This Week In Quotes: Dec 19 – Dec 25

You may wonder why feminists never stop writing about rape.

The answer is simple: Minus rape, feminism stands exposed as a trivial lists of complaints — women not “empowered” enough in TV shows, Liz Lemon selling out the sisterhood on 30 Rock, Negative Body Image You Guys in the media, etc.

Minus rape, feminism is rather too obviously a list of trivial complaints by comfortable yet hysterical semi-affluent white women. — Ace

Is this now to be how America works? If so — if the friends of a campy two-bit dictatorship can force us to put our tails between our legs and ask not to be thrown into the briar patch — then one can only wonder how we might expect to stand up to our more competent foes. Will we perhaps start pulling books critical of the Iranian leaders, the better to protect Barnes and Noble from incoming Molotov cocktails? Will we remove websites that satirize the Chinese Communist party in order to forestall denial-of-service attacks on their hosts? Will we shut down newspapers that print broadsides against the Putin regime, lest his online buddies send a few death threats our way? I would certainly hope not. Rather, I would hope that we recognize that freedom of expression is the most vital of all our civic virtues, and that no good whatsoever can come of according a heckler’s veto to hackers, to family crime syndicates, and to their nasty little enablers on the international stage. — Charles Cooke

Fewer Americans born in the U.S. have jobs now than were employed to November 2007, despite a working-age population growth of 11 million. — The Daily Caller

Candidate Barack Obama said that, as president, he would talk to anti-American dictators without precondition. He didn’t mention that he would also give them historic policy concessions without precondition. — Rich Lowry

Shell-shocked liberals are beginning to grasp some inconvenient truths. No gun massacre is horrible enough to change Americans’ ideas about gun control. No UN Climate Report will get a climate treaty through the U.S. Senate. No combination of anecdotal and statistical evidence will persuade Americans to end their longtime practice of giving police officers extremely wide discretion in the use of force. No “name and shame” report, however graphic, from the Senate Intelligence Committee staff will change the minds of the consistent majority of Americans who tell pollsters that they believe that torture is justifiable under at least some circumstances. No feminist campaign will convince enough voters that the presumption of innocence should not apply to those accused of rape. — Walter Russell Mead

In that sense the Obama administration may represent “Peak Left” in American politics, and what we are getting from the left these days is a mix of bewilderment and anger as it realizes that this is as good as it gets. America is unlikely to go farther to the left than it went in the wake of the Iraq War and the financial crash, and while that wasn’t anywhere near enough of a shift for left-leaning Democrats, the country has already moved on. — Walter Russell Mead

Studies have consistently shown that big-government liberals donate far less money to private charities than conservatives. In his book “Who Really Cares,” Arthur Brooks notes that households headed by conservatives give 30% more to charity than households headed by liberals. Another study found that even poor conservatives donate more than rich liberals. — John Merline

In ’92, the general sense was that New York was rotting from the inside. Now, crime feels like the exception rather than the rule. The city is the safest it has ever been.

Demonstrators beg to differ. They claim black people are at special and heightened risk from cops.

They argue this in a city in which a police force of 34,000 serving in a city of 8 million residents discharged bullets from their weapons exactly 81 times in 2013 — compared to 312 in 1993.

Nationwide, “police could end all killings of civilians tomorrow and it would have no effect on the black homicide risk,” writes City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald. “In 2013, there were 6,261 black homicide victims in the US — almost all killed by black civilians.”

Nonetheless, it has become acceptable, in the face of all countervailing evidence, to argue that New York’s police officers hold black lives cheap. And what New York’s police officers now know is that this is a view shared by their boss — the city’s mayor. — John Podhoretz

Society shouldn’t expect that companies that come under attack by a foreign government while exercising their right of free speech within the United States to pick up the gauntlet and go to war. We conservatives have a pretty constrained view of the proper role of the federal government, but if its portfolio includes anything it must include defending Americans who come under attack by a foreign government while exercising their right of free speech within the United States. — Kurt Schlichter

Perhaps some people still cling to the ancient cliché that everyone deserves their day in court. No, they don’t. Most tort claims are ridiculous, and that doesn’t matter. A bad case doesn’t just get thrown out – in fact, the system is designed not to throw out bad cases. You have to litigate bad cases just like you litigate good ones – for years, and at huge expense. And even then, many defendants find it’s cheaper just to pay off these parasites rather than keep covering the huge bills defense attorneys like me have to send them month after month. It’s a racket and a scam, and we ought to drive a stake through its heart. But as a society, we aren’t ready to do that. We imagine that courtrooms are the places where justice is done rather than where what some estimate to be 10% of our GDP is siphoned off to buy people like me vacation homes in Aspen. — Kurt Schlichter

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