Women should not be treated like children

I was listening to Rush Limbaugh again today. A man called in - sounded like someone in his 50s - who said that he had told his wife that he wanted the steaks that Rush Limbaugh advertised on his show - and his wife wasn't going to get them for him. Now at this point I turned the sound down, but they were still talking about it five minutes later when I turned the sound back up again, but this time they were talking about women in general.

"The wife is always right" was one of the cliches they threw out, and "A man is either hen-pecked or lying."

And this brought to mind an episode of Frasier I saw a couple of days ago - an episode that had aired in 1992 or so, about a psychiatrist who is now divorced, who also came up with the phrase, "No matter who is right in the argument, the husband is always wrong and the woman is always right."

Then there was an episode of Home Improvement, which was also probably aired in the early 1990s, where Jill the wife is talking to Wilson the all-knowing next door neighor, and Wilson said, "Every man marries a woman hoping she'll never change, and every woman marries a man hoping he will."

And I'm thinking to myself... let's say all this is true... why is it true?

Because girls are treated like children when they are children...and they are treated like children when they are teenagers, and they are treated like children when they're all grown up.

No - the wife is not always right, and the husband - or boyfriend - should not give in to what she says just because she nags him and nags him and won't shut up until he does what she wants.

But the wife should not be a "surrendered wife" either - one who doesn't point out when her hubby makes a mistake because that will ruin his ego...

The idea is that men and women are equal partners in any relationship, and this should be when they're girls and boys as well.

The idea is also that people get to know each other before they make the committment of marriage...or living together, whatever.

Guys, if your girlfriend keeps nagging you - dump her!
Ladies, if you guy wont' do anything for you without you nagging him about it incessantly, dump him!

And since nagging and procrastination are not gender specific - the same holds true if your guy nags you to change when you dont' want to, or if your girl won't do what you ask her to do - spending money or cleaning wise, etc.

Okay, rant over for today.

Rush Limbaugh Just Doesn't Get It

I was listening to the Rush Limbaugh Show today...(May 29, 2008)...and he really torqued me off today.

As I've said on a couple of occasions here, I agree with some of what he says (secure borders, not giving amnesty to illegal aliens, reward excellence and don't reward mediocrity) and disagree with other stuff (global warming, no right to marriage for gays, don't pull the plug on people who are mental vegetables i.e. Terry Schiavo, God is just and merciful, ya da ya da.)

But as a person, I gotta tell you, I really dislike the man, for a simple reason. He's a male chauvanist pig. His beliefs on the inferiority of women pervade his show.

For example, whenever he refers to a female news reporter, he always - always - calls her a news "babe" or a sports "babe" - or some kind of "babe." If that's not demeaning to these women who work very hard at their craft - regardless of whether they are Democrat or Republic in their beliefs - I don't know what is.

Today, he referred to some woman as a "sexetary" - this woman is not a secretary to a businessman but the secretary of some kind of political group, in the "Secretary of State" type of usage... and this creep has the gall to call her a sexetary.

In previous shows he has made fun of the accent of Arianna Huffington, saying she sounds like a Bond girl...made fun of the fact that she comes from Greece...

And a few weeks ago he referred to the Governor of Alaska - the Governor of Alaska, as a "dish" or a "hot babe." Okay, I can't remember the exact phrase he used, but it was something along those lines. "Yeah, she's a good governor but her looks are the icing on the cake," to paraphrase.

Now, it's true that the average man - from boy to teen to man - obsesses over women's looks and when he's with his buddies that's the type of stuff they talk about it [And do not fool yourself, gents, ladies do the same thing with guys.]
... but when you're on national radio you do not refer to women in that diminishing way. Because that's what he's doing - he's diminishing these women in the ears - and thus the hearts and minds - of his listeners.
He will say, perhaps, that he doesnt' really think women are inferior, he just says that stuff jokingly. But when you do those types of references every single day...you know that's what he really thinks.

Sure, he talks demeaningly about individual men, referring to the Breck Girl, Dingy Harry, etc, but when he talks demeaningly about a single woman, he always gets in shots about the entire sex.

Banned from Hannity.com!

I posted a link to my blog entry calling Hannity a hypocrite on the Hannity.com forums.

Went back to post something else and found out that I'd been banned.

Reason: "Contempt of host."

