[guest post by Dana]

With accusations of hypocrisy now being rightfully lobbed at Hillary Clinton after she accused a GOP candidate of having a “penchant for sexism,” yet in nearly the same breath announced that one of the most notorious sexists of our time would be stumping for her on the campaign trail, feminists are groaning in dismay at having to yet once again square their support for iconic feminist Hillary Clinton with Bill Clinton’s much publicized sexual misconduct toward women.

Given that Hillary Clinton is campaigning on a platform of owning a uterus (also known as playing gender politics), this self-appointed, self-anointed alleged champion of women and children’s rights finds herself in a bit of a pickle, too, given that she has historically been defender and enabler of her woman-abusing sexist husband, as well as intimidating and smearing any number of women who accused him of sexual assault, thus leading the charge of Democrats in their war on women.

What a sordid mess: Hillary Clinton, feminist icon, enabler of notorious sexist Bill Clinton and persecutor of his female victims, wants to become our next president, and Bill Clinton, notorious sexist ex-president and abuser of women, is campaigning to help said feminist icon and fellow abuser of women become our next president. And all the while, the American feminist is circling the wagons around these two Democratic idols because they’re all about advocating for women. Sure they are. Could it possibly get any more twisted than this? Why yes, it certainly can.

Yesterday, after the news came out that Bill Cosby would be arraigned on charges of sexual assault, Amanda Marcotte tweeted something rather remarkable:

Charging Bill Cosby is a big victory for sexual abuse survivors. It helps undermine the “crazy bitches” narrative.

Interesting, because as far as I know, this is the same Amanda Marcotte who just last year jusitifed then lawyer Hillary Clinton’s willingness to play the “crazy bitch” card on a 12 year old female rape victim in order to get her 41 year old client, who was facing 30 years to life, off the hook. Mind you, Marcotte neglected to mention that Clinton was not a public defender assigned to the case, but rather she chose to defend the rapist as a favor. Marcotte even went so far as to complain about the Washington Posts’s Melinda Hennenberger’s temerity to question Clinton’s ethical decision to smear the victim. Marcotte dismissed it as little more than Hennenberger “making hay over irrelevant details”. Here is a portion of Hennenberger’s “irrelevant” hay making:

In an interview in the mid-1980s for an Esquire magazine piece that never ran, Clinton’s glee is audible about the prosecution’s big mistake in the case, when it accidentally discarded key evidence. Some are writing off the remarks, as one fellow journalist put it on social media, as “typical gonzo defense lawyer talk.”

It is not, however, typical talk for a lifelong defender of women and children.

Nor was Clinton’s defense plan, mapped out in a court affidavit. In it, she questioned the credibility of the victim and suggested that the sixth-grader, who an ER doctor said showed injuries consistent with rape, had “a tendency to seek out older men.”

“I have been informed that the complainant is emotionally unstable,’’ Clinton wrote in the affidavit, “with a tendency to seek out older men and to engage in fantasizing.” The document, filed with the Washington County, Arkansas court on July 28, 1975, argued for a psychiatric evaluation for the victim.

“I have also been informed that she has in the past made false accusations about persons, claiming they had attacked her body,’’ Clinton wrote. “Also that she exhibits an unusual stubbornness and temper when she does not get her way.”

The “little bit nutty, little bit slutty’’ defense has a long, ugly history. It’s jarring to see it trotted out against a kid by a future feminist icon. The argument also bears an uncomfortable similitary [sic] to Clinton White House descriptions of Monica Lewinsky, who without that semen stain on her little blue dress would have been dismissed as a stalker who had fantasized that she had a relationship with President Bill Clinton.

…

In 2008, her spokesman told Newsday that Clinton “had an ethical and legal obligation to defend him to the fullest extent of the law. To act otherwise would have constituted a breach of her professional responsibilities.”

Defending even a child rapist as vigorously as possible might be a plus if she were running to lead the American Bar Association. But wouldn’t her apparent willingness to attack a sixth-grader compromise a presidential run?

Marcotte responded to Henneberger’s concern about Hillary Clinton’s willingness to use the “little bit nutty, little bit slutty” defense on the child-victim with this shameful justification:

I understand why this gives Henneberger pause, but to quote myself from 2012:

Defense attorneys use this strategy because it works, as can be routinely demonstrated. As long as juries keep acquitting based on this myth that women routinely make up rape accusations for the hell of it, defense attorneys will continue to use it. The problem here is a larger culture that promotes rape myths, not defense attorneys who exploit these myths in last-ditch attempts to get acquittals for rapists who have overwhelming evidence against them.

So there you have it. It’s the fault of society, juries, the justice system, and the fact that a defendant is guaranteed a right to an adequate defense. In Marcotte’s view, Hillary Clinton is absolved of playing the the notorious “crazy bitch” card against a child rape victim, as well as any number of sexual assault victims involving her husband. In Marcotte’s dishonest eyes, none of these irrelevant details call into serious question Clinton’s campaign platform of being an advocate for women and children. Seriously, Amanda?? Who is the real crazy bitch here?

Here’s the thing: the issue isn’t about Hillary Clinton choosing to defend an accused child rapist to advance her career (that’s a separate issue). The issue is that in her defense of said accused child rapist, if necessary, she was more than willing to impugn the credibility of a child rape victim to get the charges against her client dropped. In other words, neither Hillary Clinton nor Amanda Marcotte had any qualms about using the very same “crazy bitches” strategy that Marcotte now condemns and wants to see come to an end.

