Rape Victim: George Will Is Just As Brainless Besides Being Tasteless!

A victim speaks out against a sexist bigot.

During an interview the woman who became the center of George Will's controversial column about rape victims speaks out against the conservative agitator's piece.

Lisa Sendrow a victim of a sexual assault on her college campus thought that Will's comments were "grotesque" and "downright stupid".

We here at Journal de la Reyna agree with Ms. Sendrow.

As you know, I've said it time after time!

Rape is not funny! It's not a badge of honor. It's not something to be made into a comedy or slut-shaming event. RAPE IS RAPE. IT'S A CRIME AND PEOPLE WHO COMMIT THIS ACT SHOULD BE PUNISHED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT OF THE LAW!

People like Loudmouth Bill Cunningham, Rush "KING HIPPO" Limbaugh, and George Will are examples of this culture of men who believe that a rape victim "asked for it".

No matter how a woman acts in public, she shouldn't be subjected to any sexual assault. Many men believe that the woman "had it coming" because she was drunk or she wanted to be a "slut" anyway.

Will thinks that women who get drunk and want to sleep around deserve to be raped. That's what his controversial column talked about. It gin up so much controversy, it cost him a few syndicates who distribute his columns.

Media Matters for America interviews Lisa Sendrow and asked her how this column by Will affected her perspective of the rise in college campus rape.

George Will is a certified idiot. He's too blind or too damn stupid to understand that rape on college campuses is real and the victims are afraid to tell the law about the incident. He believes it's coveted that a woman gets raped. 

Sendrow graduated from Swarthmore in 2013 and now works as a legal assistant. She told Media Matters in an interview over the weekend that she first "tried to avoid the Will piece as much as possible," but after friends pressed her to read it she found the column "infuriating," and felt that his dismissal of her story was dangerous to survivors.

"No one wants to hear that you brought this on yourself," she said, while discussing her reaction to Will's piece. "No one wants to relive the experience or tell that story, when they haven't really had a chance to reflect. You can't really heal if people are telling you that it's your fault. But that's what Will did."

Sendrow explained that she has experienced sexual assault multiple times, but decided to officially report this particular experience and talk to Philadelphia magazine in part because at the time she worked as an advocate for survivors on a campus hotline. "I realized that I could no longer be an advocate and tell survivors to go to the college and report if I wasn't going myself." But the decision wasn't easy, and that contributed to her choosing to wait before initially reporting. "The fact that Will said I waited [to report the assault] -- most women wait awhile. You have to think about what happened, you have to heal."

Research from the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control found that 1 in 5 women had been sexually assaulted while in college, and repeat victimization is common. Reporting rates are particularly low on campuses, and campus assailants tend to be repeat offenders. "This is the only sexual assault I've ever reported," Sendrow noted, "because I felt I was the most safe reporting this one."

She added that she "was also raised to think I put myself in this situation, and it took me a really long time. After hearing others' stories I realized it wasn't my fault -- I was raped. I didn't want to be diminished, I didn't want to be afraid."

While the Philadelphia magazine story clearly documented a serious example of sexual assault (notably, Sendrow specifically stated that she did not consent), Sendrow felt that the magazine took her story and others out of context and omitted key details, "which was exactly what we didn't want to happen." Her assault was "more violent than what [the Philadelphia magazine reporter] wrote. The way he made it seem was very small in comparison." Sendrow added that she received "very threatening" messages from her attacker days after the assault, which the Philadelphia story hadn't included. She had hoped that talking to the media would in part help other survivors by showing they no longer had to be afraid and that their stories couldn't be diminished, and was frustrated when that was "exactly what [Will's column] did."

Sendrow also vehemently rejected Will's claim that survivors might have a coveted status. "I absolutely have not received any privileges from sexual assault. [Will] has clearly never experienced the fear of sexual assault," she said. "He clearly has no idea how hard it is to sleep, to walk around, thinking at any moment this person that you live down the hall from could come out."

Rush Limbaugh and Bill Cunningham are two men who believe that it's the woman's fault for a rape.

She saw a counselor and was diagnosed with PTSD following the assault, she said, which "is pretty common for a lot of survivors I know. It did not help my grades, it did not help my social status. I lost a lot of friends ... No one tells you, 'oh you're a survivor, let me give you a free lunch.' No one gives a shit about you. What benefit could we possibly get? Sometimes I feel like I can't have a real relationship because someone might touch me in the wrong way. How is that okay?"