Well...that's true enough in this instance...but I wonder if they meant it the way it sounded.

Perhaps its the "host" of Hannity.com who has "contempt" for me...and instead of engaging in dialog about Hannity's action, just decided to ban me!

http://themuntabquestion.blogspot.com/2008/05/sean-hannity-is-hypocrite.html

Sean Hannity is a hypocrite!

I was listening to Sean Hannity today, and he was making great play of the fact that there are rumors rife on the web and in news columns that he has a tape of Michelle Obama which will "blow the lid off" the Obama campaign.

But he's not going to confirm it one way or the other. "Let's keep it a mystery," to paraphrase.

Oh, please. If he possessed any such tape, he would not be keeping it a secret.

By delaying its release, if there is such a tape, he would run the risk of a "that's it?" reaction. "here we thought it was something terrible, and its this?"

Let's not forget that after everything that Obama has done in the last few months, the gaffes, the "typical white person" comment about his grandmother, Reverend Wright, etc, he still took the 98% white state Oregon just a few days ago with ease.

What could Michelle Obama possibly say now that would make Obama followers not want to vote for him?

But it's more than this. If Hannity had such a tape, he would air it because it's news. Because he wouldn't want to get scooped by the "drive-bys". Because he knows that time is running out and that if it took the drivebys a year to catch on to the Reverend Wright story, it'll take them another year to latch onto this tape - when it will be too late.

So by pretending that he "may" or "may not" have such a tape, Hannity is doing his listeners a disservice, he's doing Hilary Clinton a disservice, and he's doing the American people a disservice.

He's lying by omission.

Man up, Hannity. If you've got a damaging tape - play it now. If you don't, stop trying to boost ratings by being coy.

What is this God of which you speak?

I'm an atheist. I look around at the suffering take place everywhere in the world, and I have to admit I'm shocked every time I hear some news agency give a percentage of people - in the US, for one example - who actually believe in God and go to Church. And then we get radio pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity invoking God's name ...and I just have to shake my head.

This is what brought on today's comments, an article in the New York Times about some Jews defending the Reverend Hagee who said the following:

In a reference to the Book of Jeremiah, whose author predicts a scattering of the Jewish people but saying God would bring them back to the promised land, Mr. Hagee says in the sermon: "How did [the Holocaust] happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."

and there's another fascinating blurb in that article:

"Viewing Hitler as acting completely outside of God's plan is to suggest that God was powerless to stop the Holocaust, a position quite unacceptable to any religious Jew or Christian," the rabbi said.

So, according to these religious folks...yes, God is all powerful, he could have stopped the genocide of WWII if he'd wanted to.

Since he didn't, obviously he didnt want to. He wanted millions of people to suffer, suffer, suffer on a daily basis, horribly, until they died.

But Jews have been the "Chosen People" of God since Moses' time, haven't they? Like 2,000 years or so? And what does God do for his "Chosen People"? Let's them stay in slavery under the Egyptians..has Moses lead them into the Wilderness for 40 years...all that crap... Why? Why?

First off, if God created everyone and everything on the planet, why does he "choose" the Jewish people over everyone else he created, anyway? But then he has a habit of slamming one of his creations and lifting up another, doesn't he? Cain and Abel have to give him sacrifices and he likes Abel's and doesn't like Cain's, and are you telling me this "all-knowing" God wouldn't know that Cain was going to kill Abel?

Then we've got the Black liberation movement of the Reverent Wright and others, who state that Jesus was black. Therefore, God must be black, and God has seen them through slavery and the "long night of racism."

And I'm thinking to myself, again, what kind of God is this that these people are worshiping as their own??? A God that "sees them through" slavery instead of stopping that slavery before it starts? A God who sees them through the "long night of racism" instead of helping his chosen people by, oh, I don't know, snapping his fingers and putting the blacks on top and the whites underneath. Their all-powerful black God couldn't do this?

But oh, you may think. God lets them suffer all that time, thousands of years, millions of people suffering, so that now, today, the tables could be turned and blacks get to be on top and the whites get to be underneath and now there will a thousand years of suffering in the other direction.

That's humam nature... but is that God's nature??? To let his "chosen people" suffer for four thousand years...individual human beings suffering and dying, to make the revenge all the sweeter when it finally does come?