Look, we already know that Hillary Clinton is no more about protecting the rights of women and children than is Amanda Marcotte. They both have excused, rationalized, and dishonestly represented themselves before the American people in an effort to push themselves forward as leading advocates for women. But it is Hillary Clinton who wants to become our next president. Therefore, it is absolutely vital to point out the abhorrent untruth she continues to push, and that is that she has always been an advocate for women and children. Clearly, we know otherwise. Should this impact her run for the presidency? Absolutely. Whether it will or not, however, is up to voters. But certainly it can be agreed upon by rational people that this is simply not what an alleged champion of women and protector of children looks like.

And now that we know noted feminist Amanda Marcotte is really not about undermining any “crazy bitches” narrative, and that rape victims – even children – are fair game for this strategy, exactly how does she feel about accused rapist Bill Clinton? Pretty good, I would say:

Watching Bill Clinton speak is like getting a hug from a giant teddy bear who can hug everyone at once.

And how does Marcotte feel about candidate Hillary Clinton, enemy of women and children? Well, also pretty good:

…Hillary Clinton is the Democrat we need for 2016.

–Dana

[guest post by JVW]

Yes, the bowl season has been going on for a few weeks now, but New Year’s Eve has traditionally marked the key date in the college football postseason, from the days of my youth in which the Sun Bowl and Peach Bowl were traditionally played to the present day in which for the first time the two national championship semifinal games will take place at the Orange Bowl and the Cotton Bowl.

So, since being a curmudgeon is half the fun of being a conservative, let me take this opportunity to point out an interesting article from The Chronicle of Higher Education which calls into question the oft-heard claim from the NCAA Division I member programs that the massive revenue from college football and basketball pays the way for the entire athletic program at their institutions. Last month, The Chronicle reported that, based upon data provided by private colleges and universities via freedom of information act requests, only 6 of 201 Division I sports programs at public universities for which they received data (the state of Pennsylvania does not require its public universities to divulge their athletic spending and several other colleges failed to report their results by the deadline) managed to break even in their athletic departments. In fact, according the authors, the schools surveyed subsidized their athletic programs to the tune of $10.3 billion dollars over the past five years, with much of that money coming from mandatory student fees.

The Chronicle link includes an interactive chart which is sortable by school, conference, revenue, and subsidies. In itself, it provides quite an interesting look at how big time athletics works at these member schools. For those interested, the six schools which purport to have operated Division I athletics programs without subsidies from 2010 through 2014 are the following: the University of Oklahoma, the University of Texas, Louisiana State University, Ohio State University, the University of Nebraska, and Purdue University. It appears that in general, the schools in what are commonly termed the Big Five Power Conferences are on more solid financial footing than the smaller conferences, as the high costs of their huge athletic programs are helpfully offset by lucrative television contracts which each year pump as much as $30 million per school to conference members, with even higher payouts set to follow in coming years. Teams from less prestigious conferences, especially those who play both Division I football and basketball, appear to rely the most upon student subsidies with Rutgers University, James Madison University, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Cincinnati listed as requiring at least $27 million in subsidies in 2014.

Professors Jody W. Lipford and Jerry K. Slice, economists at Presbyterian College, recently published an academic paper which provides further insight into the extravagant ways of many NCAA sports programs. The paper is nicely summarized by an article the authors wrote for the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. Professors Lipford and Slice have discovered that which should be considered obvious: smaller schools who try to compete in conferences with the big boys generally require heavier subsidies. They compare two public universities in North Carolina with two private universities in the state, all four of whom are members of the Atlantic Coast Conference:

Flagship state universities, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, spend heavily on athletics, but also have large numbers of students. Their per-student costs are about $4,500 and $3,000, respectively. In the analysis by the Chronicle of Higher Education, UNC receives subsidies of 11.1 percent of total athletic costs, while NCSU receives slightly less (9.7 percent).

For DI-A (FBS) private schools Duke and Wake Forest Universities, with about 6,500 and nearly 4,800 students, respectively, per-student costs are around $12,000.

Note that the authors are not claiming that students at each of these institutions subsidize their school’s athletic programs with the above sums, they simply point out that running a big athletics department is probably more feasible at a school with 25,000 students than it is at a school with 6,000 students. However, it should still be pointed out that both North Carolina public universities, each of whom has been traditionally successful in football and basketball, still rely upon subsidies to maintain their programs.

One common refrain from defenders of the current system is that football and basketball would break even, but it is the non-revenue sports like baseball, softball, track, swimming, gymnastics, and volleyball — many of which are required under Title IX regulations — which push athletics department into the red. While there is certainly some merit to the idea that operating certain sports at a loss cuts into the football and basketball profits, the Washington Post recently pointed out that the increases in television and ticket revenue for celebrated athletic programs is mostly being offset by higher levels of spending on those same revenue-generating sports. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to all of us who have bemoaned the fact that massive increases in tuition and taxpayer-backed loans have led to an explosion of administrative bloat in academic programs. It turns out that massive increases in revenue in athletics programs lead to expensive new facilities and extravagantly paid coaching staffs including million-dollar assistant football coaches and similarly well-paid basketball assistants.

Enjoy the games coming up, but know that you are paying for them not only by supporting the TV advertisers, purchasing the tickets, buying the logo gear, and donating to the athletics fund, but also by subsidizing the loans that the students are taking out to pay their tuition, some of which is being spent on the field, on the court, on the diamond, in the pool, on the track, on the mat, and in the gym.

– JVW