LETHAL WEAPONS: NEOCON GROUPIES

Never underestimate the contribution neoconservative women in the scribbling and broadcasting professions have made to sexing up the war. When a bunch of babes with bursting décolletages quakes and quivers for military action, their fans (males, especially) do more than just look … they listen.

The Fox News War Harpies were certainly a dream come true for many American men. Who cares about honest reporting or even basic fact-checking when a Jenna Jameson look-alike is yelling from the screen, “Sock it to Saddam, Dubya!”?

In as much as she is classy-looking, and speaks with a dulcet lilt, Peggy Noonan doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with the Fox fillies. In as much as she prostrates herself to political power, she does. Peggy fashions her prose – a responsorial, stream-of-consciousness ramble – in the style of the black southern preacher. Unlike the preacher, however, she conflates the president with a Higher Power – Peggy believes God speaks through George W. Bush. From his furrows to his genitals, this Court Courtesan’s high-flown linguistic banalities have lovingly depicted her man’s every inch. (See “He’s Got Two of ‘Em.”)

Ann Coulter is sui generis. I can’t help liking her. (Bring on the hate mail; I think Laura Ingraham is also quite sharp.) But at this juncture in American history, Coulter ought to be extolling “Mr. Conservative” Robert Taft, not daft, dirigiste Dubya. Coulter has rightly condemned (the neoconservative) Madeleine Albright’s “preemptive attack” on Slobodan Milosevic, as having been “solely for purposes of regime change based on false information presented to the American people.” Why then the double standard regarding Bush’s Iraq excursion? Infuriating liberals is a noble conservative calling. Being a Stepford Wife to an ersatz conservative like Genghis Bush is not.

Coulter’s worst offense, however, and she’s conceded as much, is to have inspired so many wannabes. Some Coulter Copycats (Monica Crowley) have concentrated mainly on the signature hair bleaching. Others, more destructively, and in an attempt to up the ante with respect to Ann’s provocations, have stooped to support state internment.

As has become apparent from the case of the president’s nominee for homeland security secretary, Bernard B. Kerik, the neoconnerie is not particular about vetting – or even Googling and LexisNexising – their bureaucrats. And considering the delight they take in the mass killing in Iraq, no one should expect the neoconservatives to pay more than lip service to those “family values” they gush about. So I’m not sure why I was even remotely shocked to see Canadian serial sexual stalker Rachel Marsden play parrot to Bush booster Dennis Miller on his little-watched CNBC chatshow. (She was billed as a conservative “political columnist.”)

Marsden must have been on a tight schedule, having just pleaded guilty to criminal harassment before Judge Bill Kitchen in British Columbia Provincial Court. As the Associated Press reported, Marsden was forced to resign last May while working for a Canadian Member of Parliament under an assumed name. When arrested two years ago, Marsden was working for the Free Congress Foundation, Paul Weyrich’s D.C. think tank dedicated to fighting America’s “long slide into cultural and moral decay.”

The major contribution Marsden (aka Elle Henderson) has made to the cause of cultural renewal (besides joining Rush Limbaugh in finding funny the torture at Abu Ghraib) has been in the terrorization of several men; she almost destroyed an award-winning young swimming coach at Simon Fraser University (SFU) between 1997 and 1999. First, she stalked Liam Donnelly for months, making him the target of her warped (and graphic) “erotomania.” Or so Leonard Stern of the Ottawa Citizen described the pornographic letters and pictures with which she had deluged her victim.

Sexual harassment kangaroo courts are the Left’s unique contribution to obliterating the Rights of Englishmen on campuses. When Donnelly spurned her advances and gifts, “conservative” Marsden proceeded to unleash on him the Soviet-style apparatus and apparatchiks Canadians have come to know (and fear) so well. In a lengthy and lewd complaint, she accused Donnelly of repeatedly raping her and making her his sex slave. (Incidentally, Marsden’s writing has not improved much since those heady days of relating to the terrified coach her preference for non-lubricated condoms “without the Exxon Valdez oil slick all over them.”)

The totalitarian SFU harassment office, egged on by our jeering Jezebel, fired Donnelly. In the rush to ruin him, the gender ideologues discarded a mountain of evidence against Marsden and proceeded to try and convict the young man in absentia and without due process. (SFU later rehired Donnelly and paid a portion of his legal costs.)

Marsden, described rather charitably by Judge Kitchen as “extremely extroverted,” “histrionic,” and “attention-seeking,” next stalked noted Canadian criminologist Prof. Neil Boyd and then went after former Vancouver radio personality Michael Morgan, the crime for which she was convicted.

Although one can never be certain about the veracity of Marsden’s curriculum vitae, she boasts that Queen Bee Coulter herself will be a guest on her little-heard Vancouver radio talkshow. Come to think of it, I had asked Coulter’s webmaster why he posted articles by someone like Marsden. That, after I had briefed him on the Donnelly case, that travesty of justice residents of Vancouver (then including myself) recall so vividly. (What am I talking about: unless they were comatose, which is a possibility, most Canadians will remember the case that rewrote sexual harassment policy in Canada!)

He responded thus, and I paraphrase: “We all have baggage, forgive and forget.” Tell that to Donnelly, on whom Marsden took no pity. If anything, it was abundantly obvious, as Donnelly’s perceptive lawyer noted at the time, that Marsden relished every lurid moment of notoriety. With impunity comes indifference. Unless their indiscretions are exposed, neoconservatives just don’t care.

Fast forward to the Dennis Miller Show. The audience went ape as Marsden complained (and loudly: neo-concubines have foghorns for voices), “The only action Democrats ever gave us occurred in Clinton’s pants.”

This is what Scott McConnell, editor of The American Conservative, meant by “a vulgarized neoconservatism” (I can think of a better adjective for its gynocentric permutation). No doubt, the women of the neoconnerie have been instrumental in keeping their fans tuned-out, turned-on, and hot for war.

©2004 By ILANA MERCER
December 15
Antiwar.com