, told Media Matters Friday. “I saw that a million dollars went to Beck this past year, that was the annual expenditure.”
Armey, who left the organization this past fall after a dispute over its internal operations, said a similar arrangement was also in place with Rush Limbaugh, but did not know the exact financial details.
Wow. So the Tea Party was basically a massive shake-down by the conservative media. Beck and Limbaugh get all the white folks in a lather about some invented Obama conspiracy they cooked up, then they tell everyone to donate to FreedomWorks to fight said manufactured horrible thing, and all the money goes straight back to Beck and Limabugh.
You know what gets me? That Dick Armey had nooo problem with this little scam as long as he was in charge of FreedomWorks. But he obviously knew the whole set-up was a grift, because he wouldn’t be spilling the beans about it now.
These people have no shame. Every damn one of them should be thrown in jail for fraud. The syndicators and networks who aired their programming were complicit in the fraud, and they need to be held accountable too. And finally, the MSM which decided the Tea Party was some shiny-sparkly political toy deserve to go out of business for their negligence.
This story of Dick Armey trying to take over FreedomWorks with a gun-wielding enforcer in tow cracked me up. There’s a lot that’s outrageous here but the part that got me was the way they got rid of him: they wrote him an $8 million check. If only all of our gun-wielding nutjobs were appeased so easily.
Also: I’m pretty sure when a guy walks into an office with an armed accomplice and walks out with money the word for that is robbery. But I’m just an old-fashioned housewife from Tennessee. What do I know.
This is how your modern Republican Party works, people. It’s all about the Benjamins. It’s funny because just last night I read “Blues Cruise,” New York Magazine’s take on the NRO’s post-election Caribbean cruise, followed by Bruce Bartlett’s post-election bridge-burner, “Revenge Of The Reality-Based Community.” Both pieces present different sides of the same coin, which is the GOPs alternate reality problem. And what I realized after reading them both is that conservatism, and the Republican Party in particular, is no longer a political party or ideology. No, it has disintegrated into an elegant, elaborate money-making scheme. What Dick Armey did with his gun-toting friend is the apotheosis of modern, institutionalized conservatism. It’s simply perfect. Hollywood couldn’t write a better epilogue for the GOP’s election loss.
Here’s the thing: A lot of us have looked with great puzzlement at the Republican Party’s strict allegiance to an alternate conservative reality, their disinterest in facts, and their willful denialism (or, to use the wonky term, “epistemic closure”). It makes no sense to anyone looking at the GOP as a political operation. This self-sequestration into a conservative bubble is completely at odds with what a political movement should do. Don’t they want to win elections? Don’t they want broad appeal? Isn’t the point to put your policy stamp on the governing mechanism? Isn’t that what it’s supposed to be about?
But no, we’ve had it all wrong. They don’t want to govern. That’s the last thing they want. They want money. End, full stop. They want to keep the national amygdala tweaked, keep telling the rich precisely what they want to hear, and keep the donations flooding in. Spend that money on renting your own mailing list to ask for more donations. Or another con, it doesn’t matter. As long as the money keeps coming. It’s really that simple. It’s all a huge grift.
This isn’t a new revelation by any means — Rick Perlstein pretty much laid it out in The Long Con: Mail Order Conservatism — but I always assumed the con referred to a few leeches sucking off the system. There will always be some Glenn Beck types playing the rubes in Missouri and Tennessee, selling their snake oil and taking advantage of the gullible in flyover states. But I didn’t realize the whole fruit was rotten. I didn’t realize, until now, that the con is the point of the Republican Party. The Republican Party and all of its ancillary operations are simply mechanisms for making money. Again: end, full stop.
This explains so much. It explains all of the petty graft at the heart of the GOP. It explains why we have dysfunction in Washington. One party doesn’t want to win the policy debate, they don’t really care about their legislation, they just want a talking point for the next fundraising letter.
