Category Archives: culture

Charlie Rose is…Embarrassed

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Read the whole thing over at the Washington Post, it’s a long and shameful description of NLMSM icon Charlie Rose’s fall from grace—and a shocking between-the-lines read that Rose got to that position of grace in the first place—but I’m struck by a couple of comments in particular that Rose has made about these revelations and associated accusations.  The first is this gem:

I am greatly embarrassed. I have behaved insensitively at times….

Wow.  How does Rose suppose his embarrassment compares to the humiliation and damage suffered by those eight (and more?) women he abused?  And his abuse was insensitive behavior, yet….

And this one:

I accept responsibility for that, though I do not believe that all of these allegations are accurate. I always felt that I was pursuing shared feelings….

Now, as readers of my stuff know, and particularly from what I’ve written in this sort of scandal recently breaking, I’m a firm believer in innocent until proven guilty at trial, and Rose should be afforded the same consideration, but—again, wow.  “I did some of this stuff, but not all of it; and it was all a big misunderstanding, anyway!?”  This utterly destroyed what was otherwise a (structurally, anyway) sound apology.

Separately, but just as important, how is it possible that CBS, PBS, and Bloomberg TV were unaware of these abuses over that long stretch of time?  Because no formal complaints were made?  Who believes that?

That would be utter nonsense, unless we were to believe that those three teams of executives, every single one of them high-powered, highly intelligent, highly alert, fully grown adult humans were in fact just a couple of monkeys busily hearing no evil and seeing no evil.

Every organization has its rumor mill; these abuses were being talked about around the water coolers, in the wash rooms, in workers’ cubicles.  It boggles the sensibility to claim that these things didn’t eventually bubble up to “management” separately from formal complaints.  It boggles the sensibility yet further, that having heard these rumors, the executives were so lacking in initiative that they couldn’t look into them on their own initiative.

Furthermore, at least one knew from direct testimony.  Here’s Yvette Vega, Rose’s longtime executive producer, responding to one women with an explicit complaint:

That’s just Charlie being Charlie.

Vega thought everything was jake.  Guys are guys.  No worries, dearie.  Vega added, claiming to have learned better:

I should have stood up for them. I failed. It is crushing. I deeply regret not helping them.

Yewbetcha.  Now, what is Vega doing with her “regret?”  Besides bodice-ripping and wallowing in it, I mean.

And this, from an unnamed PBS spokeswoman:

PBS was shocked to learn today of these deeply disturbing allegations[.]

We’re shocked—shocked—to learn that inappropriate behavior is going on in this establishment.  Right.

Maybe it’s time that, in addition to holding the miscreants to account, we started firing and, yes, jailing, supervisors and executives who actively condoned, if not outright encouraged, these behaviors through their own conscious decisions to ignore rampant rumors and their deliberate choices to hide their heads in the sand and not investigate—whether to protect the abused employees or to clear the good names of other employees subjected to salacious, but baseless, rumors.

These guys shouldn’t be allowed to hide under their desks in their corner offices anymore.

German Democracy

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Germany’s President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, whose position is less than that of the Chancellor’s (the current incumbent is Angela Merkel of the Christian Democratic Union) but currently has a critical role, has let the cat out of the bag regarding the attitude of that nation’s political elite toward democracy and the people of the nation.

Recall that Germany held an election a few weeks ago in which the governing CDU/SPD coalition was heavily defeated.  The Social Democrat Party, a center left party, lost most heavily, and it has announced that it will not ally with the CDU in any new government.  The CDU also lost heavily, although it retains the most seats in the German parliament, the Bundestag.  That most seats, though, is a bare plurality, not enough to govern effectively.  Merkel entered talks with The Greens Party and the Free Democrats Party, whose numbers combined with the CDU’s would have given such a coalition a (bare) majority in the Bundestag.  These were difficult talks since the three parties are polar opposites socially, economically, politically, pick a dimension (and yes, I’m aware of the difficulty of a three-way opposite construction—as were Merkel and the heads of those two parties, but they went for it, anyway).

The talks broke down, and with the SPD in firm opposition, Merkel is left with the choice of a minority government or new elections.  She prefers new elections.

Here’s where Steinmeier has exposed the elite’s Know Better attitude.  The Wall Street Journal has quoted his position:

The parties have campaigned for responsibility in the Sept 24 elections, a responsib[ility] that Germany’s constitution says can’t simply be handed back to voters.  This responsibility goes far beyond someone’s own interests.

