Women’s history month.
Not a chance. Here is a review session for those who love the month of March as much as I do.
The History They Don’t Tell
Crap, its March again. We all know what that means.
March should be a time for repeated celebrations as it is the anniversary of my birth. However March is also Women’s History Month.
For those who watch normal TV its no big deal. Commercials will come and go and your news programming will be mostly unaffected.
For the consumer of AFN however, it will be an agonizingly long month as you will hear over and over again, spot after spot extolling how women have been critical to the success of our military and how nothing of merit was accomplished without them. The various lists of “firsts” will be trotted out, and spoken of again and again till hell won’t have it.
Thank God for porn DVD’s. They will be the only way I will be able to survive, especially when I go to Korea later this month…………… Where, once again I will be living behind the great firewall.
As is my custom, I use the month of March to highlight some of the history that never quite got reported. Since no one seems inclined to have a White Anglo Saxon Protestant Men’s History month-well, I have to do my part to chronicle some of the “other history” that the National Organization of Feministas Women does not seem to want to remember.
Everybody needs a mission. This is mine.
Born a poor yuppie wanna be in 1940, in Oregon, Patricia Nell Scott put herself through the University of Minnesota working as an insurance claims adjuster. It seems that ambulance chasing suited her, for she subsequently went to law school and became a shark lawyer in 1964. Along the way she married. She moved with her husband James to Colorado. In 1972, James encouraged her to run for Congress-probably to get her shrill, strident voice out of the house so he could have some peace and quiet. Regrettably, she won the election. As a result, the voters of Colorado’s first congressional district suffered through a lack of competent representation for the next 24 years.
Not content just to quietly represent her district, she became swept up in the politics of nazism feminism. She came out early in favor of abortion, affirmative action (read: quotas for women). She somehow felt that her vaunted experience as a liberal from Colorado made her qualified to sit on the House Armed Services Committee. Her world view can be summed up in one sentence: “If it has a penis, it must be guilty of something and punished“. She once called former President Bush and Vice President Quayle members of the “lucky sperm club.” She portrayed herself as a rebel who stood up for free speech, however she had a very selective interpretation of who that applied to.
For example- free speech was OK when in 1992 she was attacking the United States Navy
And we had some words with Admiral Kelso about, “Get a clue. These women are part of your team, and you don’t seem to be standing up for them at all. We’d like to have a little more focus on this problem,” as we were trying to get the Senate to have a little more focus on some of their problems and other such things.The amazing thing to me was how some of the troops then started reacting. If you really look at Tailhook, I was not trying to be high profile at all. You can go look at the newspaper articles. We really weren’t. We were making inquiries. We were talking. We were trying to be supportive. But we were not running out and calling a press conference every day. And then the thing that really gave it a lot of legs was, somehow, some of the men implicated in Tailhook decided to make me the focus, and started putting on these little plays and doing all sorts of outrageous things. That got a response, and then I got to respond to their outrageous response. This thing went on and on and round and round and round. It was not really politically smart, or PR smart.
Q: Did you care about becoming a focus?
SCHROEDER: (laughs) I could care less. Listen. You go to the House floor and I’m called names 24 hours a day. But the thing that tickled me so much was their thinking that I was the reason that Tailhook could no longer be allowed, as the kind of outrage it was. I mean, their view was, Tailhook has now got to be catered by Mrs. Smith and her cookies and we’re going to have it– What were they saying? We’re going to have it in Salt Lake City, and can only have milk, and all this. They’re thinking that I was the only one, and that everybody in the House and Senate and the Administration was running because of me. No. They just couldn’t deal with the fact that society had changed so much.
However when a group of serving Naval Officers, gathered together for a little camaraderie and a chance to relax over a few adult beverages;-these guys were not allowed to speak their minds at all. When, in a moment of harmless fun, they had a skit that just by coincidence, mind you, just happened, to parody a then well know comedian, that just happened to say “Hickory Dickory Dock-Pat Schroeder can suck my cock!” you should have heard her shriek and whine. As far as she was concerned these men should have gotten the rack, the chair or the gas chamber- or some combination of all three. She used the power of her office to get good men fired, just so that she could show how she was sticking up for other women.
Now personally, I find the thought of Pat Schroeder near any part of my anatomy to be sickening-but to each his own.
And lets not even talk about her sponsorship of a known liar, shall we?
She also had a strange view of the Constitution when it came to the role of the Supreme Court. Rather than accept a perfectly reasoned judgment in the case of McCarty vs McCarty in 1981 she decided to subvert the judgment of the justices. In 1981 the United States Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that military retirement/retainer is not subject to division in state divorce proceedings. Outraged that, the justices might think that a retiree might actually have done a thing or two to earn his or her retirement, she sponsored the single worst piece of legislation ever in Congress.
