Good thing nobody's scared of Spain
Wednesday April 16, 2008
Categories: Varia
Zapatero, the socialist prime minister of Spain, is a real piece of p.c. work. He says he's "very proud that there are more female than male ministers" in his government. Well, good for you, El Sensitivo, but I gotta say,...
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Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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I predict dozens of angry comments over the word "lulu, the "pregnant as a goose" phrase, and the reference to the dispersal of amniotic fluid and very few on Chacon's lack of qualifications or experience or the possibility of disaster when p.c. principles are more important that either of those things in the selection of one's governmental officials.
This phenomenon should probably be called the "Slut Rule."
I don't really get it with you, Rod. You make the perfectly reasonable point that it's ridiculous to say you're proud of having lots of women in government, when the Defence Minister has no experience, is incapacitated, and is (literally??) pacifist. Then you have to throw in gratuitous and misogynistic insults.
PS. How can someone be as pregnant as an egg-laying creature?
What really puzzles me about this post is the implication that being the same age as Shannen Doherty disqualifies one from holding public office in Spain. Whaaa . . . .???
I predict that Moorish armies will NOT "mass on the Ramblas," at any time during Defense Minister Chacon's pregnancy or labor. In fact, I predict that even if she chooses to breastfeed her baby while holding public office, no such threat will arise. Would you care to place a small wager on the relative accuracy of our predictions, Rod?
btw, I think the 1:55 comment was equally out of line, but I'll be interested to see how you, Rod, manage to express outrage at the public disrespect for a woman you like while engaging in similar behavior toward one you don't like. It seems to me that respect for women must either be practiced all the time, or become a meaningless shibboleth.
Kind of ridiculous post and comments. All of the European defense ministers, for quite a while, have been the same kind of light-weights (except maybe the UK - sometimes) and there actually is a reason for that since generally European armies these days are not really used for offensive wars or far-flung campaigns (NATO supporting the Americans in Afghanistan being the big exception these days) but for peace-keeping and civil duties.
But the Spanish, like many of the other Europeans, have quite good police/interior/border troops far more militarized, heavily-armed and trained than the US Border Patrol. So it is like apples and oranges, with European Interior Ministers (who have nothing to do with national parks) generally being more competent and savvy about their area of responsibilites than defense ministers. And, you don't see Europeans going around invading countries like Iraq who haven't done anything to them - so maybe making the head of NOW Robert Gates's successor has some merit.
And finally, let's give the Moors a break. The last time armed Moorish "tabores" came to Spain, in 1936, they were commanded by Generalisimo Francisco Franco and were fighting atheistic communism. Many brave Moors and soldiers of the Spanish Foreign Legion fell fighting in that struggle.
"I predict Moorish armies massing on the Ramblas before Chacon's water breaks."
More melodrama than an all canteloupe production of Hamlet. Even more, dare I say, than Andrew Sullivan.
Oh law, here we go.
"Pregnant as a goose" is a slang phrase meaning "really, really pregnant." Don't be so literal-minded.
As for literal minded, Sig, my point was that a 37-year-old person is awfully young to be defense minister of any country.
The most ridiculous thing about this is making a pacifist your defense minister. Good grief! How loony-left can you get.
The most ridiculous thing about this is making a pacifist your defense minister. Good grief! How loony-left can you get
Kind of like having a Secretary of Education who wants to hand out vouchers to private schools, or an Assistant Secretary for Health in charge of Family Planning who is opposed to contraceptives or a Secretary of Labor who despises organized labor and is opposed to the minimum wage and family leave.
Then there was the Reagan administration, where the Secretary of the Interior supported clear cutting and ridiculed environmentalists and the Secretary of Education who had opposed the creation of his department.
In the case of the U.S., there is no Constitutional basis for a department of health, education, or labor, but there is one for defense. Abolishing the former three is perfectly fine, but failing the latter is an abdication of the basic role of government. This is why it is a case of loony-leftism.
If anybody else here has heard the expression "pregnant as a goose," I wish they'd post and tell me if this is a regionalism or what. I like strange idioms, but that's nothing I've ever heard before.
Just a small point about your comment Other Jim. The story is about Spain....not the US. Are you familiar with their consitution?
Maybe Spain doesn't feel like they have much to worry about; it doesn't matter if their Defense Minister is a pacifist. And even a lot of "pacifists" have no problem with violent self-defense as a last resort. They just aren't keen on picking fights with other people, especially for no good reason. Maybe our government could take a page out of Spain's book. It's too bad that we can't be like Costa Rica and not have a standing military at all. Ahhhh, in a utopian world.
Besides, haven't you read that Spain has bigger things to worry about? Large portions of their population are legally divorcing because children from "single-parent" families get first dibs on the good schools. Then the parents magically reconcile after the kid starts school.
You guys lay off. Rod has to be hitting the wall over something. It might was well be over a 30-something pregnant Spanish defence minister.
