Liz Trotta, a Fox News contributor and former Washington Times editor, drew attention this week (2/12/12) when she suggested that women serving in the U.S. military should expect to be sexually assaulted by their male counterparts:
But while all of this is going on, just a few weeks ago, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta commented on a new Pentagon report on sexual abuse in the military. I think they have actually discovered there is a difference between men and women. And the sexual abuse report says that there has been, since 2006, a 64 percent increase in violent sexual assaults. Now, what did they expect? These people are in close contact, the whole airing of this issue has never been done by Congress, it's strictly been a question of pressure from the feminists.
And the feminists have also directed them, really, to spend a lot of money. They have sexual counselors all over the place, victims' advocates, sexual response coordinators…. So you have this whole bureaucracy upon bureaucracy being built up with all kinds of levels of people to support women in the military who are now being raped too much.
So feminists are hogging too many resources for military women who are allegedly raped too much. Trotta doesn't say what would be an acceptable level of rape.
In the Fox News universe of cranky, right-wing pundits, it's not easy to stand out for your extremism, but Trotta seems to manage. In addition to her unconventional views about rape in the military, Trotta has joked about assassinating Barack Obama "if we could" (Fox News, 3/23/08). She has also described Fox competitor MSNBC as "close to being a communist channel" and excoriated that cable network for suspending Pat Buchanan, whom she said was being victimized by the hard left and "mercilessly assailed by the homosexual lobby" and others (Fox News, 1/14/12). Trotta condemned MSNBC for suspending Buchanan over his book Suicide of a Superpower in which he argues, among other things, that the U.S. has become "a multiracial, multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic stew of a nation that has no successful precedent in the history of the world." Trotta offered an extended defense of what she called the "essence of the book" as mostly factual.
As FAIR founder Jeff Cohen recounted in his book Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in the Corporate Media, while appearing on an episode of Fox News Watch (1/5/02) with Trotta, she cheered the burning of Harry Potter books by a right-wing pastor in New Mexico: "We're talking about the press getting hysterical over some, you know, two-bit book burning. Let them burn!"
In another episode on Fox News Watch, Cohen recalled when Trotta tried to link convicted "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski to the left. Though Kaczynski lived as a recluse in the wilds of Montana and wrote a rambling "manifesto" attacking technology, the left and environmentalists, Trotta attempted to link the Unabomber to environmentalists and the left: "Mainstream media attempted to divorce Kaczynski's background and milieu from what he became." Cohen's on-air response to Trotta: "He lived as a hermit since the 1970s. For 25 years the guy lived in a shack, and you're talking about his milieu?"
But Trotta is still at it. Last October (Fox News, 10/8/11), she attempted to link Occupy Wall Street protestors to Kaczynski, comparing the activists' rhetoric to "the ravings of what sounds like the Unabomber."
At least she didn't try to link them to sexual assault counselors.
About Steve Rendall
There's no ambiguity regarding Trotta's milieu, is there?
Or the fact that it has no relation to a sense of humanity, as commonly defined.
More and more, every day, in every way, faux-noise proves that it's a monumental purveyor of unintentional (?) satire…
Or, it might all be a cunning plan…
MSNBC is so Communist that it had to fire Pat Buchanan! It is to be presumed that the difference between a non-Communist and a Communist is that, while both would employ Pat Buchanan, the Communists would fire him when their viewers protested him saying things they considered racist. I'll bet those Communists would be so evil as to fire commentators implying acceptable levels of rape, too…
It seems Liz Trotta doesn't have very high regard for the makeup of our men in the military. It appears she actually expects some of them to be rapists. I happen to think our troops, for the most part, are pretty honorable. Yes, I know that the Iraq war showed that there are a few exceptions. However, if our male soldiers are still looking at their female counterparts as sex objects, rather than fellow soldiers, then I would argue much of the fault lies with the commanders, who aren't conducting the proper training. If the higher-ranking officers, after all these years, still aren't taking women soldiers seriously, how can we expect the grunts to be any different?
Well, You Just Wait until some of these new gay troops start raping OFFICERS… and we'll see what she says THEN, by golly! ^..^
So Trotta used to be at the Washington Times? That explains a lot. The Washington Times is the house organ of the Unification Church, aka the Moonies.
Can we get the above item on Facebook?
"We're talking about the press getting hysterical over some, you know, two-bit book burning. Let them burn!"
You mean to tell me we should just ignore the crazies who do the things they do for the sake of getting media attentionâ┚¬”Âpeople like Terry Jones and Harold Camping and Fred Phelps and other media-whores? What a crazy idea indeed! We should just give them the attention that they crave. The media always needs a distraction from the real issues anyway!
Im wondering if we should not look to historical reference of men serving with woman for a perspective.Millions of Soviet woman served in the great war.I am ignorant as to what their service time was like.Today all Israeli woman serve.Again if they do this without the negatives stated there is no reason we can't.I would believe that the type of zero tolerance we have for sexual harassment in the workplace might be hard or impossible to enforce in a combat station.But as I say lets look to historical records and know that anything anyone else has done…we can do better.
Being from Texas, Ive had many opportunities of watchin Fox News. I remember once when it was being questioned by Bill O'Reilly if a female protester with a steel pole as a weapon could actually use the pole as a weapon. He was flabbergasted that the woman held the strength to tout a steel pole. Ive thrown a javelin clear across a football field and this man on tv does not think a woman can lift up some lousy Stop sign steel pole.
I had a college-football boyfriend who was flabbergasted that I could carry multiple grocery bags hanging off both of my shoulders to my hands and jump up flights of stairs two at a time with ease when he had seen me that last week clean and jerk 80 kilos, throwing the bar, as I am 130 lbs, over my head.
Some people just lack depth perception in these matters, and due to their views of women being so cantankerously screwed off (I was going to say "being so skewed", but it seemed boring to the word "screwed") which I attribute to the teachings and guidance of how their mothers portrayed women in general to their unfortunate neurological shortcomings.
Its just like how Michael said that people attribute this time, for American women, as a great time for women in history, and American women are so free. Did they study any women in history at all? Likely not. Humanity textbooks just started to include women, as my Humanities professor told me. He gave our class extra articles in supplement to our textbook because he thought it was interesting due to him never knowing an entire side of historical life due to him never studying it in school. The scary part is that he is in his thirties.
Free? No.