In one of the films I reviewed last month, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Sandy confronts Miss Brodie on the order in which she places her “anxieties.” First comes the “harm” done to her, and the last is the reason for it—sending the gullible Mary to her death to inflate her own ego. In this country (or at least for the media) it isn’t policies that promote death (virus-denial), violence (Second Amendment “freedoms”) or promoting prejudice against entire groups of people (migrants/Hispanics) that produces the greatest amount of “anxiety.” No, such things won’t cause someone to lose their day job if they are in a position that allows for a media feeding frenzy, and provides temporary “fame” and a feeling of “empowerment” for people with grudges that need massaging.
It was reported on Wednesday the family of Angelo Quinto, a former Navy veteran, was suing the Antioch, California police department and several of its members including its police chief, for Quinto’s death last December, after a police officer pinned his neck to the ground with his knee for five minutes during what was called a “mental health crisis.” Yet another George Floyd-type killing in which the victim is Hispanic isn’t “big” news; what is “big” news was New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has been in office for 10 years, resigned. Ten years as the chief executive of one of the more prominent states in the country is plenty of time to swell one’s head and become in the minds of many—especially women—to be too big for his britches, so Cuomo was an easy target for women who thought he was a little too presumptuous about his personal “magnetism.”
Hardly anyone in this world is “innocent”; pick anyone off the street and conduct an “investigation” into their past life, and if you are only interested in information from people with an ax to grind and who probably will make exaggerated claims that go unchallenged, and the person conducting the investigation has motives that perhaps do not bear close scrutiny, then of course the end result is a “scathing” report from which the only way out is to resign before the self-righteous media frenzy. If New York Attorney General Letitia James’ report was “scathing” for what amounted to “unwanted” touching and comments that were “offensive” to one’s ego, we have a right to suspect that James’ ulterior motive for what is essentially a deliberate hit-piece is the hope to use it for political advantage in the now “open” governor’s race in 2022, although she might have some “competition” from current Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is due to become the first governor of New York in the next few weeks.
Of course, for this kind of thing to work you have to at least be a real “victim” and not make false claims about the person you are trying unseat. In the recent Democratic Manhattan District Attorney primary race, Tali Farhadian Weinstein’s attempt to use the gender victim card to smear her opponents backfired; she attacked the eventual winner, Alvin Bragg (who is black) as being a danger to (white) women in campaign ads that offended many as being racist and Willie Hortonesque. She also attacked Bragg for suggesting he would be open to investigations into more possible cases of innocent men in prison who were prosecuted by Linda Fairstein, the fanatical former head prosecutor of New York's sex crimes unit, and who was responsible for the wrongful conviction of the Central Park Five; to this day she continues to claim they are guilty even after the only DNA evidence found implicated another man who confessed that he alone was the perpetrator.
Knee-jerk reactions are all too often these days, and it helps if you are a Republican, because your supporters will dismiss it is a political hit-job from the left. In 1987, Sen. Gary Hart seemed on his way to the Democratic nomination for president and an odds-on favorite to beat Vice President George H.W. Bush. But he was undone when he was photographed with a fashion model named Donna Rice on a boat. No claim was ever made that “Monkey Business” was going on (that was the name of the boat), but just the media titter that there “probably was” was enough to tank Hart’s presidential ambitions. Hart denied there was any untoward intent, and later the Bush campaign was accused of staging the photo op—the kind of “dirty play” that Bush would again do against Michael Dukakis with the Willie Horton ad. Bill Clinton would be accused of much worse but decided to just barrel through, helped by the fact that if wife Hillary, who endeared herself to fellow feminists and had ambitions of her own, could get past his indiscretions, so could they.
What was comedian and former senator Al Franken forced to resign over, which he now regrets doing? For what a radio broadcaster named Leeann Tweeden would belatedly called a “forcible kiss” while filming some comedy skit. Would she have been less “offended” if it was just a “peck?” The “infamous” photo of Franken putting his hands on the sleeping Tweeden’s breasts was also not “real”; it was “pretend” and his hands never actually touched her. Yet his Democratic colleagues were more fearful of the optics than just accepting an apology for high school prank behavior. That would have been enough back in 1989, when a House Ethics panel was satisfied with Rep, Gus Savage’s apology to a female Peace Corps worker who claimed he made an unwanted advance on her.
