My take on Sandra Fluke is that the media is trying to turn her into the Cindy Sheehan of 2012. I also predict that just like Cindy Sheehan, her true unhinged personality will eventually come out.
by Mark Steyn
I’m writing this from Australia, so, if I’m not quite up to speed on recent events in the United States, bear with me — the telegraph updates are a bit slow here in the bush. As I understand it, Sandra Fluke is a young coed who attends Georgetown Law, and recently testified before Congress.
Oh, wait, no. Update: It wasn’t a congressional hearing; the Democrats just got it up to look like one, like summer stock, with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid doing the show right here in the barn, and providing a cardboard set for the world premiere of Miss Fluke Goes to Washington, with full supporting cast led by Chuck Schumer strolling in through the French windows in tennis whites and drawling, “Anyone for bull****?”
Oh, and the “young coed” turns out to be 30, which is what less evolved cultures refer to as early middle age. She’s a couple of years younger than Mozart was at the time he croaked, but, if the Dems are to be believed, the plucky little Grade 24 schoolgirl has already made an even greater contribution to humanity. She’s had the courage to stand up in public and demand that someone else (and this is where one is obliged to tiptoe cautiously, lest offense is given to gallant defenders of the good name of American maidenhood such as the many prestigious soon-to-be-former sponsors of this column who’ve booked Bill Maher for their corporate retreat with his amusing “Sarah Palin is a c***” routine . . . )
Where was I? Oh, yes. The brave middle-aged schoolgirl had the courage to stand up in public and demand that someone else pay for her sex life.
Well, as noted above, she’s attending Georgetown, a nominally Catholic seat of learning, so how expensive can that be? Alas, Georgetown is so nominally Catholic that the cost of her sex life runs to three grand — and, according to the star witness, 40 percent of female students “struggle financially” because of the heavy burden of maintaining a respectable level of premarital sex at a Jesuit institution.
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Nor is it even the distinctively American wrinkle the Republic of Paperwork has given to governmentalized health care, under which the “right to privacy” the Supreme Court claimed to have discovered in Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade will now lead to thousands and thousands of self-insuring employers keeping computer records of the morning-after pills and herpes medication racked up by Miss Jones on reception.Nor is the issue that America has 30-year-old schoolkids — or even 30-year-old schoolkids who expect someone else to pick up the tab for their extracurricular activities, rather than doing a paper route and a bit of yard work to save up for their first IUD, as we did back in my day. After all, the human right to government-mandated free contraception is as American as apple pie and far healthier for you. In my most recent book, I quote one of Sandra Fluke’s fellow geriatrics gamboling in the groves of academe and complaining to the Washington Post about the quality of free condoms therein:
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Nor is the core issue that, whatever the merits of government contraception, America is the Brokest Nation in History — although the Fluke story is a useful reminder that the distinction between fiscal and social conservatism is generally false. As almost all those fashionable split-the-difference fiscally conservative/socially liberal governors from George Pataki to California’s pathetically terminated Terminator eventually discover, their social liberalism comes with a hell of a price tag. Ask the Greeks how easy it is for insolvent nations to wean the populace off unaffordable nanny-state lollipops: When even casual sex requires a state welfare program, you’re pretty much done for.[……]
Insane as this scenario is, the Democrat-media complex insists that everyone take it seriously. When it emerged the other day that Amanda Clayton, a 24-year-old Michigan million-dollar-lottery winner, still receives $200 of food stamps every month, even the press and the bureaucrats were obliged to acknowledge the ridiculousness. Yet the same people are determined that Sandra Fluke be treated with respect as a pioneering spokesperson for the rights of the horizontally challenged.
Sorry, I pass. “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” wrote Benjamin Franklin in 1784. In the absence of religious virtue, sexual virtue, and fiscal virtue, one might trust to the people’s sense of sheer preposterousness to reject the official narrative of the Fluke charade. Yet even that is not to be permitted. Full disclosure: I will be guest-hosting for Rush Limbaugh this Monday, so it would not be appropriate for me to comment here on Rush’s intervention. But let me say this. Almost every matter of the moment boils down to the same story: The Left’s urge to narrow the bounds of public discourse and insist that “conventional wisdom” unknown to the world the day before yesterday is now as unquestionable as the laws of physics. Nothing that Rush said is as weird or as degrading as what Sandra Fluke and the Obama administration are demanding. And any freeborn citizen should reserve the right to point that out as loudly and as often as possible.
Read the rest – The Fluke Charade
Tags: Mark Steyn
