Hey All...

So William F. Buckley Jr. died about a week ago. I can't really say anything positive about him, except that I liked reading about Augustus Gloop every so often. Actually, that's a lie. Augustus Gloop was sort of a gross and scary poem and it definitely wasn't good pre-bed reading for small children unless you want to promote nightmares about small boys exploding, and even if you were older it was sort of disturbing. But some of the other stories in The Book of Virtues were okay, if you ignored all the boring ones and the really moralizing ones, which knocked out most of them. That's really the only positive thing I can say about him.

Apart from that, well, there is this singularly moronic post by a Washington Post columnist named Charlotte Allen, whose premise in this can be boiled down to one sentence: Women are physically and mentally weak. I really genuinely hope this is a joke, but with samples like this:

I can't help it, but reading about such episodes of screaming, gushing and swooning makes me wonder whether women -- I should say, "we women," of course -- aren't the weaker sex after all. Or even the stupid sex, our brains permanently occluded by random emotions, psychosomatic flailings and distraction by the superficial. Women "are only children of a larger growth," wrote the 18th-century Earl of Chesterfield. Could he have been right?

I really have to wonder.

In case you wondered, the "episodes" she refers to are maybe a dozen reports of women fainting at Obama rallies, which she attributes entirely to their response to his manliness and not to, you know, the stress of standing for hours at a crowded campaign rally. I'd be willing to bet that a few men passed out, too, but given that it's largely hearsay anyway, who really knows?

The worst part is that she goes on like that for two pages. Women suck, women are weaker, women are bad drivers, women are emotional, women are bad at math, if we're better at anything than men it's entirely because of evolution, intelligent motivated influential women are "outliers," and we should be happy just to sit at home and accept that we can have happy and fulfilling existences by focusing entirely on making a happy home for the men around us, even though we're "kind of dim."

I really, really, really hope that it's satire. It's just a bit too convincing. The only argument in favor of the satire explanation is that she hasn't resigned her job so that some apparently better-suited male can have it while she goes home to bake chocolate chip cookies and make floral arrangements.