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Morning Briefing: 'There Has Never Been a More Pacific, Less Rapey Creature Than the White Male of Western European Descent'

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | October 2, 2018 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | October 2, 2018 |


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Guten tag, Pajibans.

Back in February, Donald Trump sought a restraining order to prevent Stormy Daniels from describing their alleged sexual encounter (I cannot believe that we still have to call this an “alleged” encounter. They fucked, OK?). Trump clearly didn’t want the world to know about his mushroom-shaped penis.

What’s most noteworthy about this, however, is that Trump coordinated this effort with his son, Eric Trump, through the Trump Organization (and a Trump Org attorney), with which Donald Trump is not supposed to be involved. This is apparently supposed to be a big deal, but honestly, does anyone actually believe that Donald gave up any control over his company?

On the bright side, his involvement doesn’t seem to be helping. Forbes did a big investigative piece this morning, the gist of which is: The Presidency has been very bad for business at the Trump properties, and that Trump has fallen 138 spots on the World’s Richest list since taking over as President. Pauvre Trump.

— Beto O’Rourke is apologizing for a sentence in a review for a play he wrote when he was 19.

U.S. Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke apologized Monday for a decades-old review of a Broadway play that he wrote as a student at Columbia University in which he critiqued the performance of actresses “whose only qualifications seem to be their phenomenally large breasts and tight buttocks.”

“I am ashamed of what I wrote and I apologize,” the Texas congressman said in a statement according to Politico, which reported the story. “There is no excuse for making disrespectful and demeaning comments about women.”

Really? REALLY? This is the kind of dirt Ted Cruz is digging up on O’Rourke? A shitty comment in a review from 27 years ago? That’s the best you got, Teddy? (FYI: O’Rourke was absolutely wrong about the women in that play, Dee Hoty and Cady Huffman.)

— Moving on: For what it’s worth, Susan Collins has asked the FBI to look into Julia Swetnick’s allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, but the bigger story on Kavanaugh came from NBC yesterday, which obtained text messages showing that Brett Kavanaugh tried to discredit Deborah Ramirez before her allegations went public. There is also some indication that he began this campaign to refute the allegation from Ramirez as early as July, although Kavanaugh told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the first he’d heard of the allegation was when it was published in the New Yorker on September 23rd. So, that’s definitely a lie (and also perjury), one of many lies under oath according to Senator Blumenthal. There is also some indication, that is apparently corroborated, that Ramirez tried to avoid Kavanaugh and his friends at a wedding ten years later.

The media has been doing a lot of legwork for the FBI this week. Hopefully, the FBI will follow their lead before Friday.

— Kavanaugh, by the way, won’t be teaching at Harvard this January, as he has for the last 10 years, after hundreds of Harvard Law alumni signed a letter urging the university to remove him.

— Finally, I want to draw your attention to a WashPo piece that has apparently touched a nerve, especially among Republicans. The piece essentially outlines male resentment toward being outed as potential sexual predators, and how white dudes feel like they’re being treated unfairly now.

The movement right has come alive with impassioned defenses of Kavanaugh in recent days. Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, whose program for years has largely defined the GOP’s white male id, has unleashed a torrent of criticism on the air - such as his riff last Friday on “militant feminism.”

“These women are angry,” Limbaugh said. “Something has happened to them in their lives, and their rage and anger, they take it out now on the country or on all men or men in ‘the powerful majority,’ which is white Christian men and so forth.”

Conservative commentator Ann Coulter bemoaned the “snickering at white men” in her syndicated column last week and insisted that “there has never been a more pacific, less rapey creature than the white male of Western European descent.”

“Can we please, for the love of God, drop the painfully trite, mind-numbing cliche about ‘white men,’ as if somehow their whiteness makes evil even eviler?” Coulter wrote.

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, tweeted after the Kavanaugh hearing that “‘Old white men’ are relentlessly being racially and generationally profiled by the ‘tolerant’ Left” and that media outlets have “almost universally profiled and stigmatized Republican Senators.”

“There has never been a more pacific, less rapey creature than the white male of Western European descent.”

Oh, Ann Coulter. Never stop being you.