And it explains the incredible infrastructure they’ve built up — the think tanks, the polling firms, the media outlets, and on and on. It’s all carefully (and expensively) crafted to reinforce a conservative alternate reality, firmly planted sometime in 1988 when Reagan was still president, whites were still a majority, the Soviets were our clear-cut enemy, and conservative ideas still had some credibility.
That reality is 25 years in the past but shh… don’t tell conservatives that. They might stop the money flow.
Today, The Corner linked to a conversation with Jonah Goldberg and John O’Sullivan on “the problem of demographics for the Republican coalition.” The pull-quote in the link explained that if the GOP is to win over asian-american and latino voters, it must “persuade them to think of themselves primarily as Americans.” I can’t understand why they’re having trouble, given this keen understanding of the voters they’re trying to reach.
The full quote is at the link, but it basically says the same thing, just more words. Most liberals jumped on this as two top conservative pundits once again being clueless, patronizing and racist toward ethnic voters. And yes, assuming Asian Americans and Latinos don’t think of themselves as “American” is clueless, patronizing and racist.
But let’s flip this argument over. Jonah Goldberg, John O’Sullivan and the editors of The Corner are saying that any group which views itself as American must by default be Republican. It is inconceivable to them that any person who views him or herself as American could be a liberal. Let that one sink in for a minute.
This is what happens after a generation of political warfare, of convincing yourself and everyone else that you own the flag, you own patriotism, you own soldiers home from war, and babies, and Christmas, and success, and Mom and apple pie — in short, everything the culture ever identified as part of being “American.”
And of course we’ve heard hints of this before, from the likes of Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, Allen West, Ann Coulter and the rest of those folks in the crazypants corner of the GOP. It is, in fact, what’s behind all of that birther nonsense. But usually the GOP establishment swoops in to do damage control, either disavowing the statement or wresting a retraction from the poor GOPer who forgot he or she was supposed to speak in dog whistles. Rarely is it put so bluntly by a member of the conservative elite.
The Republican Party will never open its tent in any meaningful way as long as the nut of their worldview is that they own being American. Until they start seeing those citizens who think (and vote) differently from them as also being American, they will not be a viable alternative to anyone outside the 27%.
In February 2012, conservative author Bruce Walker wrote this:
The data is consistent, overwhelming, and clear. Conservatives are the Real America. Leftists are colonial governors, small in number, controlling through fear and intimidation from heavily guarded forts at the chokepoints of society, unable to persuade more than a slim minority of Americans to follow them, and protected from the destruction of their own administration. Our campaign against the left is nothing more or less than a national liberation movement. We, not they, are America.
Walker is a nutjob, who writes, lives and breathes on conservatism’s radical fringe — but, sadly, that fringe has been allowed to permeate conservatism’s epicenter. Walker’s “we are the real Americans” perspective is clearly part of the conservative DNA. And guess what: Walker was convinced that Republicans would win big in November, because his unskewed polls told him America is a conservative nation (BTW, I link to Walker’s columns because they are truly hilarious. Go over and read a few, have a good laugh.)
And therein lies the problem. Republicans don’t just need to expand their political tent; they need to expand their concept of what it means to be an American. I’m just not sure they can do it. They’re going to continue to believe their dog whistles speak to everyone, when they just speak to the 27%; they’re going to continue to slip up and oopsies say something boneheaded like, “Latinos need to think of themselves as American before Republicans can reach out to them.” And crackpots like Bruce Walker are going to continue to write laughably out of touch articles proving how hermetically sealed the conservative bubble truly is.
It may take an entire generation to fix what ails the GOP.
With bigots and attention whores like Rick Santorum now serving as the face of your brand, I have to wonder if Dan Cathy isn’t wishing he’d kept his fat yap shut? You know, most fast food chains try to appeal to as broad a range of customers as possible. Chick-fil-A is narrowing its consumer base. They are now the face of right-wing, reactionary, Bible-thumping intolerance. Who thinks that’s a good brand identity?
