I held off commenting about this particular facet of the Loughner saga, because it seemed to be just me and the Jezebel staffers, and you know what they say about feminists and their endless outrage. But now a respectable Y-chromosome bearer has spoken out, as Tom Scocca at Slate wonders if “Maybe Jared Loughner Was a Bigot, After All“:
Now, via the New York Times, there’s word that there was more going on in Jared Loughner’s headspace than odd-colored dreamscapes and cryptic theories about grammar. Before his attack on Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Loughner “grew contemptuous of women in power.” Bank tellers were afraid of him, the Times reports, because of the “aggressive, often sexist things he said, including asserting that women should not be allowed to hold positions of power or authority.”
__
These bits of information appear in the 17th and 90th paragraphs of the Times story, a story dedicated to the thesis that the facts surrounding Loughner are “a curlicue of contradictory moments open to broad interpretation.”…
__
Maybe the accumulated evidence is contradictory if you’re trying to classify Loughner as an orthodox left-wing nut or an orthodox right-wing nut. But his membership in the anti-woman wing seems clear. Or is misogyny—even homicidal misogyny—too unremarkable for anyone to dwell on it?
Kryptik
Hey, maybe he listened to too much Phyllis Schalfly!
Forgive me for that moment of bitter levity, but geez. That’d be some crazy motive. Homicidal Political Misogyny?
morzer
Misogyny, obsession with gold, obsession with government, love of violence, exhibitionist tendencies…
This guy is so perfectly attuned to Glenn Beck, it’s almost ridiculous.
singfoom
This is only pertinent if his defense was “she fell down the stairs into my bullet”. All snark aside, this seems disturbing, but not a plank in his madness.
I mean, crazy conspiracy nuts don’t do all that well with the ladies, so I think it’s a bit premature to say his hatred of women drove him to kill…
ETA to answer the rhetorical in the OP blockquote:
Yes, it’s is all too common place and unremarkable. It’s sad, but that’s the world right now.
General Stuck
Who knows? Though I didn’t hear anything about this from his close friends, and his former girl friend gave no indication. The guy was not the least bit rational, seems to me, about anything. Maybe he thought banks were unconstitutional, and nearly all bank tellers are female in my experience.
OTOH
If true, sounds mighty republican to me.
Pangloss
Pandagon has a funny post on The Footwear of Tyranny.
Keith G
It seems certain that there are any number of dysfunctional and antisocial components to the black whole that is his psyche.
Punchy
Gil Meche retired, rather than take his guarenteed $12 mill and play like dogshit. Props, I guess. The Royals are sooooooooo phucked with their starting rotation.
lamh32
Okay, this isn’t about Loughner, but I’ve been waiting for an open thread to post this.
I don’t know if I told ya’ll this, but last year my 42 year old aunt (now 43) became pregnant with her 2nd child, 25 years after having her first! Well early last Friday, baby Madison came into this world. She’s the newest addition to the family. Her middle name is Beulah, after my grandmother who died during Hurricane Katrina. I knew that my aunt would name her that. It immediately made me smile, and you can hear the joy in my mom’s voice when I told her the baby’s middle name. In fact, every member of the family seems to smile when we heard her name. I suspect that even though her first name is Madison, we will be calling her “Lil Beulah” pretty soon…LOL.
Anyway, without further ado, here is baby…
Madison Beulah…
BGinCHI
@Punchy: Your feminism is really, really advanced.
General Stuck
@BGinCHI:
There is no feminism in baseball.
BGinCHI
@General Stuck: Keith Hernandez?
pragmatism
mysoginy is clearly solely libtard phenomenon because it involves hate and only liberals hate. i’ll skip the spell check and send to teh corner post haste.
danimal
Tangentially related. I’m certain that some crazed leftist is behind this. Someone’s trying real hard to make Sarah Palin look bad.
Omnes Omnibus
@lamh32: She seems to be casting a pretty jaded eye on everything for someone so young. Seriously though, cute kid.
gwangung
@lamh32: Hoo hah, and hooray! (That’s OK to do, right?)
Keith G
@Keith G: Yikes! Edit fail.
General Stuck
@BGinCHI:
Two words. Mustache
Linda Featheringill
@lamh32:
Madison Beulah: What a pretty child!