Then of course we've got the Muslims, who stone people to death, and set off suicide bombs without compunction. Yes, that's obscene, but don't forget a lot of innocent people were murdred by the IRA in England - oh those Protestants and Catholics, both of whom ostensibly worship God - only they didn't go as far as commit suicide as well...

What else is there?

The US is horror struck when the uneducated people in various countries cheered when Hurricane Katrina struck and destroyed the city and killed a thousand people. "God's will," they say, and believe it.

And what do Christians like the Rev Falwell say? "God destroyed New Orleans to punish the rest of the country for letting gays in the military." Something like that.

And there again... what kind of a God do these people worship? God, who created everything (let nothing be created that is not created by me, is that right?) hates gays - whom he created - and because gays are allowed into the US military, he destroys...not the gays in the military...but a whole city and a thousand innocent people - many of whom were not gay?

Where is the logic behind that?

Where is the compassion?

I could go on and on and on about this.

Frankly, here's the scoop. I don't believe God exists, and if he did actually exist, I'd refuse to worship him, because he's clearly a psychotic individual who enjoys nothing more than watching his creations suffer and die.

That's what it is, you know, in all likelhood (if you actually believe in God). Just as we have television and theater and watch this entertainment (and how many people like to watch all that suffering on display, eh?), so does God, or the Gods, whatever... sitting in the clouds above us, enjoying the suffering, laughing at the people who continue to believe in the face of all evidence to the contrary that God exists or is "just and merciful"...

Let's face it, people. There is no God. There's just us. The sooner we accept that, the sooner all this religious hatred can end and there might be some peace in the world.

We need to banish the "R" word

I'm talking about the word "Racist."

That's all we hear these days as an excuse for everything.

Barack Obama doesn't get the Presidential nomination? It's not because a lot of people have fears about his pastor that he listened to for 20 years, the knowledge that in his year in the Senate the only bills he got passed were ones that other people had done all the work on, that he's friends with unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, that he thinks there are 57 states in the Union, etc. etc. No - if he loses, it's because America is racist.

(ON a side note. According to Rush Limbaugh, if Hilary Clinton doesn't win, it proves feminism is dead. He makes the same kind of sweeping statement. Not at all, Rush. It means that women are too smart to vote for a woman who climbed to her position on the backs of her husband and Whitewater, et al.)

Just saw the news - didn't bother to turn the sound on - about people in Texas, I believe - protesting with signs saying "Stop racist vigilantes." This isn't about racists going around stringing up blacks, like used to happen back in the 60s, this is about people on the border with Mexico trying to stop ILLEGAL aliens from entering this country.

But as soon as someone screams "racist" - that's it. Fight over. You can no longer fight on the issues - that illegals are, ya know, illegal, and don't deserve the rights of citizens, not the least of which is getting paid welfare, getting a drivers license, etc. - you've got to defend yourself against the charge of racism.

There again you've got Barack Obama, talking about his grandmother as a "typical white person." If that's not a racist statement I've never heard one. But because it was said by a black man... apparently it's not racist?

Obama thinks there are 57 states in the US

Obama recently told people:

From Rush Limbaugh:

You are aware, probably, that Barack Obama lost his bearings recently and said that he was going to campaign in all 57 states. You heard this? And everybody chalked it up to, "Well, he's tired." You know, this is a Dan Quayle moment. I mean, Dan Quayle goes out there and misspells potato, and we still get jokes about it. Barack Obama says he's gonna go out and campaign in 57 states, he was just tired, you know, it's been such a long campaign, he's been so many places, he probably thinks there are 57 states. Well, I have here a printout from a website called the International Humanist and Ethical Union. And here is how the second paragraph of an article on that website begins. "Every year from 1999 to 2005 the organization of the Islamic conference representing the 57 Islamic states presented a resolution to the United Nations commission on human rights called combating --" yes, H.R., get ready for the phone calls up there.

Now you can tell from this... he's thinking... he might've mixed up the 7 with the 7 remaining primaries.... but Limbaugh is right. Dan Quayle "mispells" potato and he's ridiculed for the rest of his life, but Obama will definitely get a pass.

I really don't understand how people can vote for this man - or for Hilary. Each one has dealbreakers which a sane person would see and say... "Whoa." But, that goes for McCain as well! None of the three presidential candidates is worthy of the post, and whoever gets it is going to be a disaster... but I think Obama will be worst of the lot.