Men in prominent positions in politics have been putting their careers at risk for succumbing to “natural” impulses since at least ancient Roman times. In this country, what is happening now can be traced back to around 1850. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts was famed for his oratory and legal acumen, which was celebrated in the Stephen Vincent Benet short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” which was made into a film in 1941 that is regarded as a classic. Webster opposed slavery and sought to limit ban its expansion into the territories, but he was not willing to risk breaking up the Union over the matter. Because of his refusal to take a clear stand to abolish slavery (Abraham Lincoln himself famously said that if he could save the Union without freeing any slave, he would do it) this aroused the anger of journalist and women’s rights activist Jane Swisshelm, who wished to take down this “Godlike” man. How to do it?
Swisshelm portrayed herself as an ardent abolitionist, and after the Civil War briefly published a newspaper called The Reconstructionist,” although many of her women’s rights contemporaries, like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were exposed as being “secret” racists, and used ugly racial verbiage in attempts to make common cause with Southerners in opposing suffrage for former slaves. Swisshelm herself had a paternalistic notion about Native Americans, assuming they could live side-by-side with whites in harmony while they were being robbed, starved and forced onto the poorest land in violation of treaties. The Dakota War of 1862, which was the culmination of many abuses against the Natives that exploded into violence against the settlers who were allowed on treaty lands taken from them, Swisshelm in her St. Cloud, Minnesota newspaper advocated
Exterminate the wild beasts, and make peace with the devil and all his hosts sooner than these red-jawed tigers, whose fangs are dripping with the blood of the innocents! Get ready, and as soon as these convicted murderers are turned loose, shoot them and be sure they are shot dead, dead, DEAD, DEAD! If they have any souls, the Lord can have mercy on them if he pleases! But that is His business. Ours is to kill the lazy vermin and make sure of killing them.
Writings like this inflamed the local population’s desire for blood. In a military tribunal in which most of those who sat in judgment were locals, over 300 tribesman were convicted and sentenced to death. Upon learning of the case, Lincoln requested the trial transcripts, and among other things, found only two instances in which it was proven that white women had been violated, and he determined that only the 38 who were proven to be involved in the massacre of civilian were to hang. When told that his vote count from Minnesota would take a hit in the 1864 election, Lincoln replied that he wasn’t going to kill people for votes.
But Swisshelm’s attack on Webster was part and parcel with her contempt of men in general and her tendency of being “deliberately provocative.” She made so many unreasonable demands on her husband that when they eventually divorced, it was easy for her to proclaim “I having, voluntarily, assumed the legal guilt of breaking my marriage contract, do cheerfully accept the legal penalty—a life of celibacy—bringing no charge against my husband, save that he was not much better than the average man.”
In order to bring down this “Godlike” man, whose “prestige of his great name and the power of his intellect were turned over to slavery,” Swisshelm published a hit-piece in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Word had it, she claimed, that in Washington D.C. there was a “family of eight mulattoes, bearing the image and superscription of the great New England statesman, who paid the rent and grocery bills of their mother.” Webster had mistresses who “are generally colored women—some of them big black wenches as ugly and vulgar as himself.”
There was some concern that Swisshelm’s attacks on Webster would cause a backlash against the Tribune, but apparently it was not taken seriously, because actions speak louder than words. Webster did support the Compromise of 1850, which included the fugitive slave law, as a last-ditch effort to prevent a civil war, but it was doomed to failure because it satisfied no one. But in his personal life, Webster—who was known to be often in financial difficulties—was generous with what funds he had in paying for the freedom of at least four slaves before he died in 1852. Swisshelm had her moment, and like other egotists who seek “fame” by attacking those more prominent with scandalous gossip, retreated back into the shadows of history.
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