How is the mom?
geg6
Amanda Marcotte had a long post at least a week ago on this very subject. If you look in her archives, I’m sure it’s there (I’m too lazy to look it up for a link). I found the evidence she dug up on his utter misogyny quite convincing. But then, my own experience tells me that the vast majority of men who aren’t feminists themselves are misogynists. Which pretty much leaves out almost all conservatives, libertarians, and mass murderers from the woman-friendly column.
General Stuck
@lamh32:
She has the look of a skeptic. Gonna need it.
PS – she’s also a cutie pie!!
Linda Featheringill
Misogyny:
Most men who have no respect for women don’t go around shooting them.
This is fortunate for the human race because otherwise, most of us would probably not be here.
Citizen_X
@lamh32: A very serious young lady! Congrats to your aunt.
And Beulah is a lovely name; one of those old names we don’t hear so much these days.
shortstop
@General Stuck: Stop it, you two. And by that I mean: don’t post while I’m drinking, because the Red Bull burns nasal passages.
singfoom, you appear to be under the impression that a bitter divorce or breakup of a long-term relationship is a prerequisite for a really maladjusted fellow to start hatin’ on the XXs. No, sir, no; some of the creepiest general girl-haters are weird guys who never get anywhere with the ladies. That said, women do seem to be just another group of people this whack job couldn’t stand.
BGinCHI
@shortstop: It’s probably the vodka, not the Red Bull.
jeffreyw
Thread needs more salad.
Mark S.
Losing 6-0, 6-0 has gotta suck, but especially when your opponent says this after the match:
Amazingly, Safina was number 2 in the world this same time last year.
Linda Featheringill
Also on the topic of misogyny:
“Women are wicked when you’re unwanted.”
Jim Morrison
I suspect that lots of guys sinking into insanity reach a point where women are afraid and therefore stay out of reach. And if he thinks that the universe revolves around him and therefore it is all about him, then he might reach the conclusion that women in general are not good people.
Martin
Probably another liberal wacko.
shortstop
@BGinCHI: I think it might actually be the wasabi pea-Red Bull combo. No one said it would be easy.
lamh32
@Omnes Omnibus:
My aunt has already said that she thinks she has an “old soul”…LOL
wazmo
It’s Owl Day! First, a horned owl swooped down and tried to take out a Chihuahua in Illinois, and a drunk Owl was found in Germany!
General Stuck
@Mark S.:
Big womens tennis fan here, though I usually don’t pick it up until the French Open in May or so. From no teevee anymore, will have to find it streaming somewheres.
pragmatism
@shortstop: you may want to try a “man” shot. http://www.idrink.com/v.html?id=37782
WereBear
@lamh32: What a serious little face?
Does she know she’s going to be known as Beulah? :)
And on topic:
Ummmm, probably.
Men who hate women are actually unremarkable, aren’t they? And, apologizes to all the fine Y chromosome holders of the South and Midwest, certain cultures have so not gotten with the program; and live miserable, bitter, lonely lives because of it.
Karmatic.
aimai
@lamh32:
Little Beulah has a wise old face. She must be an old soul, as they say. Her expression reminds me of that myth that before they are born babies know everything there is to be known and in order to keep them from telling us what they know an Angel presses her finger on their lips making that little cupid’s bow mark. Congratulations on this adorable new arrival. I reccomend a book I just picked up on the remainder shelf: The Philosophical Baby by Alison Gopnik. The new research on what babies know and how they think is just incredibly exciting.
aimai
lamh32
@Linda Featheringill:
Mom’s doing great. She had a normal vaginal birth, but her blood pressure got too low, so they kept her for 3 days.
My aunt said she went in Thurs for her appointment, and the doctor told her what she thought was “gas” was actually mild contractions. She’d been having those for 3 weeks!!! They decided to keep her, and baby Madison was born the next day, 3 weeks early at 5 lbs and 13oz.
My aunt said, she is tinier than her oldest child was, but she is healthy as a horse…LOL!
freelancer
@General Stuck:
If you have ESPN3 or ESPN for Xbox, it’s heaven for a Tennis fan right now. They have a webchannel with constant coverage of the Aussie Open, with Live matching later in the evening (in the US).