Sendrow told Media Matters she received violent threats after the Philadelphia article was published. One threat said that she and the other women quoted in the story "deserved to be stoned." Others said "I should be raped again, or 'really' raped, that I was a slut, you know, using my sexual background to say I deserved it."

For Sendrow, most upsetting about Will's column was that "he was politicizing sexual assault, he's a conservative columnist, but why should sexual assault be political?" She criticized him for putting the term sexual assault in quotation marks, implying doubt in survivors' stories, and for using her personal story to "describe the experience of all survivors, and [making] it seem very small." She added, "it was mostly upsetting because I don't feel like survivors' voices were heard."

Will's full column, Sendrow said, made it feel "as if women don't have a voice. Anything bad that happens to a woman, it doesn't matter, because we're the ones who are at fault. And this is already what we're told every single day," she concluded. "We're raised all our lives to think this isn't an issue. But this is an issue. This is why people are triggered, this is why people have PTSD. People will go through their lives thinking rape culture isn't real."

In the end, Sendrow wondered whether Will would have been able to similarly dismiss her story of assault if it came from someone close to him.

"What if [Will's] daughter -- I don't know if he has a daughter -- but would he say to her, that this didn't happen?" she asked. "If she came to him crying, or even not crying, but if she came to him and told him this story, would he just say it wasn't real?"

George Will Is Dropped From The St. Louis Post-Dispatch!

He's on the slow march to destruction. One major newspaper dropped the loser. Hopefully more will come.

The controversial Loserville panelist got dumped by a longtime syndication. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has finally gotten the message, George Will's ignorant comments about campus rape has finally gotten some attention.

This is the beginning of the end for Mr. Will. He can take his "rape is funny" to the folks over at Loserville Nation.

Will wrote a column claiming that being a rape victim is now a “coveted status” that college women seek out.

Will argued that complaints of rape and sexual assualt on college campus were overblown. He also suggested that women claiming to be raped were “delusional.”

Will’s column is syndicated in newspapers across the country by the Washington Post, which bills him as “the most influential writer in America.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which has published Will’s column for a number of years, has had enough. In a message today to readers, the paper announced they were dropping Will from their paper and apologized for running his column on sexual assault:

The change has been under consideration for several months, but a column published June 5, in which Mr. Will suggested that sexual assault victims on college campuses enjoy a privileged status, made the decision easier. The column was offensive and inaccurate; we apologize for publishing it.

Will will be replaced in the Post-Dispatch by another Washington Post columnist, Michael Gerson.

Think Progress reports this controversy is starting to sprout legs. Hopefully it leads to a massive dump on him.

Yeah, you're entitled to the freedom of speech. It doesn't mean that you're speech can be in the nation's newspapers.

For the ignorant: RAPE IS RAPE. There's nothing funny or entertaining about it. It's a criminal act and you could spend your life in the iron college.

Loserville's George Will Mocks Rape!

Another stupid old White guy who thinks a rise in college rape is the fault of the victims doing reckless things.

Longtime Washington Post and Loserville contributor George Will is under fire. Once again sticking his condescending mouth in business he has no right to be in. He and that jackass Richard Cohen have dragged the Washington Post into trouble one too many times.

Will was once a contributor to ABC News. But he was given his walking papers after he refused to travel to New York for taping of the problems.

Now if this picks up steam and people start to question should the Washington Post step in?

Do you believe that its time to retire Will and Cohen?

Anyway, Will has been totally wrong on the War in Iraq, the War in Afghanistan, and now the impact of rape in our American colleges and universities.

He would write a piece saying that government is injecting campus victimization. He wrote that campus victimization at college and universities are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.

He believes that campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. “sexual assault” is victimization created by government.

I've said it one too many times: RAPE IS RAPE.

There is nothing funny or entertaining about it. It's not about victimization. It's about about a violation of your trust, your health and your safety. It's something that affects women, men, children, animals and those with disabilities.

Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse, which is initiated by one or more persons against another person without that person's consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority or with a person who is incapable of valid consent, such as one who is unconscious, incapacitated, or below the legal age of consent.

