Yet this isn’t a two-way back-scratching exercise. It goes three ways.
Roger Ailes was the chief of Fox News, until he was ousted last summer for what appears to be a bottomless sexual-harassment scandal. Ailes denies the claims against him. The list of women who have accused Ailes of sexual harassment exceeds two dozen, and another suit was filedthis week by current Fox News contributor Julie Roginsky. As it turns out, Ailes was accumulating sexual-harassment complainants at the very same time as O’Reilly was accumulating sexual-harassment complainants.
.. And as we’ve written before, they had forged a mutual protection racket. When O’Reilly sustained a scandal in 2015 for either embellishing or lying about his reportorial exploits in various hot spots around the world, Ailes backed him with no qualifications. There was no network investigation of O’Reilly’s ethics and integrity. He squeaked through the criticism and improved his ratings.
One year later, it was O’Reilly’s turn to back Ailes. After former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson filed her world-changing suit against Ailes, O’Reilly turned up on Seth Myers’s “Late Night” show with some helpful words. “I stand behind Roger 100 percent,” said O’Reilly
.. Starting in spring 2011, Trump began weekly chats with the folks on the unimaginably idiotic “Fox & Friends” morning show. Those sessions persisted all the way up to the moment that Trump, in June 2015, launched his presidential campaign. Trump helped Ailes by giving him a ratings-assisting weekly interview; Ailes helped Trump by giving him a platform to test poorly thought-through stances on politics.
.. These dirty old men stick together.
Manhood in the Age of Trump
Donald Trump, whose take on gender is decidedly old-fashioned and fixed. He casts himself — surprise! — as a force of nature with untamable appetites.
.. A real man lusts. A real man rages. A real man doesn’t chip in with domestic duties. That’s not just Trump’s view — he once boasted that he’d never change a diaper
.. plenty of American men live in what some sociologists call the Man Box, constricted by a concept of manhood that includes aggression, hypersexuality, supreme authority and utter self-sufficiency
.. When does Trump feel the most manly? That’s pretty obvious: when he’s salivating over women and styling himself some conquistador of the flesh, as he did repeatedly with Howard Stern and on one infamous occasion with Billy Bush. When he’s belittling and emasculating rivals (“Liddle Marco,” “low-energy Jeb”), as he did throughout his campaign. When he’s vowing vengeance against the House Freedom Caucus, as he did last week. When he’s surrounding himself with generals. When he’s pledging huge increases in military spending while moving to starve wonky research and the arts.
.. Those white crescent moons under his eyes suggest time spent wearing goggles during artificial tanning sessions.
.. men who registered narrow, clichéd instructions about manhood were more likely to act out in self-destructive ways, such as substance abuse, and in outwardly destructive ones, such as online bullying.
.. when you feel compelled to project an unforgiving kind of masculine strength, you end up in a twisted, tortured place. You can call it the Man Box. Or, these days, the Oval Office.
Mike Pence doesn’t dine alone with other women. And we’re all shocked.
fewer Americans were comfortable voting for an evangelical Christian for president than for a Mormon or a gay person.
.. Among Democrats, just 66 percent were comfortable voting for an evangelical — less than a Muslim (79 percent) and any other group except a socialist (59 percent).
Trump Appoints Social Conservative To HHS Civil Rights Office And Heads Explode
He is a defender of religious liberty. He believes there are only two sexes. Both of which make him anathema to “public health” professionals who generally believe religion is fine as long as you don’t practice it and that any sexual perversion should be honored. Of particular concern is the effort by HHS to impose upon the US healthcare system the same view of this “transgender” nonsense that Department of Education tried to impose upon our education system.
.. HHS has focused on bullying all doctors and hospitals into treating transgender individuals as sane and requiring those institutions to do whatever surgical mutilation is necessary to help them live out their delusions. One such case is in the courts right now that would force a Catholic hospital to perform “gender reassignment surgery.”
.. Transgender fanatics are terrified that Severino will pull the plug on this fraud:.. This is a situation where conservatives, regardless of their feelings about Trump, should be cheering. I can’t imagine a President Rubio making an in-your-face appointment like this. I can barely imagine a President Cruz making it. But these sub-cabinet appointments are critical to stopping the progressive agenda before it becomes embedded in the law. But, unfortunately, hate for Trump takes priority over everything else. Because to admit Severino is an excellent choice requires one to admit that Tom Price is an excellent choice. And that requires one to admit that Donald Trump is not a one-dimensional buffoon surrounded by Russian agents, which is something a lot of self-described conservatives cannot do without destroying their own worldview.