Pangloss
Michael Reagan (president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation and author of “The New Reagan Revolution”) writes on the Fox News Website that his father, St. Ronald Reagan, was a better friend to African Americans than Obama.
His proof?
“African-American unemployment fell from 19.5 percent in 1983 to 11.4 percent in 1989.”
and…
“dad’s 1932 Eureka yearbook which showed a photo of an African-American woman, Willie Sue Smith, on the same page as my father’s senior picture.”
Not kidding.
shortstop
@pragmatism: Manly, yes, I am not.
lamh32
@General Stuck: @Citizen_X:
My aunt says that she already has an old soul. My NOLA fam are really religious, “NOLA” spiritual, so my aunts believes she already has a touch of my grandmother in her (she actually looks like her too…!)
Linda Featheringill
@jeffreyw:
Nice picture of a salad!
pragmatism
@shortstop: oh noes now i’m teh mysogygynst.
lamh32
@WereBear:
I plan on calling her Maddy, but I just know that my mom’s sisters and brothers won’t be able to help calling her lil Beulah…:)
General Stuck
@freelancer:
thanks, I can stream espn, I think.
shortstop
@Pangloss: Also, Reagan once went through the MGM commissary line staffed by a black person, although there was a line with a white employee available.
stuckinred
@freelancer: And it has the Illini vs MSU! Go Illini, Go Bears!
shortstop
@pragmatism: Bwa, no. I was trying to resurrect the old Irish Spring commercial, but I couldn’t quite get it to go.
jeffreyw
@Linda Featheringill: Thank you, Ma’am. Pretty tasty, too. Dressing was bacon drippings and olive oil whipped into red wine vinegar with a splash of balsamic and a squirt of honey mustard to hold it together. Greens were spinach and romaine.
shortstop
@jeffreyw: I don’t know how to define food porn, but I know it when I see it.
pragmatism
@shortstop: great, now i can’t stop whistling the song. or am i whistling the old spice song????? don’t mind me, i’m all hopped up on the cold meds and have to be in the office today.
lol
Was not surprised to find out he was a fan of “Zeitgeist”.
tBone
@geg6:
You know, women aren’t supposed to have the upper-body strength to wield brushes that broad.
*ducks*
Mark S.
@Pangloss:
I’m surprised Mike left out the story when he once visited his parents, and The Jeffersons were on the TV.
General Stuck
Guess that civility thingy is all over with.
Alex S.
@Mark S.:
I notice that Venus Williams is now playing in nothing but a shirt.
MTiffany
Ah yes; a leftist, liberal opinion if there ever was one…
Calouste
@Pangloss :
You could also say that AA unemployment went from 184% of the national average in 1983 to 228% of the national average in 1989, but that would be slandering Ronaldus Magnus’s legacy, would it?
PaulW
What’s this about Randall Terry planning to run in the DEMOCRATIC primaries against Obama? I thought pro-life, anti-woman, anti-health Republicans weren’t supposed to run on the Democratic ticket…
MonkeyBoy
Misogyny like many other traits are is an attempt to say that all problems are somebody else’s fault.
Just look at the problems caused by the BJ site-change.
A sensible person might consider that their particular browser might have a problem and look in the threads to see if other people have had similar problems. The ego-centrics immediately announce that the site is all messed up without bothering to check comments (you can still find examples of this in the last few threads) and can’t conceive that other people (maybe because they run different software) see things differently than they do.
(Real people when they report viewing problems will say what browser version they are using, but not the ego-centrics)
Omnes Omnibus
@MTiffany: Which party would vote for Sarah?
Pangloss
@shortstop: He always bought Uncle Ben’s rice instead of the store brand.
jeffreyw
@shortstop:
I know it when I see it.
morzer
@shortstop:
He voluntarily ate dark chocolate rather than white on occasion.
shortstop
@Pangloss: He loved the music of Nat King Cole, and once was in a movie with Sidney Poitier.
Blogreeder
@morzer:
Glenn Beck: misogyny? Really? Didn’t he have a rally with Sarah Palin last August? Something related to MLK at that. I don’t know about your other points but I’m pretty sure this one is wrong. And if you’re just trying to paint Republicans as misogyny, then there’s that Sarah Palin thing again. I’m pretty sure she’s not a Democrat.
shortstop
@morzer: He frequently commented that there is “nothing cuter than a black baby.”