Victims of rape can be severely traumatized; in addition to psychological harm resulting from the act, rape may cause physical injury, or have additional effects on the victim, such as acquiring of a sexually transmitted infection or becoming pregnant. Furthermore, following a rape, a victim may face violence or threats of thereof from the rapist, and, in some cultures, from the victim's own family and relatives.

There are several types of rape, generally categorized by reference to the situation in which it occurs, the sex or characteristics of the victim, and/or the sex or characteristics of the perpetrator. Different types of rape include date rape, gang rape, marital rape, incestual rape, child sexual abuse, prison rape, acquaintance rape, war rape and statutory rape.

"Victim blaming" is holding the victim of a crime to be in whole or in part responsible for the crime.

Rape is a Class 1 Felony in most states. It carries a punishment that could land you in the iron college for life.

In some countries, you could lose your life if you're convicted of rape. And yes, the American justice system has the death penalty for rape in some states.

Why I Cannot Say That Hemings-Jefferson Relationship is Romantic

Why I Cannot Say That Hemings-Jefferson Relationship is Romantic(Updated)

I cannot in the whole world say that the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is one of romance. I'm sorry I'm not buying into mainstream media and pundits history revision. These were the same people who venomously deny that Jefferson coerced and abuse Sally Hemings, let alone an involuntary relationship. There are still many who totally deny the Hemings-Jefferson relationship to this day. Don't these people see before their eyes the many complexions Black Americans are today? They are not the products of recent couplings, but of coerced and abusive relationships between Black women and White men during slavery, segregation, and Jim and Jane Crow. My friendly blogger Ann said in her commentary:

"Until the day comes when an enslaved woman can have a say-so over her body, the children that come from her body, and how and when she can decide herself what she will or will not be able to do with her body, the word mistress will never be used by me in the same sentences with the words slave and master, regardless as to whether it is Thomas Jefferson or any other white slave master."

Not only Black women suffer the indignity of abuse, rape, and sexual exploitation by all men, but they were routinely deny respect and equal protection under the law(read At the Dark End of the Street by Danielle McGuire).  Antimiscegenation laws were a proof of such indignity. Refusing to be called by their last names is showing disrespect. 

While mainstream media and society are very obsessed over the presidency of President Obama, society doesn't want people to discuss about the other racial mixing that is both very coercive and exploitative. Barack Obama is a product of consensual interracial relationship and marriage, that of a Black man and a white woman. America is more sympathetic and comfortable with that combination although they show contempt toward that combination.  Read Richard Cohen's racist article regarding the DeBlasio family this past November. Then again, they don't pose a threat to the structure of American white supremacy because the white woman who marry black men takes his status.

It's time to talk about this shameful, sordid history instead of sweeping it under the ground as usual.

athmanduk2.wordpress.com/2008/10/08/thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings-the-master-and-the-enslaved-black-woman/#comments

Shawn James, Black Freelance Writer: Thoughts on Tamera Mowry-Housely’s EXTRA EXTRA SALTY TEARS On Oprah

Shawn James, Black Freelance Writer: Thoughts on Tamera Mowry-Housely’s EXTRA EXTRA SALTY TEARS On Oprah

Bonus Reading: http://httpjournalsaolcomjenjer6steph.blogspot.com/2013/12/from-past.html

Before Richard Cohen, Bob Dumas had a Problem with Interracial, Intercultural, and Interethnic Relationships

Before Richard Cohen, there's another despicable guy had a problem with interracial/inter ethnic relationships.


This is the hateful and racist commentary from Raleigh's G105 DJ Bob Dumas commentary about a then-upcoming wedding of one of their interns who is married to a Lumbee Indian  back in 2008:

Rush Limbaugh Clone Bob Dumas

Bob Dumas April 2008:

"Did you tell your parents, 'hey, at least he's not black?'" Dumas asked during the broadcast. "After you guys get married are you going to have a tee-pee warming party? A tee-pee warming party? I hear Pottery Barn is making great stuff for tee-pees."-

Bob Dumas of Bob and the Show gram, G105, Raleigh, N.C., back in 2008.
___________________________________________________________________

Here's more despicable racism of Bob Dumas:

By Lorraine Ahearn
Staff Columnist 
Friday, Apr. 11, 2008 3:00 am 


How could this be OK?

That was the fundamental question when a Lumbee friend called last week, outraged, after her high school-age daughter heard a trio of shock jocks trashing the tribe on Raleigh’s WDCG (105 FM).