This is a fast food chain which now appeals to the low-information, Fox News-watching, bigoted, spelling-challenged wing of the electorate.
Maybe this explains why they spell “chicken” incorrectly in their ads.
We’re in the post-partisan portion of the campaign now, didja notice? I did.
If you pay attention as I have, then like me you’ve noticed the righties are all strangely on message these days about liberals being the hyper-partisans in the room. Weird, isn’t it? After all the GOP obstruction and Tea Party demands to not compromise? Now all of a sudden the party of folding like a lawnchair has become the party of non-compromising ideologues? How’d that happen?
It’s as if they all got bundled off to Crazy Uncle Frank Luntz’s Wingnut Boot Camp in the Adirondacks somewhere, and now they’re home showing off the beaded necklaces and keychains they made on arts & crafts day.
Indeed, I saw the perfect example of this new messaging on Friday night. If you don’t watch Bill Maher’s Real Time, give praise to the great and glorious YouTubez which enables me to share this moment with you.
The conversation was between Glibertarian fool Nick Gillespie of Reason TV, failing in his attempt to appear “reasonable” and independent, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. The first thing you’ll notice is Gillespie’s annoying habit of dominating the airtime and talking over everyone, which he did throughout the entire show, and which is something else they teach you at Crazy Uncle Frank’s School For Aspiring Right Wing Pundits. “Don’t let the liberal talk, they might say something people actually agree with!”
Here Gillespie accused Maddow of being a liberal hack, saying “you will always take the side of a Democrat over a Republican.” When she demurred his response was, “Oh yeah? Prove it! Name one Republican you’d favor over a Democrat! You can’t, can you? A-HA! Told ya so! Hackity-hack-hack-hack!” As if part B of his sentence in any way related to part A. It was the craziest thing I’d ever seen, like, “Hey hippie, I made up this stereotype about you now PROVE I’m wrong!”
Here’s the video, posted by someone (obviously a Glibertarian non-partisan, because they refer to Rachel Maddow as a “rabid raccoon”). You will see my analysis is not far off the mark:
I’d like to thank Nick Gillespie for giving us this great window onto the New Conservative Message. Let me say: it’s a pretty message, but you’ve got a few kinks to work out. Still, as election day nears, we will be hearing more and more of this, I guarantee it. Why? It’s simple: the Republicans are trying to appeal to independent voters now. That means Republicans have to pretend to be the reasonable ones, and frame Democrats as the rigid ideologues who put party affiliation before country and common sense. Etch-a-Sketch, bay-beez! Republicans do everything with mirrors, and whenever they accuse the left of something you can be damned sure they’re doing it themselves.
So, be on the lookout for more of this kind of messaging because you’re going to see a lot of it. Want another example? On Sunday morning The New York Times published Campbell Brown’s ridiculous attack on Planned Parenthood. It was classic Etch-A-Sketch-ing, because Brown’s entire point was that Planned Parenthood isn’t sufficiently “bi-partisan.” This at a time when Republicans are so rabidly anti-reproductive rights, they’ve accused the Girl Scouts of being the “tactical arm of Planned Parenthood.” Yes, by all means, try compromising with that.
Brown’s last op-ed appearance in the Times was to accuse President Obama of insulting women. I guess ensuring our reproductive healthcare gets treated equally with men’s penis pills insults her. I happen to think it’s awesome. Crazy, I know. Though the Times doesn’t mention it anywhere, Brown is married to Dan Senor, a Fox News contributor and advisor to Mitt Romney. You’d think that would be information worth mentioning on Brown’s op-ed pieces but, sadly, no. BTW, the Planned Parenthood piece quickly got a thorough debunking from several sources (here’s one if you’re so inclined), sparing me the trouble.