Pangloss
@morzer: Mr. T and Gary Coleman visited the White House.
shortstop
@jeffreyw: If I stuff my face tonight, I’m blaming you for your incendiary rhetoric.
morzer
@Blogreeder:
I think you need to review abstract nouns and adjective constructions, but thank you for playing.
morzer
@Pangloss:
It’s even been suggested that they were allowed to use the bathroom….
The Other Chuck
For people using the “stylish” extension to firefox, or who otherwise care for some CSS hackery, I give you something to make BJ a little more readable. Work in progress, I still intend to do something about the fonts as well:
And oh yes, FYWP. Still can’t do anything about the markup.
SenyorDave
@Pangloss:
And Reagan only occasionally referred to the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy t-bone steaks.
Krugman has the real Reagan who was obviously so enamored with blacks that he used them in his campaigns. But as Krugman relates, it was all an innocent mistake.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/innocent-mistakes/
morzer
@shortstop:
Blood libel! Blood libel!
Nellcote
@Blogreeder:
So you’re saying they respect her for her mind?
morzer
@Nellcote:
Calling her a thing is pretty misogynistic too, frankly.
mous
@geg6:
And yet I’ve been told by a highly educated woman who said she was a staunch feminist that men cannot be feminist “by definition”, was she wrong?
Alex S.
Some music, somewhat on-topic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV8ohWIPZbw
Yoko Ono – Woman Power
Blogreeder
@Nellcote:
I think they do, don’t you?
MonkeyBoy
@The Other Chuck:
Putting two underlines instead of a blank line between ‘paragraphs’ still works. Fixing the parser is still in the queue.
Lysana
@morzer:
And tokenism is hardly a defense against bigotry accusations. Especially when the token is a bad representative of the minority/oppressed group in question. “See! See! We back a bigoted idiot with breasts! We’re better than you are!”
Chyron HR
Hey, guys, don’t forget that Sarah Palin thing! It only took the GOP 24 years to put a woman on their Presidential ticket after the Democrats did it!
Blogreeder
@morzer:
If we’re playing, I think I won. When, in the history of blogdom, has a grammar Nazi won an argument? Score!
morzer
@Lysana:
I don’t think Blogreeder knows the word “tokenism”. But your point is most cogent.
I suspect that for Blogreeder Gingrich’s multiple wives are proof that Mr Serial Adultery really does respect women.
Blogreeder
@MonkeyBoy:
Cool! I always put an angle bracket BR angle bracket to make a blank line.
morzer
@Blogreeder:
*pats you on the head*
How frighteningly clever you are, dear child.
Dee Loralei
@lamh32: What a beauty baby Beulah is, you all must be so pleased. Congrats to your Aunt and Madison Beulah.
Blogreeder
@morzer:
You’re funny, are you going to be here all week? I DO know what tokenism means. Do you really think the following Sarah Palin gets from the Right is because she’s a Token? I think you’re projecting. The Left is obsessed with diversity not the Right.
morzer
@Blogreeder:
Dear child, the more you post, the more you make clear that you are neither mature, nor intelligent, nor located in the real world. I wish you luck with puberty, but I decline to spend more time educating a flagrantly Lost Cause.
Incidentally, as a final act of charity: reader is spelled with an A, not two Es.
I shall now return to conversing with the adults.
Brachiator
In other news. Sargent Shriver passes away at 95. The first director of the Peace Corps. Imagine. A time when people dared to send people to another country not to wage war, but to try to help.
Other other news. Dick Cheney says he might seek heart transplant All over the universe, healthy young ones cower in fear that the Dark Lord of the Sith might select them for a gruesome sacrifice.
Delia
It’s rather odd that Jared saw bank tellers as a focus of power and authority when they’re actually some of the lowest ranked individuals within the banking world. Not that I doubt he had issues about women and power.