Now, the first thing that might come to mind is last year’s April fool, Don Imus, and the "nappy-headed hos" remark that earned him a you-know-what-storm and cost him his CBS Radio show.

But if you listened to last week’s "Bob & the Showgram" segment — which remained up on the G-105 Web site for several days until cooler heads prevailed — some differences became apparent.

First, Imus’ callous comments:

a) Were in passing, off the cuff.

b) Lasted less than a minute.

c) Forced Imus off the air despite several profuse apologies from Imus (who admitted his words were "racist and abhorrent"), a meeting with the Rutgers women and an appearance on the Rev. Al Sharpton’s show.

In contrast, the G-105 comments:

a) Were a clearly planned segment, with prepared background sound effects and traditional Native American music, in which the three white morning hosts derided an intern they called "White Girl" about her upcoming wedding to her Lumbee fiance.

b) Lasted 14 minutes, 33 seconds.

c) Brought a vague apology from the station manager "to any listener that may have found remarks or recordings played Tuesday, April 1st, 2008, during Bob and the Showgram to be offensive, derogatory or insensitive," and, a week later, resulted in a three-day suspension for the hosts.

So what, exactly, did they say, in remarks that Ruth Revels, founder of the Guilford Native American Association, called "the worst I’ve heard in all my years" of involvement?

The segment, led by DJ Bob Dumas, began as banter with a departing station intern who said she was leaving to get married. After the unnamed intern mentioned that she was marrying a Lumbee, stock sound effects such as fake "woo-woo-woo" Indian chants played in the background.

Dumas and his co-hosts quizzed the intern at length about her fiance, asking whether he was "full-blooded" and whether the couple planned to have a "teepee warming" after the wedding and suggesting she tell her parents, "At least he’s not black."

After making fun of the intern, who laughed along, Dumas and his co-hosts ridiculed Indians in general as "lazy" and Lumbees specifically as "inbred."

It was only after Greg Richardson, executive director of the N.C. Commission of Indian Affairs, on Wednesday demanded the hosts be fired that the station announced the suspension — eight days after the show aired.

But back to the original question from my friend, who was so angry at what her daughter heard that she was practically in tears: How could this be OK? And why was the reaction so lukewarm compared to Imus?

One reason, of course, is that Imus is national. Even though the Rutgers players don’t listen to his show, they soon got wind of it. But there’s a more fundamental difference: Lumbees are a minority’s minority.

True, they are the largest tribe east of the Mississippi, but there are only 50,000 of them in the state and only about 5,000 here in Guilford County. They have been invisible, easy to ignore. Which, incidentally, explains why they are still waiting for federal recognition after 120 years.

It also explains why someone such as Bob Dumas felt safe saying the things he said — statements he would never dare insert the word "black" into, at least not on the air.

Then again, cowards never pick on anyone their own size.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com

http://www.news-record.com/apps/pbcs.dl … /756073241



More of his racist misogyny against American Indians and White women who date/marry outside of their race:

Shock jock comments about Lumbees labeled racist

By Michael Futch
Staff writer
ADVERTISEMENT

The N.C. Commission of Indian Affairs has demanded that a Raleigh radio
station fire the hosts and producer of a morning show over “racially
charged comments” made on the air.

The station — WDCG, “G105” — posted an online apology Friday for anyone
who was offended by the remarks, which singled out Lumbees and called
American Indians “lazy” and “in-bred.”

Members of the Lumbee and other tribes in the state have expressed outrage over the comments made Tuesday during “Bob and the Showgram.” The popular morning program is hosted by longtime Triangle radio air personality Bob Dumas.

Derogatory references were made on the air about the names of Pocahontas and Sacajawea. Traditional American Indian music played in the background as the “Showgram” team laughed at their own jokes.

“I think simply, it’s very sad that you would have a radio (station) like
that putting that kind of information out on the air,” said Greg
Richardson, executive director of the N.C. Commission of Indian Affairs.
“It’s inflammatory. I wonder if they understand how inflammatory those
remarks can be.”

Richardson, who belongs to the Haliwa-Saponi tribe, said Friday that his
office had been “absolutely bombarded” by e-mails and calls complaining
about the comments. Recordings of the show have circulated this week by
e-mail.

“I’ve never encountered anything like that before,” he said. “I thought we
were beyond that. This is 2008. I think people should have more respect
than to get involved in a discussion like that on the air.”