Remember, the Spanish were the last people the Italians defeated. (except of course for the poor Ethiopians)
Considering what's happened, historically, when Spain has been a significant military power, I'm perfectly happy for them to have a pacifist, pregnant Minister of Defence. In fact, I wish the Spanish people the absolute best as they pursue a radical goal of getting on with their own lives and minding their own bloody business in the rest of the world. Would that America would do the same.
Well I'm playing Rod Bingo here and I've scored misogyny, anti-pc, europhobia and islamophobia. If he'd managed to get in local food production I'd have got a line! But it's pretty impressive for a post under 200 words, nonetheless.
Allen: "I wish the Spanish people the absolute best as they pursue a radical goal of getting on with their own lives and minding their own bloody business in the rest of the world. Would that America would do the same."
Some would say Spain and the rest of Europe are free riders on American security guarantees. Do you really think that a military vacuum would continue in Europe if the Americans were to pull out?
This is making a virtue of moral apathy.
pyrrho, exactly what military threat does Spain currently face that the Americans are saving them from? What nefarious schemes against the lazy, ungrateful Spanish are being thwarted by heroic American militarism?
With the fall of the Soviet Union (which we didn't do much to facilitate and even then didn't oppose all by ourselves) there is no serious military threat to Spain or the rest of Western Europe. China's not interested in conquering them, Russia can't keep its own sphere of influence from shrinking, and the Islamist threat is one of terrorism, not military force, and the Spanish have developed very successful counter-terrorism methods thanks to decades of dealing with ETA (and in the Spanish government, that falls under their equivalent of the Dept. of the Interior, not Defence).
In European terms, the woman has been demoted. Housing ministries are much better plums than Defense.
At any rate, given the fact that we turned over our border enforcement responsibility to General Myers' 36-year-old little girl, I don't we have a lot of ground to criticize the Spaniards.
"pyrrho, exactly what military threat does Spain currently face that the Americans are saving them from?"
None that I can see. My point is that if the US military were to withdraw from Europe, there's no telling what kind of temptations the powers in that region would be seduced by. Remember, Europe exerienced a wee bit of instability in living memory.
They are trying to make a virtue (peaceableness) of vice (weakness), which is naive and nauseating. It's like Michael Jackson saying, "I'm a lover, not a fighter." Well, Michael, thanks for sparing us the hissy fit.
Why on earth does it show "misogyny" to point out that it's crazy to hand your country's defense portfolio to a woman who's seven months pregnant? If a man could get pregnant -- I know, I know, we've been over this -- and would have to spend months after the birth caring full-time for the child, or leave the newborn in the care of others at a time when it needed its birth parent, I'd feel the same way. If they gave that critical job to a non-pregnant woman, that'd be different. Anyway, it's far worse that they gave it to a pacifist.
Derek: At any rate, given the fact that we turned over our border enforcement responsibility to General Myers' 36-year-old little girl, I don't we have a lot of ground to criticize the Spaniards.
You're right about that -- Bush cronyism rides again -- but it seems to me that's not an argument to refuse to criticize the Spaniards, but rather to criticize the Bush administration.
For the record, I favor a security policy based on "offshore balancing", which is about halfway between our current security policy and isolationism.
You can read about it in "A New Grand Strategy" by Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne. It's in the January 2002 edition of the Atlantic Monthly. You can find it online.
pyrrho, it's exactly that "instability" that makes any significant intra-European military conflict highly unlikely. The several great nations of Western Europe have been at war with one another for most of the last thousand years. The culmination of all those centuries came int he first half of the twentieth century, in two world wars from which the European psyche has never fully recovered. France isn't going to invade Spain, Britain's not going to bomb the Netherlands, and Germany isn't going anywhere without a permission slip from the UN. It'll be a long time before the horrors and destruction of the twentieth century are so thoroughly forgotten in Europe that they risk intra-continental conflict again.
Allen,
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but security analysis concerns itself with capabilities and not intentions.
Frankly, I think Rod makes these inane posts for the sole purpose of driving up the number of comments. Either that, or Lent is really getting to him.
"If they gave that critical job to a non-pregnant woman, that'd be different."
So if they gave the job to a non-pregnant woman and then she became pregnant should they then fire her?
Well, let's see . . . just how unimportant must a job be for a potentially pregnable woman to be allowed to hold it in the Rod universe? If secretary of defense is out, would, say, secretary of health and human services be okay? Oh, wait--that could not be, since every cabinet position that is a head of a department would potentially be in line for the presidential succession in case of disaster. So I guess, in Rod's view, it would be insane for a woman who was not well post-menopause to be elected president.
What, exactly, is the line of demarcation, I wonder? Is it simply the gravity and importance of the position? Or does it have to do with being responsible for potentially life-threatening situations? In the absence of these nice distinctions, I'd be forced to assume that there are almost no positions where a pregnant woman would be acceptable. I'm afraid this would make Catholic women virtually unemployable, since NFP is far from reliable.
I fear you've not thought this through very well, Rod. One of Zach's two proposals seems the most logical explanation.
Carme Chacon nows as a son so debate shall rage
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