Brown’s piece was just another version of Gillespie’s argument: you just don’t like Republicans, dirty hippie! You’re a rigid partisan who refuses to compromise! David Brooks did it too, and on PBS no less — a perfect outlet for a message targeting “undecideds” and independents. Oh, they’re clever little SOB’s aren’t they?
This is a classic schoolyard argument (“Am not!” “Are too!” “AM NOT!” “ARE TOO!”), which takes the conversation away from what Republicans have done and shifts it to who Democrats are. This is a trap Democrats all-too-easily fall into (even Maher and Maddow stepped into it briefly, saying “See, here’s this Republican thing here we agree with,” which is what they want you to do because it legitimizes their Democrats-as-rigid-partisans position).
My advice to Democrats and liberals of all stripes is to not do this. Do not legitimize the Republican framing of Democrats. Do not let them change the conversation away from what Republicans have done to who Democrats are.
Instead, I would ask Republicans why, if they are so bipartisan, they have abandoned every one of their own positions once Democrats embraced them. If Democrats are so rigidly partisan, then why pray tell did we adopt your insurance mandate idea? In 1993 there were 20 Senate Republicans who co-sponsored the HEART act which had an individual insurance mandate as a key provision. Three of those Republicans — Orrin Hatch, Dick Lugar and Chuck Grassley — were still in the Senate when the Affordable Care Act came up for a vote. They vociferously opposed the very same individual mandate in “Obamacare” which they themselves had co-sponsored in 1993. Indeed, in December 2009 Senate Republicans voted in lockestep, calling the individual mandate unconstitutional.
How come the end of life counseling which Republicans called “Death Panels” was perfectly fine when it was part of the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill? Republicans like Grassley voted for it then. What changed? Why, when it was included in the Democrats’ ACA legislation, did it suddenly become “Death Panels” which must be opposed?
If we’re the hyper-partisan ones, then why are Republicans running away from their own free market ideas like Cap And Trade? Why was it fine when Republicans were in charge, and cap-and-tax now that Democrats have come on board?
These are questions that need to be answered, every time some Nick Gillespie type wants to accuse Rachel Maddow of not liking Republicans. The answer is, I loved your ideas for the individual mandate. I loved your ideas for end of life counseling. I loved your cap and trade idea. When did you stop loving those things?
Or, I didn’t love these things but I came on board and accepted them to get done what needed to be done. Now you don’t like them? Why not? When did you stop loving your own ideas? How does that make me the partisan, when I supported your ideas and you now run away from them?
People keep telling me to stop trying to understand conservatives, but I can’t help myself. If they make sense to themselves, then really we should try to understand where they’re coming from. We don’t have to agree but for God’s sake let’s at least make the effort.
But I just haven’t been able to understand the reflexive defense of George Zimmerman from the right wing. What exactly are they defending here? Is it the NRA-guns thing? The “we don’t believe racism exists” thing? What are they defending when they rally around a guy who shot and killed a teenager? What is going on here?
It’s truly something to behold, these attacks on a 17 year old kid, and while I can maybe understand why they’d attack Sandra Fluke or someone else who came out in support of a hated Obama Administration policy, that’s not the case here. Trayvon Martin was a kid in his neighborhood coming home from the store. So all of this “he deserved to die” stuff puzzles me. Is it because hated figures like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are involved now? If those guys say the sky is blue then conservatives know it must be green?
The funniest thing has been the “revelation” that George Zimmerman registered to vote as a Democrat in 2002 (I’m not going to link to those sites, but you can Google it if you’re interested). A-HA! That proves …. what, exactly? That he was justified in shooting Martin? That he wasn’t a racist who immediately assumed a black kid was up to no good? That “stand your ground” laws aren’t dangerous? It means none of those things. What it does show us is that the right wing’s perspective is completely clouded by their hyper-partisanship and also that they assume everyone views the world through the same hyper-partisan lens. But no one ever said George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin because Zimmerman was a Republican. Yet that’s what right-wing bloggers and pundits seem to have heard. I just find that truly bizarre. I really want to understand what’s going on here.
