Bullies

by Ben Shapiro

  To that end, the Obama campaign began portraying Romney as a serial outsourcer, somebody “rooting” for economic destruction. “He is a corporate raider,” explained Axelrod. As Paul Kengor of the American Spectator pointed out, “[Axelrod] is slicing up Mitt for an Occupy Wall Street feast. He sees Mitt as a hunk of red meat for the Occupy movement, as the poster-boy for Wall Street greed.”85

  This was too much even for some honest liberals like Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, New Jersey, who said on national television that it was “nauseating” to attack “private equity.” The Obama campaign promptly forced Booker to back down from his statements, then tossed his inert political body into the sewage-ridden Newark Bay. Booker, said a source in the Obama administration, is “dead to us.”86

  And they were just getting started. In August 2012, Priorities USA Super PAC, an organization run by former White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton and associated with Media Matters head David Brock, ran an ad about one Joe Soptic. Soptic, the ad proclaimed, was a former employee of GST Steel, a company once owned by Bain Capital. Bain Capital shut it down. Soptic lost his job and his health insurance, said the ad; his wife then developed cancer and died. Essentially, the Super PAC argued, Romney killed Joe Soptic’s wife.

  There were a few problems with the story. First, Bain shut GST Steel down after Romney ended active management of the company. Second, Soptic was offered a buyout package by GST. Third, Soptic’s wife was diagnosed with cancer in 2006, five years after GST Steel shut down. Fourth, Soptic’s wife didn’t lose her insurance—she already had her own insurance. Other than that, the ad was right on the money.

  So the ad was chock full of lies. The Obama campaign knew it. They knew Soptic’s story, and they obviously knew about the ad. Their campaign spokespeople, especially Stephanie Cutter, simply lied about it—she said the campaign had no idea about Soptic’s story. But then it turned out that Cutter had hosted Soptic, telling precisely the same story, on an Obama campaign conference call months before. The Obama campaign website had a slide featuring Soptic, trying to link the death of his wife to Mitt Romney. The Obama campaign still refuses to denounce the ad—or, for that matter, the Richie Riches standing behind the Super PAC that produced it.

  Let’s leave aside the fact that the ad lied about the facts. Assume for a moment that everything the ad said had been true: Romney ran Bain, Bain shut down GST, Soptic lost his insurance, his wife died of cancer. That still wouldn’t justify the ad from any rational pro-business perspective. Businesses are not responsible for ensuring the health and welfare of former workers. Businesses are created to produce product and profit—product that is passed on to consumers, profit that is passed along to workers and yes, bosses. Blaming businesses for firing people is asinine. If Obama blamed Apple for every death of every relative of every employee Steve Jobs ever fired, the American people would laugh him off the political stage.

  But if Steve Jobs had been a major Republican donor, Obama probably would have done just that. Obama is a class bully. And he’s an anti-business bully. That’s why, in July, Obama explained to businesspeople that they hadn’t really built their own businesses. “Look,” he said, off-teleprompter, “if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.”

  So if it wasn’t your smarts or hard work that built your business, what did?

  “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

  Business owners couldn’t take credit for their own achievements, their own businesses. Business owners owed their fortunes to government, not to absence of government. Government had built their businesses. And Obama could destroy them.

  The left’s thuggery on economics hides the fact that it has been wildly unsuccessful at rectifying economic inequalities. Obama, the greatest class warrior of modern times, has created more economic inequality than President George W. Bush by a landslide. According to Robert Reich, President Clinton’s secretary of labor and a supporter of Obama, “The top 1 percent got 45 percent of Clinton-era economic growth, and 65 percent of the economic growth during the Bush era. According to an analysis of tax returns by Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, the top 1 percent pocketed 93 percent of the gains in 2010. 37 percent of the gains went to the top one-tenth of one percent. No one below the richest 10 percent saw any gain at all.” That despite Obama’s stimulus packages, his bailouts, his unemployment benefits, his vast spending, and his attacks on those who make money in America.87