She railroaded the legislation through Congress. In introducing her first bill, seeking the division of civil service retirees’ annuities, Schroeder hailed the fact that at least former spouses of military personnel would be eligible to receive social security benefits from their military sponsors’ contributions to that program. However, this did nothing later to dissuade her from going after the retired pay of military members. She provided ‘heart-rending’ stories for publication in the Congressional Record of former spouses left without financial or other support. Omitted from the testimony was the evidence that many of these women were not hacking it on the housewife front. The entire sordid chapter in history can be found here.
During the 1980’s she played a leading role in turning the DACOWITS commission, an organization that long ago out lived its usefulness, into the Pentagon’s own feminist mouthpiece and lobby. The list of officers, board members, and advisory council members reads like a who’s who list of radical feminism. The good Ms. Schroeder had a lot to do with that by ruining the chances of anyone serving on the commission who did not support her views of the military as a proving ground for social experiments.
Those efforts came to a head in 1992 and 1993 after the now infamous (and I might add, rather fun) Tailhook convention, as she spearheaded efforts to repeal the combat exclusion laws that prevented women from serving in combat units. A great book by Brian Mitchell, called Flirting with Disaster documents in detail the missteps and political intrigue that went into this period. Sean O’keefe who later did such a “good” job as NASA administrator, began the pattern of high ranking naval leaders caving in to her and her agenda. He presided over a “purge” of the Naval Officer Corps-one that would have done former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin proud. A generation of fine men was destroyed on old Pat’s altar of political correctness.
In 1996, she left Congress and took up the oldest a new profession. She became President and CEO of the American Association of Publishers. There she continued to portray herself as an advocate for free speech, even though she picked a funny way of showing that by attacking libraries and librarians. As head of the AAP her role has been to defend their rights to make profit, even at the expense of providing a useful service to citizenry. She got into a royal dust up with Google over their plans to create on line libraries.
In a role she is quite familiar with, paid whore spokesperson for the publishing industry, she has been attacking the colossus that is Google at every turn. Like all practitioners of the oldest profession lobbyists, it all comes down to money:
At the top of the list is money—something the publishers make no bones about. “I will stipulate that they built a great search engine; I use it and I love it,” Schroeder tells me. “But someone has to pay for the content so there’s something to search for. So we have to figure this out. I say to Google, ‘Let’s make a deal. You won’t make quite as much money, but I think you’ll do okay. Let’s share, boys, come on, let’s share! You don’t have to be so greedy!’
No, she would rather that her employers be the one’s being greedy-she gets a cut of what they make.
Whether on the floor of Congress or in the offices of the AAP, her strategy has been remarkably consistent for the last 30 years.
1) She refuses to compromise, instead waiting for the right moment to use the media to discredit her superiors or opponents. It is what she did to Edward Herbert back in the mid 1970’s.
2) She ensures that any opposition to her position is marginalized. In the case of women in the military. what she basically did was to try to “criminalize” opposition speech so that anyone who voiced concern about the increasing pace of social experimentation is discredited as some sort of racist and sexist.
3) To back up her position, she threatened people within government by having people fired to make an example of them. That made the successors more pliant to her will.
4) And like Nancy Pelosi, when all else fails-play the mommy card.
Conveniently, when the worst fears of her critics turn out to be true, she shifts the blame to someone else besides her and her desire to use the military as a place for social experimentation.
Maybe Dan Ackroyd sums up Pat Schroeder the best:
Jane Curtin: Dan, times change and so does the nature of relationships. People are reluctant to get married these days and looking at divorce statistics, who can blame them. But the lack of a piece of paper does not neccessarily mean a lack of a total commitment. A woman is this modern-day relationship may well give up all her personal pursuits, as Michelle Marvin claims she did, to give her full support to her man’s career. And Michelle Marvin is just asking that the courts recognize that reality. Dan, there’s an old saying: “Behind every successful man there’s a woman.” A loving, giving, caring woman. But you wouldn’t know about that, Dan, because there’s no old saying about what’s behind a miserable failure.
[ gives a look of arrogance ]Dan Aykroyd: Jane, you ignorant slut! Bagged-out, dried-up, slunken meat like you and Michelle Triola know the rules. If you want a contract, sign on the dotted line. Oh, but let’s all shed a tear for poor Michelle Triola. There was only testimony that she had sexual intercourse over forty times with another man while living with actor Lee Marvin. But I suppose that sort of fashionable promiscuting means nothing to you, Jane, who hops from bed to bed with the frequency of a cheap ham radio. But hell hath no fury like a woman’s scorn, and Michelle Triola, like a screeching, squealing, reptatious swamp sow is after actor Lee Marvin’s last three million dollars. I guess what you and Michelle are saying is that when you’re on your backs, the meter is running. Well, please spare us, gals, and tell us the rate’s at the top. Then we can choose which two bit tarts and bargain basement sluts to shack up with.