That right-wing cranks, caught in the storm of their own horseshit, would be unable to distinguish between “being 17″ and “being a criminal” isn’t particularly shocking (to most of them, there is no distinction). It’s embarrassing for a theoretically respectable site like Yahoo! to provide cover for clearinghouses like Drudge with equivocating articles that worry about “the difference between the typical teenager Martin’s family and supporters say he was and the way he presented himself on social media” and quote the “we don’t know what happened” hems and “it’s complicated” haws of Business Insider’s Michael Brendan Dougherty and PolicyMic.com’s David Shane.
But mainstream and gutter are both running from the same source: an anxiety about young black men. That’s why it doesn’t matter that Martin’s suspensions are completely irrelevant to the case, and it’s why there’s a push to sidestep the specifics of the encounter in favor of interrogating Martin’s character.
As Read pointed out, this reached its zenith when Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera told black kids to stop wearing hoodies. What he was really saying was, “stop being so scary.” That a teenager carrying Skittles and iced tea could justifiably be viewed as scary indicates the problem might lie with white folks’ irrational fear, but there it is. And surely there can be nothing scarier to conservatives than seeing hundreds and even thousands of predominantly black faces rallying in the streets demanding justice. That has got to be really scary for these folks, hiting them on a visceral level and harkening back to the race riots of the ’60s. White people scare really easily, it seems to me, which is why it’s such an effective political tool, and has been for decades.
This also reminds me of the question we all asked in 2010, the summer of crazy: “What If The Tea Party Was Black”? Walking around with guns and threatening signs, vowing to overthrow the establishment, what then?
I think the hidden message of the conservative attacks on Trayvon Martin really has its roots in this: black people are scary and white people are justified in being afraid. They are defending fear. This is a very useful message because scared people can be easily manipulated into doing all sorts of things in the service of their rulers. This is a truth as old as Plato and it will never change.
The Little Shop Of Political Horrors that is the Palin family is demanding a regular feeding. This time it’s Bristol Palin who has opened her mouth to allow some stupid to fall out. Bristol would like to know where her apology from President Obama is, you know, like the one Sandra Fluke got. Cuz, y’know, people were mean to Bristol Palin so, everybody gets a presidential apology when that happens, right?
What is it with these perpetually aggrieved Palins? Okay, look honey: when you give testimony before members of the House of Representatives over a piece of national health policy and you get called a slut and whore as a result, then maybe you’ll get your apology. So far, all you’ve done is showcase your surgically altered features on Dancing With The Stars and get knocked up after too many wine coolers when you were in high school.
The fact that she fails to understand this gigantic distinction is yet more proof that the Grifters Of Wasilla are woefully clueless about the difference between public policy and public relations, celebrity and citizenship.
The whole thing is awesome so give it a read, but I especially call your attention to this bit, which has gotten completely lost in all of the haranguing that followed:
All of this bile followed from his assertion that she testified about her own extremely active sex life.
Here’s the thing: She didn’t. She said nothing whatsoever about her own sex life. She did not mention her own contraceptive needs at all: She spoke passionately and eloquently, and respectfully, about several friends of hers, Georgetown students who she said were diagnosed with medical conditions requiring the birth control pill, but who could not get it because they could not afford it. That was it. Here is the transcript of her testimony.
In short — though Limbaugh doesn’t address this in his mealy-mouthed, backhanded “apology” — Limbaugh just made it all up, then went hog-wild, oinker-frenzy-wild, elaborating on it so he could call her names. Calling people names is bad, but calling people names based on your own invented calumny is the textbook definition of slander. The First Amendment does not protect you from that, nor should it. Even on an issue of public debate, and even if the victim is a public figure, as Ms. Fluke was here, “fair comment” is not a defense if you made up the central fact, and the central fact is wrong and is damaging and if your intent was to injure. I’m no lawyer, but as I see it: Check, check, check, check. I hope Ms. Fluke knows a good lawyer; if she doesn’t, one will find her, I suspect: The pockets here are really deep, though constricted and attenuated a bit: A LOT of flibbity-flabbity belly fat there, Rush. You really should do something about that, in your well-merited retirement.