  Obama shouldn’t feel too bad. His predecessors didn’t do anything to rectify poverty, either, despite their Marxist thug tendencies. LBJ’s War on Poverty defined the term “epic fail.” About 13 percent of Americans live in poverty today; forty years ago, that rate was 19 percent. We’ve spent some $8–10 trillion on antipoverty programs during those decades. About a sixth of the federal budget every year goes to antipoverty programs. And yet our inner cities are a wreck, income inequality has widened—and if we adjust for massive economic growth over the past four decades, the statistics look even worse.88

  What’s more, we’re alienating everyone who earns. In May 2012, just before Facebook went public, Eduardo Saverin, cofounder of the company, renounced his U.S. citizenship.89 Leftists didn’t respond by recognizing that perhaps emboldening poop-covered pitchfork-carrying morons to attack rich folks was a recipe for disaster. Instead, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said, “It’s infuriating to see someone sell out the country that welcomed him and kept him safe, educated him and helped him become a billionaire. . . . We plan to put a stop to this tax avoidance scheme.” And Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) echoed that message: “We simply cannot allow the ultra-wealthy to write their own rules. Mr. Saverin has benefited greatly from being a citizen of the United States but he has chosen to cast it aside and leave U.S. taxpayers with the bill. Renouncing citizenship to simply avoid paying your fair share is an insult to middle class Americans and we will not accept it.”90

  No. Bullying earners to the point where they leave the country is an insult to Americans. What’s worse, it bankrupts them. But that’s precisely what Obama and his cronies want to do.

  That’s why they keep focusing on the “breathtaking greed” of capitalists, as Obama did in a 2011 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. That’s why they say, as Obama did in Kansas, that the rich aren’t paying their “fair share” even if they pay the overwhelming majority of taxes.91

  And, by the way, it’s no coincidence that Obama chose to lay his class bully platform out in Osawatomie. That’s where Teddy Roosevelt called himself a “New Nationalist” and targeted “swollen fortunes.”

  It’s been a century since then, and nothing has changed except the players. The bullies keep on bullying. Until they’re stopped.

  5.

  SEX BULLIES

  The left hates Sarah Palin.

  They don’t hate her because she’s a Republican, though that doesn’t help—the left isn’t fond of George W. Bush, but they hate Palin more than Bush by a factor of five. They don’t hate her because she’s charismatic—Marco Rubio is charismatic, and the left doesn’t hate him with the passionate fury of a thousand burning suns.

  No, the left hates Sarah Palin because she’s a charismatic Republican woman.

  The first sign that the left couldn’t stand Sarah Palin came when she presented her son Trig to the world. Trig was born with Down syndrome, and yet Palin had the gall not to abort him. If she’d been a leftist, this would have been seen as an act of
supreme self-sacrifice; because Palin didn’t abort Trig out of pro-life principle, however, the left decided that she was a villain.

  And so they targeted her.

  Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic led the way, giving legs to the underground radical rumor that Trig was not Sarah’s son, but rather her grandson. “The birth of Trig was critical to appealing to a pro-life base, and was used as a political argument and weapon in the 2008 campaign and since,” wrote Sullivan. “It cannot surely be ‘embarrassing’ for the media to ask for evidentiary proof—any more than it was inappropriate for Obama to produce proof of his birth in Hawaii. It may be awkward, but it isn’t illegitimate.” The implication: if she’d just had an abortion, we’d all accept that the fetus was hers, and we could just move on.1 Sullivan, as it turns out, is one of Barack Obama’s favorite bloggers.2 Obama even invited Sullivan to a state dinner.3 But then again, it’s not as if Obama has reason to be especially suspicious of those who doubt the birth stories of others.

