Better in their words…

Don’t hold your breath…
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By JAMES TARANTO
President Obama’s faux-chivalrous defense of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice got some backup Friday, when “a dozen female members of the House,” all Democrats and “the majority of them African American like Rice,” held a Capitol Hill press conference. They asserted, in the words of an Associated Press report, that “Republican senators’ angry criticism . . . over her initial account of the deadly Sept. 11 attack in Libya smacks of sexism and racism”:

“All of the things they have disliked about things that have gone on in the administration, they have never called a male unqualified, not bright, not trustworthy,” said Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, the next chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus. “There is a clear sexism and racism that goes with these comments being made by unfortunately Sen. [John] McCain and others.” . . .
“To batter this woman because they don’t feel they have the ability to batter President Obama is something we the women are not going to stand by and watch,” said Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis. “Their feckless and reckless speculation is unworthy of their offices as senators.”
Meanwhile, feminist media critics are faulting journalists for an alleged double standard in the reporting of the extramarital affair that led to the resignation of David Petraeus as CIA director.

“The temptress must have been devious,” as the New York Times’s Frank Bruni sarcastically puts it. “The temptation must have been epic.” He disapprovingly quotes a Slate article by Fred Kaplan, who asked, “How could he–this acclaimed leader and figure of rectitude–allow such a thing to a happen?” and answered: “She may have made herself irresistible.”

Bruni thinks Kaplan was making excuses for Petraeus: “Such adamant women, such pregnable men. We’ve been stuck on this since Eve, Adam and the Garden of Eden. And it’s true: Eve shouldn’t have been so pushy with the apple. But Adam could have had a V8.”

“Frank Bruni gets it,” writes Jennifer Vanasco of the Columbia Journalism Review:

Nearly every time a heterosexual sex scandal threatens to tank the career of a powerful man, we hear (and read) the same story: The poor guy couldn’t help it. After all, what can a man do when faced with the irresistible temptation of a nubile younger woman? Certainly he can’t be expected to exhibit self-control. . . .
The truth is, an affair is always the responsibility of both people involved. There is no victim. There is no hero. There is just human fallibility. We know that. And it might not be as sexy, but that’s the story we should write.
The Washington Post’s Lisa Miller echoes the complaint: “The commentary and analysis of this season’s latest and greatest sex scandal . . . is downright medieval. . . . Powerful men are expected to stray. . . . But the women with whom they consort are unredeemed for all of history.”

They have a point; there is a double standard. But the feminist critics misunderstand the nature of that double standard.

Petraeus himself, after all, has not exactly been “redeemed.” Quite the contrary. The affair came to public attention precisely because of his resignation. No one can take away his considerable accomplishments, but his public career appears to be at an end. History will remember the ridiculous and humiliating way in which it concluded. No doubt he is paying a private price as well: “As you can imagine, she’s not exactly pleased right now,” ABC News quoted Steve Boylan, a retired Army colonel with a gift for understatement, as saying of Mrs. Petraeus.

When commentators observe that Petraeus must have been tempted by Broadwell, they are not making excuses for his errant behavior. They are merely stating the obvious: that his was a failure of self-control. It is generally understood that men are weak, subject to sexual temptation.

If Broadwell is assigned a disproportionate share of the “responsibility’ for the affair, it is because of a failure to acknowledge that women are weak, too–that “human fallibility” does indeed work both ways. If he found a younger, physically attractive woman irresistible, it seems a reasonable surmise that she found a powerful, famous, brilliant man equally so. Indeed, how could it not be so? If either one of them had successfully resisted the attraction, dangerous to both of them, there would have been no affair.

Feminists are not above employing double standards when it suits their purposes. Lisa Miller, the Washington Post columnist quoted above, was last seen in this column disparaging “the smug fecundity of the Republican [presidential] field.” Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann all have too many children for Miller’s liking, and despite her including Bachmann in the list, she blamed the men: “What the Republican front-runners seem to be saying is this: We are like the biblical patriarchs.”

As for Fudge and the other defenders of Susan Rice against supposed sexism, they seem to be implying that women in powerful public positions should be spared the rough treatment that would be accorded to men. “In unusually personal terms,” the AP notes, “the Democratic women lashed out at Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham.” The story does not mention if they lashed out at a third critic of Rice, Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. Her name does appear in the report, but only in passing, and nine paragraphs after McCain and Graham are first mentioned.

Then again, the standard is different when the black woman named Rice is a Republican. In January 2007, an AP dispatch noted “Sen. Barbara Boxer’s remark last week to [Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice that the secretary of state, single and childless, doesn’t have a ‘personal price’ to pay in Iraq.”

A final irony is that the feminist defense of Susan Rice is ultimately in the service of shielding a powerful man from accountability. After all, Obama was not merely being chivalrous when he said that if McCain and Graham “want to go after somebody, they should go after me.” He was also changing the subject away from the failure of his administration, which includes officials of both sexes, to give an honest accounting of the Benghazi fiasco.

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