Rush, in internet-speak, you are about to be pwned. By a woman.
Indeed. Rush lied about what Sandra Fluke said, then badgered and berated her for three days based on the lie he created! I fail to see how that’s any different from what Andrew Breitbart did to Shirley Sherrod: selectively editing a videotape to completely twist her words and meaning, then hold it up to the world to say “look at this horrible thing this person said.” Sherrod’s lawsuit has cleared its first hurdles and it’s speculated that Breitbart’s death will not affect its progress. It seems to me that Sandra Fluke has an equally valid slander case against Rush. I really hope she does sue, because a lawsuit is the only thing that will keep these blowhards from using lies and character assassination as political weapons.
And let me point out: this case also illustrates the huge difference between conservatives and liberal figures like Bill Maher. Rush Limbaugh is a right-wing talking point factory. His deceitful take on an issue ricochets around the right-wing echo factory — sometimes even percolating up to the mainstream media. Limbaugh said Fluke’s testimony was about demanding taxpayers pay for birth control, a lie that was repeated by Fox News yakkers like Bill O’Reilly and Megyn Kelley, columnist and talk show host Ed Morissey, even conservative cartoonists like Gary McCoy. The entire conservative media picked up and repeated Rush’s completely erroneous take on Fluke’s testimony, and they’ve been doing it for over a week solid.
Maybe they hope if the lie is repeated often enough it will become truth, or maybe they’re really just taking their information from Rush but the truth is, in no way is this issue about taxpayers paying for women’s birth control — Sandra Fluke’s or anyone else’s. It’s about private insurance companies offering contraception as part of the prescription benefit in your employer-based insurance plan. You know, the one that is part of your benefits package at work.
(As I write this I think I’ve realized why this issue has become so confusing for some conservatives: lots of really big words! “Contraception coverage” and “prescription benefit” and “insurance” — oh my!)
Now, Bill Maher may say something that crosses the line but I’ve yet to see any comment of his get repeated across the “liberal media.” Nor have I ever seen Maher misconstrue an issue, and then watch as his erroneous framing is repeated by Democratic politicians, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, the New York Times and the like. There simply is no equivalency here. None.
And here’s another thing. To paraphrase Adlai Stevenson, if conservatives stop telling lies about liberals, maybe we’ll stop telling the truth about them. But they won’t stop telling those lies until they start being held accountable for them. That’s just reality.
I don’t know why we’re supposed to just be polite and sit back and take it all the time. If someone tells a lie about you for political reasons, and that lie is turned into a hammer and you’re beaten over the head with it for days, and then that hammer is turned into a mallet and you’re beaten over the head with it some more, all because you spoke out on an issue? Fuck yeah, you should sue.
So in honor of International Women’s Day I hope women around America rise up and fight back against these lies and attacks on us. I don’t know Sandra Fluke but I sure hope she sues. Not just for her own justice, but to prevent future intimidation campaigns the next time a woman tries to speak out on an issue. We should not be subjected to character assassination by the right wing smear machine just because we testified before some members of Congress on healthcare.
I want women to speak out to their employers and their legislators about this, and International Women’s Day is as good a day as any. Hell, talk to your priests and pastors. Tell them it’s not okay that women using birth control are characterized as sluts and whores. Tell them it’s not okay for any state government to force women who are fully aware of what’s up in there to submit to vaginal probes before receiving an abortion. It’s insulting! And demeaning!
Tell them it’s not okay to tell us to press an aspirin between our knees instead of enjoying healthy sex lives. It’s not okay to tell women serving in our armed forces that they should expect to be raped.
