That Old Benghazi Spirit

You can’t help but be impressed by the industry with which Congressional Republicans try to whip up a scandal soufflé from a handful of revised talking points and some cherry-picked emailed phrases. It’s an uphill battle, as Sisyphus could attest, but just like him, the Republicans can surely eventually succeed. It’s a matter of having high hopes—those high apple pie in the sky hopes.

Take some inspiration from the men’s rights activists. They’ve been having a lovely month, all things considered. A man’s right to sex on demand has been asserted by none other than Toru Hashimoto, mayor of Osaka. Holding women captive as sex-slaves is sometimes necessary, he says, “[t]o maintain discipline in the military”. Men have their needs, after all. “For soldiers who risked their lives in circumstances where bullets are flying around like rain and wind, if you want them to get some rest, a comfort women system was necessary. That’s clear to anyone,” Hashimoto explained. I bet it would be clear to Ariel Castro.

There’s a man who lived the men’s rights dream. “I don’t know why I kept looking for another,” Ariel wrote, adding “I already had 2 in my possession.” Young women, that is, women he kept locked in his basement on account of his need for sex on demand. Two women weren’t enough for those needs, though, it turned out, and he had to kidnap a third girl, his daughter's fourteen-year-old friend whom he thought for some reason was a lot older. And what business did they have walking around freely anyway? Ahmad Shafi, leader of the Bangladeshi political party Hefajat-e-Islam gets it.

He’s gone to the mat to defend Abdul Quader Molla and his fellow war-criminals who in 1971 were involved in the mass rape of the women of Bangladesh. Calling for the execution of anybody wanting the war criminals punished, he demands the end of such “alien cultural practices” as “free mixing of the sexes”. We see where he stands on this issue. I can only assume that he would give his blessing to Ariel Castro’s solution for keeping women apart from the rest of society, given his passionate defense of those who separated young women from their families and subjected them to sexual abuse that—assuming they weren’t murdered and left in mass graves—scarred them for life.

And apparently it is all the fault of feminism. As one Groot comments “What feminists fail to see is that as men are driven more and more by their agenda to the bottom of the power and privilege scale, more and more crimes like this will be committed. Unchecked hypergamy ensures that men like these have no real chance for healthy relationships and often take through criminal efforts what alphas and the elites have access to; that being multiple women.” There, you see? If only women voluntarily chained themselves in men’s basements, there would be no need for men to do it for them. Or something.

Yeah, keep on working on that sow’s ear, boys—you’ll get a silk purse out of it some day. There’s nothing quite like that old Benghazi spirit.