This week POLITICO broke the decades old news that Ed Crane, the former patriarch of the CATO Institute - was a male chauvinist pig.
Here is my response:
Predictably I see that the peanut gallery below have snapped at the treats POLITICO dangled before them and come up with such wit as "Libertarians believe you should be able to do whatever you want no matter whom it hurts." (More precisely libertarians believe you own yourself, including your body, your time, and your work product.)
Does this mean the far more prevalent Democratic sexual harassment is because Democrats believe in redistributing sexual goodies from the young, attractive, and nubile to the old or ugly (cartoonish Weiners and decrepit Kennedys)? As they believe in redistributing income with Obamacare from the young and healthy to the old and infirm?
I was fired by Ed Crane from the Ed Clark for President campaign in 1980, summarily, after only having worked there for a few months, when I was a college student. I wasn't fired for sexual haraasment or for resisting sexual harassment, nor was I fired for being bad at my job of managing the mail room, or recrutiing the volunteers who stuffed envelopes in those pre-internet days. (I was let go because someone who was much more important to the campaign would not take a job in it if I was there, due to previous personal conflicts arising from romantic relationships.) I took my two weeks severance pay and walked upstairs to the third flood (the Clark campaign HQ were then the 2nd floor of the little building that houses the Starbucks now at Hall Place and Wisconsin Avenue on the border of Glover Park and Georgetown), where I got the same type of job for the same pay at the Libertarian National Committee. Which I imagine made neither Ed Crane, nor the person whom he was hiring who wanted me gone, happy. I'm not, as you might imagine, a fan, simply, of Ed Crane. But when Mr. Lippman called me a week or so ago asking for stories for this article (I then learned he'd called many people I know, none of whom seem to be quoted here) I didn't have a lot to tell him and I didn't think much of this project.
The context POLITICO doesn't provide is that no one needs a job at a libertarian think tank. It's a labor of love. It doesn't pay well. The people who take the lower rung jobs must live in group houses in Annandale or Crystal City and commute to work on Metro. If anyone sexually harassed you while working in such a position they could do what I did and go work at reason magazine, or the Competitive Enterprise Institutte, or the Libertarian Party, or the Mercatus Center, or the Niskanen Center, or the Pacific Institute, or the Independent Institute, or the Atlas Network, or Americans for Prosperity, etc etc etc. Or even take a job outside policy and politics that actually pays enough to buy a house and a car.
Libertarians believe in a growing economy with a thriving job market where if someone offends you at your work, you can easily start a business or work elsewhere, IN ADDITION to whatever legal remedies there might be for any contract violations that took place. Democrats believe that you should go to a bureaucracy or court and appeal and have your harasser fined - this will work if your harasser is some politically unconnected Christian small business owner, but not if he or she is a powerful politically connected Democrat like a Hillary staffer or Harvey Weinstein.
In the establishment world of the Democratic Party and the bureaucracies and mainstream media organizations it controls, a job is real money. All those Pakistani IT people Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was funding, all those Hillary-allied consultants who drained the DNC of funds according to Donna Brazille, those are opportunities that you could actually be harmed if you were denied them. I've been to a fundraiser at Bob Shrum's old Massachusetts Avenue Heights house. If he still owned it it would be worth $3 or 4 million now. If sexual harassment drove you out of the Democratic Party career ladder you would actually be harmed. (The DNC was sued for anti-gay discrimination by an employee back in 2008, and I don't know that a little research wouldn't turn up sex harassment suits and settlements.)
But it is understandable how - bruised from revelations of so much criminal activity by Obama and Hillary, and by the ongoing revelations about Democrat Congressmen and bundlers who sext teens, fly to the Caribbean to use underage sex workers, drown their impregnated secretaries, pay women they've molested $800,000 settlements, have their Hollywood mistresses die of overdoses, find their sexually harassing "faith advisors" new jobs - etc, etc. POLITICO would feel the need to discuss some pretty stale news to deflect attention.
I don't envy you your job of spinning for your masters, when the clowns you have to cover for are Schumer, Schiff, and Pelosi.
Good for you, Bruce. Excellent reply.
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