Dick Harlow, general manager of WDCG, said he would not comment Friday. He said Dumas would be unavailable for interviews, too.

On Friday afternoon, a statement was posted on the Web site for the radio
program, bobandtheshowgram.com.

“WDCG apologizes to any listener that may have found remarks or recordings played Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 during Bob and the Showgram to be offensive, derogatory or insensitive. WDCG does not condone inappropriate behavior, language or insensitive remarks.”

The N.C. Commission on Indian Affairs — established by the General
Assembly as an advocacy agency for the state’s Indian population — also
called for the Federal Communications Commission to investigate station
owner Clear Channel Communications Corp.

The state commission also wants the FCC to examine the company’s “history, tolerance, and promotion of this type of inflammatory and reprehensible programming.”

In a statement, the Commission of Indian Affairs Chairman Paul Brooks
said, “Such statements are further indicative of these individuals’
insensitivity, gross ignorance, and blatant bigotry against American
Indians across this great nation,”

The Lumbee tribe, in particular, was singled out in the 15-minute segment
that opened Tuesday’s show.

“This is the God’s honest truth,” Dumas said on the air. “You can look at
the statistics — Indians are lazy.”

The on-air exchange began when a white intern at the station — Chelsea
Pryor, who has attended the University of North Carolina at Pembroke —
told Dumas and his co-hosts that she was marrying a Lumbee.

“Hey, white girl. After you get married, are you going to have a
teepee-warming party?” someone quipped. “I could give you a pelt or
something.”

Morgan Brittany Hunt, a Lumbee who works with the tribe by talking with
teens about the consequences of smoking, called the comments racist.

“We have doctors, we have lawyers, we have businessmen,” she said. “We may have people who don’t have their four-year degree, but who get up and work hard to provide for their family. I was really upset.”

Hunt said the show is a hot topic in Pembroke.

“Everybody’s in an uproar,” she said. “It’s slander and racism. (Don) Imus
was fired for a lot less than what aired” on G105.

Nearly a year ago, MSNBC and CBS Radio fired Imus, a talk show host, after he made a slur about the mostly black Rutgers women’s basketball team. The Rev. Al Sharpton became the leading voice in opposition to Imus, calling for his dismissal.

Rebekah Revels, the former Miss North Carolina from Robeson County, was referred to as “the naked girl” during the show. Revels won the pageant in 2002 but was forced to give up the crown after her ex-boyfriend threatened to publicize topless photos of her.

“My situation was an ordeal I went through with my family that was
painful,” Revels said Friday. “I have learned to cope and deal with those
emotions. I was attacked publicly. Now they’re attacking my tribe. It’s
not about me. It’s about an ethnic culture that I love. Now it’s about
standing up for my people.”

Revels said the cast and crew of the “Showgram” and station owner Clear
Channel should be held accountable. “It’s unnecessary, uncalled for and
hurtful,” she said.

Earlier remarks

Dumas, who has been with WDCG for nearly 16 years, is not a newcomer to controversy.

In 2004, a Durham minister started an online petition to oust Dumas for
what the minister called “racially incendiary” comments about “American
Idol” winner Fantasia Barrino, who is black. Dumas used the terms “ghetto” and “low class” during the show to describe Barrino.

Five years ago, he drew the wrath of bicycling enthusiasts in the Triangle
for finding humor in motorists who assault cyclists or run them down with
their vehicles.

Staff writer Michael Futch can be reached at futchm@fayobserver.com or
486-3529.

Dumas' bigoted view of Asian women:

"Popular morning radio host Bob Dumas angered another constituency this month when he declared Asian-American women unattractive.

Dumas, who infuriated bicyclists last year with a broadcast that included jokes about running cyclists off the road, has sparked another crusade, this time by local Asian-Americans, to persuade advertisers to drop WDCG's "The Bob & Madison Showgram." The local UPN affiliate has pulled its sponsorship of the show.

A number of Asian-Americans in the Triangle heard about the Feb. 10 broadcast through a widely circulated e-mail calling Dumas' comments racist and asking advertisers to stop supporting the show.

Dumas encouraged listeners to send in pictures of Asian women, and predicted that none of them would be attractive.

"If he just wanted to get attention from the listeners, he succeeded, but unfortunately, it's in a negative way," said Rachel Chao, who lives in Cary and works in contract financing. "If he really thinks Asian-Americans are not attractive, then he has not seen enough or he has vision problems."