  Then there was the hatred of the Hollywood crowd, who couldn’t stand that this shockingly good-looking Alaskan governor was . . . gasp! . . . a Republican. Louis C.K., the balding reprobate drunk comedian, tweeted from an airplane about Palin: “I want to rub my father’s c—k all over Sarah Palin’s fat t—t.” And “@SarahPalinUSA kudos to your dirty hole, you fucking jackoff c—t-face jazzy wondergirl.” When he was slightly less drunk, he referred to Palin’s “f— retard-making c—t.” This delightful individual got invited to the White House, too, where he spent five hours hanging out with Obama speechwriter Jonathan Favreau.4 Betty White took a break from being old long enough to call Palin a “crazy bitch” on the Craig Ferguson Show.5 Thankfully, because of the show’s ratings, just two people saw it—White and Ferguson.

  Formerly funny dwarf commentator Bill Maher, whose brainpan is apparently losing the battle for headspace with his proboscis, has called Palin both a “dumb t—t” and a “c—t.” President Obama’s Super PAC accepted $1 million from Maher, no questions asked.

  The “journalistic” world weighed in, too. Keith Olbermann, between bouts of self-righteousness and bloviation, told the Hollywood Reporter that Palin is “very stupid. She’s one of the few people in politics that most political writers and broadcasters can sincerely, legitimately look down on.”6 Bill Keller, executive editor of the supposedly objective New York Times, echoed Olbermann: “If the 2012 election were held in the newsrooms of America and pitted Sarah Palin against Barack Obama, I doubt Palin would get 10 percent of the vote. However tempting the newsworthy havoc of a Palin presidency, I’m pretty sure most journalists would recoil in horror from the idea.” Read closely. He isn’t saying that Palin is unpopular. He’s saying she’s reviled.7

  The conspiracy was worse than that. As soon as Palin was nominated, leftist journalists united on the previously discussed secret Internet listserv JournoList, where they coordinated attacks on Palin. Michael Cohen of the New America Foundation, a liberal think tank, wrote, “Honestly, this pick reeks of desperation. How can anyone logically argue that Sarah Pallin [sic], a one-term governor of Alaska, is qualified to be President of the United States? Train wreck, thy name is Sarah Palin.” This precipitated a conversation with Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones, Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker, Daniel Levy of the liberal Century Foundation, Ryan Donmoyer at Bloomberg News, and Politico reporter Ben Adler, who later ended up at Newsweek. “Doesn’t leaving said baby without its mother while she campaigns weaken [her] family values argument?” asked Adler, ignoring the fact that this argument cut against decades of feminist thought. “Or will everyone be too afraid to make that point?”8

  HBO spent millions of dollars producing a Palin hit piece with falsified material, Game Change. The porn industry put together a movie starring a Palin look-alike.

  On Hollywood 2008, Wonkette ran a picture of Trig being held by Sarah’s daughter Bristol. “Little baby Trig must be so glad he wasn’t aborted for this, his first Halloween,” snarked Wonkette, “because his parents dressed him up like a political party symbol to be carried around at snarling political events. Aww. Isn’t life just grand?”9 Even relatives of Palin came under attack. David Letterman infamously suggested that Willow Palin, then fourteen, was “knocked up by Alex Rodriguez” during a game at Yankee Stadium.10 Of course, Letterman had already gone after Willow’s mom, suggesting that Sarah “bought make-up from Bloomingdale’s to update her ‘slutty flight attendant look.’ ”

  Of course, it isn’t just Palin whom the left attacks with the rage of . . . well . . . a woman scorned. Another is Michele Bachmann, labeled the “Mata Hari of Minnesota” by Chris Matthews of MSNBC, a “phony-ass broad” and a “skank” by leftist radio host Mike Malloy, the “Hate Monger of Minnesota” by left-wing sleazebag Max Blumenthal, and “America’s craziest member of Congress” by Michelle Goldberg of the Daily Beast. Matt Taibbi—you may remember him from his evil attack on Andrew Breitbart the day of his death in Rolling Stone—put together an endless profile on Bachmann labeling her a “batshit crazy . . . political psychopath” with a “gigantic set of burnished titanium Terminator-testicles swinging under her skirt.” See, she wasn’t even a girl, cuz she was conservative. These are the types of people who thought girls had cooties on the playground.11

