What? You don't think Chris Matthews is creepy?

Should men think twice before being alone with a woman? The Left is now weaponizing sex the way they weaponized race!

Tucker: A noble effort to do something to stop sexual harassment is rapidly turning into dark and menacing. Congressman Johnson of Kentucky and PBS host Tavis Smiley are the latest examples. Innocent people fear persecution. What are the new rules? How does an innocent person regain his reputation or the respect of his children?

Mark: There are no rules! There is no proportion. This started with Harvey Weinstein, who has been credibly accused of rape or brutal sexual assault. There are names, dates, and places backing up those accusations. Now that has morphed into a general accusation from someone the man doesn't even know! The Left is now weaponizing sex the way they weaponized race! It's a useful weapon to them to clear out the deck. Now one anonymous accusation can end a career.

Tucker: Maybe journalists should make sure the allegations are true and the process is transparent before destroying people's careers and reputations. Not everyone accused is guilty!

"If everything is rape, then ultimately nothing is rape!"

Mark Steyn believes the Special Counsel's investigation is "completely corrupt and absurd!"

On Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, he notes that foreign policy depends on credibility. He made the promise during the campaign, and now he is keeping it!

He says we live in a hypersexualized world with many contradictions. Mark says he was walking down a corridor at Fox News the other day when a female anchor whom he happens to like gave him a pat and said, "Hey cutie!" His first thought was to be flattered. His second thought was to go upstairs to Human Resources and demand four million dollars! He prefers the first world! "There is no longer a sense of proportion. If everything is rape, then ultimately nothing is rape!"

https://www.steynonline.com/8307/the-toxic-cutie

Trump is the target

Steven Hayward writes at PowerLine,

...sexual harassment has persisted chiefly because of the hypocrisy of liberal elites who run our media and Hollywood institutions, going back at least to their defense of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Now they are reaping the whirlwind. It is established fact that Weinstein’s own board of directors knew of his bad behavior, but only insisted that future settlements over employee harassment come out of his own pocket. So much for respecting women. And let’s not forget that the Academy Awards gave a special Oscar to convicted child rapist Roman Polanski, because, after all, as the appropriately named “Whoopi” Goldberg told us, it wasn’t really “rape rape.” I wonder how that comment would play today, or whether the Academy Awards will rescind Polanski’s Oscar in our new mood?

What changed the rules? Donald Trump. Above all else keep in mind that he is the main target of the new zero tolerance regime—the unfinished business of the “Access Hollywood” tape. And if a lot of media and Hollywood icons (and a few stay congressmen) have to go down, that’s just collateral damage. Though Trump calls it “winning.”

In any case, feminists should be thanking Donald Trump for being the catalyst behind the rules change they have long demanded.

Read more here.

Getting back to groping as usual

Kurt Schlichter predicts tax reform will die in the Senate.

There’s no way the McCain-Collins-Corker-Flake Axis of Obnoxious is going to allow Trump his long-sought victory. These bitter losers will let it get right up to the edge of passage, and then run to find a microphone and shovel up a load of horse hockey about why, as True Conservatives™, they can’t possibly support this conservative reform. They are petty, selfish, and obnoxious, which is why they are the media’s go-to Republicans and Chuck Schumer’s not-so-secret weapon. If you don’t think they would eagerly shaft millions and millions of Americans just to try and mess with Trump, I would sell you a bridge, except no bridge is going to get built because they will block the infrastructure bill too.

What about the feminist gropers?

We’ll soon be seeing articles and columns in the press about how this whole sexual abuse fuss is getting out of hand. After all, it was supposed to be a tool to destroy conservatives, but then it got out of hand and people started applying those standards to liberals. Well, we did warn them about how they were going to hate the new rules.

No, this can’t go on. Soon the media mavens will start showing a renewed appreciation for due process, and a concern about what they will call the “witch hunt” nature of the sex abuse revelations. Of course, there really are witches here – liberal witches who can’t seem to keep their wands under wraps. But this whole accountability fad is starting to get painful. Watch the establishment announce it has gone too far and that we need to step back and rethink it – so they can get back to groping as usual.

Read more here.

Sexual harassment allegations about Charlie Rose made by 8 women. His shows are off the air.

AP reports that Charlie Rose has been suspended by CBS and PBS has halted production and distribution of his show following allegations of sexual harassment. Ace of Spades writes,

I can't read the story -- I don't pay for the Post and never will -- but the sub-hed says that "the incidents took place with employees, interns, and job applicants."

Employees, interns, and job applicants.

That's gonna be a problem. Especially the last two. Though if "employee" means works-directly-under-you, that's a big deal too.

Ace links to the story in the Hollywood Reporter, which is based on the Washington Post story.