Raising hackles appears to be in Dumas' job description. In September, local bicyclists accused WDCG (better known as G105) and its owner, Clear Channel Communications, of encouraging violence against bicyclists. Two sponsors canceled their advertising on the show in protest, and station officials apologized and agreed to broadcast announcements about bicycle safety.This time, G105 backed up Dumas."
_________________________________________________________________________________
______________________

Despicable "closet racist" Richard Cohen

Richard Cohen November 2012:

"Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill De Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all."-

Richard Cohen, Washington Post Columnist

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Here's more about his abysmal record on race and gender from Think Progress:

Tuesday’s Richard Cohen column, where the long-time Washington Post writer asserts that “conventional” Americans “gag” at interracial couples, has managed to unite the entire political world against him.

But the offending bit shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. Cohen’s piece, which managed to take bizarre swipes at both African-Americans and lesbians, represents something of an apotheosis for Cohen’s career, the past few years has been spent in something of an arms race with itself, stockpiling an ever-increasing stack of offensive comments about blacks, women, and LGBT Americans.

Cohen’s race problem dates back to 1986, when he defended store owners banning black boys from their places of business. For fear of crime, you see. The black community launched a massive wave of protests, the Post’s executive editor apologized, and even Cohen later admitted his critics were “mostly right.”

Fast forward to 2013, when Cohen used the same argument to defend George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was “understandably” suspicious of Trayvon Martin, because he was black, young and “wearing a uniform we all recognize.” Cohen concluded these musings with an argument for racial profiling based on a laughably basic statistical fallacy.

But lest you think Richard Cohen is blind to racism, never fear. He’s all over racism against white people — or, as it’s more commonly known, affirmative action. Because “for most Americans, race has become supremely irrelevant” (tell that to defender of profiling Richard Cohen), “it was not racists who were punished [by affirmative action] but all whites.”

In Cohenland, it’s not only whites who are victims of political correctness run amok, but also accused rapists. In his column defending Roman Polanski, he refers the 13 year old girl who the filmmaker raped after deliberately getting drunk as a “victim” (his quotes). Cohen concluded that there was “something stale about the case” and that he “dearly wishes the whole thing would go away.”

The Steubenville rape case was a “so-called” rape and more a matter of “decency” than criminality. It was also Miley Cyrus’ fault.

Cohen’s writing on gender in general is similarly horrifying. He bemoaned the rise of the use of smart phones for news consumption because print newspapers allowed “the first lady [to] adhere to gender orthodoxy and read the softer sections” while “just as in the old movies, papa could explain things, like what’s the purpose of NATO anymore.” He squealed over Daniel Craig’s “rippling muscle,” complaining that the expectation that the modern male beauty ideal exemplified by Our Bond made experience unsexy, especially to 23 year old girls. Totally coincidentally, Cohen had been accused of telling a 23 year old Post staffer to “stand up and turn around.”

Cohen grumbled that “every 20 years or so, some woman surfaces to accuse [Clarence Thomas] of being a male chauvinist pig — to resurrect an old term from the tie-dyed era — but falls frustratingly short of making a case for true sexual harassment.” Like, say, “stand up and turn around?” Cohen finds “the level of sexism applied” to Monica Lewinsky appalling, but wonders “where is the man for her?” He has worried about too many female acquaintances trying to kiss him. Richard Cohen does not like that.

Sexual orientation is a less-common subject of Cohen’s, but his writing on it isn’t much better. In 2005, his column blamed the spread of AIDS on “not only reckless but just plain disgusting” behavior by gay men. “It is the determination of some gays,” Richard Cohen determined, “to disregard all the rules for safe sex because being gay, they think, means you don’t have to follow any rules at all.”

Anticipating the charge of victim-blaming, Cohen wrote that “sometimes the victim needed to be blamed. This is the case now with gays when their behavior is both stupid and reckless.” No other causes of the spread of the plague beyond the perfidy of gays go mentioned in the piece.

It’s that deep simple-mindedness, that total incuriosity about a changing world that makes Cohen uniquely odious. There are talented, insightful critics of left-liberal positions on gender and race — Ross Douthat and John McWhorter immediately come to mind. But Cohen isn’t a culturally conservative intellectual; he’s just someone who passes off lazy stereotypes as profound insights.