  Michelle Malkin has come in for her share of hate, too. Malkin fell under Taibbi’s perverse scrutiny in Rolling Stone after she rightly ripped the media for embracing the sexual slang term teabagging to describe Tea Partiers. Here’s Taibbi’s genius: “[T]his move of hers to spearhead the teabag movement really adds an element to her writing that wasn’t there before. Now when I read her stuff, I imagine her narrating her text, book-on-tape style, with a big, hairy, set of balls in her mouth. It vastly improves her prose.” Taibbi was obviously breathing heavily as he wrote these words. As for Olbermann, when he’s not too busy playing with his cats in his lonely, lonely apartment, he’s criticizing Malkin as a “big, mashed up bag of meat with lipstick on it.”12

  When unions in Wisconsin were busily targeting Republican lieutenant governor Rebecca Kleefisch, some of their friends brought out their most misogynistic slurs. John “Sly” Sylvester of WTDY radio suggested that she had performed “fellatio on all the talk-show hosts in Milwaukee.” He added that she had “pulled a train” on them—pulling a train being a euphemism for engaging in group sex, apparently.13

  And don’t even get started on what they say about Ann Coulter.

  So, what’s the point of recounting all of this leftist hatred for conservative women?

  This is the same left that decided that it was a War on Women to suggest that people pay for their own birth control. This is the same left that says that the Susan G. Komen for the Cure breast cancer group is sexist because they don’t want to fund Planned Parenthood, that Republicans are misogynists because they don’t think that Head Start is an effective federal program, and that anyone who opposes gay marriage for any reason is a homophobe.

  The left consistently bullies those who disagree with them by claiming they’re sexist and “heteronormative.” Those patriarchal males, according to the left, must be stopped from imposing their Neanderthal worldview on Americans—and so must their wives. Traditional values Americans who believe in legitimate and valuable differences between the sexes must shut the hell up . . . or be bludgeoned into silence.

  ORIGINS OF THE SEX BULLIES

  Men are, admittedly, by nature, sexual pigs. Let’s just put that out there at the start. Many men, if left unchecked by the civilizing influence of women and the institution of marriage, will sleep around, abandon children, and generally act like animals. How do we know that? Because that’s what teenage boys do before they grow up.

  But marriage works. The fact is that even polls of Americans today—after the sexual revolution—show that the vast majority of married people are faithful and do not get divorced. Actually, just 22 percent of people in monogamous relationships—not even marriages!—cheat. The rate goes down a
mong married couples, where 22 percent of men admit to cheating, but just 15 percent of women say they have.14 Between 3 and 4 percent of spouses have cheated on each other during any given year.15 That’s today. Fifty years ago, the numbers were, according to most accounts, far lower.

  But not according to Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey was personally a libertine of libertines—he was a sexual masochist, an amateur pornographer (who made videos starring his wife and other men), and a sexual harasser. He justified pedophilia. And he authored the most famous study of sexual behavior in American history, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and its riveting sequel, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. In that study, he found that an astonishing 85 percent of American men had engaged in premarital sex, nearly 70 percent had slept with prostitutes, and 30–45 percent of all husbands had cheated on their wives. As it turned out, according to Kinsey, more than a third of men had engaged in homosexual behavior. Unfortunately, his research was just as bent as his personal life—he had skewed statistics regularly, utilizing sex offenders ranging from pedophiles to prostitutes in his surveys.

  But the damage was done. Kinsey preached that Americans were sexual hypocrites and needed to change their standards. Traditional American society, it seemed, was a sham. The damage can still be felt today—Americans have a dramatically exaggerated view about how many people cheat on their spouses, for example. Even though only about a fifth of married people cheat, Americans think an incredible 44 percent of men and 36 percent of women are cheating. That’s the effect of the media’s compliance in the sexual revolution, which tells us that even if no one we know is cheating, everyone we know is cheating.16

  With the groundwork set—with the notion emblazoned on American minds that Americans were all lying, cheating perverts—the sexual revolution began.