The ages of the women range from 21 to 37, with alleged incidents dating from 1990-2011... Due to his stature in the industry, five of the eight women that spoke to the Post did so on the condition of anonymity.
The allegations from the multiple women have a variety of similarities. Five separate accusers described incidents in which Rose put his hand on their upper thigh in order to get a reaction. Two women claimed Rose emerged from a shower and walked around naked in front of them. One claimed that Rose groped her bottom at a staff party....

One of the accusers who spoke to the Post on the record, Reah Bravo, was an intern and associate producer in 2007 for Rose’s PBS show, claimed Rose made unwanted sexual advances toward her while she was working for him at his private waterfront estate in Bellport, New York. She called Rose "a sexual predator" and also claimed he made advances on her while they were traveling together in cars, a private plane and in a hotel suite.

Another on-record accuser, Kyle Godfrey-Ryan who was one of Rose’s assistants in the mid-2000s, claimed that on over a dozen separate occasions Rose walked nude in front of her while she was working at one of his New York City homes. She was 21 years old at the time. She also claims that Rose called her multiple times, early in the morning or late at night, to describe fantasies of her swimming nude in his pool while he watched from his bedroom.

Ryan says she brought the calls up to Rose's longtime executive producer Yvette Vega, who she says responded, "That’s just Charlie being Charlie." Ryan claims she was fired by Rose shortly thereafter.

Standards and double standards

At The Denver Post, Jon Caldera weighs in on Hollywood's sexual harassment scandal.

...After all, let’s remember what Hillary Clinton once tweeted on the topic: “To every survivor of sexual assault … You have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed. We’re with you.” The unwritten part of the tweet was, of course, “Unless you happen to be Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky or a dozen others my hubby went after,” but damn that 140-character limit.

Read more here.

O'Reilly's out-of-court settlements

Did you know that Bill O'Reilly has settled out of court five separate lawsuits? One was an accusation of verbal abuse, and four were alleging sexual harassment. What is my source? Well, he said blushingly, it is CNN! No fake news from that outfit!

Addendum: The New York Times, who I am sure also really, really would also like to embarrass O'Reilly, has a lengthy piece here on the allegations.

Refuting her own past behavior

Victor Davis Hanson writes at National Review,

...that almost every issue that Ms. Clinton has raised and every position of advocacy that she now embraces are direct refutations of either her present or her past behavior — and sometimes both. Surely she is aware of that?

Bill Clinton’s sordid sexual harassments are ancient history better forgotten. But Ms. Clinton must accept that her advocacy video about sexual assault and harassment unfortunately dredges them back up. Do her present boilerplate professions of believing the alleged victim amount to a sort of postmodern “I will let you down” confession? For two decades of Bill Clinton’s political ascendance, Ms. Clinton’s own attitude toward women who alleged that they were either harassed or sexually assaulted by Governor and then President Bill Clinton was that they were either delusional or gold-digging connivers. Nothing that Ms. Clinton said or did ever suggested that Juanita Broddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones, or Monica Lewinsky — or scores of others — was anything other than a liar or an opportunist. All these victims advanced claims as convincing as, or more so than, the he-said/she-said campus incidents in the news, whose resolutions apparently demand suspension of the Bill of Rights.

...Mindboggling was the variety of charges against Bill Clinton. They represented a primer on the current debate over what constitutes both felonious and nihilistic male aggression against women: coerced rough sex; on-the-job roughhouse groping; demands for humiliating ad hoc sex acts; the use of power and position by the employer to leverage quickie, on-the-desk gratifications from young and vulnerable female interns. In other words, Bill Clinton became iconic of just the sort of multifaceted sexual assaults — and of male denials and conspiratorial female efforts to demonize the victim — about which Ms. Clinton now shakes her finger. At various stages of his life, Bill Clinton has played the archetypal wild campus womanizer, the vain, sexually manipulative careerist, the lecherous employer, and the immune sex harasser, all of which current campus assault advocacy targets. Surely she knows that?

...Her $10,000-a-minute fee for a hack ramble is emblematic of college financial mismanagement, the effects of which fall ultimately upon indebted students.

...As for Iran and Ms. Clinton’s record as secretary of state, history is already the judge. The disastrous U.S. foreign policy toward Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and the Middle East in general was established on her watch. Her team favored the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, set the stage for the U.S. abdication from a once-quiet pre-ISIS Iraq, was in charge of the “lead from behind”/ “We came, we saw, he died” fiasco in Libya, established the security protocols in Benghazi and then blame-gamed a video-maker for the violence, dubbed Assad a “reformer” before he was to be red-lined out of power, estranged Israel from the U.S., invited the Russians into the Middle East, and gave non-negotiable requisites for non-proliferation talks.

Read more here.