There’s no better example of this than his 2009 column on Obamacare, which isn’t about health care reform so much as how much health care reform bores Richard Cohen. “For me, health-care reform is Missiles Redux — specifically the Reagan-era disputes over SS-20s and such.” Cohen complains about being “expected to know something about such matters, being a Washington columnist and all, but I could never keep the damn terms and numbers straight.” So he just throws up his hands: “The Soviet Union collapsed anyway.”

Richard Cohen doesn’t care to learn any more about missiles or health care than he knows about race, gender, or sexual orientation. But while he chooses not to write about the former, the latter appear to fascinate him. So his column becomes an evidence-free font of prejudice, the Platonic ideal of a useless old media dinosaur.

Another racist post from R. Cohen:

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen is getting, and this is not racist, horse-whipped over a new column in which he seems to suggest that gagging at the thought of interracial marriage is not racist, but merely “conventional.”

But all the haters really ought to ease up on Cohen, who, as of last week, realized that American slavery wasn’t “a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks.”

That’s gotta count for something, right?

This epiphany came to Cohen as he watched the new film 12 Years a Slave, which forced Cohen to “unlearn” the following:

• slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks.
• slavery was wrong, yes, that it was evil, no doubt, but really, that many blacks were sort of content.
• Slave owners were mostly nice people — fellow Americans, after all

Cohen says he learned all of this in school, but you’d be hard-pressed to produce a list like that from someone who was home-schooled by the banjo kid from Deliverance. If it’s even possible, the lessons he took from 12 Years a Slave are even weirder:

• “slavery was not only incomprehensibly cruel — it had to have had consequences.” – Sure, but like a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon, who could ever begin to guess at what those consequences could be without a movie to untangle them?
• “Families are broken up — not just like that, with a casual statement of fact, but with a rending of garments and an awful pain and a tearing of the soul.” – So it wasn’t all like “Hey, I’ll never see my kids again. BT dubs, I think they’re putting sage in this gruel, are you going to finish that?”
• “12 Years a Slave has finally rendered Gone with the Wind irrevocably silly and utterly tasteless, a cinematic bodice-ripper.” – Yes, who could have known the realities of slavery before last week, let alone in 1939?
• “(Solomon Northrup) goes from being a human being to a blotted entry on a ledger. We can all connect to that. At the same time, we connect less with the slaves he left behind when he was freed. He is restored to the life he once had. They remain with the life they have always had.” – Even with a really great movie as your guide, empathy has its limits.

Stay tuned for Richard Cohen’s next column, about how Birth of a Nation went kinda easy on the Ku Klux Klan.

For all of his racial insularity, though (and it is considerable), at least Cohen is a few steps ahead of Sarah Palin.

The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen Isn’t The Only Columnist Confused By The De Blasio-McCray Marriage

The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen made headlines this morning in a column, ostensibly about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s presidential chances, that took a strange turn when he began to discuss the racial attitudes of the kinds of voters Christie and Sen. Ted Cruz will have to win over. “People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?),” Cohen wrote. “This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.”

Cohen’s phrasing here makes it somewhat difficult to figure out which disagreeable sentiment he’s expressing. Does he mean to say that De Blasio and McCray’s marriage is confusing to Americans on the grounds that he is white and she is black? In Gallup’s Minority Rights and Relations poll conducted earlier this year, 87 percent of respondents said they approved of marriages between African-Americans and Caucasians, a figure that would suggest that it’s not even close to conventional to have a gag reflex triggered by the sight of an interracial couple like the one that will be inaugurated as New York City’s First Family. Did Cohen mean to say that the conventional thing to do these days, the polite thing, is to suppress any lingering concerns or uncomfortable reactions one might have about couples who don’t resemble one’s own family? That’s a more charitable reading of Cohen, and one that would serve to marginalize the remaining Americans who both are repulsed by interracial couples and more than willing to express those sentiments publicly.

But the fact remains that Cohen seems to have seized on De Blasio and McCray as a locus of anxiety about cultural change, rather than treating them as a positive symbol of a new New York. And while a Change.org petition has, predictably, already sprung up demanding Cohen’s firing, he isn’t alone in treating De Blasio and McCray as exotic not just for reasons of race but of sexuality. The couple, it seems, has become a useful litmus test less for imaginary conservative voters in the forthcoming Republican primaries, than for prominent columnists at significant American publicans.