Except that the German Constitution says exactly that, were the newly elected Bundestag unable to agree on a new coalition or a Chancellor.  However, the elites Know Better, and they insist that the people—the voters, Germany’s citizens—can’t be trusted with governance.  After all, they screwed up their just concluded chance, right?

Hmm….

Responsibility and Morality

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LaVar Ball on the magnitude of his son’s shoplifting crime in the People’s Republic of China:

I’ve seen a lot worse things happen than a guy taking some glasses.

Son LiAngelo is a star basketball player, after all, and he only stole some shades.  So, no big deal.  Not for the privileged athlete, who chose not to check his privilege at the store’s entrance.  But for the workaday merchant or manufacturer from whom the glasses were stolen—yeah, it was a big deal.

Aside from that, though, the plain fact is, any theft is wrong. Full stop.

Or at least it should be a plain fact, but we don’t teach morality in grade school anymore, do we?  That would be an imposition of one person’s views on another, and we cannot have any of that.  We must allow moral relativism because no culture is better than another—especially is a culture that allows, if not actively condones, “petty” theft the equal of a culture that holds any theft to be wrong.

The shoplifting crime, minimalized as it is by this imitation father, is just one symptom of the lack of morality in our education system, however.

So, too, after all, is a culture that subjects women to second-class status the equal of a culture that insists that all men are created equal (the pseudo-confusion of that term “men” is itself instructive).  So, also, is a culture that says it’s OK for men in power to abuse those women who approach them for any reason (a photo with a famous person, perhaps), or those women who work for them, or those women who just happen to be nearby the equal of a culture that says such abuses are wrong and those men in power should be subject to the same laws as the rest of us—and by dint of their position of power, should be held to a higher standard.

But all of that is secondary. Of far greater importance than the failure of our education system is what the elder Ball is demonstrating: too many parents today do not make even the least effort, in the home, to teach their kids about responsibility and morality.

Because, moral relativism.

The VA Still Fails

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The Veterans Administration is still creating waitlists and secret waitlists, even after all this time of reporting on and calling the VA out for its dishonesty and its disservice to our veterans.  Now a Colorado VA facility is—still—doing secret waitlists.

Investigators with the VA Office of Inspector General confirmed whistleblower and former VA employee Brian Smother’s claim that staff kept unauthorized lists instead of using the department’s official wait list system.

That made it impossible to know if veterans who needed referrals for group therapy and other mental health care were getting timely assistance, according to the report. The internal investigation also criticized record-keeping in PTSD cases at the VA’s facility in Colorado Springs.

Senator Cory Gardener (R, CO):

It [the secret waitlists] highlights even more VA mismanagement and lack of accountability in Colorado. This cannot happen again, and it’s time for the VA to finally wake up and ensure our men and women are getting the best care possible.

No.  The VA is not going to clean itself up.  Outside agencies cannot clean this sewage pit.  The VA must be disbanded and its budget and nominal future budgets passed to our veterans as vouchers so they can get the medical help they deserve—and in too many cases, desperately need—from the doctors of their choice and the medical facilities of their choice.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Fake Apologies

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Senator Al Franken (D, MN) has been accused Thursday of sexually harassing a woman while the two were on a USO tour in Afghanistan 11 years ago.  He’s apologized for it.

He was also quoted in a 1995 New York Magazine article about his generating a “joke” for Saturday Night Live, where he worked at the time, that centered on drugging and raping then-journalist Leslie Stahl.  He apologized for that, too.

Then he said about that apology during his 2008 campaign for Senate that he

didn’t think he should have to apologize for the cracks, which his opponents were taking out of context. “To say I was sorry for writing a joke was to sell out my career, to sell out who I’d been my entire life,” he writes [in his book]. “And I wasn’t sorry that I had written Porn-o-Rama or pitched that stupid Lesley Stahl joke at 2 in the morning. I was just doing my job.”

But…”I learned that campaigns have their own rules, their own laws of physics, and that if I wasn’t willing to accept that, I would never get to be a senator.” And so Franken took a deep breath and told a little white lie: “I’m sorry.”

Little white lie.  Franken still wants to be a Senator.  With his clearly stated position that apologies are just lies to be mouthed in order to get what he wants, how is it possible for anyone—let alone the woman who accused him last Thursday—to believe his apology for that Afghanistan harassment?  Or any other apology he might pretend to offer for any other transgression?  Or anything at all he might say on any matter?

And lest there be any question about that USO incident, understand clearly: the existence of Franken’s pseudo-apology stands as his blithe confession that he did the thing of which he’s accused.

And he’s still a Senator.