I’d actually like to know more about his parents and his family dynamics. The interviews I’ve seen with his friends or former friends suggest that his home was a dark and disturbing place that they didn’t like to visit. One neighbor kid said that if you accidentally threw a ball into the Loughner’s yard, you just left it there, not wanting a confrontation with Mr. Loughner. I don’t think Jared got the way he did without help.
shortstop
Yes, but they’re the ones who had to keep telling him that he couldn’t take his withdrawals in gold.
morzer
@Delia:
Yes, they are low ranked – but they are the people who would control the levels of banking to which Loughner had access. I doubt he ever got near anyone with anything in the way of real authority or power.
Blogreeder
@morzer:
Now, morzy. Can I call you morzy? That’s twice you retorted to a comment I made with no substance of your own. First time with grammar; and the second with spelling. How is anything interesting going to get accomplished that way? We are in the marketplace of ideas here. Tsk, I thought you were going to be a worthy adversary. Too bad. It could have been good.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
.
.
Day 7
On day seven of my self-imposed duty to honor President Obama’s heartfelt and inspiring call to action – “to live up to the example that young Christina Green expected in how our democracy should function” – I now choose to always err on the side of the little guys instead of the fat cats like I did before. Take that American kid, Gulet Mohamed – I’m going to throw out the illegal fraidy-cat George W. Bush playbook and let the boy come back to his home in the United States of America, the Greatest and Freest Country in the History of the World since Our Personal Hero and Savior, Ronald W. Reagan.
All this holdin’ of high office sure is hard work.
.
.
suzanne
@lamh32: YAAAAAAAAAAY! What a story! And what a cutie patootie! Congratulations to all. :)
Mnemosyne
@lamh32:
SQUEEEE! ! !
That is all.
tomvox1
Um, Anne: Are you stalking Tom Scocca? Are you two an item maybe? Nothing personal but the amount of times you link the guy is coming across a little, ahem, Jessica Walter. (I see you took a break there last December. Were you guys skiing in Vail? Did he know?). I think you’ve done your good deed re: alerting us BJers about the total fucking awesomeness of Tom Scocca. And those who want to read his posts regularly now have his blog bookmarked thanks to your excellent PR work. Maybe they’ve even made “SCOCCA*!♥” (sorry don’t have his little horse-thingy in my font library) their homepage. And also thanks to you, the rest of us know where to find him when we realize we’ve completely led an unbelievably hollow life without Tom Scocca’s rapier-like take on current events.
You’re like the Christopher Walken character in that SNL Blue Oyster Cult skit. Except you don’t need more Cowbell. You need more Tom Scocca!
Seriously, it’s almost reaching Cole-Sully proportions…
BTW, if Loughner is clinically diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, does it matter that he’s a misogynist paranoid schizophrenic? I’m pretty sure I remember that John Hinckley, Jr. et al also had problems with the ladies…
Jeanne ringland
@Blogreeder: My dad thinks she’s cute. Period.
Anne Laurie
@tomvox1: Dude, I’ve been happily married for many, many years now; pulling a Hinckley on Scocca is not the way to impress me, okay?
Also, there is a tag here for ‘Excellent Links’, not for ‘I Read These Smart Guys So You Don’t Have To’. You don’t like my posts, keep scrolling.
Chris
On a related note, it’s a good thing ESPN took back Gregg Easterbrook, who complains about liberals trying to pin Loughner on conservatives, or else it’d be awkward around the Slate.com watercooler:
Scocca: “Hey, Gregg, here’s your ass, I believe you left it somewhere recently. See if you can keep it stapled on in the future.”
goatchowder
I saw Amanda’s original post and thought she was hanging the argument on a very thin reed: claiming that asking epistemological questions is sexist (really please, how does that work? And women never ask epistemological questions?).
But now this? Making misogynistic statements proudly and attacking bank tellers? OK, he’s a sexist.
As for the house he was raised in, I’ll bet some kind of Christian home-school thing, or certainly some kind of abuse, possibly sexual as well. I’m thinking of the Bill Hicks routine: “Where’s the tower, where’s the gun? Does my penis make me a bad boy? That’s what they told me, BLAM BLAM BLAM!”
Sick fucking people. Scary that Glenn Beck and Hannity and Limbaugh and Palin are trying to turn these disturbed fuckers into a zombie robot army for Repugs, but that’s what’s happening.
tomvox1
@Anne Laurie:
Lighten. Up.