In an August column on De Blasio and McCray, Maureen Dowd lingered at even greater length on the fact that McCray used to identify as a lesbian, and that she’d treated questions about her sexual orientation from Essence as if they were fussy and old-fashioned. Then, Dowd went on to compare McCray and Christine Quinn’s wife to Anthony Weiner’s sexual escapades, suggesting that they were all part of an atmosphere of sexual strangeness that had engulfed the race.

“Besides the woman who wants to be the first first lady who used to be a lesbian, there is also Kim Catullo, the wife of Quinn, who would be the first first lady who is a married lesbian,” Dowd wrote. “Then there is the perverse Carlos Danger who wants to be the first mayor who plastered pictures of his privates online. The summer has been so drenched with the unthinkable and the unorthodox that the de Blasios, married for 19 years, seem quite conventional by comparison.”

The idea that sexual orientation is fluid, that a woman who believed herself to be exclusively attracted to women might fall in love with, marry, and have children with a man, does seem to be genuinely confusing to Dowd and to Cohen. To a certain extent, that might be the result of one of the great successes of the LGBT rights movement, making the argument that sexual orientation is innate and immutable. That idea is critical to everything from the push for legal protections for LGBT people, to pushback against so-called conversion therapy that claims to be able to change people’s sexual orientations and gender identities. But it’s not necessarily an idea that encompasses the entirety of every person’s lived experiences, whether they’ve lived a heterosexual life before falling in love with someone of the same gender, or they’re a self-identified lesbian who decides she wants to be with the man who would become Mayor of New York. The Kinsey Scale, which expresses sexual orientation as a continuum, does a better job of capturing that range of relationships and identities, but it’s a more sophisticated–and as a result, difficult–foundation on which to build legal and social change.

It doesn’t help that there’s lingering confusion about bisexuality, the possibility that a person might be attracted to people of more than one gender. The idea that bisexuality is non-existent or a transitional phase on the way to a more stable identity as a gay or straight person, is still deeply embedded in American culture. Glee, to name just one example, a show that’s been much more broadly inclusive of gay couples and transgender characters, has treated bisexuality with considerable skepticism.

It’s disappointing to see publications like the Washington Post and New York Times give column space to the idea that De Blasio and McCray’s marriage is some sort of revealing abnormality, even if they’re doing it in a rather back-door way by treating New York’s embrace of the couple of evidence of changing attitudes, or suggesting that it would be rude to treat them poorly. Bill De Blasio and Chirlane McCray, and the two children they’ve raised together, may not be a familiar sight for all Americans. Not even, as it turns out, people who are card-carrying members of the theoretically sophisticated coastal elite. But that doesn’t make their marriage and family unconventional. Instead, the reactions to them in some of the most rarified perches of the commentariat are a reminder of the unfortunate power of outdated ideas, and how little value we ought to place on certain so-called conventions.

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Bob and Richard had made racist, sexist comments during the past 10-30 years in the media. They've been given a pass from the mainstream media during the same amount of time.  All they did were apologize, pay a fine, then repeat.  That's the beauty of white privilege. They're currently on the payrolls of both WaPo and Clear Channel and are staying put.  The same could be applied Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Maher, Don Imus, Matthew Drudge, Ann Coulter, etc.  They continue to spew hateful views concerning people of Color, working class/poor people, immigrants/foreigners, women in general, feminists in particular, interracial/inter ethnic relationships, etc.

For bonus reading concerning those two bigots:

http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/11/22/2499420/g-105-apologizes-for-parade-float.html

http://americablog.com/2013/11/conventional-racism-richard-cohen.html

http://mediaconfidential.blogspot.com/2013/10/raleigh-radio-paris-rants-about-bob.html

http://www.popehat.com/2008/04/07/radio-host-calls-native-americans-lazy-jokes-about-reservations/

http://woodlandindians.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=3861

http://www.newraleigh.com/articles/archive/racist-dj-outrages-nc-native-americans/

http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/11/22/2499420/g-105-apologizes-for-parade-float.html

http://www.southernstudies.org/2008/04/nc-clear-channel-station-tries-to-make-nice-with-indians-but-takes-aim-at-mexicans.html

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/11/richard-cohen-just-the-worst

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/richard-cohen-acting-out-again

http://mediamatters.org/tags/richard-cohen